At today"s Apple event in Chicago, the company had a series of educational announcements to share. The main one is a new iPad, which finally offers support for the Apple Pencil. Unfortunately, there"s still no pins to connect the firm"s Smart Keyboard, so that feature will remain exclusive to the iPad Pro lineup.
In fact, that"s one of few features that remains exclusive to the Pro, now that the standard iPad has Pencil support. All of the rest of the specs come in at just under the iPad Pro. It contains Apple"s A10 Fusion chip, whereas the Pro has the A10X, and the camera still only records up to 1080p video. Once again, the company stuck with Touch ID for biometric authentication, rather than switching to Face ID.
You"ll notice that the bezels are still quite large. There doesn"t seem to be any real reason for this, other than differentiation from the larger Pro models.
Apple also announced that it"s releasing all-new versions of its iWork apps, including Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. The big new feature is Apple Pencil support, but the company is also bringing iBooks Author into Pages, so you can now write books in Pages for iPad and Mac.
Apple"s new iPad can be ordered now for $329 and will ship this week, although those with an educational discount can get it for $299. The updates for iWork are available now.