Today we have the biggest news in iPad since the iPad,” says Apple CEO Tim Cook. That’s right: Apple has just announced the iPad Pro, and it’s definitely the biggest iPad yet. It has everything the iPad Air 2 offers, and a little extra on top. Rather than talking about their similarities, though, let’s look at the differences.
The iPad Pro has a giant 12.9-inch display with 2,732 x 2,048 pixels. To put that size into perspective, that means the screen is almost exactly the same width as the regular iPad’s is tall. It’s also, in case you didn’t run the math, got the same familiar 4:3 iPad aspect ratio and a functionally identical pixel density to the iPad Air. Apple says it’s so big the on-screen keyboard is “full-sized,” like on its laptops.
The larger panel, Apple hopes, will be ideal for the new multitasking additions to iOS 9, which let you run apps side-by-side, or in a split view and “pop-over” video. Of course, you can do that on an iPad Air 2, but thanks to the larger screen the apps will look more like they do on a regular iPad. It also frees up some extra space around the display, which Apple has decided use to include four speakers up front. Hopefully they sound good, and this’ll be a great high-def movie machine.
Powering the iPad Pro is Apple’s latest SoC (system on a chip), the A9X. As you’d expect, it’s an upgrade over the iPad Air 2’s A8X in every way, with double the memory bandwidth and graphics performance. Apple says it’s faster than 80 percent of “portable PCs” sold in the past year. One thing Apple isn’t saying how much RAM the Pro has, but chances are its silence on the matter means that it’s the same 2GB as the Air 2.
Elsewhere, this is very much an iPad. You’ll find a FaceTime camera up front and an 8-megapixel iSight camera at the back. It has Touch ID built into the home button, 10 hours of battery life, and multiple color options (silver, gold and space grey). Essentially everything else you’d expect of an Apple tablet. So. What’s the price for all of these additions? Brace your wallet: the iPad Pro will start at $799. That’s for a 32GB WiFi model. The 128GB WiFi models will cost $94, while the LTE 128GB model costs $1079.
There are also a number of new accessories. But before we get to that, a quote — one you’ll probably hear a lot on social media over the coming weeks: “It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it.” Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder That’s right, Apple has announced a stylus, called Pencil. Okay, so it’s a little unfair to evoke that Jobs quote. He was clearly talking about a stylus as a primary interface tool, rather than an optional accessory, which is exactly what this is. But a writer can’t resist a good egg-on-face quote.
