by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
Apple announced new iPads — two iPad Air models and the iPad Pro with M4 processor — at its “Let Loose” event on Tuesday. However, one of the important updates for people who take a lot of video calls was Apple shifting the camera to the landscape edge.
Until now, the camera on the iPad was on the portrait edge, which meant you had to put the iPad in portrait mode while taking video calls. If you placed your iPad in landscape mode — like a laptop — it presented a weird and unflattering angle. The new iPad models solve this problem.
“We’ve also redesigned the iPad Air to put the front-facing camera on the landscape edge and a feature center stage that uses machine learning to keep everyone in the field of view automatically. So it’s perfect for connecting with friends and family over FaceTime or joining a video conference while using a keyboard,” Melody Kuna, Director of iPad Design, said.
The company is bringing similar changes to the new iPad Pro models powered by the M4 processor.
The new iPads are shipping next week, with the 11-inch model priced at $599 and the 13-inch model priced at $799.
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
Yeah, you can put an OLED screen in an iPad, but then you lose the brightness that iPad Pro users are used to. What is a poor computer maker to do? You stack two of them, of course.
“We’ve always envisioned iPad as a magical sheet of glass,” said John Ternus, SVP, Hardware Engineering, during Apple’s iPad event in Cupertino on Tuesday. “And with the new iPad Pro, we wanted to give customers an even more remarkable visual experience.”
The company did that by bringing OLED to iPad for the very first time, suggesting that the technology helps get the light and color accuracy that iPad Pro owners want — but that it lacks the brightness. The company solved that by creating the Tandem OLED screen, which can support an incredible 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness for both SDR and HDR content, and 1,600 nits of peak HDR brightness. The company says no other device delivers this level of display quality.
As a bonus of using OLED, it enables the company to deliver sub-millisecond control over the color and luminance of each pixel, which means that highlights in photo and video can appear brighter, while blacks can be deeper and more true, with a huge additional responsibility boost in moving content.
Together, the company calls it the Ultra Retina XDR, built into both brand-new 11- and 13-inch models .
Previously seen on the company’s high-end studio displays, the new iPad Pro also gets a nanotexture glass option to iPad Pro for the very first time: Nanotexture glass is precisely etched at a nanometer scale, maintaining image quality and contrast while scattering ambient light for even less glare.
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
Shocking as it may seem, it’s been nearly a decade since the first Apple Pencil was announced, way back in 2015. The stylus hasn’t seen much in the way of updates since then. The most significant arrived in 2018 , bringing magnetic charging to the line. Last year, meanwhile, saw the arrival of a less expensive model with fewer features and USB-C charging.
The device has been overdue for a major upgrade, so much so that the company made it the focal point of invites for Tuesday’s “Let Loose” event .
Here’s everything Apple just announced at its Let Loose event, including new iPad Pro with M4 chip, iPad Air, Apple Pencil and more
Now the line is getting a Pro model. A new sensor adds a squeeze function to the device, that lets users swap between brushes. A haptic sensor has been added as well, bringing tactile feedback to the product.
The new version of the Pencil also brings Find My to the line — a welcome addition to a device that is easily lost between couch cushions.
The premium model is compatible with both the new iPad Pro and iPad Air . With the former, it takes advantage of the M4 chip , bringing new capabilities, including adjusting bokeh effects on the fly.
The Pencil Pro runs $129. It’s up for pre-order now and starts shipping next week.
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
At its iPad-focused event on Monday, Apple announced a new and improved Magic Keyboard, its keyboard accessory for iPad.
The Magic Keyboard has been “completely redesigned” to be much thinner and lighter, Apple says, and now includes a function row for quick access to controls like screen brightness, volume adjustment and play/pause. Beyond that, the new Magic Keyboard features aluminum palm rests and a larger trackpad. Plus it’s more responsive, Apple says, with haptic feedback and a USB-C port for charging.
It’s the first major revision of the Magic Keyboard since its launch in 2020. And — with the addition of the function row — it’s now on par, feature-wise, with its counterpart the Magic Keyboard Folio.
The new Magic Keyboard comes in two sizes — one for the 11-inch iPad Pro and one for the 13-inch model — and in two colors, black and white. It can be pre-ordered today for the same price as the previous-gen Magic Keyboard, $299 for the 11-inch and $349 for the 13-inch, and will be available in stores next week.
In other keyboard accessory news, there’s a new Smart Folio for iPad Air. It attaches magnetically and supports multiple viewing angles for “greater flexibility” than the old model.
The Smart Folio is available in charcoal gray, light violet, denim and sage and priced at $79 for the 11-inch iPad Air version and $99 for the 13-inch version.
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
At its iPad event today, Apple announced its new iPad Pro tablets , powered by its new M4 chips , the fourth generation of its custom SoCs.
The new chips feature a new display engine, as well as a significantly updated CPU and GPU cores. The base M4 chips come with up to ten CPU and ten GPU cores, with the CPU cores split between four performance cores and 6 efficiency cores.
Image Credits: Apple
Image Credits: Apple
Apple claims that the new CPU is 50% faster than the M2 chips which powered the last generation of iPad Pros, while the GPU will offer a 4x increase in rendering performance, all while still offering the same performance per Watt as the M3. Apple stressed that the new GPU architecture features dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, something that’s a first for the iPad.
Image Credits: Apple
Image Credits: Apple
This is 2024, so Apple also now plays up the neural engine in its chips even more and highlights that it has long added those to its SoCs while the PC market is only now catching up. That’s fair, but there also weren’t all that many use cases for these chips before. The new neural engine in the M4 offers a performance of up to 38 trillion operations per second. That, Apple notes, is 60 times faster than the performance of the first neural engine when it debuted in the A11 Bionic chip.
The new CPU cores, too, feature enhanced ML accelerators, Apple noted.
“The new iPad Pro with M4 is a great example of how building best-in-class custom silicon enables breakthrough products,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, using Apple’s typical hyperbole. “The power-efficient performance of M4, along with its new display engine, makes the thin design and game-changing display of iPad Pro possible, while fundamental improvements to the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, and memory system make M4 extremely well suited for the latest applications leveraging AI. Altogether, this new chip makes iPad Pro the most powerful device of its kind.”
Apple first announced the 3-nanometer M3 series last October, when it announced the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max. The standard M3 featured a 10-core GPU and 8-core CPU, while the M3 Pro comes with a 12-core CPU and 18-core GPU. The high-end M3 Max (there’s no Ultra model yet) features a 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU.
Typically, Apple brought its newest chips to its Pro-series laptops first and then used the last generation for its tablets (and that’s what it is doing with the new iPad Air this year, too). But it’s taking a bit of a different approach here by debuting the M4 in the iPad Pro. If I had to guess, part of this is due to Qualcomm’s latest Arm-based Snapdragon chips being on their way to PCs — and while we haven’t seen the full benchmarks for these yet, it looks like they could put some pressure on Apple Silicon’s lead, especially as Microsoft continues to invest in Windows an Arm.
Apple iPad Pro gets an M4 chip and OLED display
Apple’s M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max 3-nanometer chips arrive with a big graphics boost
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
The latest version of Final Cut Pro introduces a new feature to speed up your shoot: Live Multicam. It’s a bold move from Apple, transforming your iPad into a multicam production studio, enabling creatives to connect and preview up to four cameras all at once, al in one place. From the command post, directors can remotely direct each video angle and dial in exposure, white balance, focus, and more, all within the Final Cut Camera app.
With Final Cut Camera. filmmakers get full control over iPads and iPhones used as cameras and connected to the app. Image credit: Apple
With Final Cut Camera. filmmakers get full control over iPads and iPhones used as cameras and connected to the app. Image credit: Apple
The new companion app lets users connect multiple iPhones or iPads (presumably using the same protocols as the Continuity Camera feature launched a few years ago). Final Cut Pro automatically transfers and syncs each Live Multicam angle so you can seamlessly move from production to editing.
Apple’s Continuity Camera lets you use your iPhone as a webcam
Final Cut Pro has existed in the iPad universe for a while – but when paired with a brand new M4 processor, it becomes a video editing experience much closer to what you might expect on a desktop video editing workstation. The speed is 2x faster than with the old M1 processors, Apple says. One way that shows up, is that the new iPad supports up to four times more streams of ProRes RAW than M1.
The company also introduces external project support, making it possible to edit projects directly from an external drive, leveraging the fast Thunderbolt connection of iPad Pro.
