By Dan Moren
April 30, 2024 1:49 PM PT
The Back Page: Meet the new new iPad
Good morning and thank you for joining us. 2024 has already started off as a huge year for Apple, including the launch of Apple Vision Pro, our new M3 MacBook Airs, and the most lawsuits and regulatory frameworks ever. Today, we’d like to share some very exciting news about one of our most important products, iPad.
We released the sixth-generation iPad Pro and tenth-generation iPad in October of 2022 and the response was amazing. Users love the iPad Pro’s huge Liquid Retina XDR display, the portrait camera orientation that they can easily cover with a thumb, and some even remember the Apple Pencil’s hover feature. The tenth-generation iPad has delighted those customers who long for us to give any concession to color and demand to plug in their Apple Pencil. And the iPad Air remains a product in our lineup.
Today, we’re announcing the biggest update to iPad ever, and we think you’ll agree that it’s worth the wait. Meet the brand new iPad Pro.
The new iPad Pro lineup features our Hyper Liquid Retina XDR Plus Premium UltraFineWoven® display, the best display in an iPad ever. It’s based on OLED technology to provide the most vivid colors and the blackest blacks, thanks to our patented BlackHole® technology that ensures absolutely no light or living matter escapes. Just don’t stare into that abyss or you never know what you might find staring back at you. Ha ha. No seriously, don’t stare at it.
Users love the iPad Pro’s industry-leading performance—it’s infinity percent faster than the leading Android tablets that don’t exist. But we’re taking that even further, yes, to infinity…and beyond. Because the new iPad Pro lineup is based around our next-next-generation M5 processor.
The M5 processor is the most powerful chip ever in an iPad. Ever. To be fair, we could have put in an M3 and that would have been the case. We could even have put in an M4. But I said to the design team: screw it, we’re going to the M5. And they obligingly put a higher number on it.
Processor power is so important for the things we all do with our iPads, whether it’s rewatching all three seasons of Ted Lasso on a transatlantic flight, or browsing the web to find out why there isn’t a season four of Ted Lasso, or using industry-leading tools like Final Cut Pro for iPad to create videos to harangue Jason Sudeikis about why he won’t make more Ted Lasso.
But we know our customers want to do even more than that, which is why our new iPad Pro is our most AI-focused device ever. We’ve optimized the Neural Engine for generative AI tasks, whether it’s writing your Ted Lasso fan fiction, or even automatically producing entirely new episodes of Ted Lasso on the fly, based on your prompts.
Simply put, the new iPad Pro is the best iPad we’ve ever made. And it’s also available at the best price of any iPad ever, where by “best” we mean “highest.” In fact, the new iPad Pro costs so much that we can’t even tell you the price: you have to go to an Apple Store and have them write it down on a slip of paper that they slide across the table to you. And that’s before AppleCare.
Thank you so much for joining us today. We hope those of you can who afford the new iPad Pro enjoy it. And the iPad Air remains a product in our lineup.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]