The iPad Pro, which debuted the M4 chip, is the vanguard of Apple's entry into the AI market

Text | Ray Technology

At the end of last year, Apple officially released the M3 chip at the "Scary Fast" special event, as well as the new MacBook Pro, iMac and other products equipped with the M3 chip.

Compared to its predecessor, the M3 performs well in single-core performance, with a GeekBench 6 single-core score of 3100+, which is quite impressive. However, under the wave of AI, the upgrade of M3 in the GPU part seems to pay more attention to the performance of ray tracing performance, and its AI computing power only reaches 18TOPS, as a comparison, the AI computing power of Snapdragon X Elite is 45TOPS, and the Intel Ultra processor has also reached a minimum of 34TOPS. Looking at the numbers alone, the M3 is more than a star and a half behind.

Due to the slow progress of self-developed large models, Apple has been in the dilemma of being attacked in the field of mobile phones and computers, and perhaps iPad is the direction of Apple's breakthrough.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman revealed that Apple will unveil the new iPad Pro at a special event in May, and surprisingly, this iPad Pro is equipped with an M4 chip instead of the rumored M3 chip. Of course, the relationship between the two chips is not an "iteration" as we expected, but a "complementary" - the M4 chip can be regarded as an AI version of the M3 chip, and its AI computing power performance is more powerful.

In fact, in the current consumer electronics market, the AI wave does not seem to have invaded the tablet category too much, and if Apple really wants to take the lead with the new iPad Pro, it may set off a new round of revolution in AI tablets.

The first M4 chip, iPad Pro to make history?

Although the iPad Pro was officially unveiled in 2018, compared to other iPad products sold by Apple, this iPad Pro's "professional" is only reflected in performance.

In 2021, Apple released Apple Silicon's first chip, M1, which is not only used in the Mac product line, but also on the iPad Pro. At the same time, Apple also comes with a mini-LED panel on the 12.9-inch version of the iPad Pro to provide a more professional color display.

Display and performance form the moat of the iPad Pro's "productivity tools", and in 2024, these two areas will also usher in major upgrades.

The 2024 iPad Pro will switch from a mini-LED panel to an OLED panel, and some people may think that such a change is not an "upgrade", after all, the service life of OLED panels is far less than that of mini-LED panels. But in fact, the main reason for the serious "overturning" of the iPad Pro in the past two generations is that the high energy consumption released by the M series chip and the mini-LED panel at the same time has seriously affected the user's experience, whether it is battery life or heat.

DSCC CEO Ross Young said that Apple will equip the 2024 iPad Pro with a high-quality OLED panel, and it may even be the most eye-catching screen in the industry at the moment. However, at present, there are not many tablets equipped with OLED panels, and the reference value may not be large. In any case, at least it can be said that the iPad Pro has reserved enough room for this M4 chip to play, and will no longer be held back by the high-power display panel.

Technically, this new OLED panel adopts a double-layer series structure, which means that its peak brightness has been greatly improved, and in order to reduce the thickness of the whole machine, Apple has also designed a special glass thinning technology to further reduce the thickness of the entire panel. In addition, the 2024 iPad Pro still supports the Pro-Motion adaptive refresh rate, which may support always-on display.

The M4 chip debuted on the 2024 iPad Pro will continue to use TSMC's 3nm process technology, but the process technology will be slightly improved compared to the M3. The core architecture part, M4 is still divided into M4, M4 Pro, M4 Max three, of which the standard version of the M4 chip equipped with iPad Pro adopts 8-core CPU+10-core GPU+A new generation of neural network engine scheme, of which AI computing power is increased by 10%~15% compared with M3.

The neural network engine is mainly responsible for the machine learning part, such as face unlocking, image processing, etc., and Apple plans to greatly improve the design of this part on the M4 chip, including increasing the number of cores and improving execution efficiency. It's not hard to see that Apple is finally recognizing the importance of AI in the current market.

It's no surprise that the iPad Pro is getting a major hardware upgrade, as the series has been leading the tablet market since its inception. But what AI functions can the iPad Pro, which debuted with the M4 chip, can achieve, this is what we are concerned about.

Apple's large model debuted, and the iPad Pro is expected to debut for the first time

After the official announcement of the special event in May, Apple released a self-developed large model of OpenELM without warning, which contains four parameter versions of 270 million, 450 million, 1.1 billion and 3 billion. It is worth noting that OpenELM is a large model designed for terminals.

Unlike mainstream AI manufacturers such as Meta and Google, Apple chose to enter the AI war with a "small model", and its purpose is also very clear: to ensure smooth operation on mainstream devices. According to the number of parameters, the 270 million and 450 million versions are likely to be applied to the iPhone and the iPad with non-M series chips, respectively, while the 1.1 billion and 3 billion versions are expected to appear in the iPad Pro and Mac.

What can the 2024 iPad Pro with OpenELM achieve?

First of all, the more advanced Siri. As a voice assistant, although Siri was born early, but the speed of development is not fast enough, when most mobile phone manufacturers have begun to access AI to improve the behavior perception of voice assistants, Apple's Siri is still stuck in the stage of reading comprehension. The new generation of Siri can use OpenELM to implement functions such as speech translation, speech-to-text, and quickly organize voice content, while also invoking shortcuts to quickly perform tedious tasks.

Secondly, the visual and text processing capabilities have been greatly improved. Apple has long deployed sensors for vision training in its devices, such as FaceID, which has enabled the debut of its first spatial computing device, the VisionPro, with accurate recognition capabilities. Considering that the iPad Pro is also equipped with sensors such as the TrueDepth camera and dot matrix projector, perhaps Apple will design visual features for the iPad Pro, such as AI conference gaze. As for the text processing capability, it is generally not much different from the common article summary generation and article content summary on the market.

Finally, and most importantly, design and painting. The biggest surprise of this event is that Apple will release the new Apple Pencil 3, it is revealed that this new stylus can be used with iPad Pro to achieve handwriting prediction, drawing capture and other functions, focusing on improving production efficiency. In addition, the large model will also speed up the content generation and export of iPad Pro in professional productivity tools such as Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro.

But I have to say that the number of OpenELM parameters is still very small compared to the mainstream large models on the market, if Apple does not consider the hybrid model of device side + cloud, then the AI functions it can achieve on the terminal are still very few, especially Apple is considering opening up the AI interface, which may make a large number of developers feel distressed.

iPad Pro leads the tablet market into the AI era?

After AI entered the mobile phone and computer market in 2023, the positioning of its products has also begun to change, such as OPPO defining all its mobile phones as "AI mobile phones", and PC manufacturers such as Lenovo and Asus launching AI PCs. Obviously, although Apple has a certain say in both areas, Apple did not react when the wave of AI came rushing in.

Relatively speaking, the tablet field has not yet shown the advantages of AI, and there are very few tablets that focus on AI large models, which may be an excellent entry point for Apple's counterattack.

So far, in addition to OPPO, mainstream mobile phone manufacturers have launched new tablets, among which only the vivo Pad3 Pro has shown a strong interest in AI. vivo Pad3 Pro takes advantage of the large screen to divide the blue heart small V into three styles: small window, split screen, and floating, and supports dragging the generated content to the WPS, documents and other pages under the split screen task. In terms of native applications, vivo provides support for the blue heart model in Atomic Notes, which can assist users in completing creative needs such as AI writing and article summary generation.

Of course, Xiaomi, Huawei's latest tablet products also mention some AI functions provided by large models, such as AI meeting minutes, AI noise reduction, etc.

AI has not been quickly deployed to the tablet market, mainly due to performance limitations. Most tablets are not yet equipped with the new generation of flagship mobile platforms, such as the Xiaomi Mi Pad 6S Pro, which still uses the second-generation Snapdragon 8 instead of the latest third-generation Snapdragon 8. With the update and iteration of performance, we may see various manufacturers start to deploy AI-related functions on tablets within this year, but it will always be later than Apple.

2024 is destined to be a year of the rise of AI tablets, and manufacturers represented by Apple have begun to equip their new products with chips with strong AI computing power, and at the same time provide more AI functions supported by large model technology in the software, and create AI tablet products around life, productivity, and all-scene ecology. Riding the wind of AI, the 2024 iPad Pro is also very likely to change the dilemma that it was only loved by professional users in the past, and the audience will radiate to more ordinary users, helping Apple stabilize its position in the tablet market. But whether the iPad Pro can make new history may not be known until Apple's special event on May 7.