Enlarge / The 2024, M4-equipped 13-inch iPad Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

The new iPad Pro is a technical marvel, with one of the best screens I’ve ever seen, performance that few other machines can touch, and a new, thinner design that no one expected.

It’s a prime example of Apple flexing its engineering and design muscles for all to see. Since it marks the company’s first foray into OLED beyond the iPhone or Watch, and the first time a new M-series chip has debuted on something other than a Mac, it comes across as a tech demo for where the company is headed beyond just tablets.

Still, it remains unclear why most people would spend one, two, or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its amazing hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop—or at least does it a little more awkwardly, even if it's impressively quick and has a gorgeous screen.

Enlarge / The new M4 iPad Pro. (credit: Apple)

When Apple announced the Apple M4 chip during its iPad Pro event yesterday, it mentioned that the chip came with "up to" four high-performance CPU cores.

Those short, easily missable words always mean that there's a lower-end version of the chip coming that doesn't include that many CPU cores, and the tech specs page for the new iPad Pro has the full details: iPad Pros with 256GB or 512GB of storage use a version of the M4 with three high-performance CPU cores and six smaller efficiency cores. Only the models with 1TB and 2TB of storage have an M4 with all four high-performance CPU cores enabled.

The 256GB and 512GB models also ship with 8GB of RAM, where the 1TB and 2TB models come with 16GB of memory installed. Though these changes are clearly spelled out on the Tech Specs page, the actual configuration page for the iPad Pros in Apple's online store doesn't give any indication that upgrading storage also upgrades your CPU and RAM.

Enlarge / Apple's M4 chip in the new iPad Pro. It follows the M3 by just a few months. (credit: Apple)

In a major shake-up of its chip roadmap, Apple has announced a new M4 processor for today’s iPad Pro refresh, barely six months after releasing the first MacBook Pros with the M3 and not even two months after updating the MacBook Air with the M3.

Apple says the M4 includes "up to" four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency cores, and a 10-core GPU. Apple's high-level performance estimates say that the M4 has 50 percent faster CPU performance and four times as much graphics performance. Like the GPU in the M3, the M4 also supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing to enable more advanced lighting effects in games and other apps. Due partly to its "second-generation" 3 nm manufacturing process, Apple says the M4 can match the performance of the M2 while using just half the power.

As with so much else in the tech industry right now, the M4 also has an AI focus; Apple says it's beefing up the 16-core Neural Engine (Apple’s equivalent of the Neural Processing Unit that companies like Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Microsoft have been pushing lately). Apple says the M4 runs up to 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS), considerably ahead of Intel's Meteor Lake platform, though a bit short of the 45 TOPS that Qualcomm is promising with the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus series. The M3's Neural Engine is only capable of 18 TOPS, so that's a major step up for Apple's hardware.

Enlarge / The promotional image for Apple's May 7 event. (credit: Apple)

On May 7, Apple will host a product announcement event at 9 am ET. Labeled "Let loose," we expect it will focus on new iPads and iPad accessories.

We won't be liveblogging the stream, but you can expect some news coverage as it happens. Below, we'll go over our educated guesses about why Apple might be doing this.

Why hold an event now?

It's unusual for Apple to host an event shortly before WWDC. New products debut at that event all the time, so if it's just a faster chip and a nicer screen for the iPad Pro and iPad Air, why not wait until June?