Yesterday in Brooklyn, at a music venue more than a century old, Apple released its newest and most innovative computer. It's thinner and lighter than its predecessor, and it's powered by a crazy-powerful new processor.
Also, there was an update to the MacBook Air.
It's true: While the new MacBook Air was the product that people hopped on a plane, train, or subway yesterday to see, the clamshell laptop was just the opening act. The new iPad Pro announced yesterday was the headliner. It's a more technically impressive device, one that demonstrates what the future of computing looks like to Apple. Apple spent approximately 20 minutes talking about the new MacBook Air yesterday, while it took longer than a half hour to go through all of the features of its new tablet and its stylus accessory, the Pencil.
One of Apple's biggest selling tools with any Mac is nostalgia. When Apple CEO Tim Cook began talking about the Mac category yesterday, he talked about Apple's history of making products that help people "unleash their creativity." On the screen behind him, a montage of black-and-white still images appeared, featuring people both famous and unknown using MacBooks for various creative endeavors. "People love the Mac, and they use it to create all kinds of amazing things every day," Cook said. When it came time to finally unveil the new Air, Cook first offered a short retrospective on the original MacBook Air, and how it "redefined the modern notebook."
When Cook talked about the iPad, he pitted it directly against notebooks made by companies other than Apple, compared its processing power to that of a game console, and called it a "magical piece of glass that transforms instantly into anything you want it to be."
Of course, many people were just happy to hear that that the MacBook Air is not being totally neglected. The MacBook Air was first released in 2008 and has received only incremental updates since then. Now, it has a high-resolution display; an improved keyboard and trackpad; a fingerprint sensor for authentication; and internals that are, at the very least, up to date. Its reveal yesterday was met with cheers from the crowd (presumably, not including the press) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
But none of those updates are really new for Apple, or for the broader laptop market. High-resolution displays have been done for years; so have fingerprint sensors. The MacBook Air's "new" Intel 8th-generation chipset isn't even the newest.
The iPad Pro, on the other hand, is a showcase of truly impressive technologies. I say this as someone who has never felt the need to actually buy an iPad. In fact, the only iPad I've ever possessed was given to me by my employer. Every time I see a new iPad, especially an iPad Pro, I briefly entertain delusional thoughts of becoming something of a digital artiste. Then I realize I don't draw very well and that my work as a journalist requires me to type frequently and at length on a traditional keyboard, something with a desktop OS. I am not the target iPad customer.
But this iPad Pro! It's enough to make anyone want an iPad. When I first picked it up yesterday in the hands-on area at the event, I was immediately struck by how light it is—and that was the larger of the two models.
The iPad Pro now comes in two display sizes: 12.9 inches and 11 inches, the latter of which fits into the same basic dimensions as the old 10.5-inch iPad Pro. The display is nearly edge-to-edge, with thin black bezels. Apple compared the 12.9-inch iPad to the size of a sheet of paper, which sounded a little like the company was trying to recreate the "manila envelope" moment, only with an iPad instead of a MacBook this time. If you were to imagine a decade ago what the glass tablet of the future would look like—the elusive glass slabs that people tapped and swiped in Hollywood sci-fi movies—the new iPad Pro is pretty close to it.
The iPad Pro's processing power looks to be even more impressive. It runs on Apple's A12X Bionic chip, which is similar to the A12 chipset that just started shipping in the new iPhones. (iPad Pros always have the "X" version of Apple's latest chip.) Apple says this processor makes the tablet more powerful than 92 percent of the available laptops on the market. The company even claimed the iPad Pro's graphics capabilities are as robust as those on an XBox One S. Apple's chip includes an eight-core CPU and a seven-core GPU. And it has its own neural engine, a dedicated machine learning engine that now ships in iPhones, too.
During yesterday's event, Adobe vice president of design Jamie Myrold and another Adobe employee named Chantelle demoed Photoshop running on the iPad Pro. The remarkable thing wasn't that they were running Photoshop; it's that they were running what appeared to be a full-fledged version of the app, not the water-down creative apps that Adobe and others have shipped for iPad in recent years. The iPad Pro on stage was doing the workload of a "real" computer.
Even the accompanying Pencil got some nifty updates. The new stylus has carved edges and a matte finish. It attaches magnetically to one side of the iPad Pro and charges that way, too. And double tapping on the capacitive surface of the Pencil lets you change virtual writing tools.
There are some elements of the new iPad Pro that Apple would probably describe as pointing toward the future and most consumers would describe as the removal of beloved features. The headphone jack is gone on the new tablets, and Apple has ditched its Lightning port in favor of USB-C on the new iPad Pros.
And then there's the price: The new iPad Pros start at $799 for a 64-gigabyte version of the 11-incher, and $999 for the same configuration of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Those are "computer" prices. And that doesn't even include the stylus or the accessory keyboard that the iPad snaps into.
But while iPad Pro prices aren't easy to swallow, it makes sense when you consider what the iPad has become. Which is to say, it really is a computer.
Yesterday's event had its fair share of subtly awkward moments as Apple tried to present its two philosophies for how it believes you're supposed to use a computer. On the one hand, there was a new laptop. This clamshell design still matters, Apple was insisting. Moments later, the company was touting a tablet it clearly sees as the real future of computing, something better and more advanced than a notebook. Cook even called the iPad not only the most popular tablet but also "the most popular computer in the world."
"It's going to push what you can do on iPad, or on any computer, even further." Cook snuck it in there: "Or on any computer." Apple believes the iPad should be compared to any kind of computer—even the MacBook Air, though it didn't say as much. The MacBook Air, after all, is what computers have been. But it doesn't necessarily mean that's what they will be in the future.
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