At the "Let's Fly" Apple new product launch conference held yesterday evening, Beijing time, Apple grandly launched the latest masterpiece of the iPad Air series, covering two sizes of 11 inches and 13 inches, and the color lineup includes blue, purple, starry sky gray and space gray, aiming to meet diverse aesthetic needs. The 11-inch model is priced from US$599 (about 4,319 yuan), while the 13-inch version starts at US$799 (about 5,761 yuan), and both products are scheduled to go on sale next week.
The iPad Air is powered by a fully recycled aluminium chassis, an advanced 11/13-inch Liquid Retina display, and a built-in M2 chip that supports 5G technology. The new iPad Air also features a 12MP landscape camera with support for portrait center mode, as well as spatial audio features, especially the 13-inch version, which offers a wider audio experience.
Another highlight of the conference was the unveiling of Apple's M4 chip and the update to its iPad Pro series. The new iPad Pro breaks the brand record with an ultra-thin design of 5.3 mm (11 inches) and 5.1 mm (13 inches). Apple's innovative use of "series OLED" technology achieves 1000 nits of continuous brightness and 1600 nits of peak brightness through a double-layer OLED structure, breaking through the limit of single-panel OLEDs. Performance tests show that the new iPad Pro has a tenfold increase in processing power compared to the original model.
As a new generation of computing core, Apple's M4 chip is based on the second-generation 3nm process, integrating a staggering 28 billion transistors, equipped with 4 large cores + 6 small core CPU architecture, claiming to improve CPU performance by 50% compared with M2 chips. In terms of GPU, the M4 chip has a 10-core design with four times the rendering performance of the M2 chip, and for the first time introduced dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and mesh shading to the iPad platform. In addition, the M4's integrated 16-core neural network engine can perform 38 trillion operations per second, which is 60 times more efficient than the A11 chip, and its energy efficiency is four times higher than that of AI PC processors. In terms of media processing engine, the M4 further improves the multimedia processing capabilities of the iPad, adding AV1 hardware accelerated decoding support, covering a wide range of video formats such as H.264, HEVC and ProRes.
In terms of pricing details, the 11-inch iPad Air will continue to be sold at 4,799 yuan, and the 13-inch version will start at 6,499 yuan. In the iPad Pro series, the starting price of the 11-inch version is 8999 yuan, and the top version reaches 19199 yuan; The starting price of the 13-inch version is 11,499 yuan, and the price of the top-of-the-line configuration climbs to 21,699 yuan. At the same time, Apple also unveiled the Apple Pencil Pro, which has the function of pen body pressure sensing and haptic feedback, with a price tag of $129 in overseas markets and 999 yuan in China, bringing a new interactive experience to creative work.