Cupertino: Amid depressing Coronavirus times, Apple on Wednesday brought some cheers in the market with launching an advanced iPad Pro with breakthrough LiDAR Scanner and new Magic Keyboard with Trackpad, along with new 13-inch MacBook Air for Rs 92,990 with two times faster performance and twice the storage.
The 11-inch iPad Pro (Wi-Fi model) starts at Rs 71,900 while Wi-Fi+Cellular model will start from Rs 85,900.
The 12.9-inch iPad Pro starts at Rs 89,900 for the Wi-Fi model and Rs 103,900 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model.
The availability for the India market will be announced at a later date, said the company.
“Combining the most-advanced mobile display with powerful performance, pro cameras, pro audio, the breakthrough LiDAR Scanner and new Magic Keyboard with Trackpad, this is another huge leap forward for iPad,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, said in a statement.
The Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro will be available for purchase in May for Rs 27,900 for the 11-inch iPad Pro and Rs 31,900 for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with layouts for over 30 languages.
iPadOS 13.4 with trackpad support will be available on March 24 as a free software update for all iPad Pro models, iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, and iPad mini 4 and later, informed Apple.
The LiDAR Scanner in iPad Pro measures the distance to surrounding objects up to 5 metres away and works both indoors and outdoors.
Built for demanding tasks like editing 4K video or designing 3D models, iPad Pro gets another performance boost with the new A12Z Bionic chip.
The Pro camera system on iPad Pro features a 12MP Wide camera for capturing stunning photos and 4K video, and now includes a 10MP Ultra Wide camera.
Apple also updated its MacBook Air, starting with 256GB of storage and latest 10th-generation Intel Core processor for Rs 92,990.
The 13-inch Retina display device now features the new Magic Keyboard, first introduced on the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
The new MacBook Air is available to order soon and in the Apple Store app. MacBook Air will be available in stores starting next week.
“With its stunning, thin and light design, brilliant Retina display, all-day battery life and the power and ease-of-use of macOS, MacBook Air is the world’s best consumer notebook,” said Tom Boger, Apple’s senior director of Mac and iPad Product Marketing.
With Intel ‘Iris Plus Graphics’, MacBook Air now delivers up to 80 per cent faster graphics performance, said the company.
MacBook Air comes with the Apple T2 Security Chip, Apple’s own custom-designed second-generation silicon, which checks that software loaded during the boot process has not been tampered with and provides on-the-fly data encryption for everything stored on the SSD.
Prasanta Patnaik