As expected, today’s Apple keynote brought the official reveal of the new iPad Pro (2020) range, together with both pricing and availability details for the United States. The product family includes the 11- and 12.9-inch variants of the newest tablets, which is in line with previous generations of these pro-grade iOS tablets.
Support for the second-generation Apple Pencil is a given, as is the use of the A12Z Bionic, Apple’s most powerful chipset to date. This chipset probably won’t be outdone before whatever is planned to power the iPhone 12 range which becomes official this fall, based on what we have seen in recent years. One interesting selling point of these new iPad Pro models is their inclusion of a LiDAR scanner, the same kind of tech used by self-driving cars to identify their surroundings.
The actual applications of this light-manipulating tech will be scarce on release but its inclusion promises a happy AR future for these iPad Pro models. The devices will start at $799 and $999 for Wi-Fi versions. Or $949 and $1,149 for LTE configurations of the 11- and 12.9-inch model, respectively. U.S. pre-orders are already live and will begin shipping early next week, Apple said near the end of today’s product event.
