Apple threw the sink out of the window announcing the new iPad with an A12 bionic chip for only $329 and the iPad Air with an A14 bionic chip. Both with Retina Display; and neural engine on the cheapest iPad for the first time.

If you have no mobile device, and you are interested in playing Diablo Immortal and don’t want the hassle of paying over $800 for a phone — the new iPad with the A12 bionic chip for $329 might be your very best decision.

Not only can you use the tablet for playing Diablo Immortal, but it has a plethora of productivity apps at the reach of your fingertip which you can also use on-the-go, at the office, or school. The A12 bionic chip is in the flagship iPad Pro tablet, now available to the cheapest new generation iPad.

You can read a partial Apple Event transcript (focused on iPad, iPad Air, and iOS14) after the break.

APPLE EVENT TRANSCRIPT: iPAD

Ted Merendino (Product Manager, iPad)

Ted: We’re incredibly proud of the role that iPad is playing in the lives of so many people. Users love our iPad 7th generation, because it delivers a beautiful 10.2 inch Retina Display with support for Apple pencil and the full size smart keyboard on a thin, light and affordable design; and our customers love all the things they can do with it.

From taking notes, as they learn something new to playing their favorite game. So this year, we’re taking its beloved design and cranking up the performance with this: the iPad 8th generation. It’s more capable than ever; and it starts with the A12 bionic. This chip is a powerhouse. It features a powerful CPU and super fast GPU.

Compared to the already fast chip in last year’s iPad, it has a 40% faster CPU and delivers a massive 2X jump in graphics.

This extra performance is great for everything from working with high resolution content to immersive gaming experiences; and compared to the competition over the last year, it’s not even close.

This new iPad with the A12 bionic is up to 2X faster than the top selling windows laptop.

It’s up to 3X faster than the top selling Android tablet; and it’s up to a whopping 6X faster than the top selling Chromebook. iPad leaves the competition in the dust; and all that power is delivered in a thin and light design that is super portable with great cameras and all day battery life.

Now our A-series chips are more than a CPU and GPU. They include powerful custom technologies like the neural engine for machine learning, which comes to our most popular iPad for the very first time. It’s capable of processing up to 5 trillion operations per second, and it powers some magical experiences on iPad.

Like allowing you to instantly transform the color of your photos or even analyze your tennis game and provide real time stats like ball speed and body positioning.

Altogether, the A12 bionic takes performance to the next level and makes iPad more powerful than ever. Now let’s talk about accessories.

They expand the versatility of iPad. iPad (8th Gen) works with the full size smart keyboard and keyboards from Logitech, like the combo touch with trackpad and the rugged combo.

That’s so important for schools; and of course, this new iPad works with one of our most beloved accessories: the Apple Pencil — with its incredible precision and low latency, plus features like pressure sensitivity and tilt.

It’s the gold standard for creativity and enables artists to bring their vision to life. And we’ve seen it become an essential tool to journal and take detailed notes. We are blown away by what we’ve seen people create with Apple Pencil on iPad.

There’s really nothing else like it; and taking the Apple Pencil experience to a whole new level is iPadOS 14, which adds powerful new pencil capabilities and other new features as well. Let’s see it in action.

iPadOS 14 makes iPad even more intuitive, fun, and productive because you can get your work done just about anywhere. Handwritten text is just as powerful as typed text. iPadOS 14 even understands what you write, letting you take quick actions with just a tap.

As you sketch, shape recognition helps you draw perfect circles, stars, and more.

Smart selection understands the difference between handwriting and drawings, making it easy to select only what you want.

And paste your handwritten notes as typed text into another app. New compact UI means you can stay focused on the task at hand.

And we know… once you start using Apple Pencil… you’re not going to want to put it away. So we have Scribble, which lets you handwrite in to any text field, even straight into numbers; or to add a final thought to that document you’ve been working on.

The new iPad and the power of iPadOS 14 are an amazing combination, making it possible to express your ideas however you want to, wherever you are.

With iPadOS 14, the already amazing experience of Apple Pencil gets even better. These powerful handwriting and note-taking features join a host of other new features that continue to push what’s possible on iPad.

And it all runs beautifully on the new iPad (8th Gen) with its 10.2 inch Retina Display, huge performance boost from the A12 bionic, MagicKeyboard and Pencil support, great camera and so much more.

And it starts at just $329 — and it’s just $299 for education customers. Nothing else delivers this level of performance and capability at such an affordable price. Customers can order iPad (8th Gen) today, and it will be available starting this Friday.

Tim Cook (Apple CEO)

Tim: iPad (8th Gen) with its huge boost in performance and the incredible features in iPadOS 14 will enable even more people to do more amazing things. And that’s not all, as I told you, we’re updating our entire full-size lineup. So that brings us to iPad Air. iPad Air was designed to deliver pro features at a very affordable price.

And today we are thrilled to introduce an all new completely redesigned iPad Air. And here it is.

This is the new iPad Air. And to tell you all about it, I’d like to hand it over to Laura.

Laura Legros (VP, Hardware Engineering)

Laura: The new iPad Air starts with a gorgeous design. The all new thin enlightened enclosure and neuro border design features of beautiful all screen display.

Each element of iPad Air is meticulous crafted from the precisely-machined top button to the scope, the detail around the camera; and the new iPad Air design comes in 5 gorgeous colors — including a new rose gold, green and sky blue finish.

Our customers are going to love these colors; and this new design features a stunning liquid Retina Display. In the same footprint as the previous Air, the new iPad Air features a larger 10.9 inch liquid Retina Display with a resolution of 2360 x 1640. That’s over 3.8 million pixels for extra crisp texts and photos.

And it has advanced display technologies like full lamination, P3 wide color, True Tone, and an anti-reflective coating that combined deliver an amazing visual experience.

To give our customers a beautiful all-screen design meant finding a new home for one of the most popular features: Touch ID.

So we designed a next-generation Touch ID, and integrated it right into the top button.

This provides a convenient and secure authentication while allowing the display to extend on all sides. This is the smallest authentication sensor we have ever designed, and it delivers the same performance, ease of use and security you know and trust from Touch ID.

The technology under the button is really amazing. It uses a Sapphire crystal lens, and a next-generation custom sensor that more efficiently captures the details of the fingerprint; and it uses a faster secure enclave to more quickly authenticate the fingerprint data, and using it as simple as ever.

Just touch the top button to unlock your iPad, log into apps, or use Apple Pay. It’s fast, easy, and secure. Another reason customers love iPad Air is its performance. So we’re debuting an incredibly powerful new chip, which is going to give the new era a huge leap in performance. To tell you more. Here’s Tim Millet.

Tim Millet (VP, Platform Architecture)

Tim: I’m super excited to tell you about the powerful new chip we’ve built into the new iPad Air. Our latest day series processor A14 bionic. Our goal is to build chips with industry leading performance, powerful custom technologies, and extremely efficient use of energy to make every one of our products best in class.

One way we do this is by aggressively adopting, cutting-edge Silicon process technology year after year.

And now with A14, we’ll be the first in the industry to use the breakthrough 5 nanometer (5nm) process technology. The incredibly small scale of this process challenges the laws of physics. In fact, we’re talking about a scale so small that the dimensions of these five nanometer transistors are measured in Atoms.

This means we were able to pack 11.8 billion transistors into A14. That’s an increase of nearly 40% over our 7nm chip. We use these additional transistors to deliver new features, increase power efficiency, and increase performance in nearly every aspect of the chip.

A14 Bionic includes a big update to our CPU. Our architecture runs more instructions in parallel, resulting in great performance at lower power; and it integrates large high-performance caches sized to meet the needs of the most demanding applications. For A14’s powerful new 6-core design this results in an enormous 40% increase in CPU performance — compared to the previous iPad Air.

A14 also features our newest GPU architecture scaled to deliver the maximum sustainable performance at the lowest possible power. An approach that also allows us to deliver industry-leading peak performance when it’s needed most.

For A14, our new 4-core design delivers a 30% increase in graphics performance as well.

And when you compare the new iPad Air with A14 to the best selling laptop and its price range, a device nearly 3X thicker and 4X heavier…

The new iPad Air has up to 2X faster graphics performance and it’s incredibly thin and light design.

So for customers using iPad Air for performance intensive apps, like editing 4k videos, creating works of art, or playing immersive games, the incredible performance of A14 can handle them all with ease.

In addition to the blazing fast CPU and GPU, A14 is loaded with custom technologies to drive that unique iPad experience.

Like a much faster neural engine — which will make iPad Air more powerful for Machine Learning by doubling the number of cores to build a 16-core architecture.

The neural engine, and A14 is capable of executing an amazing 11 trillion operations per second.

This increases Machine Learning (ML) performance by up to 2X over the previous generation.

In addition, our CPU is further optimized with second-generation machine learning accelerators, which come to iPad for the first time and accelerate the matrix multiplication frequently used in ML computations at up to 10X faster than the previous Air.

Now the combination of the new neural engine, the CPU ML accelerators, and our high-performance GPU deliver breakthrough machine learning capabilities to elevate apps built on core ML to an entirely new level of performance.

So that’s the new A14 bionic. It delivers big performance updates for the CPU and GPU. Makes iPad Air much more powerful for machine learning and also features the latest Advanced Image Signal Processor (ISP) for higher-quality videos and photos, and even faster secure enclave for Touch ID.

This is by far the most advanced chip we’ve ever made, and we’re thrilled to bring it to the new iPad Air. Now back to you, Laura.

Laura: Wow. The A14 is a huge leap forward in performance; and we’ve worked with a number of developers to see what they can do with the new iPad Air. So let’s take a look.

I’m Karim Morsy. I’m a developer with djay Pro AI. djay Pro AI is an app that brings all the tools of a professional DJ to iPad. The A14 bionic allows us to build intelligent features into the app.

You touch the record and then you start scratching it. You can actually scratch in the air. That just blows our mind that this is possible now.

Hi, I’m Alexi from Pixonic. Developer of the game War Robots. The A14 bionic chip allows us to deliver console-level graphics on a device you can hold in your hands.

It’s quite amazing to have a real-time 6v6 multiplayer game running on an iPad at 60 frames per second.

For example, the textures are much more detailed. The shadows are dynamic and reflections are more realistic. It looks amazing.

I’m Andrius Gailiunas, and I work at Pixelmator. Pixelmator is a photo editing app for enhancing photos.

So I think everyone has seen the movies where somebody is pointing out to the screen and go: “Zoom in on that.”

“Now enhance.”

And now I brought that to iPad. The Apple neural engine allows us to build functionality we never thought possible. The Machine Learning (ML) super resolution finds individual details. Edges. Colors. Gradients. Text. And it kind of combines it back into an image.

Now we can build intelligent features into the app. The possibilities are just endless with this.

Laura: With A14 chip, the new era is going to bring incredible performance to customers looking to step up to a more powerful iPad. And there’s more. Another great feature we’re bringing to iPad Air is USB-C.

USB-C increases data transfer speeds up to 5GB per second. That’s a tenfold jump in performance over the previous Air.

It provides a fast connection to a host of external devices. Like cameras, drives, and external monitors up to 4K.

The new Air also includes great cameras front and back. The front 7-megapixel FaceTime HD Camera supports smart HDR, improved 1080p video capture and better low-light performance for really high-quality video calls.

And on the back is the same 12-megapixel camera used in the iPad Pro with focus pixels, and a larger aperture to capture incredibly sharp photos and stunning 4K video — enhanced with improved video stabilization.

So the photos and videos our customers take with our new Air are going to look better than ever. And to elevate the audio experience, we’ve redesigned the speaker system, providing stereo audio and landscape mode. Great for kicking back and enjoying your favorite movies and TV shows.

The new Air also works with our amazing accessories, including Apple Pencil, which attaches magnetically to the side for pairing, charging, and storage; and the beautiful Magic Keyboard with floating design and built-in track pad.

So this is the new iPad Air featuring a 10.9-inch liquid Retina Display, next-generation Touch ID, a huge boost in performance with A14 bionic, USB-C, advanced cameras, WiFi 6, an LTE that’s 60% faster. This is by far the most powerful iPad Air ever. Let’s check it out.

So that’s the new iPad Air and we can’t wait to get it into our customer’s hands. It’ll start at $599.

It will be available beginning next month. And finally, we’re very proud that the new iPad Air and iPad (8th Gen) have been carefully designed to have minimal impact on the environment and support our overall net zero carbon goal.

Both iPads use 100% recycled aluminum enclosures and all of the wood fiber in the packaging of both iPad models is recycled or comes from responsibly managed forests.

Both iPads use 100% recycled tin solder in their main logic boards and are free of harmful substances.

So while our work here is never finished, we’re proud of the progress we’ve made with these new products.

So today we have our most advanced iPad lineup ever. It’s really a huge year for iPad. An incredible new iPad Air, delivering more pro features to even more customers. An iPad (8th Gen) with massive jump in performance. Together with the latest iPad Pro and the mighty iPad Mini.

Combined with the advanced features in iPadOS 14, make these by far the most exciting iPads we’ve ever shipped. Now, back to Tim.

Tim: What a great day of announcements. We will also be releasing major OS update tomorrow, beginning with iOS 14. A huge release that transforms the core experience of iPhone with redesigned widgets right on the home screen.

A new way to organize your apps with the app library; and a new and even faster way to experience apps the moment you need them with app clips.

iPadOS 14, which lets you do even more with Apple Pencil, provides huge improvements to iPad apps and takes the iPad experience even further.

Watch OS 7 provides a whole new way to discover and share Watch faces, a new sleep app, automatic hand-washing detection, and provides additional workouts and fitness metrics.

And TV OS 14, which makes your big screen experience even better with improved picture-in-picture, audio sharing with AirPods, Apple Music lyrics, secure camera feeds from home kit and multi-user gaming support.

All of these new releases will be available tomorrow. And all of the products we announced today will ship with these OS updates. Thank you all for joining us. At Apple, our mission is to design products and services that empower and inspire you.

And we’re so excited to see what you’ll do with all of the new innovations introduced today. Everyone take care, stay safe and have a great day.

You can purchase the iPad 2020 (8th Generation) here (affiliate link gives Blizzplanet a commission from sales. thank you!)