Gadgetory

I don't even know where to start with this thing this is the new iPad pro and this one is actually the most iPad pro you can get this is the 12 point 9 inch version with one terabyte of storage and LTE with the optional 199 dollar keyboard cover and 129 dollars of Apple pencil on top this is $2,200 of iPad pro it is big in bad and mean looking it has an 8 core a 12 X processor that is just lightning fast it has this new Apple pencil that clips on magnetically and charges wirelessly and it has a USB C port that can theoretically let it connect to basically anything it's more expensive than my laptop with a processor that benchmarks faster than Apple's own core i7 MacBook Pros this iPad pro is a beast if a muscle car could turn into a tablet it would turn into this and I should love this I should love it it should keep me up at night it should make my heart flutter every time I see it it it should be my computer my number one go-to computer but it's not am I tell you why so it's no secret that Apple's lead and tablets is just silly no other company has a tablet that offers the same power Absolution ease-of-use and battery life is the iPad pro last year when g2 reviewed the 10.5 inch iPad pro he said it was basically like Apple showing off and this new iPad pro is definitely Apple showing off again especially when it comes to hardware there are two sizes 11 inches in 12.9 the 11 inch model fits a larger screen and the same size body is the old 10.5 inch model and the 12.9 shrinks the body down to fit the screen the 12.9 is basically the same size as a sheet of paper now although I'm gonna tell you it feels a lot bigger than that Apple likes to say that both models had an edge to edge displays but I mean nothing about this vessel is edge to edge but it is an extremely nice LCD screen that's 264 points per inch on both sizes and it has apples fancy new rounded corner technology that the company calls liquid retina that's a little confusing because the iPhone 10 R also has a liquid retina LCD but the iPad display is way better than the 10 R screen with a faster 120 Hertz promotion variable refresh rate better viewing angles brightness and wider color support so I asked Apple and they told me that liquid retina really just means rounded corners that's it the new iPad pro is also the first really really new Apple hardware design language in a long time instead of rounded corners and soft shapes it's all hard corners and flat size with big exposed antenna lines in the back and a huge camera bump it kind of looks like the MacBook Pro but it's also kind of brutal looking almost like a reference design most people I showed it to you thought it was kind of cool especially in a space gray finish but it's taking a while to grow up you'll also notice that there's no home button just like the iPhone 10 the new iPad pro has a site it's the same true depth camera system with a 7 megapixel camera infrared projector and IR sensor but it works in any orientation landscape upside down whatever if your palm is covering the camera while you're holding that pad it'll tell you and if you have it at the bottom it'll tell you to look down to unlock which is pretty neat you can also double tap the spacebar if you have the keyboard cover on to unlock which is really fast and kind of reminiscent of Windows hello the lack of a home button means that you now navigate the iPad pro using the same gestures as the iPhone 10 so you can tap to wake swipe up to go home swipe up a little bit more to open the app launcher swipe up just a little bit to open the dock and swipe between apps along the bottom here now this will even preserve your app layout so if you've got two apps on one screen they'll be right there when you come back and of course you can pop over certain apps to get something done quickly if you need to these two gestures are all pretty intuitive to pick up especially if you've been using 1:10 but there's a lot going on when you swipe up and getting the doc and not the app switcher is a lot harder than you would think you have to take a minute to really dial it it apart from screen size both sides of the iPad pro are identical internally with the new 8 core a 12 X processor 4 speakers the smart connector for keyboards on the back instead of the bottom a 12 megapixel camera with smart HDR no more headphone jack and a new USBC port on the bottom to replace the lightning connector I'd normally keep going here but that USB C port is really what you all came to see right so let's just start plugging stuff in and see what happens boop-boo-boo-boop so here's the deal with one huge exception most everything you'd want to plug into a USB C port works if you have an app that supports it we tried a bunch of hubs an HDMI adapter a keyboard a camera a microphone even a VGA adapter and silly USB accessories like this fan the USB C ecosystem is not super well developed but the stupid accessories are definitely out in force the iPad pro will charge a phone it'll charge a Nintendo switch we tried some pro DJ gear but that didn't work because there's no app support for it and neither did this cheap HP printer but honestly what were you expecting but the main thing I want to plug into an iPad simply doesn't work external storage you can plug as many flash drives or hard drives as you want into this USB C port and nothing will happen they won't show up in your apps they won't show up in Apple's files app nothing if you plug a camera into the iPad or an SD card from your camera into a card reader iOS 12 will automatically pop open the camera import screen and let you import photos into your camera roll that's it you can't even import photos directly into an app like Lightroom cc Apple has to be in the middle now I asked Apple about this because I use like your MCC all over the time and I don't want to clutter up my camera roll and iCloud storage with huge RAW files and apples big solution is that Adobe wrote a series shortcut the imports photos into Lightroom and then automatically deletes them from the camera which is basically a hack to be honest a neat hack that works sure but a hack and this is essentially the story of the iPad pro and it's why I can't just use it the way I want to either you have to completely understand the limitations of iOS so well you can make use of these little hacks all over the place to get things done or you just deal with it and accept the fact you have to go back to a real computer from time to time because it's just easier and it's the same all over iOS 12 on the iPad for the most part iOS 12 is super fast and fun to use but there are roadblocks everywhere this new iPad pro is faster than my actual laptop but the mobile version of Safari just is in a desktop class browser so it kicks you out to apps all the time I don't want to use Apple Mail I don't but I can't set Outlook or Gmail to be the default so I kind of end up in Apple Mail all the time and I hate to tell you this but since Apple refuses to support Google's vp9 video codec there is literally no way to watch YouTube in 4k on this $2,000 tablet you just can't do it in the browser or in the app these kinds of little stumbles just happen when you use an iPad all day and until now we've been really forgiving of iPads because we knew Apple was taking its time building up the iPad into a real computer it was supposed to get there but you know what I'm tired of waiting it's obvious that Apple has a massive processor performance lead and I desperately want to push this a 12 X to the limit and use the iPad pro is my main computer but over and over again I can't and I don't think it's just me being stuck in some old way of thinking or needing to spend more time discovering a new workflow or understanding Siri shortcuts better this is just basic stuff like plugging in a flash drive or quickly changing the name of a file before emailing it off I don't want to adapt to my computer I want my computer to adapt to me Apple's keyboard cover has the same keys as before they feel exactly the same but the whole thing has been redesigned and it's better and worse than the on the plus side there's no more weird hump in the middle or origami folding this is just much simpler and cleaner but if you open it and just want to use it as a tablet you have to feel these keys on the back which is just not very Apple like and while the Google pixel slate and the surface pro offered near infinite adjustments I really just get the two with the iPad pro you got that one that's about it I would bet third parties like Logitech offer much nicer keyboards in the future just like they did with the older iPad pro so I would take a minute and see what they do the Apple pencil has also been redesigned but I'll be honest I'm just not that much of an artist so I gave the iPad pro 2 verge design director William Joel and also tada Miele verge tech reporter who also happens to be a published cartoonist to see what they thought of the new pencil and what it's like to use the iPad pro is professional creatives everyday the second generation Apple pencil is a huge improvement over the old no matter which way you look at it the first Apple pencil was already pretty great specs wise in terms of pressure sensitivity and Tom rejection so there wasn't much to improve upon there but the new magnetic charging method just makes so much more sense it's what the original pencil should have had instead of this horrible charging situation that required you to take off the cap so you can lose it immediately and plug it into the Lightning port so you can accidentally snap your pencil in half apples added a new feature where you can tap the pencil to the screen and it will wake it up and immediately launch the Notes app which is pretty useful but you can't really program it to open any other app like this there's also a new gesture control feature on the pencil where you can double tap the sides to switch to an eraser or the last tool that you use and the upcoming Photoshop for iPad which launches next year Apple says you can customize a gesture to other tools like zoom but I can't really see myself using this feature it's hard to get it exactly right and it's not as natural as just having a button on the side it's also kind of unfortunate that the new pencil despite being $30 more expensive than the last $99 pencil doesn't work with any other iPad besides the new iPad pro and alternatively you can't use your old Apple pencil with a new iPad pro which is kind of a bummer considering Microsoft's newest surface pro six is compatible with its server Spence three and up I know some artists who've always felt that the Apple pencil is too thin to hold comfortably compared to the thicker Wacom pens or the surface pens that hasn't changed with the new pencil as it's basically the same size and feels about the same as before there are silicone grips you can buy for the first generation Apple pencil but the new magnetic charging process in the second pencil means you'd have to take it off every time you want to charge it but still I take this new magnetic charging process over the old one any day the first thing that I noticed using the new iPad pro is how crazy fast the refresh rate is I have a iPad Mini from early 2018 and it is nowhere like as beautiful - just like swipe and I could do this for hours so we wanted to kind of push it and test it a little bit and see like well if it's rated at like a MacBook Pro can't work like one so we were using Adobe rush editing 4k footage and surprisingly it handled working with 4k footage just fine right at least it did for me we had no problem making a sequence that is roughly 10 minutes long and then we exported it and timed it and it took about as long as it would take on my iMac which is kind of crazy so while this is as powerful or maybe even more powerful than my macbook pro what it lacks are the apps and that's really important to me I like to work within Adobe's Creative Cloud and the apps that hasn't here like rush and like the beta Photoshop are nowhere near as strong or powerful as they would be on my macbook and for $2,200 having like the baby versions of them isn't really what I want the good news is that this is definitely powerful enough to use apps like that and hopefully down the line maybe we'll get a cinema 4d or something but until then we're just gonna have to wait look if you're the sort of person who might spend over $2,000 on a maxed out iPad pro you probably know exactly why you need one what you're gonna use it for and whether it's worth it to you that's great and you're gonna find the switch to USB see super convenient the new pencil to be much nicer and the a 12 X to be a significant performance boost but if you're just thinking about spending $7.99 the cheapest 64 gig 11 inch iPad pro to replace your main computer you should really ask yourself what you use a computer for and whether you can deal with the limitations of iOS every single day there isn't a single other tablet on the market that can compete with the raw Hardware of the iPad pro and honestly there aren't many laptops that can either but apples approach to iOS is holding that hardware back in serious in meaningful ways and while you SPC makes life with this iPad pro slightly easier it still has the same basic capabilities and limitations of last years I've had Pro and so just like dieter said last year if you know exactly how to get what you want out of iOS and you must have the best thing the iPad pro is definitely the best thing for me it's all just too frustrating and while I love using the pencil to edit photos in Lightroom on this display the iPad pro is still just an accessory to my laptop not a replacement for it