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“It was this relentless push from the team, ‘How can we make it thinner?’” says Apple Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak. ‘’How thin can we get it?’”
It takes a lot to make people care about a tablet these days, or in the case of the new iPad Pro, very little. Measuring just 5.1mm, it’s the most slender product Apple has ever made: even for a company that’s obsessed with fine margins, this lack of largesse is a big deal. That’s why Joswiak and Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, John Ternus, have made the trip from Cupertino to an unusually balmy London to mark the occasion.
We’re tucked away together in a corner of Apple’s deliriously spacious Battersea Power Station HQ. Back when it first conceived the iPad as a “magic sheet of glass” powered by what would turn out to be the iPhone's revelatory multi-touch tech, this cavernous 46,000 square metre home was in near ruin. In the 14 years since the iPad’s launch, southwest London's Art Deco icon has been renovated in the image of its former glories — all while Joswiak and Ternus have spent the best part of a decade realising Apple's original vision for its tablet. With more computing power than many of its recent laptops, a specially engineered OLED display and that remarkably svelte aesthetic, the new Pro is a full-circle moment for them both. “We refused to make any compromises,” says Ternus. “And that just creates this tremendous constraint.”
Recently posited by Bloomberg as Apple CEO Tim Cook’s “most likely successor”, Ternus has been working on product design at the company since 2001. Having stretched to shave off every stray millimetre in the Pro’s design, he was the person to realise the tablet was thinner than even 2005’s iPod Nano. At a company where portability is synonymous with luxury – think Steve Jobs pulling the first MacBook Air out of a paper envelope – this feat demanded that every aspect of the iPad’s makeup be reassessed and often reconfigured in the pursuit of marginal gains. “We actually put the chip behind the Apple logo, which is stainless steel and not a great thermal spreader,” says Ternus. “So then we designed a copper layer inside that Apple logo to help spread it.”
As much as the iPad Pro’s design does a lot to make tablets desirable again, this product’s staying power lies in the apps and suite of accessories that accompany it. If the OG iPad arrived as the platonic ideal of a Taschen book – the kind of thing that’d sit on a mahogany coffee table to peruse at leisure – recent models have proved to be far more tactile and accomplished in the hands of creatives. As part of the Pro’s unveiling, Apple announced new versions of its Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro apps for iPad, shrinking the same tech used in recording studios and movie editing suites inside a 13-inch touchscreen. An updated Magic Keyboard with an aluminium palm rest and haptic trackpad feedback transforms the Pro into a pretty serviceable stand-in for your laptop. And then there’s the new Apple Pencil Pro…
“We never wanted to make a stylus and that was the difference,” says Joswiak in a typically Apple way of explaining why the company waited until 2015’s first iPad Pro to debut its Pencil. “We wanted a different kind of experience that the Pencil could do.”
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Initially, the Pencil suffered from a few growing pains. You could only charge its first model by removing its cap and plugging it straight into the bottom of your iPad, which was as ungainly a process as you'd imagine it to be. Much like the latest iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil Pro is a fundamentally different device now. It charges by magnetically attaching to your iPad. It features ‘Find My’ functionality so you can quickly locate it at the bottom of a rucksack or stray corner of your office. Most significantly of all, it has a “Barrel Roll” gyroscope and squeeze gesture controls so that brush strokes now undulate according to the twists and turns of your palm.
Not everyone who buys an iPad Pro needs to get a Pencil with it, but the refinement applied to Apple’s stylus shows just how far this tablet has evolved in recent years. It’s used by private plane pilots as their GPS system, YouTubers who used to lug around a 27-inch iMac on their travels, and iPad even pioneered much of the augmented reality tech that became a stepping stone to Apple’s Vision Pro headset. “I always love that there are archaeologists who use iPad to kind of map out their site as they're digging and record everything as they go,” says Ternus.
If AR used to be Apple’s next big thing, then artificial intelligence has taken its spot in a major way. Compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Apple and AI aren’t quite as synonymous. That's why you’re going to hear a lot about the two over the coming months, especially at the company's WWDC developer conference in June. “We've been doing AI and machine learning for years and years before the world even called them AI and ML,” says Joswiak. “So you would pull down the home screen of your iPhone and it would give you the apps that you were most likely to launch based on your behaviour and the time of day.”
If Apple has one advantage in the AI game, it is power. The iPad Pro’s M4 chip has a 16-core Neural Engine capable of processing 38 trillion operations per second, which is one of those numbers that sounds gargantuan because it actually is. Almost every iPhone since 2017 has been befitted with similar capabilities and the same goes for every Mac since the introduction of Apple’s M series chips four years ago. If you own an Apple product right now, then chances are it is already a pretty capable AI machine. As such, a lot of its potential is just waiting to be unleashed.
“Back in the day when iPod was a big business at Apple, we knew that phones were ultimately the one device you'd want to carry with you and that if a phone could do music well, why would you want to carry two devices?” says Joswiak. “So why would you want to carry a dedicated AI device if the device you already own has that sort of capability?”
If the recent struggles of first-gen AI products such as Humane’s AI Pin and Rabbit r1 go to show anything, it’s that making something that’s both functional and desirable is hard. Once you’re out of that initial hype bubble, the only way forward is through finesse. Apple’s latest iPad Pro has been a long time in the making, but the pay-off is more than worth it.
Apple's iPad Pro (M4) is available from £999 at apple.com
