Apple unveils iPad Pros with OLED screen and M4 chip

Apple unveiled new iPads on Tuesday – the iPad Pro and iPad Air – along with accessories. The iPad Pro is the thinnest device made by the company and the first Apple tablet with an OLED screen and M4 chip, while the iPad Air comes in two sizes for the first time, the company announced at a pre-recorded event called "Let Loose."

The most significant and anticipated changes were introduced with the iPad Pro line. Apple announced two – an 11-inch and a 13-inch – iPad Pro tablets, which, for the first time, come with a new OLED screen and the newest Apple M4 chip.

The company says that the new iPad Pro is the thinnest Apple product ever, with the 11-inch model coming in at 5.3mm and the 13-inch model at 5.1 mm. Both devices will weigh around a quarter pound less than their predecessors.

The 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Pros are made with new technology that Apple calls Tandem OLED. Apple promises 1000 nits full-screen brightness, 1600 nits peak brightness, deeper blacks, brighter specular highlights, and more detail in shadows and low light.

The new iPad Pros will be powered by the newest Apple chip – the M4 – built on second-gen 3nm technology. Tim Millett, Apple's VP for Platform Architecture, said that the M4 features a new display engine that enables precision, color, and brightness to Ultra Retina OLED XDR display.

It has a new CPU with up to four performance cores and up to six efficiency cores. Millett said that the M4 delivers up to 50% performance compared to the M2, which was found in the previous version of the iPad Pro.

The M4 will have a neural processing engine capable of operating 38 trillion units per second. According to Millett, it is the most powerful neural processing unit found in any AI PC today.

The M4 chip will also enable faster on-device AI computations. Apple says that iPad Pros with M4 chips can easily isolate a subject from the background of a 4K video.

Another change coming to the iPad Pro line is that the front-facing camera moves from the portrait to the landscape edge. Meanwhile, the main camera will have 12MP, a Lidar scanner, and a new adaptive True Tone flash that makes document scanning easier.

The new iPad Pros come in silver and space grey-black colors. The 256 GB versions start at $999 and $1299, respectively.

The iPad Air and accessories

Apple also announced new iPad Air models, which, for the first time, come in two sizes. Along with the 11-inch model, Apple has also released a 13-inch model. Both devices will be powered by the M2 chip, which previously powered the iPad Pro. Apple promises that the new iPad Air line will deliver up to 50 percent faster performance for various productive tasks.

The 11-inch model features landscape stereo speakers with spatial audio, promising better sound quality. Meanwhile, Apple said that the 13-inch model would double the base.

The iPad comes in new blue, purple, and starlight space grey colors. The base models will have 128GB of memory, with prices starting from $599 and $799.

Apple also announced the Apple Pencil Pro and redesigned Magic Keyboard at the event.

The Apple Pencil Pro now has a new sensor in the barrel that can sense the user’s squeeze, bringing up a tool palette to quickly switch tools, line weights, and colors. It also supports haptic feedback, has a new gyroscope, and can be located via the "Find My" function.

The price of Apple Pencil Pro starts at $129 USD, the company said.

Magic Keyboard, which will be thinner and lighter, and now includes a function row for access to features like screen brightness and volume controls. It also has a new trackpad with haptic feedback and aluminium pal rest. The Magic Keyboard will cost either $ 249 or $ 299, depending on size.

The last Apple event that announced new iPads happened one and a half years ago, at the end of 2022. This was the longest pause without a new model since the release of the first iPad in 2010.

Such an unusually long pause has also affected the company’s iPad sales. In Q1, iPad sales declined by 17 percent to 5.6 billion dollars, while overall revenue declined by 4.3%, the company reported last week.

Before Tuesday's event, it was rumored that the new iPad Pro would come with an OLED screen and possibly with an M4 chip, enabling on-device computations, while the iPad Air was expected to get a bigger screen size and an M3 chip. Apple was also expected to release a new Apple Pencil and updated Magic Keyboard.