Everything Apple announced at its May iPad event

Apple hadn’t updated its tablets in over a year, an unusual oversight the company finally corrected at its “Let Loose” event on May 7, 2024. During Apple’s jam-packed video presentation, the company detailed improvements to the iPad Air, iPad Pro, and the two tablets’ most important accessories, the Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard. It’s finally looking like Apple tablets are as appealing as recent Macs.

Apple is making the new iPad Airs, iPad Pros, Apple Pencils, and Magic Keyboards available for pre-order starting on May 7, with plans to ship them out to customers on May 15. In the meantime, here’s what you need to know about everything Apple just announced.

The iPad Air is becoming more like the iPad Pro

Bigger screen option and upgraded storage

Apple iPad Air 11-inch (M2)

Apple iPad Air 13-inch (M2)

The new iPad Air is functionally similar to the 5th-generation model Apple released in 2022 in terms of its all-screen design and rounded edges. The key difference is that, this time, it’s available in both 11-inch and 13-inch sizes, just like the iPad Pro. Apple called out how the extra screen real estate will give users a bigger canvas for drawing and let them see more during video calls, but much like with phones, people also just love big screens, so offering one at a more affordable price feels like a no-brainer.

Alongside the new bigger screen, the new iPad Air comes with a landscape ultra-wide selfie camera in the same position as the 10th-generation iPad. This makes it a much more natural fit for long Zoom or FaceTime sessions because your eye lines will actually be pointed at the center of the iPad when you’re holding it in landscape instead of the left of screen. Besides the selfie camera, the only other major internal change is a new starting storage of 128GB (the previous Air started at 64GB) and the addition of Apple’s M2 chip, which supports the hover feature on the 2nd-generation Apple Pencil and offers what Apple claims is 50% faster performance compared to iPad Air with the M1 chip, three times faster performance compared to an iPad Air with the A14 Bionic, and improved machine learning performance across the board.

The biggest downside to the Air is its limited selection of color options. Apple is offering the new iPad Air in a far too light blue and purple, and the usual space gray and starlight finishes, starting at $499 for the 11-inch model and $799 for the 13-inch model.

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The iPad Pro is getting thinner and switching to OLED

Display, camera, weight, and dimensions

Apple iPad Pro 11-inch (M4)

Apple iPad Pro 13-inch (M4)

For over a year now, the standout feature of the 12-inch iPad Pro has been it’s Mini-LED display. Now Apple is switching both of its high-end tablets to OLED, via it’s new Ultra Retina XDR display, a similar display technology to the one the company uses for the Super Retina XDR display on current iPhones. In general, OLED offers deeper blacks and more saturated colors, while the Mini-LED offers superior brightness (particularly useful when you have your iPad outside) but can lead to some blooming in darker scenes.

Apple says the new “Tandem OLED” technology in the iPad Pros, which layers two different OLED panels to offer even more brightness. This allows the screen to reach up to 1,000 nits of brightness for regular content and 1,600 nits for HDR content. To make the iPad Pros even more legible outside, Apple is also offering them with a matte, “nano-texture” glass, just like it does with its pro Mac displays. Those display changes allow for iPads that are technically thinner than an iPod nano at 51mm for the 13-inch, and overall lighter than past Pros.

Apple’s made other tweaks too, switching the selfie camera and Face ID sensors into landscape orientation, making the camera bump matte just like the rest of the device, and removing the ultra-wide camera to focus on the 12MP wide, LiDAR sensor, and an improved dual-tone flash.

Surprisingly, the iPad Pro is also the first of Apple’s products to use its all-new M4 chip. Rather than the M3 that recently came to the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, Apple is skipping straight to the M4, making the iPad Pros even more powerful in terms of graphical performance, and seemingly a lot more capable at handling AI-focused tasks. Much like Macs, there are technically multiple different versions of the M4 you can get. If you upgrade to the 1TB storage option, you’ll not only get more RAM (from 8GB to 16GB) but also a 10-core version of the M4 with four performance cores and six efficiency cores, as opposed to the three performance cores in lower storage options.

The iPad Pro comes in silver and space black and starts with 256GB storage. The 11-inch model starts at $999, and the 13-inch model starts at $1299.

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The M4 chip debut

iPad Pro sees the first chip upgrade at this level

Why Apple chose the iPad Pro as the device to introduce the M4 chip when it’s previously used Pro Macs might make more sense when the company makes its software announcements at WWDC 2024, but for the time being, it seems like a meaningful upgrade. Like the M3, Apple is using a 3-nanometer process to manufacture the M4, and in terms of raw performance it seems to not move the needle much further than the M3 did.

The M4 features a 10-core CPU with up to four performance cores and six efficiency cores, which Apple claims delivers 1.5x performance when compared to the M2 (not the M3). The 10-core GPU, meanwhile, supports features like dynamic caching and ray tracing for games with even higher resolution graphics and even more realistic lighting. The truly important addition might actually be the display engine, which makes the new Ultra Retina XDR display on the iPad Pro possible, and the new and improved Neural Engine, which Apple claims can handle “38 trillion operations per second.”

The new improved Neural Engine makes existing machine learning features faster (like automatically keying out the background of a video in Final Cut Pro, for example) but will also presumably be key for whatever AI features Apple announces this summer.

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Pro apps are getting even more pro

Software was the star overall

Apple’s hardware wasn’t the only focus of this iPad event. The company also introduced Logic Pro for iPad 2 and Final Cut Pro for iPad 2, a major update to the subscription-based iPad apps the company released in 2023. Besides the rendering speed improvements the new M4 chip brings, Apple is also introducing a feature it calls Live Multicam to Final Cut Pro 2 for iPad. With it, you can connect up to four different iPhone cameras to an iPad and see what they’re filming, live. You’ll also be able to control exposure and focus, all from your iPad if your cameras are using Apple’s new Final Cut Camera app.

Apple

Logic Pro for iPad 2 is also getting some slick new features, in this case, a new Bass and Keyboard Session Players to fill out your projects with AI-generated backing tracks, not unlike the Drummer feature Logic Pro for iPad launched with. Even cooler, Logic Pro for iPad 2 is getting a feature called Stem Splitter that lets you upload a track and have Logic Pro automatically separate out vocals, drums, and bass to make it even easier to start remixing a song.

Logic Pro for iPad 2 is available as a free upgrade for subscribers on May 13th. Final Cut Pro for iPad 2 is available as a free upgrade for subscribers “later this spring.”

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The Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil are being upgraded

Leveled up, upgraded, and ‘writing’ previous gens’ wrongs

Apple Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro 11‑inch (M4)

Apple Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro 13‑inch (M4)

To go with Apple’s new tablets, both the Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard are leveling up. The new Apple Pencil Pro has a pressure sensor that lets you squeeze the sides to pull up a pen selector tool or other features in third-party apps, and a gyroscope that can detect how you roll your stylus and adjust pen strokes and brushes accordingly. There’s also a haptic motor inside that should give you a buzz to let you know when you’ve squeezed your Pencil correctly,

Apple

For the Magic Keyboard, the original rubbery version is sticking around, but Apple is also introducing a new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, which has an aluminum base and larger trackpad, along with an all-new function row at the top that makes the whole package much more MacBook-esque than it’s ever been before. You’ll still be dealing with a cramped keyboard layout in comparison to a normal laptop, but it should feel more premium and collect less dirt than Apple’s earlier keyboard accessories.

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Release date and availability

Here’s when Apple’s new tablets and accessories will be available:

• The 11-inch iPad Air, starts at $499 and comes with 128GB of storage. The 13-inch iPad Air starts at $799 and also comes with 128GB of storage. Both models come in blue, purple, starlight, and space gray.
• The new 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $999 for 256GB of storage. The 13-inch iPad Pro, meanwhile, begins at $1299 for 256GB of storage. Both models are available in silver and space black.
• The Apple Pencil Pro costs $129. The Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro starts at $299 for the 11-inch model and $349 for the 13-inch model.

You can order the new iPads, Apple Pencil Pro, and Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro starting on May 7th. They’ll be available in stores on May 15th.

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