Apple has announced its new 2022 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models with M2 chips. The new models feature Apple Pencil hover experiences, ProRes video capture, and faster Wi-Fi 6E. The design remains unchanged from the 2018 iPad Pro, however, the internals have gone through an upgrade.
2022 iPad Pro
It was expected that Apple will release a new iPad Pro update with M2 chip, and the company has finally added the new performance features from the latest MacBook Air to its tablet. The new M2 chip in iPad Pro has the following features:
- 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
- 10-core GPU
- 16-core Neural Engine
- 100GB/s memory bandwidth
- 8GB or 16GB RAM
Thanks to the M2 chip, the new iPad Pro models also get ProRes support. The media engine in M2 chip supports hardware-accelerated ProRes and ProRes RAW, as well as a ProRes encode and decode engine.
The camera lens are the same as before, but thanks to the M2 chip, these new iPad Pro models support ProRes video capture up to 4K at 30 fps for 256GB and higher versions. 128GB versions only support 1080p at 30 fps. Apple has also updated the camera with Smart HDR 4 support.
Another major new addition to the new iPad Pro is the Apple Pencil hover experience. The display can detect an Apple Pencil up to 12mm above the display, allowing users to see where they will be making contact, draw and illustrate with better precession, preview thumbnails, or see text fields expand before even touching the screen. This feature will also be available to third-party developers to integrate into their apps.
A new reference mode in the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with Liquid Retina XDR (mini-LED) adds support for professional workflows. This allows the display to match the color requirements for color grading, and compositing, as it is important to have accurate colors and consistent image quality.
Lastly, the new iPad Pro models feature support for Wi-Fi 6E. This allows for download speeds up to 2.4GB/s, twice as fast as previous models. Apple has also added support for more 5G networks around the world for cellular models.
The rest of the features like the Face ID camera, storage capacities, etc remain the same as before. Apple has also kept the same colors and storage capacities as before. The 11-inch iPad Pro model still features an LCD display instead of mini-LED.
The new iPad Pro models are available for order today in 28 countries and regions, and will start shipping on October 26.
