Apple has just announced a new range of iPads. With the all-new M4, the iPad Pro skips the M3 Arm chip, which debuted last year.
Both the iPad Air and the iPad Pro are being updated. There are 11-inch and 13-inch versions of the Air, which contains the same M2 chip as the late 2022 iPad Pro. Both Air versions have at least 128GB of storage, while up to 1TB can be opted for.
The iPad Pro is also available with 11-inch and 13-inch screens, respectively, but that’s really where the similarities end. The Pro features a combination of two OLED panels to boost brightness, while the Air still uses an LCD. The maximum nits are 1,600 for HDR and 1,000 for SDR. Apple calls this screen Ultra Retina XDR.
AI tablet
We could almost call the new iPad Pro an “AI PC,” given the 38 TOPS possessed by the new Neural Engine in the M4 chip. Apple reminds us that it has been integrating this AI hardware into its products for quite some time. Back in 2017, the iPhone X appeared with a Neural Engine in the A11 Bionic. That’s considerably more than the approximately 34 TOPS that Intel Core Ultra chips can scrape together by combining the CPU, GPU and NPU.
The CPU contains 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. Compared to the 2022 iPad Pro, the average performance goes up by 50 percent. The 10-core GPU can even complete rendering tasks four times faster than the M2. In terms of battery life, there should be nothing to fear, as the M4 achieves the same performance as the M2 with half the power consumption. The chip also remains significantly cooler, with 20 percent less heat emanating from the M4 versus the M2.
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