The wait is finally over. Apple just announced two brand-new iPad Pros—an 11-inch and a 13-inch model—at its Let Loose event today, confirming our months-long speculation about them. The event also revealed two new 11 and 13-inch iPad Air models.
New 11 and 13-inch iPad Pros
One of the most boasted features of the new iPad Pros is their revamped design. The company claims these are the “thinnest Apple products ever” and are even slimmer than the iPod Nano. The 11-inch iPad Pro is only 5.3mm thick, and the 13-inch one measures just 5.1mm. The 11-inch iPad Pro weighs less than a pound (0.98 lbs), which is seriously impressive. Apple added that despite shaving a few mms off the thickness and a few pounds off the weight, the two new iPad Pros are just as strong as its previous versions, sporting robust all-aluminum bodies.
The biggest news here is Apple finally brought the long-awaited OLED display to its iPads. But this is Apple we’re talking about. They’re not going to simply give us a regular OLED display and call it a day. On the two new iPad Pros, they’ve introduced what they’re calling Tandem OLED technology. We’re going to dive deeper into this later, but for now, all you need to know is Tandem OLED is essentially two OLED displays stacked onto each other for increased brightness.
The new Pros hit a max of 1,000 nits for both SDR and HDR content and 1600 for HDR. The Cupertino company promises deeper blacks, more detail in shadows and lowlight, and more responsive motion content. The Tandem OLED is also getting a nano-textured glass coating for the first time, which will help with scattering ambient light for less glare. Considering this huge bump in display specs, they’re calling this an Ultra Retina XDR display and are claiming this is their most advanced display yet.
The massive performance upgrade on the new iPad Pros is a big deal, too. It seems as if Apple took last year off by not releasing an 11th-gen iPad and breaking its decade-long streak of going all out in 2024’s releases. Performance-wise, we see an upgrade from the M2 to an M4 chip on the new Pro models.
The M4 chips are built on second-gen 3nm tech and use an all-new display engine for improved precision, color, and brightness. We also get a revised 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, which translates to a 50% faster performance than the M2 CPU and four times faster than the GPU on the M2 chip. Apple’s promise that the M4 chip will use half the power of M2 makes this upgrade even more impressive while performing considerably better than it was.
The folks at Apple reiterated the inclusion of an NPU (Neural Processing Engine) on their machines for years—something that other tech companies have started exploring recently. But the new iPad Pros apparently feature the most powerful NPU you’ll find on any machine. It’s been upgraded to offer 38 trillion operations per second and is a whopping 60 times faster than Apple’s first NPU on its A11 chip.
The new 11- and 13-inch iPad Pros are now available for order with an expected ship date of May 15 in Silver and Space Black at a starting price of $1000 and $1300, respectively.
New 11 and 13-inch iPad Airs
The iPad Air saw a 13-inch model for the first time and a revamp of its regular 11-inch version. The company sounded inspired by the 13-inch iPad Pro and wanted to offer users the same amount of real estate on an Air. Both models sport landscape stereo speakers with Spatial Audio, but the larger iPad Air offers enhanced speakers with more bass. In terms of performance, we see an upgrade from the M1 to an M2 chip on the two new iPad Airs, along with a faster CPU, GPU, and NPU, making them 50% faster than the previous Air.
The 11 and 13-inch iPad Airs are also available for order now and will ship 15 in Blue, Purple, Starlight, and Space Grey for $600 and $800, respectively.
