iPAD PRO 2021: SUPERCHARGED WITH XDR DISPLAY, M1 CHIP, & THUNDERBOLT

The iPad Pro has become something of a workhorse in recent years, offering professionals an alternative to a laptop with cutting-edge capabilities and software. At this year’s Spring Loaded event, Apple supercharged its flagship tablet with the M1 chip and Thunderbolt support, unlocking even greater opportunities for creatives in need of an all-in-one machine.

BRINGING THE POWER OF THE MAC TO iPAD

Though this year’s iPad Pro refresh didn’t quite get the same level of attention as the allnew iMac, which received its biggest design overhaul since its inception 22 years ago, it’s an impressive upgrade all the same. Following on from the success of the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini, which were supercharged with an M1 chip last year, Apple has decided to bring the power of its custom silicon technology to the iPad, which it says “takes the industry-leading performance of iPad Pro to an entirely new level.” For the first time, the iPad Pro features an 8-core CPU design and the world’s fastest CPU cores in low-power silicon, offering up to 50% faster CPU performance than the A12Z Bionic chip the M1 replaces, and an 8-core GPU offers 40% faster GPU performance than the previous generation. It’s this powerful combination of technology and performance that helps to widen the iPad Pro’s lead as the fastest device of its kind, and with next-generation 16-core Neural Engine, an advanced image signal processor, a highbandwidth memory architecture with up to 16GB of memory, two times faster storage, and up to 2TB capacity, the iPad Pro is blazing.

Making the decision to introduce the M1 chip to the iPad Pro is a natural evolution, as Apple has, in recent years, marketed the iPad Pro as an alternative to a computer. Indeed, it used a controversial marketing campaign titled “What’s a computer?” to promote its capabilities, and the 2021 generation lives up to that hype. Of course, Apple’s Mac sales must also be a consideration when the company introduces new high-end technology in such a way, but when you consider that the iPad Pro retails for around the same price as a MacBook Pro, it’s clear Apple sees the product categories as complementary rather than competition.

One of the most exciting things about the M1 on the iPad Pro is that Apple has created a new device that offers industry-leading power efficiency, offering all-day battery life and a thin and lightweight design, ideal for on-the-go.

Whether you’re a photographer, researcher or administrator, you can benefit from the power of the iPad Pro and iPadOS to get the job done, and because M1 shares the same architecture as Apple’s A-series chips, iPadOS is fully optimized to take advantage of the power of the chip. Whether users are answering an email, editing 4K video on the fly, or developing an app, the iPad Pro is more than capable.