Apple has launched two new iPad Pro models with OLED screens. The new iPad Pro comes in 11- and 13-inch variants – both are stunningly slim, and their displays promising to be brighter than ever.
Apple calls its OLED screen tech Tandem OLED. This uses two OLED screens on each tablet, combining the brightness of both. This helps the tablet to reach 1000 nits of full screen brightness and 1600 nits for peak HDR. That's nowhere near the 3000-4000 nits achieved by modern OLED TVs, but still pretty impressive for a tablet.
This level of brightness has a knock-on effect to the rest of the picture. Not only does it create brighter highlights, but you get deeper blacks and more shadow detail. The screen – which Apple is calling Ultra Retina XDR Display – is more responsive to motion too. And because it's an OLED screen, it's thinner and lighter than the previous iPad Pro's. There's a nano texture glass option for less glare, too.
Apple claims the new iPad's screens are "like holding a cinema in your hands."
Both new iPad Pros boast a sleek new design, with the OLED screen helping them to slim down considerably. The 11-incher is 5.3mm slim, while the 13-inch model is 5.1mm – making it the slimmest Apple product ever. That's even more impressive when you consider the amount of power inside.
Namely the M4 chip. Apple claims this will mean a huge leap in performance over the M2 of the previous iPad Pro. The CPU is 50 per cent faster than the M2's CPU, while the GPU is four times faster, and brings ray tracing to the iPad for the first time. That should be a boon for gamers.
Apple claims the M4 Pro can perform to the same level as the M2 model, but using half the power. It also says it can match a slim PC laptop while only using a quarter of the power, though it doesn't say which model PC it's comparing it to.
The OLED iPad Pro's neural engine is Apple's most powerful ever, capable of 38 trillion operations per second. That makes it 60 times faster than the first neural engine in the A11 Bionic chip (though that was released back in 2017).
Overall, the new Pro is up to four times faster than the M2 iPad Pro, Apple claims.
There are improvements elsewhere, too. Like the new iPad Air, the new Pro has the camera on the landscape edge, which makes more sense for video calls. There's a new Magic Keyboard accessory that's thinner and lighter, and has a new row of keys for functions like dimming the screen. And there's a new Apple Pencil with new features for more advanced illustrating.
Both new iPad Pro OLED models are available to pre-order now and will go on sale 15th May – a week tomorrow. Prices start at £999 / $999 / AU$1699 for the 11-inch and £1299 / $1299 / AU$2199 for the 13-inch. Storage options now start at 256GB (up from 128GB on the previous model).
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