The iPad has now gone as far as its software will let it. The new 9.7-inch Apple iPad Pro (starting at $599) is a powerful, portable tablet with high-end features and a high-end price. But the limits of iOS and iOS apps mean it's no laptop replacement. Like its big brother, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, it's more expensive than the iPad or Android tablets, but isn't as capable as Windows 2-in-1s in the $800-1000 price range. So while the iPad Pro 9.7 has a terrific processor, a gorgeous screen, and is more affordable than the larger iPad Pro, the apps available for iOS don't justify its high price.
Pricing and Physical Features
The 9.7-inch iPad Pro comes in six models. Wi-Fi-only versions are $599 for 32GB, $749 for 128GB, and $899 for 256GB. Cellular versions cost $729 for 32GB, $879 for 128GB, and $1,029 for 256GB. The Smart Keyboard cover adds $149, and the Apple Pencil stylus is $99.
The Pro 9.7 is the exact same size, shape, and weight as the iPad Air 2: 9.40 by 6.60 by 0.24 inches (HWD) and 0.96 pound. It comes in dark gray, gold, rose gold, or silver. The most visible change from the iPad Air is how the camera lens slightly protrudes from the tablet body, because the Pro is using the 12-megapixel iPhone 6s camera rather than the 8-megapixel iPhone 6 camera on Apple's other recent tablets. (No, it doesn't rock when it's set down on a table.) The front camera has been upgraded to the 5-megapixel unit from the iPhone 6, too. If you look along the edges of the tablet, you can see the new quad speaker setup. As with other iPads, the only port is a single Lightning connector.
The True Tone display is new, too. It's the same 2,048-by-1,536 resolution screen as you get on the Air 2, but it's less blue because of ambient light sensors that change the display's white point to respond to surrounding lighting. You can turn that off (which makes the display bluer). It's a nice feature, but far from a must-have. While Apple claims the screen has a wider color gamut than previous iPads, I found that difficult to see.
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The most useful advance that I found from the iPad Air 2 is the new speaker arrangement. Not only are the speakers about 6dB louder than the iPad Air 2's speakers, their more diverse placement makes for a richer sound that surrounds you much better than the speakers on the iPad Air 2 do.
Accessories and Networking
My review unit came with Apple's Smart Keyboard cover, which docks to a magnetic connector on the bottom of the tablet. It's a lightweight and very usable keyboard. It's narrower than the 12.9-inch iPad Pro keyboard, but Apple kept the overall space around the letter and number keys the same by shrinking the function keys around the edges. That's smart, and it makes for an unusually pleasurable typing experience—I had less finger fatigue than I do typing on Logitech's Ultrathin keyboard cover, our favorite keyboard for the iPad Air.
The Pro also works with the Apple Pencil ($79.00 at Amazon) , which is smoother and better than other available tablet styli. The more expensive Surface Pro 4, for instance, comes with a pen that clips right onto the side of the tablet, but it feels cheap and chunky, and the tablet's screen flexes a bit when you press hard. The Apple Pencil is much more solid and well-balanced, feels more realistically grippy on the screen, and has options for tilt and shading sensitivity that other styli lack.
Like the iPad Pro 12.9, the Pro 9.7 has dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi with MIMO. In practice, I got the same excellent Wi-Fi speeds and performance on this iPad as on the 12.9-inch Pro, and significantly better performance than I saw on the iPad Air 2. While the iPad Air 2 topped out around 120Mbps on a 150Mbps connection, the Pro models were able to get 150Mbps; they also got significantly faster speeds at the edge of the Wi-Fi cell, sometimes to the tune of 60Mbps versus 10Mbps.
For LTE connections, the Pro 9.7 has the embedded Apple SIM, which lets you activate the tablet with day passes or monthly subscriptions on AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, or GigSky, a roaming provider. Unlike all previous iPads, the Pro 9.7 includes band 12, which extends T-Mobile's suburban and rural coverage, and band 30, which alleviates congestion in some AT&T cities. But I don't find those additions blockbusters the way they are for the iPhone SE, because cellular service is mostly a supplement to Wi-Fi on iPads, rather than its primary form of Internet access.
Performance
The iPad Pro 9.7 uses a 2.26GHz Apple A9x processor with 2GB RAM, which provides performance in between the iPad Air 2 and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. With Geekbench scores of 3,081 single-core and 5,294 dual-core, it's still faster than any Android tablet. The Pro 9.7 benchmarks better than Intel Atom-based Windows tablets or the 12-inch Intel Core M-based MacBook, and competitively with a two-year-old MacBook Air. Its graphics hardware is also strong, notching 32fps on the GFXBench OpenGL ES 3.0 Manhattan test, just like on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. In other words, this is completely laptop-class hardware, able to crunch numbers and generate images as well as Macs or Windows devices.
But, of course, it's running iOS. We have a full review of iOS 9.3, and its split-screen multitasking is an absolute must for anyone trying to get work done. iOS still has better-written, better-looking tablet apps than Android does, with more and better business and productivity apps available. In terms of gaming and multimedia playback, the Pro is spectacular: Streaming video and immersive driving games that use the built-in tilt sensor pair gorgeously with the bright screen and quad speakers. But once a tablet costs over $600, it's not really competing with Android, and iOS's sandboxed file system and often feature-limited apps still don't compete well with the options available for Windows. More on that in the next section.
The 12-megapixel camera on the new iPad is very similar to the one on the iPhone 6s and the iPhone SE. The most standout new features are 4K video recording and continuous autofocus. With tablets, don't think about using the main camera for family snapshots—think of it rather as a tool for computer vision or augmented reality. More pixels can really help there.
The front-facing camera on a tablet, meanwhile, is for video conferencing and live streaming, among other things. While the sensor has bumped from a grainy 1.2MP up to 5MP, it's still only capable of 720p video, which is disappointing. There's no obvious reason for that, especially since most conferencing and live streaming platforms now support 1080p or better.
In our battery test, which streams a video over Wi-Fi at maximum brightness, I got 5 hours, 38 minutes. That's much better than the 3 hours, 51 minutes I got on the larger iPad Pro, and slightly better than the 5 hours, 15 minutes I got on the iPad Air 2. Remember, cutting the screen brightness to half—as you do most of the time in real-life usage—generally almost doubles that, giving you the 10 hours of battery life that Apple predicts.
But Is It Pro?
Apple is pushing the iPad Pro as a laptop replacement, but it isn't. The iPad Pro simply doesn't do the kind of work we do on laptops as well as a laptop does. But it does new kinds of work, tablet-centric work, that's still relatively inchoate and hasn't entirely been defined yet.
Big-name professional apps are now appearing on iOS, but they're generally de-featured in some way. Microsoft Office is great for basic document creation, but it doesn't include all of the features you find on Office for Windows. (I rely a lot on Excel macros, for instance.) Pro artist apps like Photoshop, Procreate, and Sketches get basic document creation down pat, but fall short when you need to do the kinds of layering, correction, editing, and export tasks that many artists need to finish their jobs. There are a lot of PostgreSQL database clients, but none are quite as convenient to use as Postico on the Mac. You can absolutely edit multiple 4K video streams, but the workflow in the touch-only iMovie is awkward when you're managing a large library of clips (and you can't attach an external hard drive with footage). In the professional world, there's also a huge library of line-of-business apps that have always been custom Windows solutions, including chunks of our own content management system here at PCMag.
The best "pro" apps I've seen on the iPad are usually designed to be used standing up or walking around, including point-of-sale apps, airline or hotel check-in apps, architecture and real estate CAD or viewing apps, astronomy apps, and others. These are apps that never worked well on laptops anyway. And for these apps, I find the 9.7-inch iPad better than the 12.9-inch iPad, because it's more portable. The 12.9-inch model is great if you're working on a drafting table or at a desk, but it's unwieldy to hold in the crook of your arm. The 9.7-inch model can be used with the Pencil to take notes while standing up without awkwardness, for instance. So on one level, it is more Pro than even its bigger sibling.
Comparisons and Conclusions
The 9.7-inch iPad Pro is more powerful than the iPad Air 2, but I'm having trouble justifying the increased price for most buyers. For $499, you can get a 64GB iPad Air 2 with similar size, shape, and performance. The Pro's sweet spot is the 128GB model, which costs $749 (or $879 with cellular). Add the keyboard and Pencil to take advantage of the tablet's "pro" features, and you're up to $997 (or $1,127 with cellular).
Were it priced like the iPad Air 2, the Pro would be a good buy. But the Pro lives in a sort of uncanny valley of the tablet market, where it's priced like high-quality Windows 2-in-1s such as the HP Spectre X2 ($449.00 at Amazon) or the Microsoft Surface Pro 4, but can't run fully featured Windows or Mac business apps. While our reviews of the Spectre and Surface Pro 4 make them look more expensive than the iPad Pro, that's because we reviewed higher-end models. A 128GB Spectre X2 with keyboard costs $799; a 128GB Surface Pro 4 with keyboard and pen costs $1,028. That's pretty close to the price of a similarly equipped iPad Pro.
Business applications, in general, are still designed for a mouse-and-keyboard paradigm rather than a touch-centric approach, and I don't think that's going to change in the next few years. iOS applications also tend to have fewer features than their counterpart Mac OS or Windows applications. Most business and vertical iPad apps, meanwhile, don't need the Pencil support, quad speakers, or screen tweaks you get with the Pro, and so they'll work perfectly well on an iPad Air 2.
The big exception here is if you intend to draw or take notes with the Apple Pencil, which provides an unmatched stylus experience. I'd also suggest the price premium might be worth it if you intend to use the internal speakers frequently, as the new quad speakers are a major improvement over those in the iPad Air 2. Overall, though, while the 9.7-inch iPad Pro is a very good tablet, the iPad Air 2 and the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 remain our Editors' Choice picks.
The 9.7-inch iPad Pro is the most powerful Apple tablet you can comfortably carry, but it can't replace a traditional laptop or 2-in-1 for the most common business tasks.
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