Apple iPad Pro

We recently received the new 12.9-inch Apple iPad Pro for review, which starts at a price tag of $800. At first look, the iPad Pro looks more like a 12-inch laptop than a tablet. When you look at the device’s spec-sheet, it seems as powerful as a mid-range laptop, and indeed upon use, you will realise that it can do things that other laptops can’t.

But iOS is both the iPad Pro’s triumph and its trial. You can go from zero to productive work in seconds. If you’re used to doing your work on a Mac or PC, however, you’ll quickly run into the tablet’s limits: two windows (hey, at least it’s not a single one any more), no easy way to navigate the UI without pulling your hand up from a connected keyboard, and apps that just aren’t quite as powerful as their desktop equivalents.

Ultimately, the supersized iPad Pro, which is available for a hefty price tag starting at $800, is a love letter to the creative types who have been Apple’s most faithful customers. The iPad Pro isn’t meant to sit on a desk with a keyboard attached; it’s made to be held with Apple’s spectacular new stylus, the Pencil (an optional $99 accessory), in your other hand.

Its niche audience will surely adore it, but its very high price prevents us from endorsing it more heartily for everybody else. People who really need enterprise applications, in general, will be better served by other options available on the market that come with a wholesome full-on operating system experience.

At 12.0-by-8.68-by-0.27 inches (HWD) and 721-grams, the iPad Pro is obviously taller and wider than all of the 10-inch tablets out there, although it’s slimmer and lighter than most on the market. I found the tablet easy to carry around, but difficult to use standing up.

The 12.9-inch, 2,732-by-2,048 display, at 264 pixels per inch, looks great at arm’s length, and it’s stunningly bright and anti-reflective. It’s surrounded by a sizable bezel, with the 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera above it and the Home button/fingerprint scanner below it. The 8-megapixel main camera is on the upper left corner of the back. The tablet comes in matte silver, gold, or gray finishes.

The iPad Pro we tested, came with a storage capacity of 128GB and it was a wi-fi + cellular model, with an asking price of $1079. Performance-wise, it’s now clear that Apple’s ARM processors have matched the performance of mid-range Intel laptop processors, and all that remains is for the software to catch up. The iPad Pro benchmarks like a laptop.

The iPad Pro scores even better than the Macbook Air on graphics, in fact. Using the GFXBench T-Rex test, both the Pro and most Macs hit the vsync limit of 60fps onscreen. But offscreen, with the resolution normalized to 1080p, the Pro’s A9X chip hits 163fps, which I’ve never seen before on an ARM-based device. That’s double the frame rate on the iPhone 6s and the Macbook Air, and equal to the performance of a 2013-era desktop iMac. It’s

Qualcomm has recently started to side with Apple in saying that single-core performance should be taken more seriously than benchmarks that push four cores at once, because relatively few applications use more than two cores at a time. The results are, obviously, snappy. I was able to open up and scroll around large Excel files without a problem, and multitask to my heart’s content.

But I also feel like the Pro is reaching the limits of iOS. In my standard test exporting a one-minute file in iMovie, the Pro proved only 10 percent faster than last year’s iPad Air 2, even though the processor and GPU are much more powerful; that’s a limitation of the software.

The iPad Pro runs iOS 9.1, which is our Editors’ Choice for mobile operating systems. It’s our top pick because it’s kept updated and because the APIs for third-party apps are awesome, which means industry-leading third-party software experiences almost always come to iOS first and best.

Split-window multitasking is one iOS 9 feature that really comes into its own here. I found myself very frequently popping open an Evernote sidebar to copy text into my Microsoft Word documents. To multitask, you drag in from the right-hand side of the screen and pick a compatible app. Not all apps are compatible, but many are. The app automatically snaps to about a third of the screen, but you can drag the split-view window wider to split the screen more evenly.

Attach Apple’s $169 Smart Keyboard accessory and the iPad Pro certainly looks like a laptop, or at least like a Surface. Hold down the Command key in any app to see keyboard shortcuts. Start running Microsoft Word or Excel and you’ll be able to do very productive work, until you run into a workbook with macros that won’t render on iOS.

But with a keyboard attached, the iPad Pro struggles with iOS’s touch-first design. There’s no mouse or trackpad support, so you have to poke at the screen a lot. That’s not a good ergonomic setup. Some apps insist on popping up the software keyboard even when a hardware keyboard is attached.

And you just can’t think of the iPad Pro as a general-purpose laptop replacement because so many applications assume desktop technologies. I know many people already use iPads as laptop replacements, reveling in their always-on, quick-hit, virus-free nature. The iPad Pro is a step up in that regard. But it doesn’t break any real new ground—until you get out the Pencil.

Here’s where things start to get interesting. The question isn’t really if you can do your work on the iPad Pro. The question is what you can do better with an iPad Pro than you can with a $1,000 laptop. Add a smooth, white, $99 accessory to the iPad Pro, and amazing things start to happen for artists, designers, architects, and other members of Apple’s core creative classes.

The Apple Pencil feels warm, comfortable, and delightfully well-balanced. It’s round, so you think it will roll around helplessly on the table, but it’s weighted, so it doesn’t. You charge it with a built-in Lightning connector under a cap on the back end (which is Apple’s one mistake—that back end should work as an eraser, but it doesn’t.) Apple says the Pencil has 12 hours of charge, and charges enough for 30 minutes of use within 15 seconds.

The Pencil is far superior to hold compared with Microsoft’s Surface Pen, which feels lumpy and awkward in contrast. Drawing on the screen has zero lag, and both pressure and angle sensitivity work perfectly. In addition, iOS’s bench of pressure-sensitive, high-end creative apps runs deep, with full Adobe and Corel suites available.

Although high-end creative apps are available on the Surface Pro 4, their stylus compatibility isn’t obvious and sometimes involves driver updates, and the screen has a disturbing amount of give while drawing, creating a wave effect. But here’s where the iOS dilemma comes up again. Corel’s Procreate and Adobe Draw are great apps, but there’s a reason Adobe Draw isn’t called Illustrator—it just isn’t Illustrator.

If you’re a graphics professional, eventually you’re going to want some feature that’s in Illustrator and not Draw, and then you’re going to have to put the iPad Pro down and use your Mac (for it will always be a Mac) to pluck your unfinished work out of the Creative Cloud.

I tested the 128GB iPad Pro, which comes with 113.8GB of free storage. iPads have never had removable memory, so you should only go for the 32GB model if you intend to do your document and media storage in the cloud. The Microsoft Office app suite comes in a little over 2GB, and a lot of high-end games are around 1GB each nowadays.

If you use the main 8-megapixel camera like a phone camera, you are going to look insane. But there are still good reasons for a tablet this huge to have a rear camera: augmented reality, computer vision, scanning, and translation applications all come to mind.

So in that case, sharp macro performance trumps fast image capture, and that’s what I see here. Macro shots taken with th iPad Pro—the kinds of shooting you’d do to translate text in a book, for instance—are super-sharp and clear. But in general, focus lock can take about half a second, so you can’t just whip out the tablet and shoot instantly. The main cameras records 1080p video at 30 frames per second indoors and out, but not 4K video like the iPhone 6S.

The 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera is designed for video conferencing. In low light it’s very noisy, but what it’s doing is making sure it can maintain 30 frames per second at 720p. In good light it focuses on the foreground, which it should do for video chatting.

For multimedia playback and gaming, you have a very luxurious experience here—something I realized when I started showing YouTube videos to a group of kids. As mentioned earlier, the iPad Pro’s screen is more viewable than a Surface Pro 4’s. It’s also richer than a laptop’s, so it’s a great panel for giving multimedia presentations to a small crowd.

With four speakers, two on each side of the device in landscape mode, you get powerful stereo sound here. Each speaker is 2-3dB louder, with significantly more bass, than the iPad Air 2’s, and also considerably louder than the Surface Pro 4’s.

We’ve seen iPads before. We’ve seen keyboard cases. We’ve even seen lots of styli. But as happens so often, Apple has remixed existing elements into something new, driven by design, ease-of-use, and compelling third-party apps.

The iPad Pro, with the Pencil, makes pro-level on-screen work easy in ways previous devices never did because the styli weren’t accurate enough (previous iPads), or the third-party ecosystem for proprietary stylus technology never developed. It also doubles as a light-duty, virus-free laptop, thanks in large part to the terrific Microsoft Office suite.

But then, unless iOS software catches up with the laptop-class hardware here, there’s only so much you can do with the iPad Pro. The more pro you get, the more line-of-business you get, and the more you start pushing against the functionality limits of even the most professional iOS apps.

The iPad Pro is breaking the ARM/x86 boundary to create a mobile device with the kind of processor power previously reserved for laptops, and pushing the boundaries of Apple’s touch-centric interface to officially include keyboards and styli, after years of tolerating them winkingly. The iPad Pro pushes Apple’s tablets forward in ways we haven’t seen for a few years. Let’s see what software developers can do with it.