New iPads, Pencil, and Keyboards – A report card on the latest products

yesterday Relax The event announced the new iPad, Apple Pencil, and Magic Keyboard — plus a few surprises, some nice, some not.

There were no big surprises in the actual iPad announcements, as they were largely in line with what we expected…

iPad Pro

We, as expected, got a new iPad Pro with a tandem OLED display, in both 11-inch and 13-inch versions. The show is of course headline news.

The Ultra Retina XDR display features advanced Tandem OLED technology that uses two OLED panels and combines light from both to deliver stunning full-screen brightness. The new iPad Pro supports an incredible 1,000 nits of brightness for SDR and HDR content, and 1,600 nits of brightness for HDR content. No other device of its kind provides this level of extreme dynamic range. Tandem OLED technology enables sub-millisecond control over the color and luminance of each pixel, taking XDR resolution further than ever before.

One pleasant surprise here was the matte glass option (what Apple calls Nano Glass). This is a $100 upgrade, but it’s still a very good option available.

Both models have already received the new M4 chip – something that even the source of the rumours, Bloomberg Mark Gorman, did not dare to describe anything more specific than probability.

The M4 is based on the M3’s GPU architecture — and the 10-core GPU includes powerful features like dynamic caching, mesh shading and hardware-accelerated ray tracing, coming to iPad for the first time. Combined with the high bandwidth of unified memory, professional rendering applications like Octane will see up to 4x faster performance than the M2.

The new Advanced Media Engine includes support for AV1 decoding, providing more power-efficient playback for HD video experiences from streaming services.

My view for some time has been that people are becoming less and less realistic Need The power of the iPad Pro, and that’s even more true for this model, but it’s still crazy how much performance Apple has crammed into the iPad.

Speaking of compactness, the new iPad Pro is also thinner than ever – so much so that the Thunderbolt cable actually protrudes above the screen!

Verdict: A truly amazing achievement, but one that very few people need. The starting price also increased. The cost to max out the 13-inch iPad Pro, plus the new Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil Pro, is now more than $2,700. That’s more than the cost of most MacBook Pro configurations.

iPad Air

The new iPad Air is also consistent with pre-event reports. The big news here, of course, is the 13-inch model. For the first time, iPad buyers no longer have to pay for Pro features they don’t need just to get a bigger screen.

The 11-inch model is a relatively modest update, but it also remains at the same starting price of $599, so no complaints there. There’s little reason for anyone with the previous model to upgrade, although it’s nice to see the front camera repositioned for use in landscape orientation.

Verdict: The 13-inch iPad Air is a really nice addition to the iPad lineup, and helps offset the increasingly impressive prices of the Pro models. For $799, you still get a great screen even without the Pro’s OLED upgrade, and this screen size is a real joy for immersive content, as well as multi-window work.

A “new” iPad for beginners

There hasn’t been a new entry-level iPad as such, but Apple has dropped the ninth-generation model from the lineup, giving the 10th generation a very welcome $100 cut. This effectively means that the cost of entry to the iPad got a slight increase to $349, but it is a lot Best value.

Verdict: This is great news, and I consider it as good a step as a brand new device.

Magic keyboard

The new Magic Keyboard was a smaller upgrade than some reports suggested, but the aluminum base gives it a more premium look, and it’s good to see that Apple hasn’t raised the price further.

The main benefits here are the function keys and larger trackpad. The bad news is that it’s only compatible with the latest models (although this includes the Air, which is a nice surprise). This means that anyone who wants to take advantage of it can only do so by replacing their iPad.

Verdict: A worthwhile upgrade, without an increase in price, but the lack of backward compatibility is disappointing. If it were just an iPad Pro, that might have been more understandable given the ultra-thin design, but less forgiving given that it can accommodate the new 0.2-inch-thick sixth-generation iPad Pro and the 0.24-inch iPad Air, though not the 0.25-inch fifth-generation iPad Pro. inch.

Apple Pencil Pro

The new Apple Pencil Pro doesn’t get all the new features it’s been rumored to have. There are no magnetically attached interchangeable tips, and no specific eraser feature.

However, it did offer some other upgrades we’d expect: tap gesture and find support.

It’s also getting a new Barrel Roll gesture, which may have been a source of some confusion with the interchangeable tips, as this provides a way to switch between thin and thick brushes, for example.

Verdict: Some worthwhile new features for sure, and the good news is no price increase compared to the 2G. However, it is again disappointing that there is no backward compatibility with previous iPad Pro models. The relocation of the front camera – with corresponding changes to the magnetic attachment and charging – is the potential issue here. I doubt it was intentional: Apple likely wanted to sell a new Pencil to owners of older models.

Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro

Some very welcome improvements here! The Live Multicam capabilities in the iPad version of FCP are a tremendous achievement, as are the torso splitting and additional AI musicians in Logic Pro.

What’s even more exciting is that a new Final Cut Camera app will be announced soon. Bad news for Filmic and BlackMagic, whose apps are likely to be Sherlocked, but probably good news for iPhone and iPad owners.

Verdict: All surprises are welcome here!

All this, then, is a very powerful event.

picture: apple