Apple announced the iPad Pro, its largest tablet ever, on Wednesday at an event in San Francisco.

"Today, we have the biggest news in iPad since the iPad, " said Apple CEO Tim Cook in front of a crowd at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.

The tablet features a 12.9-inch screen, which is much bigger than the iPad Air 2, which has a screen that measures "only" 9.7 inches. The iPad Pro's screen features 5.6 million pixels, which is more pixels than are packed into the Retina display on the 15-inch MacBook Pro.

"This is the most advanced display we have ever built, " Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said during the event.

Apple is releasing a few accessories to go along with the new iPad Pro, including a stylus called the Apple Pencil ($99) and a soft keyboard called the Smart Keyboard ($169), both sold separately.

Apple

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The new tablet is 1.8 times faster than the iPad Air 2, thanks to its A9X processor, according to Apple. The company also claimed that the iPad Pro can last 10 hours on a single charge.

The iPad Pro has a supersized price to go along with its giant screen: $799 for 32 gigabytes of storage. It will become available in November in silver, gold, and space gray.

Add the maximum level of memory, 128 gigabytes, and LTE connectivity and the price jumps to $1079, which is actually more expensive than the $899 starting price for the MacBook Air.

Apple also announced a new iPad mini 4 for $399. The 7.9-inch tablet features the same processing power as the larger iPad Air 2, the company said. Its release pushes down the price of the iPad mini 2, which is now selling for $269.

Source: www.nbcnews.com