Month: May 2024

Enlarge / Apple's M4 chip in the new iPad Pro. It follows the M3 by just a few months. (credit: Apple)

In a major shake-up of its chip roadmap, Apple has announced a new M4 processor for today’s iPad Pro refresh, barely six months after releasing the first MacBook Pros with the M3 and not even two months after updating the MacBook Air with the M3.

Apple says the M4 includes "up to" four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency cores, and a 10-core GPU. Apple's high-level performance estimates say that the M4 has 50 percent faster CPU performance and four times as much graphics performance. Like the GPU in the M3, the M4 also supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing to enable more advanced lighting effects in games and other apps. Due partly to its "second-generation" 3 nm manufacturing process, Apple says the M4 can match the performance of the M2 while using just half the power.

As with so much else in the tech industry right now, the M4 also has an AI focus; Apple says it's beefing up the 16-core Neural Engine (Apple’s equivalent of the Neural Processing Unit that companies like Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Microsoft have been pushing lately). Apple says the M4 runs up to 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS), considerably ahead of Intel's Meteor Lake platform, though a bit short of the 45 TOPS that Qualcomm is promising with the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus series. The M3's Neural Engine is only capable of 18 TOPS, so that's a major step up for Apple's hardware.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple's newest iPad Pro puts an M4 chip inside a thinner frame available in new 11-inch and 13-inch sizes, while also upgrading the screens on both to "tandem" OLED displays for more brightness.

Compared to the last iPad Pro, released in early 2022, Apple would like you to particularly consider how thin and light these new Pros are. The 11-inch model is 5.3 mm thick and weighs less than a pound, while the 13-inch is 5.1 mm, which Apple says is its thinnest product ever, and 1.28 pounds.

The tandem OLED design, dubbed Ultra Retina XDR, delivers 1000 nits at fulls-screen brightness, and 1600 nits at peak HDR, equivalent to a high-end Samsung TV. The screens are "nano-texture glass," which is essentially a matte display finish.

M2-based iPad Airs come out next week. (credit: Apple)

Apple today announced the first 13-inch iPad Air. Apple is also releasing a revamped, 11-inch iPad Air next week, meaning the tablet will be available in two sizes for the first time.

The 13-inch iPad Air will offer 30 percent more screen real estate than its smaller counterpart, so Apple's pushing it for multitasking and applications like multiscreen views. During its press conference today, Apple said it decided to release a 13-inch iPad Air since more than half of iPad Pro users opt for the larger (12.9 inches versus 11 inches) size.

In addition to a larger screen, Apple's claiming the 13-inch iPad Air will offer better sound quality than the 11-inch version, due to it offering twice the bass.