Apple iPad Event: 4 AI features announced
At Apple's May 7 iPad event on Tuesday, the tech giant unveiled the iPad Air and iPad Pro with some snazzy new AI capabilities.
The iPad Air has an M2 chip, which offers AI features for design and photo editing. But the iPad Pro now comes with an M4 chip, confirming some last minute rumors, Apple leapfrogged over the M3 chip and, instead, packed the iPad Pro with an M4 chip. The chip has an upgraded Neural Engine for accelerating machine learning tasks, and can handle 38 trillion operations per second.
iPad Air AI capabilities
With the M2 chip, the iPad Air was trained on 20 million photo images.
Subject lift
Apple users can highlight specific aspects of an image or design and move them around for easy editing.
Live text
The iPad Air recognizes text in images for looking up phone numbers and translation.
iPad Pro with OLED display AI capabilities
As mentioned, the M4-based iPad Pro comes with a host of new AI features. Here are some perks you'll get with the new Apple tablet.
Isolate subjects in Final Cut Pro
With a simple tap, users can highlight the subject of an image or video in Apple's video editing app. With iPadOS, the iPad Pro offers easy AI editing capabilities like matching exact colors.
Scan documents
The iPad Pro is making your scanner obsolete. Now you can scan a document and AI will stitch together multiple pages.
Today's event marks the first time Apple has announced a device with generative AI capabilities as a selling point. Apple was considered slow to jump on the AI bandwagon, compared to competitors like Samsung and Google which have already deployed AI-powered features for their smartphone lineups. But starting with the iPad Pro, Apple is ramping up AI offerings.
WWDC is a little over a month away, and we're expecting major AI additions to iOS 18. Apple's flagship September iPhone event will likely bring more AI-related announcements. If Apple's strategy is about taking the time to get it right, we'll find out how that pays off very soon.
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