The new iPad Pro is a technical marvel, with one of the best screens I've ever seen, performance that few other machines can touch, and a new, thinner design that no one expected.
It's a prime example of Apple flexing its engineering and design muscles for all to see. Since it marks the company's first foray into OLED beyond the iPhone and the first time a new M-series chip has debuted on something other than a Mac, it comes across as a tech demo for where the company is headed beyond just tablets.
First up, there's the M4 chip. The previous iPad Pro had an M2 chip, and the latest Mac chip is the M3, so not only did the iPad Pro jump two whole generations, but this is the first time it has debuted the newest iteration of Apple Silicon. (Previously, new M-series chips launched on the Mac first and came to the iPad Pro a few months later.)
Using second-generation 3 nm tech, the M4's top configuration has a 10-core CPU, a 10-core GPU, and a 16-core NPU. In that configuration, the 10-core CPU has four performance cores and six efficiency cores.
A lower configuration of the M4 has just nine CPU cores—three performance and six efficiency. Which one you get is tied to how much storage you buy. 256GB and 512GB models get nine CPU cores, while 1TB and 2TB get 10. Additionally, the two smaller storage sizes have 8GB of RAM to the larger ones' 16GB.
This isn't the first time Apple has tied RAM to storage configurations, but doing that with CPU cores is new for the iPad.
The iPad is first and foremost about the display, and that's where Apple has really gone to town here. Previously, the biggest iPad Pro had a Mini-LED display that helped overcome some of LCD's downsides by counteracting bloom and achieving higher contrast between dark and bright areas of an image than before. It had darker blacks and very bright HDR highlights.
Now, both iPad Pro models have OLED screens. Not only that, but they have a new kind of OLED screen called "Tandem OLED," which stacks two OLED panels on top of one another to achieve higher peak brightness with a little help from the M4.
Details are scarce on exactly how Tandem OLED works, but we know that one of the panels is transparent to light generated by the second, so the light path goes from one through the other. A series of algorithms monitor and adjust this process on the M4 chip.
What matters for most users is the result, though, and it's spectacular. You get precise, per-pixel illumination for perfect contrast without any of the distracting blooming exhibited by the previous large iPad Pro's Mini-LED display, and you also get perfect blacks in the pixels that should be black, which is a dramatic difference from regular LED displays' gray-ish glow.
We're also seeing peak brightness of around 1,600 nits on highlights (1,000 typical), which is frankly absurd for an OLED screen. One of the main downsides of OLED displays compared to competing LED technologies has been that they can't usually reach the same brightness in HDR highlights. Not so here.
This display is about as good as it gets in
any consumer device (including high-end TVs and smartphones). My only complaint is that when I watched the same content on the iPad Pro as I watched on my LG OLED TV, the image skewed subtly to green with some content. I would have never noticed it without a side-by-side, direct comparison, though.
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.
arstechnica.com
