iPad extreme

Whenever I get a new gadget to review, I try to focus on its standout features and use them to their fullest to get a deeper understanding of the product's strengths and weaknesses.

With the iPhone XR(opens in a new tab), it mainly came down to the display and not having a secondary camera, so we shot all the product photos for the review with another iPhone XR to see if I’d miss the iPhone XS’s(opens in a new tab) better screen and more versatile camera (spoiler: no).

For Apple’s new iPad Pros (2018)(opens in a new tab), I did my best to use my 12.9-inch review unit to do everything a customer might use it for — things like drawing, editing video, writing, reading, watching videos, listening to music, playing 3D games, and then trying to do as many of these things simultaneously like you might on a laptop or desktop computer.

How much of a “real” computer experience can you get with the new iPad Pros(opens in a new tab) is what I wanted to know. Can it finally replace a laptop the way a Surface Pro can? The answer: Maybe, kinda, sorta.

There’s no question the new iPad Pros, with their spankin’ boxier design and slimmer bezels, are beautiful slabs of glass; Face ID is awesome, they’re even more powerful than any iOS device or competing tablets, and they can do some seriously incredible things with the right apps.

But the tablets are hampered by the same limitations of previous iPads (Pro or not): iOS on an iPad still isn’t as robust for general work as a MacBook(opens in a new tab) running macOS(opens in a new tab). That doesn't, however, mean the iPad Pro's strengths aren't better than its weaknesses, though.

You can multitask with features like opening two or three apps at the same time, but with the way they’re designed to work, it’s slower than a traditional windowed-app experience on a Mac(opens in a new tab) or PC(opens in a new tab). I love having a touchscreen to tap and scroll, but I long for a mouse when I want more precision when I'm doing things like scrubbing through a timeline in a video editing app.

And as vastly improved as the new Apple Pencil(opens in a new tab) is with its ability to magnetically clip onto the iPad Pro and wirelessly charge it, and as great as the Smart Keyboard Folio’s two angle positions are, they cost extra, and they're not necessarily always a better substitute for a tried and true keyboard (with good key travel) and responsive trackpad.

For certain types of creative professionals who will relish the iPad Pro’s desktop-class performance, the iPad Pros paired with an Apple Pencil are well worth the high price tag — the 11-inch starts at $799 and the 12.9-inch starts at $999, respectively, without any accessories — to unlock a new kind of creative and mobile productivity.

The new iPad Pro inspired me to want to do more, to make more, to “Think Different” just like the original Mac did when I sat down in front of its all-in-one design, boxy mouse, and drew in MacPaint for the very first time.

But if you’re just planning to use the iPad Pro to watch videos, browse social media, or play light games like Candy Crush, its potential will be wasted, and any older or cheaper iPad(opens in a new tab) or cheaper brand of tablet will do. 

You should only get a new iPad Pro if you’re gonna be pushing its power. Otherwise it’s like getting a sports car and never driving faster than 35 mph — people will ooh and ahh at your shiny new thing, but you’ll return home feeling empty every time.

Not since the iPad Air has the iPad received such a major design overhaul that it changes everything about Apple’s tablet. From the second I touched the new iPad Pros right after their announcement, I knew this was the iPad’s very own iPhone X moment.

On the 11-inch iPad Pro, Apple’s increased the display size (up from 10.5 inches) while maintaining virtually the same footprint as the old model. The iPad Pro I’ve been testing, the 12.9-inch one, is the tablet that feels the most tangibly new.

The bezels are slim as the 11-inch and equal on all four sides, but it’s so much easier to handle in your hands. Without a huge “forehead” and “chin” bezels, the 12.9-inch no longer feels like a breakfast tray when you grab it in landscape. In portrait mode, the side bezels are still a reasonable thickness for your thumbs comfortably to rest on.

Both iPad Pros are thinner — the thinnest iOS devices ever — at 0.23 inches (5.9mm) thick, but there’s no flex to them at all. I tried bending my review unit with a moderate amount of pressure and it remained rigid.

The 11-inch weighs the same 1.03 pounds as the 10.5-inch iPad Pro, but the 12.9-inch model is 0.10 pounds lighter. It’s not something you should notice, but psychologically because the whole device is smaller and thinner it somehow seems much lighter than it really is.

In space gray (there’s no other color for these new iPad Pros), the tablets and their flat sides look like powerful work displays — not your typical lean-back device for binging Netflix. Combined with the rounded corners of the Liquid Retina display, something Apple tells me was developed first for the iPad Pros but launched with the iPhone XR first, the modern industrial design is both futuristic yet familiar.

The display itself is arguably Apple’s best LCD in a device ever, even better than the iPhone XR’s screen in my opinion. While it lacks any kind of 3D Touch pressure sensitivity or Haptic Touch vibrational feedback, the Liquid Retina display is still stunning from all viewing angles. Not to mention, it’s really bright, the colors are rich, and the resolution (2,732 x 2,048) is beyond sharp. Its ProMotion feature, which ramps the display refresh rate from 24Hz (for things like reading) all the way up to 120Hz (for things like scrolling and gaming) is a feature of the iPad Pros that I wish the iPhones had.

Beautiful as the screens are, Apple could have went further. The new iPad Pro displays don’t support HDR and as good as the LCD is, it’s no OLED. It’s not a deal-breaker by any means, but whenever I watched Netflix videos with letterboxing (the black bars above and below the content), I cried a little inside that the screen wasn’t OLED so that the bars would be as black as the bezels instead of dark gray.

An OLED display with HDR support would have driven up the price even more, but it would have made the heftier price tag more justifiable.

The rest of the iPad Pro is pure Apple refinement. The buttons are flatter, but they’re no less tactile. The quad speakers are physically smaller, but they’re actually a little bit louder and producer wider and clearer sound. There’s no headphone jack (like you didn’t see that coming?) and I don’t really mind since AirPods are so, so good and good wireless headphones can be in any price range from $25-$500. If you’re not down with wireless, grab a USB-C-to-headphone-jack dongle from Apple for $9.

Tucked into the top bezel (in portrait mode) is a TrueDepth camera system. Just like on iPhone X, XS, XS Max, and XR, the camera system houses the front-facing FaceTime camera, infrared camera, dot projector, flood illuminators, and other sensors like the proximity and ambient light sensors, and a microphone.

It’s super advanced camera tech, but here’s what you need to know: It supports Face ID in any orientation (portrait, landscape, and even some angles in between), it enables Animoji and Memoji (also good for using these during FaceTime video calls), and it takes selfies (more on that later).

It’s mighty impressive Apple was able to get Face ID to work in any orientation and equally baffling why the iPhone X, XS, and XR can’t unlock in any orientation other than portrait. It’s not perfect — I still got some Face ID unlock fails at some angles or if my hand was covering the TrueDepth camera system (iOS warns you if you’re blocking it) — but mostly it successfully worked more times than on my iPhone XS.

The luddites will bemoan the loss of Touch ID (even though it’s inaccurate and false that it’s less secure than Face ID), but I didn’t miss it one bit. I’ve moved on to Face ID and only those who have never used it will never understand how much better it is for things like unlocking the device, authenticating Apple Pay purchases, and entering saved passwords.

The biggest change besides the design and Face ID is the USB-C port. Yes, my friend, Apple has killed the Lightning port on an iOS device for the first time.

Switching from Lightning to USB-C means all of your existing cables won’t work and you’ll have to buy new ones if you don’t already own some, but the advantages of the universal port are worth the swap.

For one, the new iPad Pros can charge using the same USB-C cable and power adapter as the ones that come with any of Apple’s MacBooks (that include the MacBook, MacBook Pros, and the new MacBook Air). Hurray for less crap to travel with!

Another reason USB-C’s more versatile than Lightning: It’s easier to connect the iPad Pros to an external monitor (up to 5K resolution) and to accessories like a DSLR camera. Just by changing the port, Apple’s essentially made the iPad Pros more like a laptop computer than previous iPads have ever been.

As much as I hate dongles, it’s so great to not have to buy a special Lightning-to-USB dongle to connect to download photos from my SD cards directly to the Photos app. I used the same accessories I use for my 12-inch MacBook: an SD card reader plugged into a USB-A-to-USB-C adapter that came with an old Pixel phone, and voilà, downloaded all my photos without having to spend another penny.

Not to mention, with a USB-C-to-Lightning cable, the new iPad Pro’s have USB-PD (power delivery) and can charge another device like an iPhone at 7.5 watts. I mean, bumming a charge off an iPad Pro is a good reason to choose an iPad Pro to bring with you on a flight instead of a MacBook.

The possibilities with USB-C are endless… if Apple builds around it. Right now, crucial accessories that would make the iPad Pros more computer-like such as hard drives and USB flash drives do nothing when you plug them into the tablets. With no Finder or proper file system, there’s just no way to read the files on these storage devices.

It really seems like a no-brainer for the Files app to be able to do this and I’m praying Apple adds support for external storage drives in an upcoming iOS 12 update or iOS 13.

The worst thing about tablets designed as laptop replacements is their hidden costs. As if the tablet itself isn’t already expensive enough, the accessories — essentials to get the most out of it — cost extra and add to the price.

For the iPad Pros, the extra costs are for the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard Folio. The second-generation Apple Pencil has been redesigned with several improvements and as a result costs $129 ($30 more than the original).

Whether you agree the updates are worth another $30 is your decision, but I think they are. Would I have preferred the same $100 price? Of course I would have since the Pencil’s already pricey enough, but hear me out.

With the new Apple Pencil, Apple’s addressed two of the original’s chief complaints: storing it and charging it. The new Pencil has a matte finish that’s now easier to hold in your fingers especially if they’re sweaty. New is a flat side that’s good for two things: not rolling off the table (yes!) and magnetically attaching to the side of the iPad Pro.

Magnetically clipping it to the iPad Pro also connects the new Pencil and wireless charges it at the same time. In a briefing for the new iPad Pros, Apple showed me a gutted version of the new Pencil and the tightly-packed magnets and components within the slim writing and drawing instrument. It’s a marvelous engineering feat no doubt.

The new Apple Pencil also supports gesture controls. For example, if you’re doodling in the Notes app, you can double-tap on the side of the pencil and it’ll switch from ink to the eraser (or change it to toggle between current and last tool used, or show the color palette). Other apps can customize the tap gesture to whatever they want. In a demo at the iPad Pro’s announcement, we saw Photoshop use it to zoom in on an image. It’s a useful addition and I really hope developers get fun with it like maybe use for gaming or something.

Beyond these changes, the new Apple Pencil’s the same responsive stylus as the previous one. The tip’s pinpoint precise and there’s virtually no lag when dragging it across the iPad Pro’s screen.

Whether it’s drawing (fun fact: all of the animations in this review were drawn by Mashable’s talented senior illustrator Bob Al-Greene(opens in a new tab) using the new iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and Procreate app) or splitting video clips in Adobe Premiere Rush CC or iMovie, the Apple Pencil’s so versatile for creating things on the iPad Pros it’s practically a must-buy accessory.

There is one bad piece of news: The first-gen Apple Pencil doesn’t work with the new iPad Pros and the new Apple Pencil won’t work with older iPad Pros.

The other must-have accessory that makes the iPad Pro more like a laptop is the Smart Keyboard Folio ($179 for the 11-inch and $199 for the 12.9-inch).

The keyboard’s mostly the same with the same liquid-resistant covered keys. So if you didn’t like the previous Smart Keyboard you probably won’t like the new ones. Me? I like that the keyboards have more travel than the “butterfly switch” keyboards in all of the MacBooks. I wish the Keyboard Folio’s keys were backlit, but I can touch type so isn’t a huge biggie.

I do have to credit Apple for improving “lapability”. Compared to the previous Smart Keyboard, the new one has two angles to position the iPad Pro and makes for more comfortable viewing angles with the set on your lap or on a table.

I also like that the Keyboard Folio protects the entire backside and magnetically clicks into place on the iPad Pro using over 100 magnets embedded into the tablet’s aluminum backside.

Apple’s keyboard is good, but I found myself wishing it had a trackpad like on the Surface Pro’s Touch Keyboard. I know you can touch the iPad’s screen and maybe Apple thinks the Pencil is a good enough mouse replacement, but’s easier to have a cursor input at keyboard level instead of having to reach up and tap with a finger, or the Pencil, or use a two-finger gesture on the screen to call up a cursor when I’m doing things like typing thousands of words (like this review which I wrote about a third on an iPad Pro before going back to my MacBook Pro because it was easier to multitask).

I don’t even know where to begin with the new iPad Pro’s performance. The A12X Bionic chip powering the tablets is such a monster and so far ahead of any other competing mobile chip that it’s perhaps time to stop classifying it as mobile silicon.

When the original iPad Pro launched in 2015 with A9X chip, Apple touted its power as comparable to desktop performance and our own tests confirmed(opens in a new tab) the speed.

Three years later, the new iPad Pros take performance to another level. The 7-nanometer A12X Bionic’s based on the A12 Bionic inside of the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR and though they’re similar, the A12X Bionic is considerably more powerful thanks to its 8-core design versus the 6-cores in A12 Bionic.

Apple says the chip is up to 35 percent faster on single-core and up to 90 percent faster on multi-core processes. I broke out the reliable Geekbench 4(opens in a new tab) to test both claims.

Using the average of three CPU tests, the new iPad Pro scored 5,027 on single-core and 18,050 on multi-core compared to the 2017 iPad Pro’s 3,964 single-core and 9,529 multi-core scores. That makes the new iPad Pros 27 percent faster on single-core and 89 percent faster on multi-core — all within Apple’s claims.

As I’ve said over and over again, synthetic benchmarks like these CPU scores give you an idea of where the new iPads pro rank in comparison to other devices. But what you really want to know is what kind of tangible performance you can get from such power and will it actually make a difference in your work.

I can’t speak for every kind of person’s needs, but I can tell you editing video on the go is not easy. Ask any video producer and they’ll recommend using a beefy laptop with a discrete graphics processor, especially if you’re crunching 4K video files, and rendering lots of transitions and effects, etc.

The more powerful your CPU and GPU, the faster videos will render and export. So I put the iPad Pro’s to the task.

Using Adobe Premiere Rush CC, I created a 3-minute long project file consisting of five 4K video clips (taken with an iPhone XR for our XR review), tossed in a title at the front and a “Subscribe” card at the end, added three video clip transitions (two dissolves and one dip-to-white), and color-graded two clips each with one filter preset.

The entire project weighed in at 179MB and although I had hoped to export the video in 4K, the highest settings you can export in Rush CC on mobile is 1080p at 30 fps. Since the videos were shot at 24 fps, I selected settings for 1080p and 24 fps, and then hit the export button.

I did this on multiples iOS devices running iOS 12.1 and took the average of three exports tests and here’s what I got (don’t worry, all devices were charged to 100 percent and remained plugged in to prevent any kind of performance throttling(opens in a new tab) from depleted battery health:

• 12.9-inch iPad Pro (2018): 54 seconds
• 10.5-inch iPad Pro (2017): 1 minute and 24 seconds
• 9.7-inch iPad Air 2 (2014): 7 minutes and 18 seconds
• iPhone X (2017): 1 minute and 56 seconds
• iPhone XS (2018): 1 minute and 13 seconds

I also did the export test on my MacBook running the newest version of macOS Mojave and a Surface Pro running the latest version of Windows 10 Pro:

• 12-inch MacBook (2015) with 1.2Ghz Core M + 8GB of RAM: 2 minutes and 1 second
• Surface Pro (2017) with 2.6GHz Core i5 + 8GB of RAM: 8 minutes and 8 seconds
• 13-inch MacBook Air (2018) with 1.6GHz Core i5 + 8GB of RAM: 8 minutes and 8 seconds

Breaking down the numbers, the new iPad Pro exported the video 56 percent faster than last-gen iPad Pro, and 711 percent faster than a four-year-old iPad Air 2, and 115 percent faster than the iPhone X.

The performance gap is smaller compared to the iPhone XS — the new iPad Pro exported the video 35 percent faster — but still speedier. The time saved from waiting for an export to be finished is time that can be put towards uploading or doing something else.

Even more nuts is the iPad Pro’s performance compared to laptops. It exported the video 124 percent faster than my 2015 12-inch MacBook and 804 percent faster than a 2017 Surface Pro and even the new 2018 MacBook Air(opens in a new tab).

These are preliminary performance tests, too. It’s up to developers to optimize their apps to tap into the A12X Bionic’s insane power so it’s very possible better code could mean even faster performance.

Many of the apps I tested such as Rush CC, Lightroom CC, Procreate, and others weren’t optimized for the the iPad Pro’s screen resolution (you’ll know because they don’t fill out the entire display), but I expect them to be updated on the day of the tablets’ release or shortly after.

The A12X Bionic’s raw power makes everything on iOS (and I mean everything) feel faster. Beautiful 3D games like Asphalt 9 and Fortnite run smooth and rarely with any framerate issues. It’s very telling when Fortnite at “high” graphics settings is playable at 30 fps, but a 2017 top-of-the-line 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro with discrete graphics can barely load(opens in a new tab) it without lag.

Battery life is also as excellent as on previous iPads. Apple advertises "up to 10 hours" for mixed usage and I got just about exactly that for reading, playing some games, watchings lots of YouTube and Netflix, and typing out some of this review. More intensive apps like Rush CC and iMovie will drain your battery quicker, so keep that in mind. But even still, I still got around 7-8 hours while working with pro-level apps.

iOS 12(opens in a new tab) on iPad Pro is, well… iOS 12. With iOS 11(opens in a new tab), Apple gave the iPad Pros a much-needed productivity boost that better used the larger displays. Features like Slide Over, which lets you open a third app on top of two split-screen apps, drag-and-drop, a dock that holds more apps, screenshot annotations in Notes, and the Files app narrowed the gap between an iPad Pro and, say, a Surface Pro or a Chromebook, but not by a whole lot.

While there are a whole bunch of new features in iOS 12 (see our full review here(opens in a new tab)), most of them are available on both iPhone and iOS with very few of them being iPad-only. It’s nice to see the Stocks and Voice Memos app finally on the iPad, and the improved versions of Apple News, Apple Books (formerly iBooks), and Apple Music present on iPad, but I’d love to see Apple rethink not just these apps, but iOS as a whole for the iPad.

Sure, iOS 12 uses the new gestures first introduced with the iPhone X (short swipe from the Home bar to return to the homescreen, swipe up towards the middle to bring up all your recent apps, and swipe up from the top left and right corners to bring down notifications and the Control Center), all of which are very easy to get used to, but fundamental 2-in-1 laptop things like cursor support, or keyboard shortcuts, or real windowed-apps are either nonexistent or still not yet available in many apps.

I’m aware that iOS is an entirely different way of doing things compared to macOS and Windows 10 and I don’t know what’s the best solution to make it more like these desktop operating systems without compromising its lightness. All I know is the more Apple keeps cramming in so much power into the iPad Pro, the more I wish it could do more macOS things.

iOS 13’s still a year’s out, but I strongly feel Apple needs to revamp iOS for the iPad Pro to really make the hardware more compelling.

No gadget review is complete without any kind of camera tests. An iPad’s no iPhone, which means you’re not gonna be using it to take many photos or videos.

So it’s not really disappointing to see the iPad Pro’s get somewhat of a camera downgrade. The rear camera’s still a 12-megapixel shooter, but Apple’s changed it from a six-element lens to a five-element lens and removed optical image stabilization.

I was upset at first — you always want a better camera in every new product — but after hearing Apple’s explanation and thinking about the number of times I’ve used my iPads for shooting photos, I understood the change.

One: Most people don’t use their iPad cameras and when they do, it’s mostly for things like taking photos of notes or documents or scanning QR codes. And two: Because the iPad Pro is so thin and the position of the camera now needs to sit behind the display (the camera on the previous-gen iPad Pros sat in the space within the top bezel), Apple had to redesign the camera to fit in the aluminum case.

If you’re scanning documents, then no big loss. But if you’re in the minority and do shoot with your iPad, you’re gonna notice some loss in sharpness from shaky hands.

On the bright side (pun intended), the iPad Pro cameras take photos with Smart HDR, which increases the dynamic range and brings out the shadows and highlights.

Selfies, on the other hand, get a couple more options. Here’s how a regular selfie compares:

And here’s Portrait mode and the four different studio lighting effects:

Portrait mode is only available on the front-facing camera. Why can’t the iPad Pro’s single-rear camera shoot portrait mode shots using the Neural Engine and machine learning to isolate backgrounds like on the iPhone XR? Apple wouldn’t say or even tell me if it’s something that could be added later in a software update.

And if you’re shooting video (more power to you if you wanna be the next Martin Scorsese shooting with a tablet), the iPad Pros shoot 4K at 30 or 60 fps. Previous iPads could only record at 30 fps.

Using the the 12.9-inch iPad Pro for the last week, I kept asking myself: who are these powerful new tablets for?

And I kept coming back to the creative professional — the niche user who is willing to change the way they’re used to doing things on a laptop or desktop — and not the mainstream user. You can of course buy an iPad Pro because maybe you have to have the latest and greatest Apple device and it’ll be a great consumption tablet, but you wouldn’t be getting your money’s worth.

It’s challenging to convince people who have already established a way of working to create with new tools and in a different way. It definitely felt weird at first for me to edit a video by essentially “drawing” with it using an Apple Pencil with the iPad Pro laid flat on a table instead of on a display parallel to my face. But after a few hours doing things in this new way, it felt natural(opens in a new tab). Working on a video felt new and the lightbulbs were going off in my head like they haven’t in ages.

This physical closeness with digital content creation is a paradigm shift from mouse and keyboard. On a laptop or computer, you click on things and it feels mechanical and inhuman. With an iPad Pro, you’re touching the glass with your fingers, you’re slicing clips or drawing lines with the Pencil, and you’re feeling the words as you type them out on a keyboard and touching them on the screen when you fix typos.

It’s such an intimate creation process that it made me realize that Apple’s not merely trying to change my or your old habits. Apple’s not trying to make the iPad Pro a laptop replacement because the device isn't one. It’s trying to do something bigger: invent a new way of creating for a new generation that is not bound to the old computing laws of clicking a mouse.

For tomorrow’s creators, creating on iPad Pros will be normal. The iPad Pros already have the power to make and design the rich and high-quality visual and audio content for tomorrow. The device, instruments, and apps are no different than when creators shifted from analog to digital with the advent of personal computers decades ago.

Just like with the original Mac, the new iPad Pros are made for creators who will gladly embrace the costs because it makes things so much easier and faster. The new iPad Pros are only expensive if you buy one and don’t create things with it. Otherwise, they’re a steal for anyone who wants the future, today.