Company hopes larger iPad will appeal to businesses and professionals to revive flagging tablet sales, but runs risk of cannibalizing laptop market
Apple’s large new iPad Pro has a 12.9in screen and comes with a stylus that Apple has named Pencil. Photograph: Apple
Apple has announced a new iPad Pro with a larger 12.9in screen and a focus on productivity.
The company’s chief executive Tim Cook took to the stage of San Francisco’s large Bill Graham Civic Auditorium to announce the new iPad, alongside a series of updates to the company’s other products including the iPhone.
Cook said: “We asked ourselves, how could we take iPad even further? Now we have the biggest news in iPad since the iPad – the iPad Pro the most powerful and capable iPad we’ve ever created.”
The new stylus that Apple has named Pencil
The iPad Pro is the first iPad since the first iPad’s launch in 2010 to have a screen larger than 9.7in and has the same width screen as the iPad Air 2’s height.
The iPad Pro, similar to Apple’s MacBook Pro and Mac Pro computer lines, is being marketed as a business or professional tablet, capable of running two full-sized applications side-by-side on the screen.
Measuring 12.9in diagonally, the iPad Pro’s screen offers 76% more screen area than the current 9.7in, with the same 4:3 ratio for its width and length.
The new tablet will use Apple’s new A9X processor, which is 1.8 times faster than the previous generation A8X used in 2014’s iPad Air 2. Its graphics performance is twice that of the A8X, which will help drive the large, high-density screen with 5.9 million pixels.
“It’s faster than 80% of the processors of portable PCs that were shipped in the last 12 months, and faster than 90% of the graphics of the portable PC shipped,” said Apple’s Phil Schiller on stage.
The new iPad Pro comes with a boosted speaker setup
The iPad Pro also has 10 hours of battery life, matching the iPad Air 2, is 6.9mm thick (0.8mm thicker than the Air 2) and has four speakers creating stereo sound. The iPad Pro will be available in November in silver, gold and space grey for $799 with 32GB of storage, with versions with 128GB of storage and 4G connectivity costing $1,079.
Keyboard like the Microsoft Surface tablets
Apple also released their own version of Microsoft’s Touch Cover, which was released with the original Surface Tablet. The Apple Smart Keyboard costs $169 magnetically attaches to a new Smart Connector port on the bottom of the iPad forming a screen cover when closed.
Apple also released a pixel-accurate pressure sensitive stylus for the iPad Pro called the Apple Pencil, again similar to Microsoft’s Surface stylus. The Pencil is charged via the Lightning Connector directly from the iPad Pro and costs $99.
Microsoft demonstrated its Office suite on iPad Pro on stage, including using the Apple Pencil. Adobe also showed off new additions to its creative applications for iPad, which now support the Pencil.
The larger iPad Pro, which joins the 9.7in iPad Air 2 and the 7.9in iPad Mini lines, runs the risk of cannibalizing Apple’s laptop sales, reaching similar costs at the tablet’s highest specifications with 4G connectivity as the MacBook Air line. It could be more attractive to business users, who have already started to use Apple’s 9.7in iPad as a cheaper, more secure and longer-lasting laptop alternative.
The NHS, publishers and other office-based industries have adopted the iPad as a work machine, but a larger tablet combined with a deal Apple signed in July with IBM could be crucial to reviving flagging sales.
IBM released a collection of business applications for Apple’s iPad in December for banking, retail, governments and the telecommunications sector.
Apple has seen five straight quarters of declining sales of its iPad line, despite the launch of a thinner iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3, both introducing Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint sensor.
Consumers have cooled on tablets, with the global shipments of the devices falling since the fourth quarter of 2014. A slower rate of tablet-replacement compared to smartphones, and cannibalization by larger-screened smartphones including Apple’s own 5.5in iPhone 6 Plus and phablets such as the 5.7in Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ and 6in Google Nexus 6, have been blamed.
Apple’s share of the global tablet market was also down 5% year on year in the fourth quarter of 2014 at 28.1%, according to data from research firm IDC.
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