The frosting on top of the new generation of iPad Pro and iPad Air is the introduction of Apple Pencil Pro, which comes with ‘Find My’ support and new capabilities for adapting the stylus to different creative tasks.
Working on an app like Procreate will not be the same given the versatility of the Pencil Pro. It has a new sensor in the barrel that accepts your squeezes to bring up tool palettes so you don’t have to manually tap into them with your free hand. Haptic feedback lets you know when the squeeze was accepted or when something you moved has snapped into place. There is a roll gesture “for precise control” of whatever tool you’re using, powered by a new gyroscope.
The new Pencil is the first proper update to the Apple Pencil series since the second-generation model was announced in 2018 (an affordable USB-C Apple Pencil was released last year but the updates weren’t huge).
The addition of the ‘Find My’ feature has long been a demand among iPad fans. It’s easy to misplace a pencil-shaped device and it can be expensive to replace it. Having this feature will make it easy to find the Apple Pencil.
An all-new thinner and lighter Magic Keyboard makes the new iPad Pro more portable and versatile than ever. Picture: The Telegraph
Further, app developers can now create their own custom interactions for the Apple Pencil Pro. Procreate CEO James Cuda showed brushes that “respond in entirely new ways” thanks to the barrel roll feature or using the squeeze feature to activate software shortcuts.
The Apple Pencil Pro is supported on the newly announced M2 iPad Air and M4 OLED iPad Pro. It is priced at ₹ 11,900.
The company has also refreshed its Magic Keyboard, which is designed to work with the M4 iPad Pro line. Once connected to the iPad Pro, the tablet almost becomes a laptop and the experience “feels just like using a MacBook”. The keyboard comes a larger trackpad with haptic feedback and there’s also a new function row for quick access to convenient controls, besides an aluminum palm rest.