Apple Streamlines iPad Line, Launches Apple Silicon M4, and Says “AI” a Lot
Apple’s new iPads make it clear which iPad to buy for every purpose and budget while adding exceptional OLED displays to the Pro models, and launching Apple Silicon M4 six months ahead of expectations.
Apple’s new iPads won’t get the tech press to stop questioning what an iPad is “good for” or definitively answer “what is a computer.” But even with multi-year drops in iPad sales, the iPad is still over a $20 billion annual business with extremely healthy margins, and today’s announcements should at least stop last year’s decline when no new iPads were offered. If you want a proper laptop, Apple is happy to sell you one instead. And if all you need is a smartphone …you know. However, there are lots of people who want a multi-purpose tablet with over a million apps and deep ties to the rest of Apple’s ecosystem. Apple now has four iPad categories to choose from:
The New iPad Lineup
The old, home-button 9th gen iPad will remain available for education and “select retail channels,” but it is mostly going away. Apple is dropping the price on the 10th gen iPad to $350, making it the default choice for families and Christmas presents. Over the holidays, retailers historically have discounted the base iPad, so it could dip as low as $300 with gift cards and rebates. It’s an excellent product and is no longer hamstrung by a cheaper model diverting sales.
The iPad mini remains unchanged at $499 for people who specifically want the form factor (it’s a great way to watch content on airplanes) and businesses who build it into POS (Point of Sale) systems and for mobile data collection. It’s not a big market by Apple’s standards, so it is on a longer refresh cycle, but the business segment is evergreen. The competition mostly targets this space with cheap Android and FireOS tablets or expensive fold-larger smartphones; Samsung is the only real competitor on the enterprise side with its 8” Galaxy Tab Active line.
The iPad Air now comes with adequate storage (128GB for the same price as the old model), new higher storage options (512GB and 1TB), and an M2 chip which should be more than enough for most computing, drawing, and drafting needs. It still lacks a high refresh rate display, which would be nice to have at this price point. Apple rarely provides product mix breakdowns, so it was significant when it admitted that half of iPad Pro buyers choose the larger 13” size. Apple isn’t one to let a good trend go to waste so it is now offering two versions of the new iPad Air, in 11” (starts at $600) and 13” (starts at $800) sizes. Another way Apple is acknowledging that people use the iPad Air as a laptop replacement is by moving the webcam to the landscape edge (attach rates for the Magic Keyboard must be fairly high as well). The new iPad Air comes in four colors so subtle we could not tell them apart in the event lighting.
When equipped with a Magic Keyboard, the all-new iPad Pro costs as much as a Mac, but it provides comparable computing power – more, actually, until the Mac gets an M4 – and a different user experience that is more portable, touch-centric, Pencil-capable, and optionally always connected. Like the iPad Air, Apple has doubled the base storage (to 256GB here) while keeping pricing the same ($1000 for 11”, $1300 for 13”) and moving the webcam to landscape. The new design is incredibly thin — the 13” model is just 5.1mm thick and feels like a movie prop in the hand. Weight has been cut as well, and this is especially apparent when combined with the new Magic Keyboard ($300/$350), which also went on a diet and gained a much-appreciated row of function keys. The iPad Pro gets a new rear flash for better document scanning and retains a LiDAR sensor for people who use the iPad to scan rooms for construction and design.
The one area where the iPad Pro was behind the competition has been fully addressed: Apple’s dual-layer OLED display looks absolutely spectacular. Apple is branding the technology, “Tandem OLED” and the display, “Ultra Retina XDR” because Apple compulsively brand everything, but eyes-on this display looks fantastic. By doubling up the OLED panels, Apple achieves the absolute black and wide color gamut of OLED with some of the brightness of mini-LED: 1000 nits in SDR and HDR, with 1600 nits peak HDR. If you have the means and simply want the best movie playback platform, Samsung is no longer the default option. There is also a $100 glare-free glass option that is a no-brainer if you’re using the iPad for professional color correction work or drawing outdoors. However, it is only available on 1TB and 2TB versions, and you probably shouldn’t get if you treat your tablet with anything less than microfiber kid gloves.
The new $129 Apple Pencil Pro for the iPad Pro adds nifty squeeze-for-palette and rotate-for-neat-effects features. It is very well done, and while not every user will need this, Apple isn’t charging more for it than before, so there’s no downside. It works with the new iPad Air and iPad Pro and now supports Find My for when it rolls off the table and under the couch or gets left in the campus library by mistake.
AI and Apps
To appease investors, Apple injected “AI” into the conversation as often as possible, and the M4 certainly has an enormous amount of die space dedicated to its NPU (“Neural Engine” in Apple Speak) and is claiming 38 Tops using Int8 data type. We may get more genAI information from Apple at WWDC, but Apple was able to make AI meaningful to potential customers by highlighting how the latest versions of its pro video editing and music creation apps for the iPad use AI to power genuinely impressive and useful AI capabilities. I got to see demos of Final Cut Pro for iPad with live multi-cam (4 cameras simultaneously with the new Final Cut Camera iPadOS/iOS app), external storage for projects, and nifty AI editing tools. Demos of the updated Logic Pro for iPad adds AI session players for bass and keyboards, Chromaglow analog effects (it just makes everything sound better), and Stem Splitter, which separates out tracks even if you’re starting from a mix (I call this “karaoke mode”).
Apple also showed off a handful of third-party creativity-focused applications, but it still needs to lean harder into its app advantage – and keep it growing. There are full-featured office and personal productivity iPad apps that could use some marketing love, and Apple needs to do more to incentivize developers to develop ground-up iPad-specific apps rather than reskinned iOS apps. I’d love to see upgrade pricing with lower App Store fees rather than forcing every app to be a subscription. Another idea might be “family pricing” tiers to encourage developers to offer unique iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, and VisionOS versions of their apps and get paid more than just for a single version across the ecosystem.
Silicon and the Competition
Apple is putting Intel and AMD on notice that its silicon team has not slowed down despite some personnel changes, and that Apple is ready for the Arm-based competition from Qualcomm. The M4 SoC provides even better performance at existing power draw as Apple’s prior silicon or the same performance at lower wattage, extending battery life. In addition to the improved efficiency of the chip, the iPad Pro has additional layers of thermal insulation, and never got hot when running the short demos at Apple’s NYC location.
Samsung’s next version of the Galaxy Tab S will need to highlight strong computational, AI, display, and app prowess of its own. However, the bigger problem with premium Android tablets is the software ecosystem, and that’s an area that Google has only seemed intermittently interested in investing in. On the Windows side, there is plenty of software for convertibles, but the chipsets have not been able to match Apple Silicon’s performance and battery life. Perhaps Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Elite X platform can solve that problem — if OEMs are willing to invest in the platform across different form factors.
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*The only gotcha there is that the 10th gen iPad lacks a headphone jack; smart parents will add Apple’s $9 USB-C 3.5mm dongle to their purchase or deal with having to buy Bluetooth headphones for their kids and ensure that they are always charged.