It’s unclear exactly what new AI features the M4 will power in the new versions of iPadOS and macOS, but we do know that the updated Neural Engine introduces greater support for 8-bit compute, so working with 8-bit data should be twice as fast on the M4 as on the previous chip. Apple is looking to support a wide range of data formats, which is good for efficiently running different types of models. What will that mean in terms of specific models and features? We’ll probably have to wait until WWDC in June to find out.
That’s a bit of a theme with anything having to do with the M4 here; to learn more about it, we really need to test it on the Mac, where more tools are available for that task. So look out for more in-depth coverage of the M4 when it comes to the Mac—hopefully in just a month or two.
The Mac is also where I’m personally most excited about the M4. The truth is that you have to dig pretty deep into Final Cut, Logic, or a small cadre of other pro apps on the iPad Pro to find a case where you’ll see a different experience on the M4 than you would with the M2. They exist, mostly in the form of very specific tools and features within those programs, but most users won’t run into them much.
The Mac is a more versatile machine with more demanding workflows simply by nature of who is typically using it and what software has been released for those users. The iPad Pro is more powerful than most users need it to be, but Mac users will surely appreciate a notable bump in performance when they get the same chip in the future.
OLED display
The iPad is first and foremost about the display, and that’s where Apple has really gone to town here. Previously, the biggest iPad Pro had a Mini-LED display that helped overcome some of LCD’s downsides by counteracting bloom and achieving higher contrast between dark and bright areas of an image than before. It had darker blacks and very bright HDR highlights.
Unfortunately, the smaller iPad Pro still had an older-style LCD display. As balanced as it was, it couldn’t hold a candle to the quality of the OLED screens found in iPhones and high-end TVs.
Now, both iPad Pro models have OLED screens. Not only that, but they have a new kind of OLED screen called “Tandem OLED,” which stacks two OLED panels on top of one another to achieve higher peak brightness with a little help from the M4.
Details are scarce on exactly how Tandem OLED works, but we know that one of the panels is transparent to light generated by the second, so the light path goes from one through the other. A series of algorithms monitor and adjust this process on the M4 chip.
What matters for most users is the result, though, and it's spectacular. You get precise, per-pixel illumination for perfect contrast without any of the distracting blooming exhibited by the previous large iPad Pro's Mini-LED display, and you also get perfect blacks in the pixels that should be black, which is a dramatic difference from regular LED displays' gray-ish glow.
We're also seeing peak brightness of around 1,600 nits on highlights (1,000 typical), which is frankly absurd for an OLED screen. One of the main downsides of OLED displays compared to competing LED technologies has been that they can't usually reach the same brightness in HDR highlights. Not so here.
This display is about as good as it gets in any consumer device (including high-end TVs and smartphones). My only complaint is that when I watched the same content on the iPad Pro as I watched on my LG OLED TV, the image skewed subtly to green with some content. I would have never noticed it without a side-by-side, direct comparison, though.If you're looking for a portable screen for watching movies or authoring content, you can't get better than this. There's an adage that a tablet is all about the screen, and if that's true, this is the best tablet ever made—there's no competition anywhere near it, even in Apple's own lineup.
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