Apple just announced a new iPad Pro, and at a watch party in New York City, a few reporters got to take a look at Apple’s new tablet firsthand. After holding and playing with the device for a few minutes, I can say pretty confidently that Apple’s not kidding about how much more svelte the new model is. At 5.3mm thick for the 11-inch model and 5.1mm for the 13-inch tablet, this new iPad is noticeably thinner and lighter than anything the company has made before.

It’s such a big difference that the larger model, which I’ve always felt was kind of preposterously huge, feels much more comfortable to hold and use. (And it’s technically even larger now, up to 13 inches from 12.9 before.) You can tell the difference between the Pro and the new Air from practically across the room, and as someone who has carried around an 11-inch Pro for the last year and a half, it’s really a big difference. The biggest question I have for now is about fragility: is the new Pro potentially too thin? It feels rigid and sturdy enough in my hands, but there are always tradeoffs with a device like this. We have lots of testing to do.

The new Pro’s most notable new spec, other than its waif dimensions, is the new OLED screen. It’s a little tough to make too much of exactly how it looks based on a quick glance in a crowded room, but even from a distance, it’s clear how much crisper the display really is. The “Tandem OLED,” as Apple calls it, appears to be plenty bright, and the viewing angles are excellent in the way they typically are on an iPad. The screen didn’t wow me immediately the way the redesign did, but it does look great.

As for the M4 chip powering the whole thing? Well, we’ll have to see. For most uses, the iPad has had more than enough horsepower for a long time — the M4 is clearly meant to power extremely intense use cases, like the new multicam setup in Final Cut Pro or some of the more advanced artistic features in apps like Procreate. In a short demo, it was super fast. The iPad is pretty much always super fast.

Key to the new Pro’s appeal are its two new accessories — the new Apple Pencil Pro and the upgraded Magic Keyboard. The Magic Keyboard looks and feels really nice. Its aluminum body and enlarged trackpad are much higher-end than what we’ve seen from previous versions. Typing on it felt a lot like typing on my MacBook Air, which was pretty clearly the goal.

And there’s now a row of function keys at the top, which will make it a much more useful keyboard-and-trackpad machine in general. (Though iPadOS is still not a particularly great operating system for the trackpad in particular, but we’ll have to wait for WWDC to see if Apple improves that.)

The Pencil Pro... well, it feels like the Pencil. You definitely feel the haptic feedback when you squeeze or double-tap, which is a nice addition to the setup, and it was smooth and fast on the Pro’s screen as I drew and moved stuff around. (I am decidedly not an artist, so we’re going to need someone to more thoroughly test this.) Most of the coolest stuff is software, too, and a lot of the Pencil Pro’s best features will come from third-party developers.

At $999 for the 11-inch model and $1,299 for the 13-incher, the iPad Pro is very much not the iPad for casual consumption — that would be the new iPad Air or even the now-cheaper 10th-generation iPad. But Apple likes to do its best hardware work on its highest-end devices, and this Pro looks like it holds up the tradition nicely.

Photography by David Pierce / The Verge

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