New iPad Pro packs M2 chip and improved Apple Pencil hover experience

As anticipated, Apple has announced the new iPad Pro with the M2 chip which also features a next-level Apple Pencil hover experience. However, contrary to some rumors, no 14-inch tablet was unveiled.

The M2 chip features an 8-core CPU — which Apple says is up to 15% faster than the M1 — with advancements in both performance and efficiency cores, and a 10-core GPU, delivering up to 35% faster graphics performance. According to Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, combined with the CPU and GPU, the 16-core Neural Engine can process 15.8 trillion operations per second — 40% more than M1 — making iPad Pro even more powerful when handling machine learning tasks. The M2 chip also features 100GB/s of unified memory bandwidth — 50% more than M1 — and supports up to 16GB of fast unified memory.

Joswiak says the power of M2 also extends to the new media engine and the image signal processor, which combined with the advanced cameras, enable users to capture ProRes video for the first time and transcode ProRes footage up to 3x faster.

What’s more, powered by the new iPad Pro and iPadOS 16 (due next week), hover with an Apple Pencil (2nd generation) purportedly provides a completely new dimension for users to interact with their screen. The Apple Pencil is now detected up to 12 mm above the display, allowing users to see a preview of their mark before they make it.

Joswiak says this also allows users to sketch and illustrate with even greater precision. For example, with Scribble, text fields automatically expand when the pencil gets near the screen, and handwriting converts to text even faster. Third-party apps can also take advantage of this new feature to enable entirely new marking and drawing experiences.

The new iPad Pro supports the fastest Wi-Fi connections with support for Wi-Fi 6E. Downloads are up to 2.4Gb/s, 2x faster than the previous generation. Wi-Fi + Cellular models with 5G (sub-6GHz and mmWave4) now support more 5G networks around the world.

The new iPad Pro is available to order beginning today, October 18, at apple.com/store and in the Apple Store app in 28 countries and regions, including the US, with availability in stores beginning Wednesday, October 26.

The new 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro will be available in silver and space gray finishes with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB configurations. The 11-inch iPad Pro starts at US$799 for the Wi-Fi model and $999 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model; the 12.9-inch iPad Pro starts at $1,099 for the Wi-Fi model, and $1,299 (US) for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model.