Apple just announced the new iPad Pro, and at a watch event in New York City, several reporters got a first-hand look at Apple’s new tablet. After holding and playing with the device for a few minutes, I can confidently say that Apple isn’t kidding about how slim the new model is. At 5.3mm thick for the 11-inch model and 5.1mm thick for the 13-inch tablet, the new iPad is noticeably thinner and lighter than anything the company has made before.
This is such a big difference that the larger model, which always seemed ridiculously huge to me, is much more comfortable to hold and use. (It’s now technically even larger, up to 13 inches compared to 12.9 inches before). The difference between the Pro and the new Air can be seen practically from across the room, and from the perspective of someone who last wore the 11-inch Pro for a year and a half, it’s a really big difference. The biggest question I have for now is about fragility: is the new Pro potentially too thin? It feels stiff and strong in my hands, but with a device like this you always have to compromise. We have lots of tests to do.
The most notable new spec on the new Pro, aside from its dimensions, is the new OLED screen. It’s a little difficult to tell exactly what it looks like from a quick glance in a crowded room, but even from a distance you can see how much clearer the image is. The “Tandem OLED,” as Apple calls it, appears to be quite bright, and viewing angles are excellent, as we usually see on the iPad. The screen didn’t immediately impress me as much as it did after the redesign, but it looks great.
What about the M4 chip powering the whole thing? Well, we’ll have to see. For most purposes, the iPad has enough power for a long time – the M4 is clearly intended to handle extremely intensive applications, such as the new multi-camera setup in Final Cut Pro or some of the more advanced artistic features in apps like Procreate. It was super fast in a short demo. The iPad is almost always super fast.
It’s amazing how much lighter and thinner the new Pro feels in your hand.
The key to the new Pro’s appeal are two new accessories – the new Apple Pencil Pro and the improved Magic Keyboard. The Magic Keyboard looks and works really nice. Its aluminum casing and enlarged trackpad are much higher-class solutions than what we have seen in previous versions. Typing on it felt like typing on a MacBook Air, which was apparently the goal.
Function keys! It has function keys!
There’s now a row of function keys at the top, which will make this a much more usable keyboard-and-trackpad machine overall. (Though iPadOS still isn’t a particularly great operating system, especially for a trackpad, but we’ll have to wait for WWDC to see if Apple improves that.)
Pencil Pro looks like Pencil, but with some cool new features.
Pencil Pro… well, it feels like a pencil. You definitely feel haptic feedback when you squeeze or double-tap, which is a nice addition to the setup, and on the Pro screen it was smooth and fast when I was drawing and moving things around. (I’m definitely not an artist, so we’ll need someone to test it more thoroughly.) Most of the coolest stuff is software, too, and many of Pencil Pro’s best features will come from third-party developers.
At $999 for the 11-inch model and $1,299 for the 13-inch, the iPad Pro is by no means an everyday iPad – it would be the new iPad Air or even the now cheaper 10th-generation iPad. But Apple likes to do the best hardware work on its high-end devices, and this Pro looks like it’s keeping up the tradition nicely.
Credit : www.theverge.com
