We were expecting new iPhones today, and we were even expecting Apple TV announcements, but whether Apple would update its iPad line was more difficult to say. It seems Apple is bucking its own announce-new-iPads-in-October trend, however, because the company just added a 12.9" iPad to its lineup.

The newly named iPad Pro is 6.9mm thick and weighs 1.57 lbs—slightly heavier than the 1.54 lb first-generation iPad. According to Apple, it will have a 10-hour battery life. It measures 12"×8.68"×0.27" compared to the iPad Air 2's dimensions of 9.4"×6.6"×0.24". The Pro weighs in at 1.57lb compared to the 0.98lb of the Air 2.

The new tablet will be called the iPad Pro, and the entry-level version comes with a healthy 32GB of storage, rather than the 16GB of the other iPad base models. The iPad Pro also comes in a 128GB version. Pricing on those Wi-Fi-only tiers is $799 and $949. An LTE version (which comes with a 150mbps LTW modem) will only be available in the 128GB version and will cost $1,079. European pricing isn't yet known, but it'll probably start at around £700/€900.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Apple confirmed that the iPad Pro's screen has a 2732×2048 resolution, as had been rumored in the weeks leading up to this event, with 5.6 million pixels. Taking the stage at Apple's launch event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller explained the design choice. "Let's start with the display: Why make a bigger one?" he said. "You can touch your documents, touch your books, interact with everything. It does things an iPhone can't do since it doesn't have to be pocketable, does things a notebook can't do because it's holdable."

Schiller noted that the new tablet's internals would also benefit from the refresh as well: the iPad Pro would have a custom timing controller like the 5K Mac, as well as a variable refresh rate for the screen—something new for Apple products. The Pro also runs on an A9X chip with "double the memory bandwidth of the A8X and double the storage performance." In addition, the iPad Pro comes with a stereo, four-speaker audio system, which will balance "from left to right depending on how you're holding the iPad."











The iPad Pro comes in three finishes—silver, gold, and space gray. It has an 8MP camera and is compatible with 802.11ac Wi-Fi with MIMO. The iPad Pro also has a Touch ID sensor, as is custom for Apple's most current devices.

The Pro will also work with a bevy of new accessories. The Smart Keyboard is one of them—a fabric iPad Pro cover that users can type on, it resembles what we've seen paired with Microsoft's Surface. The keyboard cover connects to the iPad Pro via three circles on the side of the iPad Pro, which deliver power and data to and from the keyboard and connect the accessory magnetically to the tablet.

Andrew Cunningham







The other is called Apple Pencil, a stylus that detects force, position, and tilt to write on the iPad Pro. Apple's Chief Design Officer Jony Ive showed the stylus off in a video, saying that when it's being used to draw, its digitizer scans twice as often to create a more responsive image. "It delivers precision that lets you touch a single pixel," Ive said. Apple also even called up Corporate VP from Microsoft Office Kirk Koenigsbauer to talk about how Office for iPad will work with the Apple Pencil to, for example, let users draw things and convert them into objects.

The Smart Keyboard will start at $169, and the Apple Pencil starts at $99.

The iPad Pro's large screen has it rivaling its smaller MacBooks, and the new multitasking features in iOS 9 could make the choice between getting a small MacBook or getting a large iPad Pro more difficult for some users. Such a large screen is no doubt intended to show off iOS 9's Split View, in which a primary app can take as much as 75 percent of a device's screen while a secondary app appears in the space unoccupied by the primary app.

The company showed off how new software would work on the iPad Pro, noting that users will be able to edit up to three 4K movies at once using iMovie. In AutoCAD 360, Schiller said users can explore creations at 60 frames per second.











Toward the end of Apple's tour of the iPad Pro, Schiller took the stage again to note that Apple will be releasing an iPad Mini 4, basically a smaller version of the iPad Air 2 with an A8 chip instead of the A8X. It will weigh 0.65 lbs and start at $399. The older iPad Mini 2 also got a price reduction and will now start at $269.