Reporter Li Yuyang reports from Shanghai
At 10 p.m. on May 7th, Apple held a new product launch conference, and the iPad product line ushered in a major update, and the new generation of iPad Pro used the latest M4 chip, directly skipping the M3 series.
The reporter of "China Business Daily" noticed that since Steve Jobs first launched the iPad in 2010, it has been 18 months since Apple last updated the iPad product, which is the longest interval in the history of iPad release. Debuting the M4 chip on the iPad Pro, Apple should obviously expect a lot from it.
It is worth noting that at this press conference, Apple also directly compared the iPad with the hot AI PC. "Compared to thin and light PC processors, the M4 chip can achieve the same performance with a quarter of the power consumption, and the Neural Engine surpasses all AI PCs on the market today." John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of hardware, said.
Under the new round of AI boom, Apple is also going to be a hot spot. "The increase in AI computing power means that Apple is ready to deploy large models on tablets." Su Lianjie, chief analyst of the AI industry at Omdia, a research institution, speculated. He also said that the NPU computing power of the iPad Pro M4 chip has reached 38 TOPS (meaning that the processor can perform 1 trillion operations per second), which is close to the 45 TOPS of mainstream AI PC manufacturers in the industry.
Some of the views are even more exaggerated, such as "the AI PCs on the market have a new competitor" and "let the iPad Pro kill all AI PCs in seconds...... As a result, as of the close of the release of the new generation of iPad Pro, Apple's stock price rose slightly by 0.38%. At present, we no longer need to think about whether Apple wants to deploy large models on the device side, but need to re-examine its positioning of iPad products.
"Apple keeps saying: Why should your next computer be a computer? The iPad Pro has the value of partially replacing lightweight computers. In addition, applications in medical, design, video, music and other industries can also use AI. Huang Yefeng, a senior industry analyst who has been paying attention to the PC market for a long time, pointed out.
The M4 is the thinnest and the thinnest
The 35-minute press conference is Apple's realignment of the product line after a year and a half of discontinuation of the iPad, which means that the company has abandoned the iPad product form with a physical Home button.
In this iPad product update, the most eye-catching is the iPad Pro. In terms of appearance, the new iPad Pro has the thinnest thickness, with the lowest version being only 5.1 mm thick, which is thinner than the iPod Nano, a music player in the early years.
Such an extreme thickness is due to Apple's complete cancellation of LCD and Mini LED screens on the iPad Pro this time, and the use of OLED screens instead. The latter has a self-illuminating characteristic, which can directly eliminate the relatively heavy backlight module, so the thickness is greatly reduced.
In order to reduce the burn-in problem of OLED screens, Apple directly uses a two-layer OLED screen, which is called "double-layer series OLED" (Tandem OLED) technology, so that the new iPad Pro has a global maximum brightness of 1000 nits and a peak brightness of 1600 nits.
The Tandem OLED is rumored to be supplied by BOE and has been first released on the Honor Magic 6 Porsche Edition. In this regard, the reporter asked BOE for confirmation, but the other party did not give a positive response.
The biggest highlight of the new iPad Pro is the first release of TSMC's second-generation M4 chip with 3nm process, which has more than 28 billion transistors, including up to 10 CPU cores (4 high-performance cores and 6 energy-efficient cores), and all use a new generation of machine learning processors, compared with the M2 chip on the previous generation iPad Pro, the CPU performance is increased by up to 50%.
In terms of GPUs, for the first time, Apple has equipped the iPad Pro with hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, which, combined with dynamic caching and higher memory bandwidth, can achieve up to 4x faster speeds when using professional rendering apps such as Octane.
In addition, in order to cooperate with its subsequent layout in AI, Apple is equipped with a powerful neural network engine (NPU) on the M4 chip, which has a computing speed of 38 trillion times per second, which is 60 times faster than the first A11 chip equipped with NPU.
However, it is still necessary to pay attention to Apple's "knife method": the new iPad Pro in the 256GB or 512GB version is equipped with a "broken version" of the M4 chip (with a core cut off). On the whole, Apple's update to the iPad Pro this time is also full of sincerity, with the M4 chip and OLED screen making this product "inside and out".
Of course, the price also set a new record. The iPad Pro has an entry-level storage capacity of 256G, and the price of the 11-inch version starts at 8999 yuan, and the price of the 13-inch version starts at 11499 yuan.
"The price of the new iPad Pro is $200 higher than the previous generation, and the iPad Air is also launching a 13-inch product, which may also crowd out potential demand due to the dispersion of firepower." TrendForce estimates that the total shipments of the 11-inch and 13-inch AMOLED iPad Pro in 2024 will be only 4.5 million to 5 million units.
Don't pretend: talk a lot about AI
According to Apple's fiscal 2024 second quarter (ending March 30, 2024), its iPad business revenue continued to decline in the previous quarter, falling to $5.56 billion.
However, Apple's iPad is still the tablet with the largest market share in the world. According to the latest report released by market research agency IDC, global tablet shipments in the first quarter of 2024 will be 30.8 million units, a year-on-year increase of 0.5%. Specific to each brand, although Apple's sales fell by 8.5% year-on-year, it still ranked first in the first quarter of shipments, reaching 9.9 million units; Samsung ranked second with 6.7 million units shipped, with shipments down 5.8% year-over-year.
Compared with the top two, third-ranked Huawei saw a 43.6% year-on-year increase in shipments to 2.9 million units, while Lenovo and Xiaomi ranked fourth and fifth, respectively.
In the tablet market, the iPad's positioning is varied: from touchscreen gaming to drama streaming tools to productivity tools. In fact, Apple has been pushing the iPad into the productivity space since the launch of the iPad Pro, and has been hinting that the iPad will become the computer of the next generation of young people.
Under the wave of large AI models, Apple has stopped pretending to be large models and AI, saying that it is studying artificial intelligence and sees it as an important source of opportunities.
At the end of February this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook said at Apple's annual shareholder meeting: "All Macs powered by Apple silicon are very powerful artificial intelligence machines. In fact, there is no better computer on the market for artificial intelligence than the Mac. ”
Cook also said that Apple will stand out from AI competitors by tightly integrating hardware and software, using in-house developed chips, and prioritizing privacy and security. When asked how he would consider reaping benefits through AI, Cook said he would make a major announcement "in the coming weeks" and did not want to "disclose it in advance".
"Generative AI is a very critical opportunity in [Apple's] products." Cook said. He also made a high-profile announcement at the earnings conference: "All of our devices, or the vast majority of them, will have generative AI." ”
At the press conference, Apple said: "Without the M4, there is no new iPad Pro." "The AI-based iPad has undoubtedly made a good start, focusing on professional creation, focusing on productivity, and using the iPad ecosystem to show AI interaction capabilities in the fields of film production and music creation.
"In fact, Apple has always had an ecosystem of generative AI, hardware and software, and Macs also have corresponding generative AI applications that can be used, but they haven't been advertised yet." Huang Yefeng said that these generative AI applications can be deployed on iPad, iPadOS, iOS and MacOS share a large part of the software stack, Apple itself can do it, and third-party developers can also do it.
Regarding the competition between iPad and Mac in terms of productivity, Huang Yefeng pointed out: "iPad Pro has the value of partially replacing lightweight computers, and various promotional industry applications, such as medical, design, video, music, etc., can also use AI. Therefore, it can be used as a supplement to the Mac in terms of productivity. ”
(Editor: Wu Qing Review: Li Zhenghao Proofreader: Yan Jingning)