M4 debuts in the thinnest iPad Pro yet

On 7 May, Apple held one of its shorter keynote events, and in roughly forty minutes it did something it has rarely done before: it gave its newest desktop-class chip to a tablet first, and mentioned artificial intelligence only in the margins. The M4 chip, built on a second-generation 3-nanometre process, debuts inside a redesigned iPad Pro that is, at 5.1 millimetres, the thinnest product Apple has ever shipped. The order of events matters more than the specs.

The numbers are, by Apple’s standards, unusually aggressive. The M4’s new CPU is claimed to be up to 50 per cent faster than the M2 it replaces, while its GPU, based on the architecture first seen in the M3, adds hardware ray tracing and mesh shading. The neural engine now performs 38 trillion operations per second, which Apple says is sixty times the speed of the original neural engine in the A11 Bionic chip from 2017. The display, an Ultra Retina XDR panel with two OLED layers stacked, reaches a claimed peak brightness of 1,600 nits in HDR and 1,000 nits across the board, and the front camera has moved to the landscape edge, a small change that says a lot about how Apple now expects the device to be held.

What is easy to miss is what the chip’s arrival on a tablet means. In previous generations, Apple’s M-series chips debuted in laptops and desktops, with the Mac kept as the flagship. This time the Mac has been demoted, at least in sequencing, and the iPad Pro carries the newest silicon because it is the platform through which Apple wants to sell its vision of thin, quiet, battery-efficient computing. The MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro will follow later this year with the same chip, but the tablet becomes the proof of concept.

The event also produced two smaller products that matter more than their size suggests. The Apple Pencil Pro adds a squeeze gesture and a haptic engine, and for the first time a pencil can be located with Find My; the iPad Air, meanwhile, moves up to the M2 and gets an 11- and a 13-inch lineup, effectively inheriting the size that used to belong to the Pro. Apple also redesigned the Magic Keyboard with a larger trackpad and an aluminium hinge, which is a quiet admission that the tablet’s most important accessory is still the thing that turns it into a laptop.

It is reasonable to be a little sceptical about the enthusiasm. The iPad has spent years being described as a laptop replacement, and it remains, for most people, a second device. The M4 is wasted on much of what the average user does with it, and the price of the Pro, which starts well above a MacBook Air, invites the old question: if you are paying laptop money, why not buy the laptop? Apple’s answer, delivered without irony, is that the thinnest and lightest device with this much power is precisely the laptop its engineers would build, if laptops could be this thin. That argument gets stronger every year, but it has not yet fully landed.

Still, the technical direction is clear. The neural engine’s arithmetic is the real headline, even if Apple refused to say the letters AI out loud, because every future feature Apple ships, from on-device transcription to image processing, will run on it. The M4 is less an upgrade to the iPad than a bridge to whatever Apple announces in June, and the iPad Pro is the bridge’s first pier. For the rest of the year, the question is whether the Mac versions of this chip can keep the momentum that this tablet has started.