A red iPhone wasn’t the only thing Apple had up its sleeve this week. On Tuesday, the Cupertino, California company announced a new 9.7-inch iPad that’s intended to replace the iPad Air 2, which has been discontinued. It starts at $330.
The new entry-level new iPad, which Apple is simply calling “the iPad,” features the firm’s speedy A9 processor, a Retina (2,048 x 1,536 pixels) display, a battery that lasts about 10 hours on a charge, and virtually the same specifications as the outgoing iPad Air 2. It boasts an 8 MP rear iSight camera, a 1.2 MP front-facing FaceTime camera, two speakers, a Touch ID fingerprint sensor, support for Apple Pay, and accouterments you’d expect — namely, a 3.5mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, and Bluetooth 4.2.
“iPad is the world’s most popular tablet. Customers love the large, 9.7-inch display for everything from watching TV and movies to surfing the web, making FaceTime calls, and enjoying photos, and now it is even more affordable,” Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, said in a press release. “New customers and anyone looking to upgrade will love this new iPad for use at home, in school, and for work, with its gorgeous Retina display, our powerful A9 chip, and access to the more than 1.3 million apps designed specifically for it.”
The new 9.7-inch iPad will launch on Friday, March 24 in Apple’s online and brick-and-mortar stores. The first batch of launch countries include Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The second wave, which includes Denmark, India, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Turkey, and other countries, will follow in April. Finally, Brazil, Taiwan, and others will get it in May.
Compared to the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, the new iPad is a step down in terms of raw processing power. The Pro features a 12 MP camera and a faster chip. But this time around, affordability seems to be the focus, and at $330, the new iPad is significantly less expensive than the $600 9.7-inch iPad Pro.
That could help spur lagging iPad sales. Last fiscal quarter, Apple sold 13.1 million iPads, compared to 16.1 million from the same time last year. The company still dominates the tablet industry with an estimated 21-percent market share, according to Strategy Analytics, but the market overall is on a downswing. A recent report from market research firm IDC showed that table vendors shipped 52.9 million tablets in the fourth quarter of 2016, down 20.1 percent from a year ago.
With any luck, the new iPad will turn things around.
Affinity’s new all-in-one creative app is finally coming to the iPad, nearly a year after Canva launched the redesigned desktop version for Mac and Windows. Creatives have been asking for the iPad release ever since, especially because files created in the new Affinity app cannot be opened in the older V2 iPad apps.
Affinity already has Photo, Designer, and Publisher apps on iPad, but the new release combines those tools into the same unified app that Canva launched on desktop last year.
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Apple has just launched its latest iPad mini with a notable set of upgrades, including an OLED screen, improved speakers, and a more resilient build. It also gets a new chip, and the whole package costs $200 more than its predecessor. But if you look closely at Apple’s online store, you’ll realize that $699 isn’t enough to get you the most powerful version of the A20 Pro chip inside this tablet. In fact, even if you pay $800 for the 256GB model, you still won’t get the beefiest variant. Only when you jump to the 512GB trim, which costs an absurd $999, do you get the most powerful flavor of the A20 Pro.
The $999 model gets more than extra storage