iPad Pro First Look

We’ve long anticipated this new OLED iPad Pro, growing almost bored with the wait, and yet the new tablet announcement was weighty enough that it still managed to leave us winded. Sure, the updated iPad Air with M2 and a 13-inch variation would be par for the course for Apple’s standard refreshes, but the iPad Pro now has an OLED screen, a new M4 chip, and a slimmed-down chassis. All that combined, and it’s certainly the most exciting iPad announcement since the Cupertino company shared the details on its first tablet. Oh, and that’s not all. The new Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil could push the iPad’s versatility far beyond even a MacBook Air.

For starters, the $999 11-inch and $1,200 13-inch iPad Pro are packing not one but two layers of organic light-emitting diode displays. Why is that significant? Because OLED screens are notoriously some of the best for great contrast and deep, deep blacks. One of the few drawbacks of OLED displays has traditionally been brightness, but Apple claims the two layers of OLED actually push the SDR and HDR brightness past 1,000 nits. On HDR, Apple says you’ll manage to get 1,600 nits of peak brightness.

It wouldn’t be Apple if it didn’t create its own nomenclature for its displays. The new tandem OLED design is what the company calls “Ultra Retina XDR.” Look at the slides and judge for yourself whether the OLED panels make a difference, but they’re striking in person. Also, take a look at the size difference between the old and new iPad Pros. The 11-inch iPad Pro is now 5.3 mm, while the 13-inch is just 5.1 mm thick. Apple made the point that it’s now “thinner than an iPod Nano,” so if anybody still has one of those MP3 players in the back pocket of their old pair of pants, you might have a somewhat antiquated form of comparison.

The tablet entry would be strong enough, but the accessories might push the iPad Pro over the edge. A new Magic Keyboard now uses aluminum in its base, and yet it’s lighter than previous iterations with a better trackpad. Plus, the full-function row gives you the full MacBook experience. The real star is the new $129 Apple Pencil Pro, a stylus that has subtle haptic feedback, a new squeeze function to access in-app menus, and, most importantly, a “barrel roll” sensor that will detect the position of the roll of your pencil. Also, it finally has access to Find My.

Give it enough time, and we’ll see if it truly becomes the best iPad you can buy, let alone the best among current-gen tablets. Hell, we’ll want to finally determine whether the OLED iPad Pro is so good that we’ll finally ask why we should even buy one of the smaller MacBooks.