By Jason Snell
May 7, 2024 7:18 PM PT
Some hands-on iPad event impressions
Apple declared Tuesday as the biggest date in iPad history since the launch of the product in 2010. I’m not sure I’d go that far. It was a major event, to be sure, but so was the original iPad Pro and Apple Pencil launch in 2015 and the 2018 launch of the redesigned iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil 2.
But yes, today brought a brand-new iPad Pro and a new iPad Air that continues to be recycled out of the features of previous models, but at a more accessible price. The lack of any updates to the low-end iPad (other than a price drop) and the iPad mini (which desperately needs one) diminish my enthusiasm for Tuesday as the all-time iPad update.
It was a good day, though. Especially for those of us who use and love their iPads. But despite all of it, I’m also left with some of the same feelings of unease that I had back in 2018.
The iPad Air is the new iPad Pro
Don’t get too hung up on the iPad Air’s name. It makes sense in that it forms half of a pair with a more powerful, higher-priced device in the same product line, like MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The difference is that the iPad Air is thicker and heavier than the iPad Pro. What’s lighter than air? On the iPad, Pro. Pro is lighter than air.
But that’s not the point of the iPad Air. It’s meant to bring iPad Pro features down to a cheaper price so more iPad users can benefit from features that used to be cutting-edge. Apple cuts the price and saves by reusing tech from other iPads.
This time around, that’s been taken to an extreme: the 11- and new 13-inch iPad Air are identical in size to the old (2018-2022) iPad Pro models. Apple’s literally re-using those old models, with only some minor feature variations. There’s no Mini-LED HDR display on the 13-inch model as there was on the M1 and M2 versions, nor is there a Face ID sensor; if you want a keyboard, the 2020-era Magic Keyboard will suffice. You can use either the USB-C Apple Pencil or the new Apple Pencil Pro, so that’s a win, and the FaceTime camera has been moved to the horizontal axis.
There are a few other minor cuts here and there, but fundamentally, the iPad Air is even closer now to the old iPad Pro and offers a larger model for the first time. Just as with the MacBook Air, which finally stretched to offer a 15-inch model, now there’s a more affordable 13-inch iPad. It’s a good thing, even if it’s not the most exciting or cutting-edge hardware. (Given the past of iOS software innovations, that might be just fine.)
Even better, Apple has finally decided to embrace simplicity and is calling the larger iPad Air a 13-inch model. Yes, the screen is technically 12.9 inches when measured diagonally, but all of Apple’s laptops are rounded to the nearest inch for simplicity’s sake, and now the iPad has been given the same treatment. 11 and 13, that’s the spirit.
One disappointing note: Apple continues its trend of removing color from its products as they escalate in price. The iPad Air’s colors were subtle before, but they’re vanishingly distinguishable now. On Tuesday, I sat not two feet away from two iPad Airs in blue and purple, and, reader, I could not tell that they were not silver. And while you may be thinking, well, poor Jason’s colorblind, and that’s why he’s saying such hurtful things, I’ll remind you that blue and purple are colors I can see.
For the life of me, I don’t know why Apple hates fun colors. The regular iPad has them.
The M what now?
It was quite a shock when Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported last week that the new iPad Pro might ship not with an M3 processor, but with the debut of the M4 processor. The report seemed outlandish, but the more I thought about it, the more it made some sort of crazy sense. And it turns out, Gurman was dead on.
Why the M4 now? It mostly has to do with Apple shifting chip production at TSMC (the company that fabs Apple’s chips) from the first-generation 3nm process to a new, more efficient second-generation 3nm process. There’s a whole backstory about TSMC’s change in 3nm processes that’s not worth getting into here, but suffice it to say that the first-generation process is largely a dead end, and the company is moving to a new set of 3nm processes.
So while Apple was proud of buying out TSMC’s first batch of 3nm processors to build the M3 and A17 Pro chips, it’s time to close the book on those chips—and by the end of next year, that generation will probably be entirely discontinued.
While it’s easy to think of processors as monolithic, every new M-series processor is really a collection of different parts, and they advance at different rates. With the M4, Apple’s moving to a new process a little earlier than one might expect—I doubt the company wants to release a new M-series generation more often than once a year—and the chip itself seems somewhat evolved over the M3.
The M4’s CPU cores are slightly improved over M3, featuring next-generation Machine Learning accelerators that help speed more basic AI tasks that don’t require farming things out to the Neural Engine or the GPUs. Apple has also changed the balance of the CPU cores in the M4, taking the total number to 10 (from eight) by adding two additional efficiency cores. This should boost overall CPU efficiency, though the four performance cores will largely gate peak performance. (And on the lower-end iPad Pro models, Apple’s using binned M4 chips with only three functional performance cores.)
The features Apple touts as being major GPU improvements are actually ones introduced in the M3, which never came to the iPad Pro—so it seems like there are no major changes on the GPU front in the M4 after the major upgrade during the last generation. However, the M4’s display engine has gotten a major upgrade, which was required for the complex Tandem OLED display of the M4 iPad Pro to work properly. (It’s a shining example of how Apple benefits from controlling its own chip design so it can build functionality that enables specific product features.) It remains to be seen if there are any other display-engine enhancements that might affect Macs running on the M4.
Finally, the M4 has powerful AI processing units… just like Apple chips have had for years. It was hard not to listen to Apple on Tuesday and get the sense that the company feels it’s being unfairly marked as “behind” on AI, given that it’s been building its Neural Engine cores into chips since 2017.
The Pro hardware
Adding the M4 is impressive, as is the rest of the iPad Pro hardware package. I want to spend more time with the Ultra Retina XDR displays to really experience how bright and colorful they are in various conditions and with different sample media, but my brief exposure to them was definitely eye-opening. Apple has done a lot of engineering work to build a unique dual-layer OLED system that can produce eye-watering brightness.
Just as impressive is the resulting physical size of both iPad Pro models: They got smaller. In the case of the 13-inch model, a lot smaller—it’s not only the thinnest iPad (or Apple product?!) ever, but perhaps even better, it dropped nearly a quarter of a pound in weight. The new model is only 85 percent of the weight of its predecessor! And the 11-inch model weighs just slightly less than a pound. It’s a huge engineering victory.
I also have to applaud the relocation of the FaceTime camera and Face ID sensor to the horizontal side of the device, as I almost never use the iPad Pro in any orientation but horizontal. The Apple logo on the back still needs to be rotated to match, but I’ll take the win. And thumbs up to Apple for finding a way to make the relocation happen while also retaining the ability to magnetically dock and charge the Apple Pencil at the same location.
Unfortunately, the new iPad Pro suffers from the same tragic lack of color as other Apple products. You can get them in any color you want, as long as they’re silver or the new Space Black, which appears to be a bit darker than the old Space Gray.
The software letdown
Here’s something I wrote in my review of the 2018 iPad Pro:
Saying that the processor in the new iPad Pro can handle anything thrown at it is praise, sure, but it’s also a little bit of an indictment. As users, we need more things to throw at it.
I got those vibes again on Tuesday. Apple has evolved the iPad a lot since 2018, but the product still exposes a remarkable imbalance between the incredibly confident and skillful march forward by the company’s hardware design and processor architecture groups and the erratic advancement and limited functionality of iPadOS.
I will give Apple credit: It worked hard on Tuesday to show off all the use cases that might lead someone to buy an iPad Pro for between $999 (11-inch, base config, no accessories) and $3077 (13-inch, max config, all accessories). There were lots of great Apple Pencil-based demos featuring creative professional apps, of course. I was impressed with the substantive updates planned for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro.
There was also a dude on a BART train editing a spreadsheet in Numbers. Which, ooookay….
I like seeing Apple sweat a little in making a case for a product. It’s really doing its best, and if I were someone who primarily performed creative tasks with an Apple Pencil, I’d be all in. As someone who uses a keyboard (and a USB microphone, I suppose) to make a living, I’m looking at $2177 for a mid-range 13-inch model with cellular, an Apple Pencil Pro, and a Magic Keyboard. That’s substantially more than I’d pay for a new MacBook Air, and while I know that I can’t use the MacBook Air as a thin and light touch tablet, I also can’t use my iPad Pro as a travel podcasting unit.
I’m not saying that iPadOS and the iPad platform are bad. They’re not. I write regularly on my iPad Pro and read on it every morning and evening. I wouldn’t travel without it.
What I’m saying is, when it comes to iPad Pro hardware, it feels almost like Apple can do no wrong. On the software side, iPadOS is still rife with limitations that probably don’t matter much if you’re just using it to watch TV in bed or triage a few emails—but matter a lot if you’re trying to go beyond a limited set of features and some specific apps.
I will live in hope that the next version of iPadOS will address some more of these issues. (I have expressed this sentiment every single time a new iPad Pro has been released. It hasn’t helped.)
The accessory situation
Accessories make the iPad. No, really: The iPad’s ability to use things like the Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard are what make its Apple’s most ergonomically versatile computing device. It’s the reason I love the iPad.
So let’s cheer the new accessory additions. While I’m not a heavy Apple Pencil user—I only really use it for editing podcasts and the occasional marking up of a PDF—I have huge admiration for the Apple Pencil 2 as the apotheosis of Apple Products. It is a high-tech object that feels and looks like an inert solid block. It’s the most non-technical tech product ever, and yet when you bring it close to an iPad, magic happens.
The new Apple Pencil Pro is a sensible revision of the Pencil 2. (Apple’s moving to a model where iPads will support two Apple Pencils, one on the low end and one on the high end.) If you want to save some money, you can use last year’s USB-C Apple Pencil on these new iPads, but you’ll lose magnetic charging—which is delightful—and some snazzy new features, like a squeeze gesture that brings up a contextual menu, haptic feedback that reacts to the squeeze gesture and other events, and the ability to rotate the pencil to change how brushes function or apply other changes to content.
The new Magic Keyboard is also an improvement. It retains the clever cantilever design but takes advantage of the lighter iPad Pro weight to slide it further back, adding room for a larger trackpad (with haptic click!) and a full row of function keys. Oh, to finally adjust my iPad’s volume and brightness without taking my hands off the keyboard.
The anticipation resumes
I look forward to the new iPads shipping next week. While I continue to view Apple’s iPadOS software strategy with consternation, I am still a heavy iPad user and want the product to keep getting better. On the hardware side, it has certainly taken a big leap forward.
As for the rest, well, you know. Hope springs eternal. There’s always the next WWDC.
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