Buying a 1TB M4 iPad Pro will get your double the RAM and an extra CPU core thrown in

Apple announced the brand-new M4 iPad Pro yesterday alongside the new M2 iPad Air and the Apple Pencil Pro, not to mention the revamped Apple Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro. There was plenty announced during the event, but it's the M4 iPad Pro that's particularly notable. It's a hugely powerful tablet and one that comes with plenty of RAM and storage. But it turns out that if you pick two particular storage options you'll also get some other things thrown in for good measure, too.

Apple didn't make a big deal out of the news when it announced the M4 iPad Pro, but it's since been discovered that anyone who spends the extra $600 to upgrade from 256GB of storage to the 1TB model (or higher) will also get an additional CPU core and twice as much RAM.

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Apple has historically not chosen to give details about what cores the iPad has and how much RAM is offered, but in the case of the M4 it turns out that the base model with 256GB of storage comes with an M4 chip that has a 9-core CPU. But if you then choose to buy a 1TB or 2TB storage option you'll actually get an M4 chip that has a 10-core CPU instead. You'll still get the same number of GPU cores so there is nothing of note there, but it's interesting that Apple is putting two versions of the same M4 chip into the same tablet here.

It's a similar situation with regard to the RAM offered here, too. If you buy an M4 iPad Pro with 256GB or 512GB of storage you'll get a chip with 8GB of RAM while those who pick the higher storage options will get twice as much RAM, bumping the figure to 16GB. That's a huge jump, and again, Apple hasn't made that clear to everyone - it certainly isn't mentioned when going through the iPad Pro purchase workflow on Apple's website, that's for sure.

There are no other changes involved, however, so both M4 variants will come with a 16-core Neural Engine, however.

None of this applies to the M2 iPad Air, so no matter which one you buy you'll get a tablet with an 8-core CPU with a 10-core GPU. 8GB of RAM is also offered no matter which of the new iPad Air tablets that you happen to pick.

Both of the new tablets are available for order now but you won't be able to pick them up until next week.