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The M4 iPad Pros

Tuesday, 14 May 2024

The consensus from product reviewers — including yours truly — has been remarkably consistent for the latter half of the iPad’s entire existence, especially when it comes to iPad Pros: incredibly powerful and beautiful hardware hamstrung by infuriatingly limited software. That was the consensus regarding the new iPad Pros in 2022, in 2021, in 2020, and in 2018. In fact consensus is arguably too weak a word. I’m not sure there’s any product in all of tech that has been so consistently regarded by product reviewers for so many years.

Incredibly powerful and beautiful hardware hamstrung by infuriatingly limited software.

But what if we’re thinking about this wrong? This conclusion — that iPad Pros are great hardware let down by underpowered software — starts from a hardware-first perspective. In the abstract, given this amazing hardware, what type of software should power it? What kind of OS? What metaphors for the UI? iPad Pros have been — since the debut of the Pro fork in the iPad lineup — portable-workstation-class computer hardware. iPadOS has never been a workstation-style OS. The obvious truth — reiterated in recent weeks by the EU calling bullshit (or perhaps, conneries) on Apple’s claim that iPad and iPhone are separate platforms — is that iPadOS is a souped-up tablet-oriented variant of iOS.

This has never been more true than now — the M4 iPad Pros are, by some practical measures, the fastest computers Apple makes. But iPadOS is not the sort of system that the typical power user would think to run on super-powerful hardware.

But let’s invert our thinking on this. Instead of starting with the hardware and pondering what the ideal software would be like to take advantage of its power, let’s start with the software. A concept for simplicity-first console-style touchscreen tablet computing. A metaphor for computing with smartphone-style guardrails, with tablet-specific features like stylus support and laptop docking. A tablet OS that is unabashedly a souped-up version of iOS, not a stripped-down version of MacOS. What type of hardware should Apple build to instantiate such a platform?

Obviously Apple should build affordable iPads for the mass market: iPads that are pretty thin, pretty lightweight, with very nice displays, good performance, and great battery life. The original 2010 iPad — offered in only one size, 9.7 inches — had an entry price of $500. Inflation adjusted, that’s a little over $700 today. The new 11-inch M2 iPad Air starts at just $600; the 13-inch iPad Air at $800. The very nice no-adjective 11-inch iPad (officially marketed as 10.9-inches) costs just $350 — effectively half the price of the original iPad in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Those are excellent devices at compelling prices to fit the good (iPad) and better (iPad Air) slots in a good / better / best lineup. But what about best? What should Apple offer for the iPadOS user who is willing to spend more?

For the sake of this argument, let’s posit that there exist tens of millions — perhaps 100 million — users who love the iPad for what it is. People who feel empowered, not hamstrung, by how it works, and who have no or very little need for a computer that exposes the complexity of a desktop OS like MacOS or Windows. And that there exist tens of millions more people who enjoy having an iPad to complement, not replace, their desktop computer. That in broad strokes there exist two types of iPad user: (a) those for whom iPadOS, as it is, suits them well as their primary “big screen” personal computer; (b) those for whom an iPad, due to its very deliberate computing-as-an-appliance-style constraints, can only ever be a supplemental device to a Mac, Windows, or Linux “real” computer. Neither group needs a more powerful iPad, and so because of this, everyone — power-user nerds and typical users alike — tends to use iPads until they break, wear out, or age out of software support.

Personally, I fall squarely in group (b). I feel severely hamstrung trying to use any iPad for my day-to-day work. My personal iPad is a 2018 11-inch iPad Pro, and it’s still very much fine for my needs, even after spending the last week testing this new 13-inch M4 iPad Pro. And so the power-user thinking is that if I’m fine with 6-year-old hardware that is utterly blown away, spec-wise, by this new M4 generation of iPad Pros, then, ipso facto, something is profoundly and fundamentally wrong with the software platform. That if the iPadOS software platform were what it should be, it would compel users — like me, perhaps like you — to upgrade to this latest and greatest hardware to “take advantage of” the hardware’s extraordinary capabilities.

But what if that’s misguided? What if the iPadOS platform is great? Or at the very least, the software is very close to the mark of what it should be and how it should work? What then should Apple apply its hardware engineering resources to, to create a best tier in the iPad lineup?

In that case Apple would prioritize things like optimizing the hardware for thinness and lightness, while maintaining long battery life. To those ends, they would apply the extraordinary performance-per-watt of Apple silicon not so much to making slow things faster, but to making everything the iPad does more power efficient. Twice as fast for the same energy consumption is the Mac way of thinking. Same performance with half the energy consumption is the iOS way of thinking. But those are two sides of the same performance-per-watt coin.

From this viewpoint, going from better (iPad Air) to best (iPad Pro) shouldn’t be about power and performance and the ability to use the device for any and all complex computing tasks, but instead about being just plain nicer. Like going from a Toyota to a Lexus.

Display

For a device that is fundamentally all-screen, that means making the nicest possible displays. Every iPad Apple has ever made had a nice (for its time) display. Every iPad Pro has had a great display. But there remains so much room for refinement.

Consider printers. In my lifetime I’ve gone from crude, painfully slow, annoyingly loud dot-matrix printers, to inkjets, to 300 DPI black-and-white laser printers, to 600 DPI laser printers, to 1200 DPI color laser printers. During the decades-long era when printing was an important part of most people’s computing lives, the quality of the output improved steadily. No one needed higher-quality output but nicer is nicer.

There may well be an endpoint to display technology, where tablet-sized displays are so good that there’s no point improving them. Printers, in my opinion, got to that point a decade or two ago.¹ But we’re not there yet, and Apple’s foot is seemingly pedal-to-the-metal pushing iPad Pro display quality forward.

Everything about this new tandem OLED “Ultra Retina XDR” iPad Pro display is excellent. Blacks are black, whites are white, and everything is far sharper than my middle-aged eyes can discern. Oh, and it is bright. It is so bright that when reading in bed at night, alongside a trying-to-fall-asleep spouse, I had to turn the brightness way down in Control Center. It is so bright that it seems perfectly usable outdoors in direct sunlight.

No one really needs a display this good on an iPad. But most people would surely enjoy having a screen this good on their iPad. And some of those are happy to pay a premium for it.

Performance

My review unit is a 1 TB model, with 10 CPU cores and 16 GB RAM. Here are benchmarks from Geekbench 6 (higher scores are better):

	Single	Multi	GPU
M4 iPad Pro (2024)	3,780	14,616	53,555
M2 iPad Pro (2022)	2,627	9,987	46,643
M2 MacBook Air (2022)	2,631	9,997	46,486
M3 MacBook Air (2024)	3,092	12,036	47,785

All devices have 13-inch displays. iPads running iPadOS 17.5. Macs running MacOS 14.5. All scores averaged across 3 runs.

There exists no iPad model with an M3 chip, and I suspect there never will be one. So I chose the four devices in the above table to speculate about how a hypothetical M3 iPad would perform. iPadOS and MacOS are very different OSes, but the Geekbench 6 results for an M2 iPad Pro and M2 MacBook Air aren’t just close, they’re effectively identical. Presumably, if there existed an M3 iPad Pro, its Geekbench scores would be nearly identical to those of the M3 MacBook Air.

I don’t know if Geekbench is a good benchmark for making such evaluations, but if it is, it would appear that, regardless of whether it’s in an iPad or MacBook, the M3 is about 1.2× faster than the M2, in both single- and multi-core performance, and the M4 is about 1.2× faster than the M3, in both single- and multi-core. Geekbench scores improved only about 1.1× going from M1 to M2. But if we can expect ~1.2× improvements with each successive M-series generation, the M6 will offer double the CPU performance of the M2, and the M8 triple. (As Intel has learned the hard way, it’s quite a big “if” to assume that this 1.2× improvement per generation can be maintained.)

I’ll also include results from Speedometer 3.0, a benchmark for web rendering engines (higher scores are better):

	Speedometer 3.0
M4 iPad Pro (2024)	33
M2 iPad Pro (2022)	26
M2 MacBook Air (2022)	27
M3 MacBook Air (2024)	38

All results using Safari on iPadOS 17.5 or MacOS 14.5.

These results don’t make much sense to me. The M2 iPad Pro and M2 MacBook Air perform nearly identically, but the M3 MacBook Air is quite a bit faster than the M4 iPad Pro, despite the above Geekbench results suggesting that the M4 ought to be 1.2× faster than the M3. I don’t think this discrepancy is worth racking our brains over; I suspect that this is more about the differences between the iPadOS and MacOS versions of Safari/WebKit.

The bottom line is that the M4 is very fast, and according to both Apple’s stated specs and my own observations after a week of use, very power efficient. It appears that Apple is playing no marketing tricks, and despite its appearance only six months or so after the M3, the M4 is worthy of its next-generation name.

That leaves us pondering the fact that the M4 is a better chip than the M3 that hit the MacBook Air lineup just two months ago. That’s not ideal, but it is what it is. Ideally the new MacBook Airs would have the M4 too. Apple has not and almost surely is not going to fully explain the rationale behind this, but you don’t need to be Morris Chang to surmise that this is about TSMC’s production capabilities. The MacBook Airs are Apple’s best-selling laptops; the iPad Pros are Apple’s least-selling iPads. I think it’s as simple as this: the current MacBook Airs have the M3, not the M4, because there isn’t yet sufficient supply of M4 chips to satisfy demand for MacBook Airs. M4 supply obviously is sufficient to meet iPad Pro demand, and, further, according to Apple, only the M4 is capable of driving the Ultra Retina XDR displays, which are effectively two OLED displays stacked atop each other.

So I think there’s no way today’s MacBook Airs could have the M4, because TSMC can’t yet produce enough M4 chips on their second-gen 3nm process. And conversely there’s no way today’s new iPad Pros could sport the M3 because the M3 lacks a display controller that can drive the tandem OLED Ultra Retina XDR displays — plus, I suspect, the extraordinary thinness and low weights of these new iPad Pros wouldn’t quite be possible without the M4’s thermal advantages over the M3. Apple could make thin and light iPad Pros with the M3, but not iPad Pros this thin and light.

The Meaning of ‘Pro’

Which brings us back to the entire question of what the iPad Pro is supposed to be. It’s easy enough to say they’re all just computers. A MacBook could in theory run iPadOS. An iPad could in theory run MacOS. (The developer kits Apple supplied after announcing the Mac’s Apple silicon transition in 2020 were, effectively, iPad Pros in Mac Mini chassis.)

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard someone declare that Apple should “just” add touchscreen support to MacOS and allow iPads to dual-boot between MacOS and iPadOS, I’d be a very annoying customer at the bank tomorrow. Those who espouse this opinion are often so adamant that such an arrangement would be both an undeniably good idea for users and “easy” for Apple to do that they are convinced that the only possible explanation for why Apple hasn’t done this is that it’s all part of a scheme to sell both an iPad and MacBook to users who might otherwise just need one.

Apple clearly sees these two platforms from an entirely different perspective. Sure, there’s no denying that Apple is in the business of selling devices. But the idea that Apple deliberately hamstrings the iPad in order to sell more MacBooks makes no long term sense. Apple thrives and truly only succeeds when it makes the best devices possible. If iPadOS is fundamentally deficient, why does Apple sell so many iPads? Why are so many iPad users so happy with their iPad as their only computer other than their phone? “I want to work in ways that iPadOS does not support” does not mean “Everyone wants to work in ways that iPadOS does not support”.

I have observed numerous times that Apple uses the adjective pro in a multitude of ways. Sometimes it means professional, but sometimes it just means deluxe. This difference is exemplified by the iPad and MacBook lineups. With MacBooks, the Pro models are more professional. They have nicer displays and nicer speakers, yes, but primarily they’re about doing things faster. They are thicker and heavier than MacBook Airs. iPad Pros go the opposite way: they are thinner and lighter than the iPad Airs. Yes, it’s ironic that with iPads, the “Air” models are neither the thinnest nor lightest. But this really does explain the philosophical differences Apple sees between the iPad and Mac platforms. A better Mac is faster. Nicer too, but primarily faster. A better iPad is nicer. Faster, too, but primarily nicer. These new iPad Pros are just incredibly nice. And optimizing for niceness is underrated.

I’ve seen it suggested by the “amazing hardware hamstrung by iPadOS’s limitations” crowd that everyone who likes or even loves using an iPad should settle for the iPad Air or even the just-plain iPad. That the iPad Pro’s power is going to waste, and thus there’s no sense paying a premium price for it. But how is it a waste to put that power to use in ways that can’t necessarily be measured objectively? The new iPad Pros sport the M4 not just to accomplish more powerful tasks but primarily to make everyday tasks as nice as they can possibly be, starting with how it feels to simply hold an iPad Pro in hand.

The New Magic Keyboard

As is my wont, I’ve written this entire review using the M4 iPad Pro itself, using the new Magic Keyboard.² What a fabulous upgrade this new Magic Keyboard is. The trackpad is bigger and undeniably better. Aluminum palm rests feel better. The keys have great typing feel — I think better than the feel of the old Magic Keyboards, but certainly no worse.

So the new Magic Keyboards offer sturdier construction, better typing feel, much better and bigger trackpads, and they add a function-key row, complete with a top-left Esc key.

The new Magic Keyboards are about 5 percent lighter than the old ones. Oddly, Apple doesn’t list the weight as a spec for the Magic Keyboards, but by my scale, the original 13-inch Magic Keyboard weighed about 700g; the new one weighs about 660g.

Some weights, with the iPads encased in their corresponding Magic Keyboards (all measured on my scale):

13″ M3 MacBook Air: 1,227g
13″ M4 iPad Pro: 1,247g
13″ M2 iPad Pro: 1,398g
14″ M3 Max MacBook Pro: 1,607g

Until now, a 13-inch MacBook Air was a noticeable 170g lighter than a 13-inch iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard (~12 percent). Now, though, a 13-inch iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is only a negligible 20g heavier than a MacBook Air. That’s something. You can absolutely feel the difference in hand.

I have one significant complaint about the new Magic Keyboard: it’s hard to open. MacBooks have a notch carved out of their aluminum base, under the trackpad. When closed, this notch gives your thumb a place to begin exerting upward pressure on the display to open it up. There is no such notch on the new Magic Keyboard. So instead of lifting the “display” (which is really the iPad itself) up to open it into laptop configuration, I find myself starting with the iPad Pro perpendicular to the desk, and pulling the keyboard/trackpad down. You don’t have to pry it open, per se, but the top-heavy nature of an iPad in a keyboard case inherently makes it harder to open than a MacBook with their lightweight display tops. Top-heaviness also requires that the Magic Keyboard hinge be quite a bit stiffer than any MacBook hinge. It’s the nature of the beast. An iPad in the original Magic Keyboard isn’t easy to open either.

Miscellaneous

The new Pencil Pro feels just like a Pencil 2 but with a haptic-feedback “squeeze” action. Just like with Apple’s recent trackpads (including the trackpad on the new Magic Keyboards), the Pencil Pro doesn’t really have a clicking button. It’s faked through haptics. But the fakery is so convincing that it’s indistinguishable from an actual clicking button. I am not even vaguely an illustrator or sketcher, so I can’t claim to have put the Pencil Pro through its paces over the last week. But the cleverness of the new tool-switching radial menu for switching between Pencil tools is so fun that it makes me wish I had more use for a Pencil than annotating PDF documents. It’s really nice, and it’s great that the Pencil Pro works just as well with the new M2 iPad Airs.
Battery life has been excellent. As I type this sentence, I’ve been using the iPad Pro non-stop for hours, and the battery is still at 83 percent.
Moving the front-facing camera to the long side, optimized for use in laptop orientation, is an obvious win overall. I continue to think it’s a bit weird that Apple didn’t pull the trigger on this change years ago, when they first embraced the fact that many people wish to use their iPads in laptop-style keyboard cases. But there’s one downside: the Face ID sensors are in the same sensor array as the camera, and when holding the iPad Pro as a tablet, in portrait orientation, that’s where my right hand often is. I’ve gotten used to this change over the course of the week, though — I encountered the “hey, your hand is blocking the Face ID sensors” animated arrow warning far more frequently the first few days than the last few.
My review unit hardware is in space black, which I think looks great.
The remarkable thinness of the new iPad Pros — this 13-inch model I’ve been testing is just 5.1mm thick; the 11-inch models 5.3mm — has raised questions about durability. Is it going to bend? It feels quite sturdy in hand, with no flex. I asked representatives from Apple about durability, and they claim the new iPad Pros should prove every bit as durable (and in particular, bend-resistant) as previous iPad Pros. Arun “Mrwhosetheboss” Maini did me one better, and asked John Ternus about durability in an on-camera interview posted to Twitter/X. Ternus’s answer echoed what I was told on background: the new iPad Pros have their main logic board and a supporting rib running down the middle of the hardware in portrait mode. This design both better dissipates heat and adds rigidity to the chassis. Durability questions can only truly be answered through extensive real-world use, but my money is on these new iPad Pros being as durable as promised.
The cameras — front and rear — are both fine. No raves, but no complaints. It is a bit weird that the previous generation iPad Pros had both 1× (“wide”) and 0.5× (“ultra wide”) cameras, and the M4 models are back to just the lone 1×, but this seems less like a regression and more like a sign that adding an ultra wide camera to the previous generation was overkill. The microphone seems excellent for one that’s built into a tablet.
My review unit does not have the nano-texture display finish. If I buy one of these iPads, I’ll probably opt for the nano-texture, but I’m curious to see what reviewers who did get to test it think. (And I’m curious to see it in person, again, at an Apple Store this week.)

Conclusion

iPadOS is what it is. Whatever you (or I) think of it as a productivity platform, you’re a fool if you think it isn’t beloved by many. It’s popular, even for some “professional” use cases, not despite iPadOS’s guardrails but often because of them. Those guardrails feel limiting to me, often very much so, but those same guardrails are liberating to others. There is tremendous power in having a computer that is simple not merely by suggestion but by hard and fast technical constraints.

Should you only buy what you need, or splurge for what you’d most enjoy? A Lexus instead of a Toyota. A first-class seat instead of coach. Craft IPA instead of Budweiser. In other aspects of life, few question the mere existence of premium-priced superior experiences. But with the iPad, those unsatisfied by the nature of iPadOS seem to think those who do love iPadOS don’t deserve a premium tier of hardware.

And there are professional apps used for serious work on iPads. Apple’s own Final Cut and Logic for iPads are not toys. Both are very serious siblings — and for non-extreme projects, peers — to their respective Mac versions. For visual artists there are a plethora of serious iPad apps: DaVinci Resolve (video color grading), ZBrush (3D sculpting), Procreate Dreams, Affinity Designer, Frame IO. There’s even a paint app from Adobe called Photoshop, which apparently has been around for a while. Arguing that “no one can do real work on an iPad” reminds me of Yogi Berra’s “No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

A “pro” device that goes pro by getting thinner and lighter, not heavier and thicker, is not a non sequitur. Or at least not necessarily. What makes for a better iPad is simply orthogonal, in many regards, to what makes for a better Mac. Way back in 2010, when the iPad was new (and ran what was called iOS) and it felt like the Mac’s days might be winding down, I wrote, “It’s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light.” I meant that figuratively. But these new M4 iPad Pros make it quite literal. ★

Well, printer output quality. Not the printers themselves, which if anything, have gotten more maddening in recent years. ↩︎︎
Well, almost the entire thing. There’s nothing I’m aware of for iOS that makes HTML/Markdown table creation as easy as TableFlip, an excellent $10 (cheap!) Mac utility by Christian Tietze. And I added many of the hyperlinks to the text from my Mac, while copy editing in BBEdit before publication. Inserting dozens of links from open Safari tabs or from web search results is a tedious task that I’ve automated all the tedium out of using Keyboard Maestro, AppleScript, and Perl — none of which are available on iPadOS. ↩︎

Brief Thoughts and Observations on Yesterday’s ‘Let Loose’ iPad Keynote

Wednesday, 8 May 2024

Keynote / Mini Events

Apple hosted about 50 members of the media in New York City, in their ludicrously spacious Tribeca townhouse, to watch the keynote stream live. They had a hands-on area post-keynote, and a bunch of demos and briefings throughout the morning and early afternoon. It was nice. More low-key than the pre-COVID on-stage events (like the Brooklyn one in 2018, when they introduced the first retina MacBook Air and the 2018 iPad Pros), but low-key is good. Doing things in-person is good. (They held a similar event yesterday in London, too — which perhaps explains why they streamed the keynote at 7am PT.)

The New iPad Airs

No surprises here, but the big news is the addition of a 13-inch iPad Air to the lineup. Until last summer Apple’s only “big” MacBook was the 16-inch MacBook Pro (which starts at $2,500), and their only “big” iPad was the 13-inch iPad Pro (which, until yesterday, started at $1,100). If you wanted a big-screen MacBook or iPad you had to pay premium Pro prices, even if you didn’t need Pro features or performance. Last summer they introduced the 15-inch MacBook Air (starting price: $1,300) and now there’s the 13-inch iPad Air (starting price: $800).

There’s really not much else to say about the new iPad Airs. During the keynote, John Ternus described the iPad Air as getting features and components that were previously exclusive to the iPad Pro models, and that’s apt. But that means there’s not much new to talk about.

The New M4 iPad Pros

They are thin — really thin. It seems impossible that the new iPad Pros are thinner than an iPod Nano, but read the tech specs and weep:

For completeness:

The thinness is noticeable in hand, but the reduction in weight is even more noticeable. Per Apple’s specs, the new 13-inch iPad Pro weighs 579g, down from 682g in the 2022 models. That’s a sounds-too-good-to-be-true 15 percent reduction. The weight reduction for the 11-inch iPad Pros is less dramatic: 444g, down from 466g in the previous generation. (Those are Wi-Fi-only weights, but cellular networking adds only a meager 3–4g.)

Apple is advertising the new tandem OLED “Ultra Retina XDR” displays as “the world’s best displays”, full stop. From what I saw in the hands-on area yesterday, they indeed look terrific: bright, inky-black blacks (as you’d expect from any OLED displays), seemingly no problems with blooming or a halo effect. Generally though, Apple’s “best display” goes into the iPhone Pro, so purely as a guess, I’ll bet that the iPhone 16 Pro models get this display technology come September.

And, yes, the new iPad Pros have the M4, not the M3 chips that debuted just six months ago. This seems largely driven by moving to TSMC’s next-generation 3nm process, which brings efficiency gains compared to the first-generation 3nm process used to fabricate the A17 Pro and M3 family. In briefings yesterday, Apple reps emphasized, repeatedly, that these new iPad Pros could not have been built without the M4. The efficiency gains allowed Apple to make them remarkably thin and light, and more essentially, only the M4 has a display engine that can drive the new tandem OLED displays. This truly is one of those examples where Apple controlling the entire stack — their own silicon driving their own display design — puts their products in a league of their own. They couldn’t drive the new displays without the M4’s display controller and they wouldn’t have engineered that display controller if they hadn’t had these tandem OLED displays in mind.

Mark Gurman’s week-before scoop that these iPads might have the M4 is simply remarkable, even with the hedging around “might”. A hall of fame rumor scoop. Nobody else even spitballed such a notion. If not for Gurman it would have been a rather shocking surprise in the keynote. And my understanding is that Apple went to extraordinary lengths during development of these iPad Pros to keep the debut of the M4 under wraps. Apple folks are never ever happy about leaks, but this one in particular seemingly surprised them. But it also makes me wonder about reports — most prominently by Gurman himself — that these iPads were originally slated to launch in March, presumably just a few weeks after the launch of the M3 MacBook Airs, and just two months after the launch of the Vision Pro, which sports an M2. How soon after the launch of the M3 could the M4 have appeared? One thing I’m taking away from this is that it’s wrong to think about M-series generations as year-over-year annual iterations, like the A-series chips in iPhones. Rather, it seems like Apple is evolving the M-series chips in parallel, designing them with very specific but widely varied products in mind.

The iPad Family Lineup

Back in October, after Apple launched the Apple Pencil with USB-C, I wrote the following regarding the complexity and confusion in the iPad lineup:

Off the top of my head, what I’d like from Apple on the iPad front next year:

Drop the old 9th-gen iPad from the lineup. That iPad is so old it still has a home button.

Lower the price of the 10th-gen iPad by $100. (And maybe give it a speed bump from the A14 to A15 chip? But it’s probably wishful thinking to hope for a price cut and a newer chip.)

Update the iPad Air (and Mini?) models to be more like today’s iPad Pros, with Face ID instead of Touch ID.

Major revision of the iPad Pros, which haven’t seen a major form factor change since 2018. Put more pro in the iPad Pros, just like Apple has done with the iPhone 15 Pro models.

Update the Magic Keyboard, ideally in a way that continues to support both iPad Airs and 11-inch iPad Pros. The Magic Keyboard is a great idea, and I think a popular one. But it ought to be better — thinner, lighter, and more durable. (The white ones especially age quickly. Keep your eyes out for them in the wild, in cafes and airports — they often look quite grungy. Compare and contrast with MacBooks, which often look great even after years of daily use.) Mark Gurman has reported that just such a revision to the Magic Keyboard is in the works.

That would clarify the iPad’s three tiers: good (regular iPad, 10th-gen), better (iPad Air — the best choice for most people), and best (iPad Pros, with advanced new features and capabilities). The point should be to make the question “Which iPad should I buy?” as easy to answer as possible. I think Apple has made that question pretty easy to answer for iPhones, MacBooks, and Watches — and for peripherals like AirPods. Now do it for iPads.

Apple came pretty close to hitting every single item on my list yesterday. The only miss is that the new iPad Airs still use Touch ID, not Face ID. A few sources told me, after I wrote the above post in October, that Face ID components remain surprisingly expensive lo these many years after Face ID first appeared with the iPhone X in 2017, so I’m not surprised in the least that the iPad Airs still use Touch ID on the top button.

The only sore thumb in the entire iPad lineup is the iPad Mini, which, since it first appeared, has always been the least-frequently updated iPad. Compared to the 10th-gen regular-sized iPad, the iPad Mini seems expensive at $500. But the iPad Mini is more like a small iPad Air, with features like P3 wide color and an antireflective coating. And the current iPad Mini, despite being 2.5 years old, still has a faster chip than the 10th-gen iPad (A15 vs. A14).

Pricing

Storage	M4 iPad Pro 11″	M2 iPad Air 11″	iPad 10th-gen	iPad Mini 6th-gen
64 GB	—	—	$350	$500
128 GB	—	$600	—	—
256 GB	$1000	$700	$500	$650
512 GB	$1200	$900	—	—
1 TB	$1600	$1100	—	—
2 TB	$2000	—	—	—
11″ → 13″	+300	+200	—	—
Cellular	+200	+150	+150	+150
Nano-texture^*	+100	—	—	—

* Available only with 1 or 2 TB storage.

A 13-inch M4 iPad Pro with 2 TB of storage, cellular networking, and the nano-texture display costs a cool $2,600.

Rounding up to 13

Praise Jeebus, Apple has decided to label the bigger iPads as “13-inch” rather than the more exact but far less graceful “12.9-inch”. Apple is more comfortable rounding down than up. Underpromise, overdeliver. Look at the tech specs for the 13-inch MacBook Air: the display is 13.6 inches, so it could credibly be rounded up to 14. But these product names are more like “size classes”, not specs. I’ve been referring to big iPad Pros as “13-inch” for a while now, on the same grounds as rounding up prices like $499 to $500. Glad to see Apple make it official though.

Pencil Proliferation

With yesterday’s introduction of the Apple Pencil Pro, Apple now has made, and continues to sell, four different Pencil models. I saw a lot of gripes yesterday that this is confusing — that there ought to be just one Pencil, or perhaps two at the most. But in practice I don’t think it’s all that confusing. You don’t start by buying a Pencil; you start by choosing an iPad, and then you buy a Pencil that goes with that iPad. Arguing that it’s confusing that different iPads support different Pencils is like saying it’s confusing that different iPhones require different cases. In real life you just buy a case that is designed for your specific phone model, and it’s not confusing at all that the Apple Store carries cases for several generations of iPhone models, each in two different sizes.

I mean in theory, it would be better if there were one Pencil that worked with all iPads. And it stinks that if you have a Pencil 2 already, you can’t use it with a new iPad Pro or Air. But the mistake that prevents Apple from being able to offer just one Pencil has nothing to do with any of the Pencil models, but instead was the company’s yearslong resistance to moving the front-facing camera on iPads from the short side (like an iPhone) to the long side (like a laptop).

From my brief hands-on time, the haptic feedback and new squeeze gesture on the new Pencil Pro are just great. And for illustrators and calligraphers, the support for rotating the barrel to rotate the on-screen pen nib is very cool. On the cusp of the keynote I offhandedly hoped for the ability to turn the new Pencil upside down to get the eraser tool, but this squeeze gesture and the new radial menu of Pencil tools that appears contextually under the current pen location is a better idea. Upside down eraser support would offer a shortcut for just one tool; the squeeze menu gives you a shortcut to all tools.

I suspect naming the new Pencil “Pencil Pro” is a downstream effect of the fact that Apple needs to keep selling the Pencil 2. (People who own years-old iPads still buy new Pencils.) But Apple never printed the “2” on the Pencil 2 barrel — it just says “ Pencil”. And physically, the new Pencil Pro is indistinguishable from the Pencil 2 — same size, same color, same texture. They even use the same replacement tips. So if they had named it “Pencil 3” but still printed only “ Pencil” on the barrel, anyone who owned both models wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. So “ Pencil Pro” it is, even though it works with the new non-pro iPad Airs.

Also: the new Pencil Pro supports Find My. Unsurprising, but nice.

Miscellaneous

Anyone playing a drinking game that required taking a shot for each mention of “AI” or “machine learning” during the keynote probably passed out before it ended.
There’s just one rear-facing camera on the new iPad Pros. The previous generation had two: wide (1×) and ultra-wide (0.5×). I’m not sure what to make of that other than conceding that iPads don’t really need multiple cameras. I can’t recall ever — not even once — wishing that my personal iPad Pro from 2018 had an ultra-wide lens in addition to the main 1× camera. Perhaps this omission helped Apple shrink the camera bump on the new iPad Pros, and/or reduce the overall thickness?
Apple is, for the first time, offering a nano-texture display option for the new iPad Pros. It costs an additional $100 and is only offered with the 1 and 2 TB storage configurations. I liked the way it looked in my limited hands-on time yesterday, and it didn’t seem problematic fingerprint-wise. I did not get the chance to try the nano-texture display with a Pencil, alas, but I can’t help but suspect it offers an at least slightly more paper-like feel. One oddity: only the display has the texture — the black bezel surrounding the display is glossy. The delineation between the glossy bezel and textured display area is both easy to see and easy to feel. In a sunny room with glare from the windows, I thought that looked odd: obvious reflections and glare on the bezel, but no reflections or glare on the display content area. With the nano-texture versions of the Pro Display XDR and Studio Display, the nano-texture finish includes the bezel area — except for one tiny glossy spot on the Studio Display in front of the FaceTime camera lens. Perhaps with all the various sensors for Face ID and the front-facing camera, leaving the entire bezel glossy was deemed a better trade-off than making several glossy cutouts. (No notch on iPads.)
Apple is doing some chip-binning with the iPad Pros. The 256 and 512 GB models have 9-core CPUs (3 performance, 6 efficiency) and 8 GB of RAM. The 1 and 2 TB models have 10-core CPUs (4 performance, 6 efficiency) and 16 GB of RAM. (The new iPad Airs all have the same M2 chip with 8 GB of RAM.)
I still have no idea how the event name “Let Loose” is applicable to any of yesterday’s announcements. But sometimes a name is just a name. ★

Follow-Up on Apple No Longer Including Stickers With New Products

Wednesday, 15 May 2024

Wednesday, 15 May 2024

The M4 iPad Pros

Tuesday, 14 May 2024

Display

Performance

The Meaning of ‘Pro’

The New Magic Keyboard

Miscellaneous

Conclusion

Monday, 13 May 2024

Friday, 10 May 2024

Thursday, 9 May 2024

Brief Thoughts and Observations on Yesterday’s ‘Let Loose’ iPad Keynote

Wednesday, 8 May 2024

Keynote / Mini Events

The New iPad Airs

The New M4 iPad Pros

The iPad Family Lineup

Pricing

Rounding up to 13

Pencil Proliferation

Miscellaneous

Wednesday, 8 May 2024

Tuesday, 7 May 2024

Monday, 6 May 2024