New iPad Pros with OLED displays and the thinnest design ever, powered by Apple’s new M4 chip topped the news out of Cupertino’s “Let Loose” launch event, where redesigned iPad Airs were unveiled in 11‑inch and 13‑inch M2 configurations. The switch to OLED is a major change for Apple, which used mini-LED on the most recent models. And it’s not just garden variety OLED, but tandem OLED, combining two OLED displays for very high contrast with deep blacks and 1,600 nit peak brightness. The Ultra Retina XDR visuals are enabled by the M4 and its new display engine.

The Verge calls it “a major display upgrade,” and says “the 13-inch model measures just 5.1 millimeters thick, which Apple says is its thinnest device ever” (while the 11-inch version is 5.3 millimeters). For the first time, Apple is making available a matte display finish (using nano-texture glass coating) with these iPad Pros.

“The base storage for both models is now 256GB, with prices starting at $999 for the 11-inch and $1,299 for the 13-inch,” writes The Verge, noting that “both are available for preorder today and will be available in stores on May 15.”

A loaded 13-inch iPad Pro with 5G and matte glass will cost about $2,599, excluding accessories, “true high-end laptop pricing for a device that Apple envisions now more than ever as a laptop replacement,” The Verge adds.

Other changes include repositioning the front-positioned (Face ID) camera to landscape, making for more natural-looking video calls. The rear camera (12-megapixel f/1.8), now has document stitching and a flash for improved document scanning.

“The Apple Pencil Pro now supports squeeze gestures and Find My location tracking,” and a gyroscope allows artists “to roll their brush when drawing.” As with Microsoft’s Surface Pen, Apple has added haptic feedback.

The complete list of upgrades can be found in Apple’s iPad Pro newsroom post, and there is a separate news release detailing the advances of the M4 system on a chip (SoC).

Greater power efficiency with up to 1.5x faster CPU performance than the M2 is one point. The CPU has up to 10 cores, while the new 10-core GPU “builds on the next-generation GPU architecture introduced in M3, and brings Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading to iPad for the first time,” Apple says.

Apple claims the M4 features the fastest neural engine of “any AI PC today,” capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, making the new iPad Pro “an outrageously powerful device for artificial intelligence.”

TechCrunch writes the “the most important addition to the new iPad Air (above) is that it now comes in two sizes: 11 and 13 inches,” noting that display is still LED.

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