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Apple on Wednesday officially unveiled the new iPad Pro with a new Magic Keyboard and Trackpad support.
The brand also updated its MacBook Air and Mac mini.
“We’re making iPad even more capable and versatile by bringing trackpad support to iPadOS,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice-President of Software Engineering.
“We carefully considered the best way to integrate trackpad use into a touch-first environment while retaining everything our customers know and love about the iPad. We’re thrilled to bring this new way of interacting with iPad to the millions of people using iPadOS today.”
iPad Pro specs
The new iPad Pro features trackpad support in a first for iPad. The device comes with Apple’s new Magic Keyboard, a LiDAR Scanner and the A12Z Bionic chip.
The iPad Pro comes in 11-inch and 12.9-inch variants. It will have an edge-to-edge Liquid Retina display in both sizes with P3 wide colour support and a display refresh rate of up to 120 Hz. The screen comes with an ‘anti-reflective’ coating.
The iPad Pro has an eight-core GPU in the A12Z Bionic, along with an enhanced thermal architecture and tuned performance controllers. Depending on device settings, usage and other factors Apple claims that the new iPad can last up to 10 hours on a full charge.
The device comes in different variants based on storage with a starting configuration of 128GB along with 256GB, 512GB and 1TB configurations.
The Pro camera system on iPad Pro features a 12-MP wide camera and a 10MP Ultra-Wide camera. It also features five ‘studio-quality’ microphones for audio.
Apple, in a bid to enhance the iPad Pro’s AR capabilities, has integrated a LiDAR Scanner with the device. Apple says that the scanner can measures the distance to surrounding objects up to 5 meters away, both indoors and outdoors operating at nanosecond speeds.
Trackpad support
Apple has introduced trackpad support to iPad with the iPadOS13.4.
The trackpad supports multi-touch gestures for navigating navigate through the system.
Designed for the ‘touch-first experience’ on iPad, the cursor appears as a circle on the iPad that highlights user interface elements, text fields and apps on the Home screen and Dock.
Updates coming to Apple has also updated its iWork suite of productivity apps — Pages, Numbers and Keynote to enable trackpad support.
Apple will provide trackpad support starting March 24 for all iPad Pro models, iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, and iPad mini 4 and later. It will be available on any iPad running iPadOS 13.4 and work with Apple’s Magic Mouse 2, Magic Trackpad 2 and the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro.
Magic Keyboard
Along with the second-generation Apple Pencil4 and an updated Smart Keyboard Folio 5, Apple also introduced the new Magic Keyboard which attaches magnetically to iPad Pro. The keyboard comes with backlit kets and a scissor mechanism that delivers 1mm travel. It has cantilevered hinges that can be adjusted based on the viewing angle up to 130 degrees. The Magic Keyboard can be charged using a USB-C pass-through charging mechanism.
The new 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro will be available in silver and space grey colours.
Price and availability
The brand has not disclosed the exact dates as to when the devices will be available in India. The new iPad will be available “soon,” Apple said in an official statement.
The 11-inch iPad Pro Wi-fi model is priced at ₹71,900, while the Wi-Fi + Cellular model will be priced at ₹85,900. For the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, the prices start at ₹89,900 for the Wi-Fi model and ₹1,03,900 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model.
The Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro can be purchased separately starting May for ₹27,900 for the 11-inch iPad Pro and ₹31,900 for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.
The second-generation Apple Pencil and the Smart Keyboard Folio will also be sold separately. The Apple Pencil for iPad Pro is priced at ₹10,900. As for the Smart Keyboard Folio, it is priced at ₹7,500 for the 11-inch iPad Pro and ₹9,900 for the 12.9-inch model.
Apple has also updated its MacBook Air with the new Magic Keyboard and increased storage, lowering its price to ₹92,990 in India. It also doubled the storage capacity of the Mac mini. The ₹74,900 configuration now comes standard with 256GB, while the ₹1,05,900 configuration features 512GB of storage.
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