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Apple's latest event has just wrapped with the headline undoubtedly being the spectacular new iPad Pro confirmed as featuring the new M4 chip.
We'll get to all the rest of the stuff in a second, new M2-powered iPad Airs, new Apple Pencil and all that sort of thing, but the centrepiece of Apple's iPad-focused Let Loose event this afternoon was without doubt the new iPad Pro. And the centrepiece of that, as rumoured, is the new 3nm M4 chip.
M4 chip debuts
The new CPU offers up to four performance cores and now six efficiency cores, delivering up to 1.5x faster CPU performance over the M2 that sat at the heart of the previous-generation iPad Pro. It builds on the GPU architecture of M3 — the 10-core GPU includes powerful features like Dynamic Caching, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, which come to iPad for the first time. Usefully it also delivers what Apple claims is industry-leading performance per watt. Compared to M2, M4 can deliver the same performance using just half the power, and compared to the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 can deliver the same performance using just a quarter of the power.
A new advanced Media Engine includes support for AV1 decode, providing more power-efficient playback of high-resolution video experiences from streaming services.
It also features Apple’s most powerful Neural Engine ever, capable of 38 trillion operations per second. That is a mammoth 60x faster than Apple’s first Neural Engine in the A11 Bionic chip, and something that makes it "an outrageously powerful device for AI."
We'll know more about the implications of that after WWDC 24 next month, but for now we have demonstrations such as Scene Removal Mask in Final Cut Pro isolating a subject fro its background in a 4K video with just a tap.
"The World's Most Advanced Display"
The new iPad Pro was long rumoured to have an OLED display. In fact it has two. Apple says that what it has dubbed the Ultra Retina XDR is the world’s most advanced display. It uses two OLED panels and combines the light from both to provide impressive full-screen brightness: 1000 nits of full-screen brightness for SDR and HDR content, and 1600 nits peak for HDR. For pro users working in high-end, color-managed workflows or challenging lighting conditions, a new nano-texture glass option comes to iPad Pro for the first time. Nano-texture glass is precisely etched at a nanometer scale, maintaining image quality and contrast while scattering ambient light for reduced glare.
A new 11-inch model is just 5.3 mm thin, and the standard 13-inch model is even thinner at a striking 5.1 mm, while both models are just as strong as the previous design. The 11-inch model weighs less than a pound, and the 13-inch model is nearly a quarter pound lighter than its predecessor
Pricing and availability
Customers can order the new iPad Pro with M4 starting today, May 7 in 29 countries and regions. The new 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Pro will be available in silver and space black finishes in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB configurations. The 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $999 for the WiFi model, and $1199 for the WiFi + Cellular model. The 13-inch iPad Pro starts at $1299 for the WiFi model, and $1499 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model.
Tags: Technology Apple
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