The rumored monster tab from Apple has finally been unveiled. At the launch event in Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced “the biggest news in an iPad since the iPad.” The new iPad Pro is Apple’s attempt to regain iPad’s popularity. It is the “biggest screen on an iOS device, with more power and performance than any iOS device.”
The company touts that the new iPad is thin enough to hold all day and buoyant enough to be used as a flotation device. Nevertheless, it feels a bit too chunky to hold in one hand.
- Screen: 12.9-inch Retina display
- Display: 5.6 million pixels
- Sound: 4 speaker audio
- Battery: 10 hours
- Main Camera: 8 MP iSight Camera
- Connectivity: Up to 150 Mbps LTE
Apple has also introduced two new accessories – the Smart Keyboard and the Apple Pencil with the new iPad Pro. The keyboard can attach itself with the iPad magnetically while the announcement of the Pencil did leave the crowd a bit baffled. It features an inbuilt lightning connector for charging.
And to everyone’s surprise, Apple invited Microsoft on stage to demo the new Apple Pencil with its Office suite of apps. It can be used for circling items, draw shapes in PowerPoint slides and by using iOS 9’s multitasking capabilities, users can have ‘Word’ and ‘Excel’ open at the same time.
The Apple Pencil has been priced at $99 (optionally) and will be available starting November. It remains to be seen whether the stylus will be compatible with existing iPads.
Coming back to the iPad Pro, it features the improved A9X chip that the company says makes it 1.8 times faster than last year’s iPad Air 2. It is slightly on the beefier side of things at 6.9 mm and weighs 1.57 pounds, just slightly heavier than the original 9.7-inch iPad.
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The 32/128 (Wi-Fi)/128 (Wi-Fi + Cellular) GB iPad Pro will cost $799/ $949/ $1079 respectively when it goes on sale in November, while the Smart Keyboard will be available for $169 additionally.
