I’m working on a longer piece about iPads but I just want to put this out first. Fast Company’s Harry McCracken sat down with Apple Senior Vice Presidents Greg Joswiak and John Ternus to talk about the latest iPad models that just came out this week.
I’ve been wondering why Apple decided to launch the M4 with the iPad, breaking “tradition” with previous M series chip releases. Apple did mention previously that this generation of iPad Pro wouldn’t have been possible without the M4 and there’s been plenty of dicsussions about the M4’s capabilities and significance, but for some, the M series had unofficially stood for “Mac”. It’s a high performance class chip designed to do deliver the most power but also incredibly long battery life. While it does make sense for it to eventually make it to the iPad, I didn’t expect a brand new version to debut on the iPad. It had debuted on a Mac and new versions had been showcased first on Macs, until now.
According to Joz, Apple’s engineers were able to incorporate in the M4 the capabilities they need to support the technologies they want to include in the latest iPad Pro, which was why they went with it.
That Apple is in a position to incorporate the technologies it needs into the chips it designs doesn’t just explain how it was able to build the thin, powerful iPad Pro. It’s also why the M4 is showing up first in the iPad Pro rather than a Mac: Rather than being a Mac processor repurposed for an iPad, it was conceived from the start to drive the iPad Pro’s new OLED screen.
“Our chip team was able to build that controller into the road map,” explains Joswiak. “And the place they could put it was the M4.”
This to me is a sign that Apple remains faithful to the iPad line despite years of seeming neglect in terms of the direction of the product. At some point the iPad was going to be the future of Apple’s computing, potentially replacing the Mac, at least for the masses, but with the release of Vision Pro and the resurgence of the Mac thanks to the M series chips, that plan isn’t so clear anymore. Maybe now the plan is to offer different devices for different types of consumers. I’ll get into that and more in the upcoming piece.
AuliaSays 