iPad Pro announced: accessories, features, specs & more

Apple calls it “the biggest news in iPad since iPad.” We call it a bloody enormous iPad. Say hello to the 13-inch iPad Pro, complete with two key accessories, a bold design and powerful internal hardware. Here’s what you need to know.

Accessories

Steve Jobs once famously said that “if you see a stylus, they blew it.” Five years later, Apple unveiled the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil. The stylus-by-any-other-name looks svelte in the usual Apple style, with an accurate, pressure-sensitive tip and tilt sensors embedded inside. That should result in very natural drawing and writing experience, although it’s yet to be seen how much it differs from other iPad styluses.

The Pencil charges from the iPad Pro, with a 15 second charge giving you 30 minutes of drawing time. The Pencil is supported by built-in apps in iOS 9, and Apple even invited the Microsoft Office team to the stage to demo the Pencil working in Office for iOS.

The other big accessory of the day was the Smart Keyboard, a fabric-covered keyboard that looks and acts like Microsoft’s Touch Cover for the Surface. It connects to the on the side of the iPad Pro magnetically, sending data and receiving power through a new Smart Connector (which can reportedly be used with other, forth-coming accessories). The keyboard allows for faster and more comfortable typing, as well as acting as a stand to allow for a laptop-like configuration.

The two iPad Pro accessories are sold separately, and cost $99 for the Pencil or $169 for the Smart Keyboard. UK prices haven’t yet been announced.

Design

The heart of the iPad Pro is its 12.9-inch display, which is about double the size of the iPad Air 2 at a higher 2048 x 2739 resolution (~265 pixels per inch). The new iOS update allows two apps to be run in split screen, which certainly makes the most of this extra large screen.

As usual, the screen is covered with scratch-resistant, oleophobic and anti-reflective glass. One interesting new feature is a variable refresh rate, allowing the screen to update less often (perhaps 15 or 30 times per second instead of 60) to save battery.

The larger size of the iPad Pro has also allowed Apple to include four speakers, which are capable of adapting to how you hold it to keep volumes and frequencies balanced. This is a nice upgrade considering the Air 2 still uses an underpowered stereo speaker.

The iPad Pro will be available in space grey, gold and silver – no rose gold here, as we saw with the iPhone 6S. The iPad Pro will measure 6.9 millimetres thick, and weighs 713 grams.

Hardware

Inside, the iPad Pro has the most powerful hardware of any iPad to date. That includes an Apple A9X chip, the bigger brother of the A9 that powers the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. This chip offers 1.8x the CPU performance of the A8X in the iPad Air 2, and double the GPU performance. Despite the upgraded performance, battery life remains the same at 10 hours.

This is backed with doubly fast RAM and flash storage, which should result in a much faster experience throughout the OS. Wireless connectivity has also been upgraded compared to the iPad Air 2, with 802.11ac WiFi and 23-band LTE.

Photography with the iPad is already a bit of a cliche, but it’s possible here despite the greater size of the iPad Pro. The rear camera is an 8-megapixel unit, while the front-facer remains a meagre 1.2-megapixel unit.

The iPad Pro will be available with 32 or 128GB of storage; the 128GB model of storage can also be upgraded with LTE connectivity. UK prices have not yet been announced, but the US prices start at $799 (£520) and go to $1079 (£700) for the most expensive model.

Conclusion

Thanks for viewing our coverage of Apple’s September event. Please read our iPhone 6S and 6S Plus announcement blog if you haven’t already, and let us know what you thought in the comments below.