Ars Technica reviews Apple’s M4 iPad Pro: ‘a technical marvel; impressively quick’
With the world’s most advanced display and outrageously fast M4 performance, the new thin and light iPad Pro takes a huge leap forward.
Apple earlier this month unveiled the groundbreaking new iPad Pro in a stunningly thin and light design, taking portability and performance to the next level. Available in silver and space black finishes, the new iPad Pro comes in two sizes: an expansive 13-inch model and a super-portable 11-inch model. Both sizes feature the world’s most advanced display — a new breakthrough Ultra Retina XDR display with state-of-the-art tandem OLED technology — providing a remarkable visual experience. The new iPad Pro is made possible with the new M4 chip, the next generation of Apple silicon, which delivers a huge leap in performance and capabilities. M4 features an entirely new display engine to enable the precision, color, and brightness of the Ultra Retina XDR display. With a new CPU, a next-generation GPU that builds upon the GPU architecture debuted on M3, and the most powerful Neural Engine yet, the new iPad Pro is an outrageously powerful device for artificial intelligence.
Samuel Axon for Ars Technica:
The iPad Pro is so much faster than most people need it to be — so loaded with expensive, cutting-edge technology — that it seems like it exists more for Apple to show off what it’s truly capable of than it does for most actual user needs…
The M4 is the perfect example of this; it’s ridiculously fast, yes, but there are only a few applications that can truly make any use of that speed in a way that feels meaningfully different from the M2 found in the current-generation iPad Air, and even in those apps, you’re generally looking at edge cases or very specific features.
On the other hand, the OLED screen is extraordinary, and even folks who aren’t display nerds will absolutely see the difference. If you’re looking for a high-end movie-viewing experience on your next flight, look no further than these tablets (or Apple’s Vision Pro). The screen on the iPad Air is fine for that, but it’s nowhere near as good as what you get with the Pro now. The screen is the main reason I would consider buying a Pro instead of an Air. It’s not a small difference.
In a way, it almost looks like the iPad Pro is a testing ground for new technologies like the M4 and OLED that might come to the more flexible Mac platform in the near future.
The iPad Pro is an amazing device, and it’s a delight to use for some kinds of tasks. But despite continual refinement, the limitations of iPadOS compared to the flexibility (and better pro software support) of macOS mean I’m more excited about what these new developments might mean for future Macs than anything else.
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MacDailyNews Take: iPad Pro. Come for the display, stay for the M4 which will give you many, many years of headroom into which to grow.
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