Apple Spring 2021: New 12-inch iPad Pro rocks Liquid Retina XDR display

The most powerful and advanced iPad Pro ever has been announced, pushing the limits of what’s possible on iPad. The addition of the Apple-designed M1 chip delivers a massive leap in performance, making iPad Pro the fastest device of its kind.

The breakthrough M1 chip takes the industry-leading performance of iPad Pro to an entirely new level. The 8-core CPU design features the world’s fastest CPU cores in low-power silicon — delivering up to 50 percent faster CPU performance than A12Z Bionic. The 8-core GPU is in a class of its own, delivering up to 40 percent faster GPU performance. This combination of CPU and graphics performance on iPad Pro widens its lead as the fastest device of its kind. Powerful custom technologies, including a next-generation 16-core Apple Neural Engine, an advanced image signal processor (ISP), a unified, high-bandwidth memory architecture with up to 16GB of memory, 2x faster storage, and up to 2TB capacity, make iPad Pro more capable than ever. The industry-leading power efficiency of M1 enables all of that amazing performance along with all-day battery life in the thin and light design of iPad Pro.1 Because M1 shares the same fundamental architecture of A-series chips, iPadOS is already optimised to take full advantage of the powerful technologies in M1 to easily handle everything from simple navigation to the most demanding workflows.

12.9-inch Liquid Retina XDR Display Brings Extreme Dynamic Range to iPad Pro

The new Liquid Retina XDR display brings the stunning front-of-screen performance of the Pro Display XDR to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Engineered with a new cutting-edge mini-LED design that uses over 10,000 LEDs across the entire back of the display, the Liquid Retina XDR display features up to 1000 nits of full-screen brightness, 1600 nits of peak brightness, and a phenomenal 1 million-to-1 contrast ratio to enhance creative workflows. The result is a stunning visual experience that reflects what can be seen in the real world by capturing the brightest highlights and the most subtle details in even the darkest images. Now creative professionals, including photographers, videographers, and filmmakers, can view and edit true-to-life HDR content on a large display they can take anywhere. The new Liquid Retina XDR display includes other advanced technologies that can also be found in the 11-inch iPad Pro, including ProMotion, True Tone, and P3 wide colour support, delivering an unmatched mobile cinematic viewing experience for HDR and Dolby Vision content.

With 5G available on iPad Pro, customers on the go can do even more with better performance and access to next-generation download and upload speeds — great for higher-quality video streaming, real-time collaboration, or FaceTime in high definition, with a new TrueDepth camera system on iPad Pro featuring an all-new 12MP Ultra Wide front camera designed specifically for iPad, enabling Centre Stage, a new experience for video calls. Centre Stage uses the much larger field of view on the new front camera and the machine learning capabilities of M1 to recognise and keep users centred in the frame. As users move around, Centre Stage automatically pans to keep them in the shot. When others join in, the camera detects them too, and smoothly zooms out to fit everyone into the view and make sure they are part of the conversation.

Support for Thunderbolt and USB 4 makes the USB-C port on iPad Pro the fastest, most versatile port ever on an iPad, with 4x more bandwidth for wired connections than the previous iPad Pro — up to 40Gbps. Thunderbolt supports 10Gbps Ethernet and opens up a massive ecosystem of high-performance accessories, like faster external storage and even higher resolution external displays.