This is Apple's new, more powerful - but still cheap - iPad

"More powerful than all Chromebooks and most computers."

Apple is holding a somewhat untraditional launch tonight, where they do not have any live broadcast at all and use a much smaller local area than usual. Also, the whole california is in Chicago, a good distance away from solar heat California. But what in the world should the company really launch?

As expected, the first product was a brand new iPad, and here Apple has first and foremost upgraded the inside and the things we do not see. That is, the design is more or less identical, there is still a Touch ID browser in front and no new and remote face scanning like many before the launch was guessed.

These are qualities we are most likely to first see in a new iPad Pro generation. For the regular tablet now known as "iPad 2018," what's new card can be summed up with two words:

Ok, okay, there's a little more to say! Firstly, the processor is very strong - one of the most powerful on the market, in fact. The A10 Fusion-Brikka Apple is the first to have iPad Pro 10.5 and offers 4 kernels - two of which are high-performance cores. This is also a mobile chip with very good graphics features, probably only beaten by Apple's own A10X Fusion and A11 Bionic processors.

Apple himself says the upgrade from the A9 chip in today's "iPad" will provide 40 percent better processor performance and 50 percent better graphics performance. If the numbers are correct we will first know when we have folded in her. If the stated battery time of 10 hours is right, we will also know.

If the amount of memory is upgraded, it is not known, but the upgrade on the processor front seems to be motivated by a desire to improve the experience for expanded reality (AR) and creative apps.

This is also where the Apple Pencil support comes in. For example, Apple showed how school students could now dissect a frog directly in an AR app by placing the frog in front of you and cutting it with the pen. A big battle for animal welfare, and probably fun for schoolchildren - but more importantly, there are now alternatives to Apple's own pen.

Logitech, in collaboration with Apple, launched a cheaper pen called "Crayon". This is to be sold for around $ 500, or about half of Apple's pen. Other accessories, such as a cheaper keyboard, were also displayed.

The starting price of the new iPad 2018 will be $ 3,490, which is the same as the current model. "Refresh" has never hit better than for this launch.

A school-focused launch
At the time of writing there is nothing but the new iPad launched from the podium, and Apple has spent about an hour talking about how well the new board will be for school life. Fine, but for most of us - who are not students or teachers - it's a bit insignificant.

With that said, it seems that Apple is now really trying to take the lead and become a major player in schools. For example, they refuse the new iPad for learning purposes, 200GB of free storage, and launch a whole lot of new apps for learning.

For example, kids or adults can learn to code via Swift Playgrounds (Swift is Apple's programming language for iOS and MacOS), teachers can manage their subjects via "Classroom" and students can follow up school work through the schoolwork app.

This is an area Microsoft and Google have long been dominated, so maybe some competition from the apple camp?