The New iPad Pro: Powering a Super-Speedy, Efficient, High-Performance, Minimal Memory Device with the M4 Chip

In the past, if you chose not to use an upgrade on a specific model of iPad, you knew that the same chip would be used on any other model. In the past, Apple only tied RAM upgrades to storage boosts; that’s still true here, with the quantity doubling from 8GB to 16GB. It is possible to purchase Apple’s glare-fighting nanotexture glass for only $100 (lucky you!), which isn’t available on the lower-end models. So, if you really want the best-performing iPad Pro, you have to bump your storage to the 1TB or 2TB configuration.

Realistically, you won’t probably lose much processing power by sticking with the 256GB and 512GB storage tiers. The chip supports hardware-accelrated ray tracing, and both versions have the same memory bandwidth of 120GB/s. With six efficiency cores each, which are designed to handle more mundane, less demanding day-to-day tablet tasks, you’d be hard-pressed to notice much of a difference in ordinary use.

The whole thing is powered by the M4 chip. We will have to see. For most uses, the iPad has had more than enough horsepower for a long time — the M4 is clearly meant to power extremely intense use cases, like the new multicam setup in Final Cut Pro or some of the more advanced artistic features in apps like Procreate. It was very fast in the demo. The iPad is pretty much always super fast.

The new Pro has only one notable new spec that is outside its waif dimensions is the new screen. Even though it is not easy to see exactly how the display looks, it is clear from a distance how much sharper it really is. The “Tandem OLED,” as Apple calls it, appears to be plenty bright, and the viewing angles are excellent in the way they typically are on an iPad. The screen didn’t wow me immediately the way the redesign did, but it does look great.

It’s such a big difference that the larger model, which I’ve always felt was kind of preposterously huge, feels much more comfortable to hold and use. And now, it is even larger, up to 13 inches from 12.9 before. You can see the difference between the Air and Pro in the room, and as someone who has carried an 11-inch Pro for the last year and a half, it is really a big difference. The biggest question I have for now is about fragility: is the new Pro potentially too thin? It feels rigid and sturdy enough in my hands, but there are always tradeoffs with a device like this. We have lots of testing to do.

And there’s now a row of function keys at the top, which will make it a much more useful keyboard-and-trackpad machine in general. We will have to wait for Apple to make any changes to the operating system in order to find out if it improves the trackpad.

The Pencil Pro feels like a pencil. You definitely feel the haptic feedback when you squeeze or double-tap, which is a nice addition to the setup, and it was smooth and fast on the Pro’s screen as I drew and moved stuff around. I am not an artist so we will need someone to more thoroughly test this. Most of the coolest stuff is software, too, and a lot of the Pencil Pro’s best features will come from third-party developers.

Towards an Intelligent Continuum Operating System: Why Apple is pursuing OpenAI in the M4 and M4 M3 Series

Since 2020, the M-series has only been available by Apple. The all-new M4 was unveiled as an exclusive to the new iPad Pro.

The shift in strategy makes sense, seeing as how Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (which focuses on new software capabilities coming to its entire product line) is next month. In April, Bloomberg reported that iOS 18 will include “a new slate of generative AI features” and that Apple was currently in talks with OpenAI to incorporate some of the company’s features into the next version of the iPhone operating system (this is in addition to reports that Apple is also talking to Google about licensing the Gemini assistant).