A day with the 9.7-inch iPad Pro and its accessories

Earlier today, I was handed a 9.7-inch iPad Pro and a gaggle of accessories in a big bag with my name on it, which is pretty standard procedure when companies hand review units off to you. And then I was told there was no embargo.

For those of you who don’t know, pre-release review hardware is often given under the condition that you not publish anything about it until a certain date and time. It’s unavoidable in access-based journalism, and it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, agreeing to let a company dictate when you can publish something gives the company tighter control of its message, and outlets that aren't included in that embargo are at a disadvantage compared to publications that are. On the other, it serves as a sort of safety cushion for reviewers, giving us time to test things thoroughly and prepare articles for publication without fear that we’ll be beaten to the punch by some competing outlet.

We’re flying without that particular safety cushion for the new iPad Pro, so we’ll try to split the difference. Today, I’ll give you some expanded impressions of the hardware and accessories based on the few hours I’ve been able to use it (as opposed to the 10 to 15 minutes that are typical for a hands-on session). Next week, I’ll expand those impressions into a full article with additional observations, more performance and battery data, and other thoughts about the new iPad Pro’s place in Apple’s lineup and the wider market.

Look, feel, and screen

The 9.7-inch iPad Pro is a whole lot like an iPad Air 2 in many ways. The size, screen resolution, and weight are all identical, as are Apple’s stated battery life figures for both tablets (10 hours of Wi-Fi Web usage, 9 hours of cellular usage). If you use your iPad primarily as a consumption device, there frankly isn’t much here to encourage you to upgrade.

Most improvements are hard to spot unless you're looking for them. The screen, for instance, is nice. But it’s only nice in ways that you’ll really notice if you’re a stickler for color accuracy or see an older and newer iPad side-by-side. For instance, the screen’s DCI P3 color gamut (a feature originally implemented in the most recent 4K and 5K iMacs) means it can display deeper and more accurate shades of green and red, but it’s not nearly as impactful as the switch from a non-Retina display to a Retina one.

The True Tone feature is subtle. The screen has four sensors that subtly affect the white balance based on ambient light, something Apple says is meant to make the iPad’s screen more accurately resemble a sheet of paper. The screen I’m looking at is just a little orangey right now because of the dim ambient lighting I’m typing this in. Turning the True Tone feature off (something you’ll probably want to do if you’re adjusting photos for color accuracy) makes the screen look unexpectedly cool and harsh, though I know for a fact it’s not something I would have complained about before seeing the new iPad Pro.

Another common question is about the “embedded Apple SIM” that the company lists on the iPad Pro’s product pages. The Apple SIM is a multi-carrier SIM card that lets the iPad connect to some cellular networks without specific SIM cards, which presumably simplifies the manufacturing and sale of the LTE-enabled iPads. But for carriers that don’t work with the Apple SIM, Apple still provides a good-old-regular-old nano SIM tray on the edge of the device.

The last major difference to bring up in this quick impressions post is the camera bump on the back, a bump that exists because this iPad uses the same camera as the current high-end iPhone (a first; iPads typically use serviceable but inferior cameras). In the iPhone 6 and 6S phones, that camera bump causes the body of the phone to wobble a bit when placed on a flat surface. A similar sort of wobble would be bad for the iPad Pro, particularly for people who want to lay the tablet flat on a table and draw on it with the Apple Pencil. Happily, the iPad is so big that it doesn’t wobble at all—the camera bump is just an aesthetic annoyance, not a functional one.

Accessories

Let’s begin with the Smart Cover. iPad Air and Air 2 Smart Covers won’t work with the iPad Pro, not because they won’t physically fit but because Apple has changed the layout of the magnets that make the Smart Cover stick. Old Smart Covers will stick on the side of the tablet, but they won’t stick to the front or put the tablet to sleep automatically.

The new Smart Covers are pretty much the same as the old ones, but when you’re just using the cover by itself it hangs over the edge of the tablet just a little when closed in a way that looks and feels a little awkward when you’re handling it. I have dubbed this phenomenon “overflap,” and the overflap seems to be happening because Apple designed this particular Smart Cover to fit better with the Silicone Case rather than the iPad itself. Put on a Silicone Case (which covers the rear of the tablet and joins with the Smart Cover to provide full protection) and the Cover fits perfectly.

As of yet I have no strong opinion about the Apple Pencil and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro that I didn’t already have when I was imagining what a hypothetical 9.7-inch iPad with Apple Pencil support would be like. The smaller iPad is much better suited to being a quick sketchpad than the Pro, and if my usage is typical I think it’ll find a lot of fans among people who aren’t “artists” but do occasionally need to draw something or just want to start drawing more.

Finally, the Smart Keyboard. When I wrote about it yesterday, I criticized it for being frustrating because it’s noticeably smaller than the full-size version on the big iPad Pro. It’s still smaller than that keyboard, and after typing a couple thousand words on it, I can say that I still make more errors than I do when using a full-size keyboard. But Apple has made the keycaps smaller so that it can increase the amount of space between keys, which is ultimately what has saved it. A full-size keyboard is more comfortable, but not having the little keys jammed right up against each other makes the smaller Smart Keyboard more-or-less usable for extended stretches. I’m also confident that the same third-party keyboard makers who have made full-ish-sized keyboard cases for the iPad Airs will be able to repeat that feat when they make accessories with a Smart Connector.

Performance preview

I haven’t run tons of performances tests or any battery life tests on the smaller iPad Pro yet, but suffice it to say the A9X is still a pretty good mobile chip. Some basic numbers from Geekbench and GFXBench, mainstays of our testing suite:

The CPU in this A9X is clocked a little lower than the one in the 12.9-inch iPad Pro: about 2.15GHz instead of 2.25GHz. Its multi-threaded CPU performance also isn’t drastically better than the A8X in the iPad Air 2—the Air’s CPU cores are slower, but there are three of them to the A9X’s two. Single-threaded performance is still very good, though. Offscreen GPU performance, in which the GPU renders a scene at 1080p on all devices, is down quite a bit. This implies that the A9X's GPU has either been clocked lower, is throttling more, and it could even be a slightly different GPU altogether (though this seems unlikely for reasons of manufacturing and scale if nothing else). It could also be a function of reduced memory bandwidth, also visible in the Geekbench memory scores. Onscreen performance, which renders scenes at the screens' native resolutions, is about the same though, which means you should have no problems with any games or CAD apps on this iPad for the foreseeable future.

The other performance wrinkle is one that we reported earlier today—the smaller iPad Pro has 2GB of RAM instead of the 4GB in the larger version. For now, the majority of iPads have 1GB or even 512MB of RAM, so there’s not going to be a ton of memory pressure. In a couple of years, as older iPads stop being supported and more professional apps make their way to iOS, the smaller Pro’s 2GB may become more of a bottleneck.

That’s everything we’ve got to share about the smaller iPad for now. Having half the RAM of the larger version is a bummer, but in most other ways it's still best described as a smaller version of the big iPad Pro. If you’ve got specific questions, let us know, and we’ll try to answer as many as we can in our full review next week.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham