Design

12.9" Retina Display

At 12.9 inches diagonally, the Retina Display on the iPad Pro offers 78% more display area than that of the iPad Air 2. Under the glass lies a revamped Multi-Touch subsystem and 5.6 million pixels. With a 2732 x 2048 screen resolution, the iPad Pro provides sharp text, vibrant color, and deep black levels, making everything from photo editing to intense 3D gaming more vivid and engaging.

Photo Alignment

To improve on‑axis contrast, Apple used an advanced process called photo alignment. This involves shining UV light to create a uniform terrain across the film coating on the thin film transistor and color filter, so the display's liquid crystal molecules lie precisely where they should. Better‑aligned molecules mean you see better contrast when looking directly at the display.

Oxide TFT

The oxide thin film transistor in the iMac Retina 5K display has been adapted to the Retina display on iPad Pro. The resulting TFT provides faster pixel charging and better brightness uniformity across the larger canvas.

Variable Refresh Rate

The iPad Pro knows when the content on your screen is static and cuts the refresh rate in half, to 30 times per second instead of 60. This means that the screen isn't just big and bright; it's energy efficient too.

Timing Controller

The timing controller, or TCON, is the brains of the display. It tells each pixel what to do and when to do it. Since the iPad Pro has 2.5 million more pixels than the iPad Air 2, Apple custom designed the TCON to handle the greater resolution, giving it more bandwidth to allow lightning pixel control at fast speeds.

Portable & Lightweight

Despite having 78 percent more display area than the iPad Air 2, the aluminum unibody of the iPad Pro measures 6.9 mm thin and weighs just over 1.5 pounds.

Four Speaker Audio

The iPad Pro has four innovative speakers that produce a stereo soundstage as enveloping as its display. The speaker housings have been machined directly into the unibody enclosure, and their innovative architecture gives the speakers 61 percent more back volume compared to previous iPad audio designs. You'll hear a wider frequency range and up to three times more output than on any other iPad. The speakers in iPad Pro aren't just high fidelity, they're highly intelligent. While all four produce bass frequencies, the topmost speakers are dedicated to higher frequencies. They also automatically recognize whether the device is in portrait or landscape view. So you'll always get vivid, well-balanced sound no matter how you're holding the iPad Pro.

Smart Connector

The Smart Connector is an interface that takes advantage of the two-way conductive fabric in the Smart Keyboard (sold separately). It allows iPad Pro to provide power to the Smart Keyboard and lets the Smart Keyboard relay each of your keystrokes back to iPad Pro. Simply align the Smart Keyboard to iPad Pro - just as you would with a Smart Cover - and start typing.

Technology

A9X Chip with M9 Motion Coprocessor

The A9X, Apple's 3rd-generation 64-bit chip, gives iPad Pro the power to easily take on tasks that were once reserved for workstations and PCs. Despite the high performance, the A9X chip's underlying architecture is efficient, ensuring that there's one way in which iPad Pro isn't massive - battery consumption. With 1.8 times the CPU performance of the iPad Air 2's A8X, the A9X chip delivers in both speed and responsiveness. Even complex tasks like creating, rendering, and manipulating a 3D design or editing multiple streams of 4K video happen quickly and smoothly. Despite having nearly twice the pixels in its Retina display, iPad Pro still offers up to double the graphics performance of iPad Air 2. The iPad Pro features a revamped storage controller that has increased read and write speeds, so you can quickly open even the large files, like the big 4K movie you just edited or all the RAW images you imported from your HD camera.

Metal

Metal gets high graphics performance out of the A9X chip and iOS 9, so developers can design highly immersive console-style games and blazing-fast apps. Metal optimizes the CPU and graphics performance to deliver detailed graphics and complex visual effects, so every virtual world feels more realistic.

Battery Life

You might expect that such high performance would compromise battery life. But even with its high-resolution Retina display and robust A9X chip, the iPad Pro maintains energy efficiency, providing up to 10 hours of battery life on a single charge while on Wi-Fi and up to 9 hours on a cellular signal (battery life may vary depending on usage).

Wireless Connectivity

The iPad Pro features 802.11ac Wi-Fi technology and MIMO, so you can easily connect to fast networks and enjoy download speeds of up to 866 Mb/s.

iOS 9

Slide Over

Now you can open a second app without leaving the one you're in. You can quickly browse the web, respond to a text message, or jot something down in a note, then slide that app away and get back to the one you were using before.

Split View

With Split View on the iPad Pro, you can go a step further and have two apps open and active at the same time. Work on a sketch with the reference photo beside it or write a paper while copying citations from a book in iBooks.

Picture-in-Picture

While using FaceTime or watching a video, press the Home button and your video screen scales down to a corner of your display. Tap to open a second app, and your video continues to play - even while you use the other app. So keep watching your favorite TV show while you reply to the email that just came in.

Shortcuts at Your Fingertips

Shape up your text in no time with the Shortcut Bar, convenient editing tools, and a handy way to select text with Multi-Touch gestures. And now when you use the Smart Keyboard (sold separately) with your iPad Pro, you can enjoy even more keyboard shortcuts.