Apple’s iPad Pro Review: Extraordinary Hardware for Those Who Want Tablet-First Computing

A tablet is an in-betweener, for use cases when you want more screen real estate than a phone, and more intimacy — in form factor and interface — than a laptop. Research shows that most tablets are used for light computing tasks: watching TV and movies, social media, personal email, casual games, sketching, photo editing, and web browsing. Portability is high: a tablet can be held in your hand, and Apple’s tablets offer convenient 5G options that its laptops lack. Apple’s entry-level 10th gen iPad fills this role well. For serious drawing, drafting, and photo work you’ll want to step up to at least the iPad Air for the higher resolution color-accurate display. You’ll also get significantly better performance, which is not only useful for those photo edits, but also means a longer lifespan in terms of software support. However, Apple has long believed that there are people who want to use tablets as primary computing devices, and the iPad Pro serves that customer.

Strictly from a price and weight standpoint, the iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard demand comparisons with laptops. The configuration that Apple sent over, a 13” iPad Pro with a 10-core CPU Apple Silicon M4, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, 5G, Magic Keyboard, and Apple Pencil Pro sells for $2448. You could economize on storage, but then you lose the RAM — and you’d still be spending as much or more than a well-equipped MacBook. The new iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard are lighter than before, but combined weigh 2.7 lbs — exactly the same as a 13” MacBook Air. If you want a laptop instead, Apple will be delighted to sell you one. However, if you want a handheld form factor, touch-first and (mostly) single-app-at-a-time user experience, the iPad Pro is the clear market leader. There are two aspects of the new iPad Pro that make it worth buying even as an upgrade from prior models – design and display – and one that makes it a safe investment going forward – performance.

Design

The iPad Pro is lighter than before and remarkably thin. The new iPad Pro weighs in at less than 1.3 lbs, down from 1.5 lbs, and it is the thinnest product-with-a-display that Apple has ever built. Did I get out my calipers and iPod nano to check? Of course I did. But this is more than an exercise in aesthetics marketing: the difference is absolutely noticeable. In the past I always asked Apple for the 11” model, but the new designs opens up the 13” iPad to people who plan to use it as a handheld device while sitting on a chair or in bed. The extra screen real estate is useful for both work and play, but I found it especially crucial for anything that uses split screens. I did not try to forcibly bend the iPad Pro in half — I am not Zack Nelson – but it did feel structurally solid when I applied a small amount of pressure.

Display

I won’t fault deep-pocketed consumers if they buy the iPad Pro just to watch movies: the Tandem OLED screen is absolutely stunning. While the mini-LED on the last 13” iPad Pro (but not the 11”) had some brightness advantages, display tech was the main area where Apple had been behind Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S. With the new iPad Pro, Apple has leapfrogged ahead. Watching movies and premium TV on the iPad Pro means dramas with deep shadow detail and accurate skin tones, sci-fi with inky black space and super bright Dolby Vision highlights, and animation with dazzling, saturated colors. The Tandem OLED technology allows the OLED display to get incredibly bright — up to 1600 nits in peak HDR and 1000 nits for all content – so I had no difficulty watching movie clips near a bright window at my local pizza store. The iPad Pro’s speakers are good, too, playing loud and clear and with a sense of space well past the dimensions when playing Dolby Atmos content. It does lack lower bass — there’s only so much you can do to defy physics when you consider the size of the speaker enclosures.

Performance

The Apple Silicon M2 in the 2022 iPad Pro is plenty performant, but to drive the Tandem OLED display required new silicon, and efficiency gains of the M4 enabled Apple to shave millimeters and grams off without hurting battery life or your hands (it never got hot in my testing). The M4 is also faster and has dramatically more AI processing power, which is mostly future-proofing today* unless you plan to do AI research on your iPad, but there are tantalizing hints of how to put this power to use in some of the new apps.

To establish at least some idea of the M4’s limits on non-AI tasks I ran Geekbench 6 on the iPad Pro and a variety of other systems for context; suffice it to say that Apple is not lying about the M4 being a big jump over the prior model’s M2. The iPad Pro is dramatically faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in Samsung’s premier Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra. It is faster and much more powerful per watt than Intel and AMD systems used in Windows tablets, and appears to handily beat Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite as well, at least on single-core tasks (I remain extremely eager to get hands on with that platform, which should be the Windows performance-per-watt leader). GPU performance is harder to assess cross-platform because of software optimization, especially in games, but Metal performance is nearly double that of my M2-16GB MacBook Air 15. It pales next to the M3 Max 64GB I have in a 14” MacBook Pro, so one can only imagine what an M4 Max will look like when fed equivalent RAM resources.

Geekbench 6Apple iPad Pro M4 16GBApple MacBook Air 15" M2 16GBApple MacBook Pro 14" M3 Max 64GB Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra Snapdragon 8 Gen 2OnePlus Pad Dimensity 9000
CPU single-core38462649288617871112
CPU multi-core14608100972110649583357
GPU - metal5341328532154958

Using the iPad Pro

The iPad Pro can certainly handle my workload as an analyst. This mainly consists of Microsoft 365 apps (quite full-featured on iPadOS), web research sessions where I confirm details I once knew, and bludgeoning together pictures and corporate logos for report thumbnails. However, as capable as it is, iPadOS’s peripheral support lags a PC, and even on the go, the interface is not as flexible for the way I live-blog press conferences as MacOS or Windows. I have gotten it to work, and I am tempted by the iPad Pro for movies on flights and integrated 5G at the press conference venues. But I still prefer a laptop that is designed to bounce among different apps and won’t tip backwards when I reach out to take a picture with my phone.

Perhaps because Apple recognizes that an iPad is not superior to a laptop for laptop things, the company is highlighting creative use cases for the iPad Pro. Apple promotes “the intersection of technology and liberal arts” across all of its products, but the portability inherent in a tablet really does lend itself to music, photo, video production on the go if you have the hardware and software to support it.

There are a handful of apps that take full advantage of the NPU (“Neural Engine” in Apple Speak) that takes up a huge amount of space on the die, and I spent time with one of them — the upcoming version of Apple’s Logic Pro. This is a far more complicated music creation app than GarageBand, and I didn’t get much farther than the tutorials. But it was great fun to create splits out of a combined track, and I could get AI session players to jazz up their keyboard fills and change their rhythm on the fly. I didn’t test Final Cut Pro for iPad myself, but I got a demo at the Apple Event where layers were created in a video edit with a single tap on the screen – something that would take hours to do manually. As developers add AI functionality to their apps, the M4 iPad Pro will still feel fast while older iPads either won’t get the new capabilities or they’ll have to wait while the system grinds through CPU and GPU resources to accomplish the same task.

Apple promises the same 10 hours of mixed use per charge as other iPads. In practice, I exceeded this by as much as two hours and comfortably took it with me on the go without a charger in the bag. However, this is still a relative drawback of the thin and light form factor; Apple specs the 13” MacBook Air at 15 hours of web browsing.

*The Usual Software Caveat

Apple famously integrates its hardware, software, and services across its device ecosystem. Apple gave me the new iPad Pro 13” to review last week, but software upgrades are expected as part of WWDC in June, and any new features announced there won’t reach the hardware in early Fall. The software wait is not all that relevant for most of the iPad line, but the iPad Pro is where Apple has the farthest gap between hardware capabilities and software. This means that anyone reviewing the new iPad Pro 13” now is liable to undersell its capabilities that are mere months away. That could include new AI features that take advantage of the huge jump in NPU performance on the iPad Pro’s M4, and all the “multi” areas where iPadOS lags MacOS: better multi-tasking, multi-window, multi-monitor, and perhaps even multi-user support. Still, I can only review what I have here today – and it turns out that’s plenty.

The iPad/Mac Convergence Caveat

For those of you waiting for Apple to merge the iPad and the Mac …don’t. Apple is philosophically opposed to merging direct (finger/touchscreen) and indirect (mouse/trackpad-to-monitor) interfaces. Apple sells tens of billions of dollars in iPads and Macs; this is not a broken business model. If you want both, well, as long as you can afford both, Apple built Continuity software to let you extend your Mac onto the iPad or easily start projects on one and continue them on the other. While you won’t get a touchscreen iPad Mac, you can be certain that Tandem OLED displays will eventually make their way into some Macs or Studio Displays in the future, and Apple M4 silicon will be adopted throughout the Mac line in the coming year or so.

Hands On with the Magic Keyboard

Apple does not release attach rate numbers for the iPad, but I suspect that as many as 80% of iPad Pro buyers purchase a keyboard to go with it. Apple redesigned the Magic Keyboard for the new iPad, and it is considerably lighter and feels better to use than in the past. Key travel isn’t long, but it is extremely tactile and I genuinely enjoy typing on it. However, one key gripe is that even though the new function row blesses us with an Esc key for programmers, Apple couldn’t find space for a proper forward delete key for us typists. There is also no Fn key for those with Mac muscle memory (Fn-delete), so you’ll need to continue twisting your fingers into control-D.

The Magic Keyboard still keeps the iPad Pro at angles that are top heavy; the combination doesn’t tip over on a flat surface, but on your lap you will need to press down on the palm rests to keep it stable. This isn’t a problem during active use, but if you aren’t careful and lift both your arms up at once, your $1650-and-up combo will tumble backwards onto the floor.

Hands On with the Pencil Pro

Apple added several features to the Apple Pencil Pro: Find My, a “squeeze” gesture with haptic feedback, and rotation for nib control. Find My is the first thing I enabled after pairing it with the iPad Pro as I have a habit of leaving the Pencil in a bag or in a different room and thinking that it is lost forever. Barrel roll is great for calligraphy and provides one more reason to buy an iPad Pro instead of a Wacom tablet, at least for on-the-go work. The new squeeze-to-palette feature is wonderful, as it greatly speeds up workflow in apps that support it. Pre-launch it didn’t appear to be implemented in ProCreate, Fresco, Flow, or Paper, but it was seamless in Freeform, with nice tactile feedback. I expect that every major app that uses Pencil input will be updated in the coming months.

Drawing and painting on the iPad Pro with the Pencil Pro is rewarding, though note-taking still feels like writing on slippery glass compared to dedicated e-ink notepads with more textured surfaces. I also still wish that Apple’s Pencil Pro had a flip-to-eraser feature; it is my most frequently used function on Amazon Kindle Scribe Premium Pen when taking notes. The Kindle Scribe allows note synchronization with Microsoft OneNote; the iPad lets you use actual OneNote, no synchronization required.

One final Pencil note: writing, drawing, and drafting aren’t the only reasons to use a stylus. Tint is a beautiful and calming puzzle game that is simply stunning on the iPad Pro’s 13” Tandem OLED display, and, while you can play with your finger and don’t need any of the Pencil Pro’s added features, using the Pencil Pro as a brush is the perfect input method.

Final Analysis

Techsponential is a market analysis and advisory firm, so I’ll wrap up with some market analysis. iPad sales have been down both quarter over quarter and year over year. Most of this is due to post-pandemic market saturation, but the lack of any new products in the category certainly played a role, too. The new iPad Pro and iPad Airs should help revenue recover, especially the major new design, technology, and higher starting prices on the iPad Pro. However, the bigger change is Apple clarifying the lineup and making the 10th gen iPad the default starting point. The 10th gen iPad is a much better product than the 9th gen, and it is now $100 more affordable than before. It is also a small stealthy price hike, raising the entry point into iPad-land from the 9th gen’s $330 (often discounted at big box retailers) to $350.

There are competitors to the iPad Pro, but premium Android tablets have struggled to overcome Apple’s early and consistent advantage in tablet-optimized apps. Google’s Pixel tablet is aiming at Amazon’s Echo Show as a home hub, not the iPad Pro for creative and personal productivity. Samsung continues to offer an even larger 14.6” Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra, but Apple now has a brighter OLED display, and Samsung will need to respond to Apple’s software and silicon lead. Lenovo has innovative cross-device software for its phones, laptops, and tablets, but the tablets themselves are undistinguished. In China, Huawei has premium tablets with its own rich ecosystem capabilities, but it, too, lags Apple in tablet-optimized app availability.

Windows convertibles have good keyboard-and-mouse productivity software but the interface – and most apps – aren’t designed for regular use as a tablet. They are typically considered as laptop substitutes, not as iPad Pro alternatives.

The Apple Silicon M4 is a performance-per-watt and AI powerhouse. With a six-month update cycle Apple has shown that its silicon team has not been slowed by personnel changes or cowed by competition. The PC OEMs aren’t overly threatened by the iPad Pro, but as Apple starts putting the M4 and its variants into laptops and desktops, they will need an answer. Even though it looks like the M4 will outperform the Snapdragon X Elite on some metrics, Intel and AMD are further behind on power efficiency; Apple speeding up its silicon cadence could push more PC manufacturers to Qualcomm as a way of closing the gap no matter what device form factor they choose.

To discuss the implications of this report on your business, product, or investment strategies, contact Techsponential at avi@techsponential.com.

Unboxing the iPad Pro 13

AI, Hybrid Work, Silicon, Smartphones/ComputingAvi Greengart