- Let Loose event LIVE — Everything announced at the Let Loose event, as it happens
- OLED iPad Pro — M3 and a major display upgrade expected!
- iPad Air 6 — Apple's thinnest and lightest tablet gets a new processor!
- Apple Pencil 3 — Or should we say Apple Pencil Pro?
Apple has just unveiled the company's brand new iPad Pro 2024 at its May 7 Let Loose event. The new iPad Pro features a new design, new display, and new accessories. Let's get into it.
The new iPad Pro comes in two sizes: the long-known 11-inch model and a new 13-inch model (no more 12.9-inch model for 2024). The new iPad Pros are even thinner than their predecessors with the 11-inch model coming in at 5.3mm and 5.1mm for the 13-inch model. Apple says this makes the iPad Pro even thinner than the long-gone iPod nano and its thinnest product ever. It's also lighter with the 11-inch model coming in under a pound at 0.98 lb with the 13-inch not far behind at 1.28lb.
The next big update with the new iPad Pro is its new display — it's finally happened, an iPad is finally rocking an OLED display. The new OLED display features XDR performance which means it will rock a 120Hz refresh rate. Apple says they accomplish this with a new technology that uses two OLED displays at the same time, which Apple called Tandem OLED.
That technology also means a boost to brightness. The new iPad Pro can hit 1000 nits of brightness for both SDR and HDR content and 1600 nits of peak brightness for HDR content. The OLED display also means that users will experience brighter specular highlights in photos, deeper and truer blacks, more details in shadows and low light, and more response to content in motion. Apple is calling this new display the Ultra Retina XDR display.
Best yet, it's coming to both sizes — not just the big iPad Pro anymore. Apple is also offering a nano-texture glass option on the iPad Pro for the first time, taking the technology from the Pro Display XDR and bringing it to its portable tablet.
The new iPad Pro also comes packed with the new M4 chip. The latest generation of Apple's M-Series processor features second-generation 3nm technology that makes the chip even more power efficient. It also comes packed with a new display engine designed specifically to power the OLED display on the iPad Pro.
The new M4 chip also features a new CPU that features 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. Apple says that the new chip is twice as fast as the M2 chip. It also features a next-generation 10-core GPU architecture that supports dynamic caching, mesh shading, and ray tracing — all accelerated by the hardware.
Speaking of efficiency, Apple says that the M4 chip is just as powerful as the M2 chip at half the power. The new chip comes with a new 16-core Neural Engine which the company says is faster and more efficient than previous generations. It also processes 38 trillion operations per second, making it 60 times faster than the first Neural Engine.
The new M4 chip also comes packed with 120Gh/s of unified memory bandwidth and, due to the new design, a 20% thermal improvement that makes the chip 4x faster than the M2 Pro and 10x faster than the original iPad Pro.
The new iPad Pro also comes with new cameras and microphones. The latest-generation Pro comes with a 12Mp f/1.8 rear camera that can shoot 4K ProRes video with smart HDR. The back of the iPad Pro also still includes a LiDAR scanner and a new adaptive True-Tone flash.
This new camera system now supports AI-powered document scanning which will remove shadows and other imperfections from a scan. The new iPad Pro also packs a new front-facing 12MP Ultra-Wide camera that (thank god) is finally placed better for using the iPad for video calls in landscape rather than portrait orientation.
The new iPad Pro also includes improved performance for Face ID and a new, faster, and more efficient charging system for the Apple Pencil. Speaking of which, Apple also announced a new Apple Pencil Pro and next-generation Magic Keyboard to help accessorize your new pro tablet.
The new iPad Pro will start at $999 for the 11-inch and $1,299 for the 13-inch and come in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB storage configurations. You can order the new iPad Pro today and it will be available next week.
Out with the old
Apple's previous version of the iPad Pro was unveiled in October, 2022. That update brought the M2 Apple silicon chip and the Apple Pencil hover feature, however the design otherwise remained unchanged from the M1 iPad Pro. The iPad Pro previously featured the Liquid Retina XDR display in the 12.9-inch model, delivering not only a 120Hz refresh rate but mini-LED backlighting.
We're covering the Apple iPad event as it happens. Follow the Let Loose event LIVE here. Or check out our roundups for all the latest on the new OLED iPad Pro, iPad Air, and the new Apple Pencil.
