Thoughts on announced 2020 iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard
18 Mar 2020An absolute deluge of iPad announcements were made today, including:
- new 4th generation 11 and 12.9 iPad Pros https://www.macrumors.com/2020/03/18/new-ipad-pro-a12z-bionic-trackpad-keyboard/
- cursor support launching in iPadOS 13.4 to release March 25 https://www.macrumors.com/2020/03/18/ipados-13-4-coming-march-24/
- a new Magic Keyboard cover with integrated trackpad releasing in May
Not a ton seems to have changed on the iPad Pro: there are a bunch of new camera features (some to support enhanced augmented reality), but the processors only looks slightly improved. As someone who never uses his iPad for photography or AR, there’s not a lot here to tempt me to upgrade.
The bigger changes are around pointer support: iPadOS 13.4 will add native support for mice and trackpads as well as a lovely new Magic Keyboard cover with an integrated trackpad. It’s great to see iPadOS diverging in features from iOS as was promised back when it was split off last year. And yes: the Magic Keyboard will be backwards compatible with 3rd generation iPad Pro models https://www.macrumors.com/2020/03/18/new-magic-keyboard-supports-2018-ipad-pro/.
It’s a solid round of updates, and a testament to the initial design of the 2018 iPad Pro that there aren’t a ton of hardware changes to by made outside of small upgrades. I’m curious to see if the RAM situation has changed at all, but I’m not planning on upgrading this time. I’m absolutely going to grab that new Magic Keyboard cover, and I’m still hopeful WWDC 2020 will bring some way to develop apps on iPadOS.