The hardware was willing, but the software was weak. Thats a 50+ percent improvement over last years A12Z, another 8-core chip, though the M1 is clocked at a much faster 3.2GHz compared to the 2. The new 12.9-inch iPad Pro has a Liquid Retina XDR display powered by new mini LED technology. In 2018, when Apple released the first iPad Pro with a USB-C port on the bottom, it didn’t update the software to read the entire contents of a thumb drive when you plugged it in. In Geekbench 5, which tests both CPU and GPU performance, the iPad Pro performed nearly identically to the M1 MacBook Pro, with a single-core score of 1714 and a multi-core score of 7,210. The 12.9-inch tablet starts at 1,099 in its cheapest configuration. That means the cheapest iPad Pro you can snag is 799, which would be the Wi-Fi-only 11-inch model with 128GB of storage. With the announcement of USB 4/Thunderbolt support on these new iPad Pro models, I’m thrown back to the past. Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi + Cellular models are available, and the prices of the iPad Pro (2022, M2) have stayed the same (in the U.S.) as last year. How are we supposed to interpret this? That Apple’s hardware team thinks the iPad is a vehicle into which incredible, cutting-edge features should be built, but that the teams responsible for Apple’s own professional-focused apps don’t think the iPad is worth the effort? Thunderbolt support for what? As impressed and enthusiastic as I am about the Affinity Designer apps and the video-editing power of LumaFusion, it’s still perplexing to see Apple show off yet another iPad Pro, with yet another impressive hardware upgrade, and Final Cut Pro is nowhere to be seen. (It’s probably also going to be great to watch movies on.)īut more than five years after Apple introduced the iPad Pro, it’s telling that Apple is still demonstrating its gorgeous pro-level displays by using third-party apps.

The result, though, is a display that is bright and offers extreme dynamic range, a great boon to pro-level photographers and videographers alike.

Ipad pro m1 parallels