2021 Apple iPad Pro 12.9 Review - M1 and Mini LED Display By MobileTechReview

This is Lisa from mobile tech review, and this is the 2021 iPad Pro 12.9 inch, otherwise known as the one with the apple m1 CPU inside Apple Silicon and the mini LED display so yeah the m1 CPU. You can get an iMac. You can get an iPad crazy times that isn't it, and that probably means good things for the iPad. We'll talk about that. Also, we're going to talk about this mini LED display, which is stunning drop, dead, gorgeous verges on OLED for contrast levels and color saturation, but I know you have some concerns about that, and we are going to look at those now. So there are a lot of reviews of this iPad out already, I'm not going to do one of those here's, the specs, here's the charts kind of thing, because enough of that's out there, I'm going to give you more of a high level overview of my opinion of this product, including the saline things like the performance, the state of iPadOS and the display, and one of the things the new iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil is perfect for is editing PDFs and speaking of that, thanks to our video sponsor wonder share and their new PDF element for the iPad and with the m1, it's powerful enough to handle even long PDF documents in PDF element.

For example, I have a 200-page plus manual with illustrations, and I can do things like read edit markup and annotate PDFs. I can fill in and sign forms too. Obviously, with the manual you don't want to do that, but that's one of the most popular things people have to do these days need to sign a form, absolutely not a problem here they have a cloud service of their own. They also support iCloud Dropbox and a myriad selection of ways that you can get files in and out of the iPad. There's dark mode support.

Clearly, there's Apple Pencil support. So if you want to do things like annotate draw a circle around highlight, you've got that there and if you want to open and copy something from a Word file and paste it in or grab a JPEG and throw it, and you can do that too so. Grab your discount up to 50 off on the new PDF element, use the link in the description below and now back to our video. So the display on this is the same aspect: ratio as previous generation iPad and it's what they call their Dr display technology, a retina Dr whatever anyway, it's mini LEDs, which is becoming the rage in TVs now, and we're going to see this in more laptops. I've reviewed just a few laptops that have it, and what's with this led thing, and how good is it? It looks shockingly good if you're watching movies, that's where you're going to notice it the most the HDR effect is overwhelming.

It has 600 nits of brightness for normal use. Furthermore, it can go up to a thousand nits for the whole screen when watching movies or 1600 nits at small locations in a video. So that means I was watching the series, the rain on Netflix, which is beautiful cinematography, and it came alive in ways that I really just haven't seen before in terms of the bright points being bright and the dark points being nice and inky black, and often I watch using an OLED laptop, so you would think hey you can't get better than that. Well, you can because one of the drawbacks with OLED is they can't get that bright? So this one, the highlights in the scene were that much brighter. The color saturation is excellent.

We would come to expect that from apple honestly, I know some of you pick an iPad Pro instead of a MacBook in part, because you want a touch screen and apple ain't doing that on macs and because the display quality is even better than what you get on a Mac. Well, you got full p3 coverage here and the color saturation is excellent, and it's done in the usual apple way, which is to say towards color accuracy. You still have your true tone going on here, so it can adjust the lighting as appropriate. You know a little warmer or cooler depending on your ambient light, but the colors they're just beautiful looking on this, and I did compare it to an OLED. In fact, we have a Samsung Galaxy, s7 plus, which is an OLED tablet to compare it to, and even when looking at lg's HDR demo videos to show up their TVs or TVs and stuff.

I can't say that I could see a difference in terms of contrast between the two. Now you have 2500 local, zip dimming zones and 10 000 led backlights on this. The only drawback with mini led- and I know this has become a thing for some people already is there's like about a one millimeter wide border around the screen. That's a little less white when you're looking at a light background, just a slight bit of shading, because the LEDs can't go out beyond the display, or otherwise you'd have the opposite effect: a bright white halo around the edges of it. But I mean you have to really be looking for it, and it doesn't bother me, certainly you're not going to see it when you're watching a movie and even when creating art I use my iPad nightly for procreate to draw.

It really doesn't make enough of a difference to affect what I'm doing, because you're not really colorizing every pixel when you're drawing you're looking at the bigger picture, and you're often zooming in and when it comes to drawing on the edges. It's not the easiest thing. I think many artists do what I do, which is to move the canvas over more towards the center when working on the edges of a canvas anyway. So it's good stuff. The other issue that some people are worrying about is blooming.

So you have a black background again like these lg HDR test videos. You can see on YouTube a very black background and something very light, so they can show off the amazing contrast of the displays, and they're um. You won't see on OLED light blue typically, because each pixel is individually lit where it has its kind of like a pattern of every four pixels with mini led. Furthermore, you know, because of local dimming, it's possible to see a little of light blooming, but you have to really be looking at it and to me, it borders on maybe you're worrying about this too much if you're really obsessing on it. If you use a camera which is sensitive to light still, camera beat your phone is down, it sees differently than your eyeballs do, so it can exaggerate the light blooming.

So still photos don't go by those much on our video. You can see. We've got some of this, so you can see it for yourself. The light blooming is pretty well controlled, certainly better than looking at an IPS display when it comes to that and nothing that's at all disturbing now I did fire up the Kindle app and I did use the night mode. So you have a black background and white text, and really I didn't see big blooming around the paragraphs either there it was fine.

I don't know if kindles already updated something or whatever the deal is and when using the apple, pencil and testing in procreate black background drawing in white, then I don't think this is an issue. It's a stunning display, and should be because this is an expensive product right. It starts at 10.99 for the 128 gig Wi-Fi only model so as ever, it's potentially more expensive than buying a 13-inch, MacBook Air or a 13-inch MacBook Pro. You have to want the iPad experience now. This is an age-old discussion, and I'm not going to talk about is a tablet better or is a laptop better for you.

I think at this point this canoodles has been around long enough. You probably have an idea a lot of people get by using an iPad as a primary computer. It's fine! If you're doing office work. It's fine. If you're doing light, photoshop sort of work photo editing, it's fantastic.

If you're using something like procreate, I mean this is a tool that a lot of professionals use when they're at home, and they're working on their art concepts and all that sort of thing when it comes to using the Apple Pencil on this as delightful as ever. There are two things I would add about the display number one right away. I saw on first blush the colors and the color temperature were easier on the eyes without looking fake yellowy or something like that, it was just natural and non-straining on the eyes. I don't know how else to put it, I couldn't see any PWM on this. There is.

This is a laminated display, so there is no air gap. I would say that the display layer, the glass on top, is a little thicker, but not really enough of a difference to make a difference with the Apple Pencil, and I again I'm somebody who does spend almost every night drawing on the couch while watching TV, so just slight bit more there's no parallax, there's no offset it's good to be most like a computer though then you're going to have to buy something like that: 350 magic keyboard. So it gives me more spending and by the way, the Apple Pencil too, is another 129. So this is not an inexpensive product for those of you who can afford it and those of you who want it, those who want the best possible performance in a tablet. The best tablet OS sorry folks, but really google hasn't done anything with android for tablets to make it super desirable.

Have that we know this now and for those who want the best display. I mean nice right, you might say the tab s7 plus is giving it a run for its money and stuff, but it's an android tablet that still hurts in terms of application support and the OS support for it. Also, the thing to keep in mind is every year when I and other people review iPads. We say the hardware is leaps and bounds almost beyond where it should be so, hopefully, iPadOS will catch up and there's a new version coming soon. Io iPad, OS, 15, right and WWDC is coming up next month.

So you know: we've been through this for years, I'm going to say that take that with a grain of salt, so far apple has done a wonderful job of creating a tablet experience here, one that works on big screens, one that is fluid powerful, easy to use with your fingers. Fine with the pencil even adequate now with the keyboard and the accessory ecosystem- that's around it, but that still doesn't mean that apple is going to take it to the next step with iPadOS 15. Things like. Yes, we have a basic file manager, some file structure thing, but it's still a headache sometimes, when I have to get things on and off, especially things that are corner cases, they're, not like what you would put on. iCloud drive, you're doing this stuff for work, you're transferring databases around any of that sort of thing.

So again, you know who you are. If this does the job for you for college work for some people, this can be just fine for other people. Like me, I manage websites, I do web development, I do video editing and all that sort of thing, and I have to work with massive storage, recording 4k video on external cameras and that's just still a nightmare to try to get into the iPad and do it in something like. I me movie or suffusion, which, by the way, do fly on this and that's not something. That's even up for grabs the performance on.

That's fine, but it's the ecosystem experience by the way, the keyboard case. They have revised that you've probably heard about this to make it a fraction of a millimeter thicker, because this iPad is ever so slightly thicker, I'm using the last generation one. It fits it's not squeezing the screen or anything like that. So if you have the previous generation one don't worry about now some of the things that are indication. This is getting more computer like here.

We have the m1 with the 8 core CPU and the 8 core GPU. So that's the higher in configuration if you're buying an iMac, a Mac mini or a MacBook Air. That's interesting, and for the first time, apple's actually tell you how much ram the product has where they never used it before you had to use a utility to figure out, so the base model from 128 gigs to 512 gigs has eight gigs of ram. If you go up to the one terabyte model or the two terabyte model, yes, that's a thing uh, then you get 16 gigs of ram. Do you need 16 gigs of ram, probably not, but for those who are actually trying to do something like 3d modeling on this or more so multitasking with a couple of heavy applications, then maybe that's worth considering? If you want that two terabyte model, though the prices for storage get exponentially more insane, once you go up to one, terabyte is 17.99, and then it's 21.99. If you want two terabytes, if you want cellular, which is now 5g by the way, and I've seen good speeds on this 5g, we do have good 5g coverage.

I tested on T-Mobile here, that's 200, more so pricey stuff going on here, but some things that are more computer like in this day of Zoom calls apple, is doing things to improve face time, at least on the front-facing camera. So now there's a feature where basically especially they're, acknowledging that, depending on orientation, you're holding it in the camera might be offset a little. It tries to keep you in the frame, and it even follows you when you're walking around it works pretty well, it looks pretty good. That's pretty neat! You also have five microphones on here: they're talking about their studio, quality audio like they have with the max, and the quality again is pretty good. The speakers on this is ever a good.

Multi-Speaker system sounds better than most laptops in the 13-inch size range and even the 15-inch size range, making it a wonderful media, consumption device says always or for those of you who are doing things like doing a little audio editing work on this with GarageBand yay that and there's one more thing. There's the USB c port now supports thunderbolt 3 as well, and it's USB c4, which that doesn't make a huge difference honestly, but the thunderbolt actually works. I attached the thunderbolt drive worked no problem. I attached the display, I attached a thunderbolt 3 docks, and that worked, and then I attached the display to the dock and a Samsung t5 SSD, and lo and behold, it all worked again we're getting a little more computer a little more powerful. The drawback still with using external displays with this.

Is it still only mirrors the iPad screen? So you don't get a multi-monitor setup like you could, if you were using a mac or any Windows PC and to me that is a bit of a drawback, and thus it maintains the 4x3 aspect. Ratio of the display, which is pretty weird for your average 16 by 9, monitor big black bars on the left and right for a tablet. The cameras on this are stupidly. Good that hasn't really changed. You have your main wide and an ultra-wide camera.

You have a LIDAR sensor on this, and it does portrait mode, so you can do portrait effects and studio lighting effects and all that sort of thing granted with a 12.9-inch tablet you're, probably not going to be waving this around taking pictures. Much, but you know again, I think artists buy this a lot and maybe are taking pictures to use as reference or something like that or vertical market medical folks who all need imagery, and it's got that in spades by tablet standards, particularly so for the battery. The tablet has a 40.88 watt hour battery. It comes with a one meter, long USB c cable for charging and a 20 watt wall, wart charger, the usual small compact apple thingy, and they claim 10 hours of use on Wi-Fi for web surfing and streaming video or nine hours with cellular and that's pretty much accurate. You know this is not going to actually beat a 13-inch MacBook Air with a m1 anymore when it comes to battery life, which is an amazing thing.

I's pretty decent, it's fine! If he uses all day for work, you definitely are going to charge it when you get home from work, let's put it that way, but it's fine! So that's a 2021 iPad Pro 12.9 inch with the m1 CPU and the new mini LED display. If you're interested in the 11-inch size that one doesn't get the mini LED display, it does get the m1 so less of an exciting reason upgrade from the previous generation, but that one's only 7.99, which hurts somewhat less so obviously, as is often the case with products, if you have the previous generation one, maybe you're not just leaping to upgrade. Okay, the CPU multi-core performance is almost twice as fast, but I don't think a lot of people felt their old iPad was slow right, but that mini LED display is probably the tipping point for some people. If you do a lot of media consumption watching movies. In other words, if you have a couple of generations old iPad, you just want to move into the pros.

This is a pretty exciting time. You've got the new m1. You've got the beautiful display, so there's that that's definitely a yes. If you're willing to spend this much money on a tablet, I'm Lisa from mobile tech review be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more cool tech videos and hit the notification bell, because there's going to be more exciting videos coming.

Source : MobileTechReview