Corinne Reichert and Stephen Shankland report in CNET:

Apple will launch a series of new iPads in April, a report Wednesday said. The new iPad Pros will come with Apple’s homemade M1 chips, a Thunderbolt port, and better cameras and screens, according to Bloomberg. They will reportedly come in 11- and 12.9-inch display sizes.

That’s cool. Maybe I’m not a “Pro” but the iPad Air 4 is just about perfect for me. From my layman’s perspective, the A14-based chip in the iPad Air 4 is very similar to the M1, minus some of the cores. The 2020 iPad Pro’s chip (an A12Z) is a generation or two behind that, though it has more cores than the A14 does. Apple obviously needs to remedy that to help justify the iPad Pro’s greater price.

I am thinking that the “Thunderbolt” port is merely following the direction that everything with a USB-C connector is going in: USB 4 compatibility. That, plus more processor cores, sounds good for videographers, podcasters, photographers, and (I guess) gamers. Unfortunately, if Apple doesn’t fix some problems with the Files app (just try transferring a gigabyte-sized file off your iPad to a network share—I’ll wait…for it to fail), these performance boosts will be hamstrung.