Apple’s iPad event: Five things you should know

Though Apple’s announcement of new iPads and accessories overnight took the form of a pre-recorded streaming broadcast, it was accompanied by several live events around the world where media could put the products through their paces. Here’s what we saw.

The iPad Pro comes in two familiar sizes, each featuring a new OLED screen.Credit: Tim Biggs

The iPad Pro’s OLED screen

The new iPad Pro is Apple’s thinnest ever device, and also its first tablet to sport a vibrant OLED screen. To be clear, this is by no means the first OLED tablet on the market, but Apple’s engineering efforts here go far beyond the marketing bluster that terms like “Ultra Retina XDR” suggest. OLED panels at this large size, in a thin device that needs to be powered by battery, tend to be relatively dim, while Apple’s is anything but.

For example, Samsung’s 2023 Tab S9 is bright for an OLED tablet, reaching about 600 nits normally and up to around 750 in the brightest highlights of an HDR image. That’s perfectly fine for most content and in a dark environment, but the new iPad Pro can hit 1000 nits across the whole panel, or boost highlights in an HDR image up to 1600 nits. Paired with OLED’s natural ability to turn pixels off completely, that means you can get images with pure blacks and extremely bright colours, and use the display in any lighting conditions.

Apple thinks professionals will want this display because of its accuracy and consistency, but after seeing it in person I also just want to look at photos, watch movies and play games on it. A demo of Diablo Immortal, which also makes use of the ray tracing capabilities of the M4, looked stunning on the display.

M4 gives a suggestion of Apple’s AI future

Despite the naming convention, it’s clear that Apple doesn’t consider each of its Apple silicon chips to be straight upgrades of the last. The M3 for example is an entire family of chips, and there’s no doubt that the likes of the M3 Max has a lot more sheer power than the iPad Pro’s M4. For all we know the M4 may only ever show up in this one device (unlikely though that may be), but at the very least I think the M4’s approach to AI says a lot about Apple’s position on the technology in general.

The iPad Air now also comes in two sizes.Credit: Tim Biggs

Apple will be the first to tell you that it’s been building machine learning tech into its hardware for ages, but that doesn’t change the fact that the wider industry has shifted massively in a short amount of time to focus on generative AI and its potential to upend various industries and workflows. These tools work on iPhones, Macs and iPads, but many of them require a connection to the cloud, meaning your content or queries get sent to a server or remote machine for processing.

The AI engine in the M4 is phenomenally powerful compared to anything currently being built into PC chips, and could mean AI tasks running on the device (like image upscaling, or separating a subject from the background in a video) are made faster by a huge factor depending on how the programs have been composed. But it also means things like large language models of text to image capabilities could more easily run on the device itself rather than involving the cloud, which given Apple’s history of preferencing on-device for privacy reasons, would seem to be where a theoretical Apple competitor to ChatGPT would be going.

The Apple Pencil Pro

Apple’s latest stylus has a few new tricks up its sleeve, which all add up to more intuitive ways to get multiple complex tasks done all at once, after you adjust to the learning curve. You can now squeeze the Pencil (which gives a little haptic feedback, like the AirPods Pro, so you know the message was received), or roll it between your fingers to trigger different effects. In Apple’s own apps, that means a tool like a flat calligraphy pen now works a lot more naturally; you can just roll it as you like to change the angle of the stroke.

In practice there’s a lot going on, between tapping, squeezing and rolling the Pencil, which you can also hover over the screen to see a preview of where your mark will go. In typically excessive Apple style, the stylus even projects a digital shadow onto the page, which changes shape depending on the tool you’ve selected. Not every app needs to use the pencil the same way however; others can use the rolling motion to adjust settings, while others use the vibration to confirm when you’ve snapped a virtual object into its proper place.

Australian Procreate developer Savage Interactive’s chief executive James Cuda appeared in Apple’s presentation to show his app’s own take on the Pencil’s features. In Procreate, squeezing summons a custom tool menu while rolling can do things like apply a twisting liquify effect to images. In animation app Procreate Dreams, the new Pencil can be used to do multiple tasks at once. In the example shown, the user draws with the pencil to define a path for an object to animate across, while also rolling to rotate the object.

More choices for non-Pro pads

Aside from creative professionals, iPads are mostly used for schoolwork, note-taking and media consumption, in which case all the features of the iPad Pro might not be necessary. But while it might have been overshadowed in the announcement, the new iPad Air has a lot to offer non-Pros and seems like a big leap over its predecessor.

The new Air works with the new Pencil, has a desktop-class M2 processor, and for the first time comes in a 13-inch model in addition to the standard 11-inch. And looking at them side by side, the bigger one is very compelling. Content doesn’t just appear larger on the bigger screen; it’s the same size but you can see more at once. That could be a big deal for dedicated note-takers, or even just for people who like to browse the web on iPads. At $1300 for the 13-inch Air, this is the first time you’ve been able to get an iPad this big for less than $1500. And the current 13-inch Pro starts at $2200, so it’s worth weighing up if you need that fancy M4 chip.

On the other hand, the standard iPad (previously referred to as the Gen 10) is a fantastic device that’s hard to beat at its new price of $600, and could be all the tablet most people need.

New Pro apps

As iPads have become more powerful, new apps have appeared to allow them to integrate into professional workflows, from colour grading films to planning out architectural projects. At the event Apple unveiled some new software of its own, specifically for editing video and creating music.

James Cuda appears during Apple’s presentation to talk about new features in the Procreate app.Credit: Tim Biggs

The new version of Logic Pro, which is also coming to Mac, makes use of AI so that even a single producer can feel like they have access to a whole professional music studio. A demonstration involved a regular stereo recording being analysed and broken down into a multi-track project in less than 10 seconds, ready for elements like the vocals and guitar to be edited separately. Then tracks were added using a new feature called Session Players, which are AI agents that create realistic drum, bass or keyboard loops on the fly according to your chord progressions and a range of customisable inputs.

On the video side, a new version of Final Cut Pro supports the new Apple Pencil Pro for controls, and renders more streams of 4K video much faster. But most impressive was a feature called Live Multicam. By installing an app called Final Cut Camera on any iPhone or iPad, you can create multiple connected cameras that are all controlled by a central iPad, meaning you can adjust exposure, focus or any other control on each one, while also viewing and recording all the feeds at once just like a professional television production setup.

The author travelled to London as a guest of Apple.

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