These are the best, lightest and most powerful ipads that you can buy with one of the best displays that I’ve ever seen on a device that’s not a television, but it comes at a price.
The new iPad Pro with M4 is officially available starting today. And it starts at 9:99 for the 11 inch model and 12:99 for the 13 inch model. But personally, I don’t think your spending stops there.
The Magic Keyboard has been redesigned, and it’s now officially the only one that’s compatible with these new ipads. And of course, the Apple Pencil Pro is now also available. And if you’re somebody who does a lot of graphic design work, illustrations, you might need the Apple Pencil. But me personally, I cannot not have a keyboard. And so yes, you can buy 3rd party keyboards. There are cheaper options available.
But I loved the Magic Keyboard from before there were a few things I didn’t like. And I think apple has finally fixed some of those things that I didn’t like with the new redesign version. So let’s start with that. I absolutely love the new aluminum base here. The keyboard, that area is now made up of quality aluminum. It feels more MacBook like than ever before. You’ve got a function row at the top. Now. You can do things like adjust the brightness with just a tap of the key and you can change playback controls, volume, etc. All of these things you kind of had to jump into Control Center you can now officially do on the first party Magic Keyboard. I think you can do this with other keyboards, but now apple brings it to its first party accessory lineup. And also the trackpad, it’s larger, it’s glass, it has haptic feedback. It’s basically a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air trackpad. And I love it.
That was the thing that I absolutely hated the most about the last keyboard. I didn’t like the physical pressing that you had to do, and it just wasn’t a good experience. Now with the function row, again, it’s so underrated to have something like this. It is a little crammed here at the top, but I’m not gonna complain too much. I’d rather have it here than not.
Now, did I mention that the trackpad now has haptic feedback? No more physical clicks. Again, just can’t stress how great this new keyboard and trackpad feels. It’s been only a couple of hours, but I’m absolutely digging it so far.
The Apple Pencil Pro, again, probably less important for most of you out there, but for you students, you graphic designers, you illustrators, people who just like using a stylus to navigate, you’ll probably want this. There is haptic feedback now inside of the pencil, and this paves the way for new features like the squeeze gesture, where you can just go ahead and squeeze the base there of the Apple Pencil, and now you’ll bring up different functions and controls within the application that you might be in. So if you’re in something where you’re writing, it can bring up all of the different writing tools, erase, or everything that you might need just with a quick squeeze. You don’t have to go looking for that down in the toolbar or anything like that. And so I absolutely love that.
I love the haptic feedback. You might be dragging things around in procreate, and it’ll give you that feedback to kind of give you a better precision with where you’re moving things. And then again, if you’re an illustrator and you want to do a barrel roll, you couldn’t do that with the Apple Pencil before and now you can. This just kind of opens up a way more possibilities for those of you who really like using the Apple Pencil. I personally don’t know how much more I’m gonna use it past the initial review experience. But again, I can already tell that these improvements are going to help a lot of you out there.
Now the iPad itself is, first and foremost, still an iPad, but with some pretty major changes in terms of the design. Apple has made this thing incredibly thin and lightweight, and they have certainly marketed that to no other. I mean, I think the image that apple used at the announcement to show the thinness against the iPad Pro model from before when the one with the M2. In real life, it’s harder to see that thinness, but you can definitely feel it. I mean, when you pick it up, it’s as light as air, which is interesting because the iPad air, which was originally named that because of how light it was, it’s no longer the lightest product, especially in the iPad world. And so that kind of doesn’t really mean that anymore. This is definitely super light, super portable. Even if you go at the 13 inch model, again, this is hands down the thinnest apple product or apple device that apple has ever made. They said that quite a few times. So I’m really driving that home. And some of you out there might be worried about bending it. I wouldn’t. I mean, unless you’re sitting on it or you’re purposely trying to bend it, I can’t imagine a world in which that might happen. You could toss in your bag. I still feel like it’ll hold up just fine. If you have a case on it. I think you’d really have to go to extreme lengths to actually bend this, but it’s possible. So yeah, you know, just be careful with that. It is a very thin product.
The iPad Pro also has an incredible new oled display that apple is calling its all Ultra Retina XDR display that apparently apple has stacked two Ola displays on top of one another. A process apple calls Tandem OLED to make this iPad incredibly bright. 1,000 nits of sustained brightness, which is up 400 nits from the previous model that was at 600. And you get 16 nits of peak HDR brightness. And just to sum it up, honestly, I am blown away about how good this oled iPad looks. It’s super bright. It’s super vibrant. Apple did a fantastic job with these oled displays. It’s quite possibly the best oled display I’ve ever seen in this form factor. I know Samsung’s was really good. I think these are gonna be pretty comparable. I cannot wait to get them back home and kind of put them side by side. But yeah, I’m really digging the new iPad Pro displays. OLED is definitely the way to go. And I cannot wait to see apple hopefully introduce this in the MacBook Pro in the not too distant future. It’s just a really good oled panel. And if this is your main content consumption device, maybe you don’t have a TV, you watch on your iPad, then go big or go home gets like upgrading to an oled TV. I highly recommend it.
There is a nano texture glass option available and it does an impeccable job at cutting out reflections, direct light sources, but it does kind of take away from the oled experience if you’re somebody who’s using this iPad on the go, especially outdoors, lots of direct lights kind of pointing in on it, it’s gonna do a good job of absorbing that light, spreading it out so that it’s not just something that’s overbearing and you can’t see what you’re looking at. But if you don’t need that and you’re in, you’re fine with some of the reflections here and there, you’re gonna get the better oled experience if you don’t do nano texture, but just want to throw that out there. And if you want to do it, it’s an extra hundred dollars, but you have to get the one or two terabyte models. So really think about that before you make that decision.
One of the best new features of the brand new iPad Pro and even the iPad air with M2, which again will do a video on very soon. So be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss those videos.
But one of the best things about those ipads is that it now finally takes the camera, which would sit, if you haven’t docked, on the keyboard on the left side. It’s in that portrait mode orientation when you’re holding it. Now it’s moved over to the landscape orientation, which is perfect. It makes sense. Lots of people are probably using these ipads in landscape. And so, yeah, you have the camera up there. I cannot stress just how great this is. It’s a 1080 p Facetime camera. It’s got center stage. It’s got everything you need. And your video calls will just seem much more natural with not only yourself, but the person on the other end. They’re gonna think, hey, I think they’re actually looking at me. Granted, you’re probably looking up or down a little bit more because the camera is up. At least you’re looking in the right direction and not off to the side. And so I cannot stress just how great of a change that is. Otherwise, the camera is just a normal camera from apple. It’s 1080 p. Looks good, could be better. But if you’re just doing quick calls on the go, I think you’ll be totally happy with it.
Speaking of cameras, apple did remove the ultra wide camera on the back. So you just have one camera now. Again, it’s not all about me. So if you’re somebody who absolutely needs those cameras on there, especially actually the ultra wide, you still got the main camera, but if you needed the ultra wide for some reason, then don’t get this iPad. But otherwise, if you’re like me and you don’t even care whether there is a camera on the iPad, then yeah, none of this really matters to you. Lastly, we have the M4 chip. Now this is a first impressions video, and so it’s pretty hard for me to tell you exactly what I’m getting in terms of performance. Apple skipped the M3, went right to M4 because its neural engine has been vastly improved for AI tasks and functionality. And which, you know, we saw apple talk about one specific feature that I really can’t wait to try, and that’s the ability to be able to remove the subject from the background in a 4K video just by one tap. So there was a dancer and there was a background. They removed the background, added in a text background super quickly. That’s something that peaked my interest. But we haven’t really gotten a whole lot of other features that were mentioned that could take advantage of the new M4 chip and its AI capabilities. I’m guessing all of that will come in due time, probably at WWDC with iOS and iPad OS 18. But in terms of just everyday work and tasks, I think the M2 was just fine. I feel like the M1 was just fine. Heck, even some of the hey chips, the bionic chips that were in some of the older ipads are probably good for most of you out there, but if you’re somebody who’s gonna be doing a lot of 3D modeling, graphics, video, whatever the case may be, you’re probably gonna be just fine with the M4 chip. I haven’t done much, if anything, with these right now. Here are some geek bench scores if you’re curious. But I think for most of you out there, you’re gonna be just fine in terms of performance. And hopefully those new AI tasks and features and whatever it might be coming down the road will make jumping up to an M4 chip worth it if you decide to go that route.
Now to sum it up, I am very impressed with the hardware. I always been impressed with Apple’s hardware. I think that the new Ola displays are incredible. Moving the camera was a great move. The Magic Keyboard is one of my favorite things about the iPad Pro, and I love that it changed all of the things I didn’t like, and now it’s almost perfect. And then, you know, I just think it’s an iPad, which a lot of people have been saying it’s still an iPad at the end of the day because of iPad OS. And I don’t know what the future entails for iPad OS 18. Obviously, I mentioned some AI things could be coming down the pipeline, but a lot of people just want Mac OS on an iPad.