A few new pieces of hardware today. Apple has announced new iPad Pro models, an update to the MacBook Air and a tweak to the Mac Mini.
Well, you might be in lockdown and not able to buy anything from the Apple stores that are shut, but Apple has had a hardware announcement today.
The headline for us has to be the new iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard. It looks very slick when used together.
As you might have seen in the video, the app doing the editing is LumaTouch's LumaFusion. Sadly no FCPX on the iPad Pro yet, but this iOS app is a very close second. The other YouTube video from Apple shows Enlight's Videoleap video editor. Interesting.
The new iPad Pro has the A12Z Bionic chip, new Ultra Wide camera, studio-quality mics and a LiDAR Scanner. Yes we said 'What?' as well. LiDAR is 'Light Detection and Ranging' and will help with AR apps.
We would also expect apps to take advantage of the multicamera setup as has been shown on the new iPhone 11.
We have seen a lot of third-party click-on keyboards for the iPad Pro but the Magic Keyboard with trackpad, although priced at $349 does look pretty cool.
“We’re making iPad even more capable and versatile by bringing trackpad support to iPadOS,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “We carefully considered the best way to integrate trackpad use into a touch-first environment while retaining everything our customers know and love about iPad. We’re thrilled to bring this new way of interacting with iPad to the millions of people using iPadOS today.”
The 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $799 (US) for the Wi-Fi model and $949 (US) for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model, and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro starts at $999 (US) for the Wi-Fi model and $1,149 (US) for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model.
Not taking the front of the stage this time is an update to the MacBook Air. Interesting that the iPad Pro and MacBook Air got released together. There is a big overlap in the target market for these machines and we can see a lot of users transitioning to iPads unless they have to run Mac apps such as FCPX. Apple chose iMovie to feature on one of their press images.
The model, starting at 256GB of SSD storage, has now up to two times faster CPU performance and up to 80 percent faster graphics performance. You can specify up to 2TB of SSD if you wish!
It also comes with the new Magic Keyboard we first saw on the 16inch MacBook Pro last year. Video editors might like to note that it can also support a 6K external display.
The new MacBook Air starts at $999.
And finally.. We must mention that the Mac Mini got an update today as well, both models now have double the storage. The $799 configuration now comes standard with 256GB, while the $1,099 configuration features 512GB of storage
