Apple iPad Pro (2021) 11" vs 12.9": Unboxing & Review By DetroitBORG

By DetroitBORG
Aug 13, 2021
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Apple iPad Pro (2021) 11" vs 12.9": Unboxing & Review

Hey guys this is mike the Detroiter, with a new iPad pros for 2021 in both the 11 inch and 12.9 inch size. Now, as always, there are some key similarities between these devices, but some important differences, but the big news for 2021 is the m1 chip which is borrowed from the mac lineup. That brings the iPad closer to the mac range than ever before, but the other big news is the new display technology on the 12.9 inch, which really sets it apart from the 11 inch, and we'll take a look at that difference. Once again, the iPad Pro is available in silver or space gray, so no vibrant, colors, like on the iMac or the iPad Air. What is new is the optional two terabyte configurations for both the 11 inch and 12.9 inch, but we also get 5g for the first time, which adds another 200 above the Wi-Fi model, so that's more expensive than the LTE radios from the previous generation in terms of the included accessories, they're identical on both of these iPads. The only difference is, if you get the 5g model, they'll include a sim ejection tool with your paperwork, but otherwise you get the same set of white apple stickers along with a quick start guide.

Also included, is the new upgraded 20 watt power adapter. This is the same power adapter that launched at the end of last year and, of course, an USB type-c power cable. Now, while the 11-inch base price still starts at 7.99, the base price of the 12.9 inch is 100 more expensive at 10.99, and that's thanks to the Dr display and for the first time apple is talking about ram on their iPads. So they come standard with eight gigs of ram, but you can get 16 gigs on the one terabyte or two terabyte versions. So that's a massive increase over the six gigabyte from the previous generation, and it also sounds very similar to the mac lineup in terms of design, not a huge departure from the previous generation.

The display is still pushed to the edges and rounded off at the corners, which is the reason they call it a liquid retina display, because it's smoothly rounded off at the corners in terms of the basic specs and dimensions these displays are carried over from the previous generation. The only real difference here is the backlighting technology on the 12.9 inch, but before we get to that, let's talk about the basics, so both of them have the same pixel density of 264 PPI. They also have promotion technology which adaptive adjusts the refresh rate of the display up to 120 hertz. So you get that extremely smooth refresh rate, especially within the UI of the OS. We also have some basics like true tone technology, which will automatically adapt the white balance of the display to the ambient lighting conditions of the room, and we get 600 nits of max brightness.

We also have a very effective anti-reflective coating. So, even though these displays are glossy, the anti-reflective coating makes it pretty easy to manage it. So one of the big challenges of HDR on a conventional LCD screen, like the one on the iPad 11 inches, is that you need extremely bright, highlights and deep contrast in order to pull off the effect properly. But you can't do that with a conventional backlight, because in order to get those highlights, you have to bring up the brightness which washes out the black level. That's where a Dr display comes in with a matrix of LEDs behind the entire lcd, which allows them to turn off individual zones to achieve true black levels.

That means you get an OLED, like contrast, ratio of a million to one now, we've seen this technology before on TVs, but with a device. This is small, you need a lot more LEDs for it to be effective. In the case of this iPad, pro there's 10 000 mini LEDs across this entire panel, and they're, grouped together in local dimming zones, specifically 2596. So this allows the iPad to focus light into only the areas of the screen that needs to be lit. But the most important aspect of this display technology is that it's extremely bright, where it needs to be without washing out the entire screen.

In fact, this display can push out up to 1600 nits of maximum brightness in HDR. So that's useful for highlights or specular highlights things that need to be bright on the display, while everything else needs to be dark or black. To achieve that extreme contrast, that's when things really pop in HDR, but of course there are some drawbacks because there's far fewer LEDs than there are pixels, so that means you're going to still see some haloing around the areas you're lighting, especially when the background is supposed to be black. Now. This is something you really only notice in certain scenarios, and it's much less obvious when you're looking at the iPad head-on, especially in a semi-lit room, but otherwise this display is much more immersive and vibrant than any other iPad screen I've used now there are some design differences between the Wi-Fi and 5g model to point out so, for example, there's an extra antenna strip on the 5g model at the bottom edge, and if you look at the antenna stripe at the top edge of the 5g model, you'll see that it wraps around the corner and there's some additional antenna stripes at the top edge.

But, more importantly, with this generation are the millimeter wave antennas which you'll find position at the top edge and bottom edge. This is the same antenna design, that's also on the iPhone.12. apple actually had to redesign the entire chassis of the iPad Pro in order to accommodate the optional 5g radios. So, even if you have a Wi-Fi model, you can see the effects of the 5g design. So if you compare this to the previous generation, you can see that the speaker grills have been moved toward the center, and they've reduced the overall width and increase the overall size of the perforations.

So that's one way to identify. If you have a 2021 iPad, just count the number of speaker holes, you have. The 5g iPad also has a NATO sim tray along the bottom right edge, although you don't need to use this because there's also an electronic embedded sim inside the iPad, although the dimensions of the 11 inch haven't changed, the 12.9 inch pro has gotten slightly thicker in order to accommodate the Dr display, but it's only half a millimeter thicker, and it's imperceptible. You really have to zoom in closely like I'm doing here, to illustrate the difference. In fact, accessories that worked for the previous iPad Pro like the magic keyboard will still fit on this one.

Now. Those millimeter wave patches at the top and bottom is not to be confused with the magnetic charging dock for the Apple Pencil along the side again, which is also color coordinated with the iPad you bought speaking of accessories. We still have that three pin power connector along the back of the iPads, which connect with accessories like the apple magic keyboard or fuller, keyboard or other third-party accessories, and that works with all the magnets integrated into the design of this chassis, which keep all the accessories nice and secure. Another feature: that's exclusive to the iPad Pro, which really makes a difference is the quad speaker design, which automatically re-orientate the sound depending on how you're holding the iPad. So these quad speakers have been tweaked for the new chassis design, but they still sound very similar to the previous generation, which are really impressive.

The sound is very immersive and powerful for such a small device, and you get support for things like Dolby, Atmos and spatial audio. Both iPad pros also have five microphones, which apple calls studio grade, so we find one along the side, two along the top edge near the true depth camera, another microphone right next to the true depth camera, which faces the user and another microphone built into the camera module on the back. So we have all of these microphones for stereo audio pickup, along with noise cancellation. Also upgraded is the true depth camera which gets a new 12 megapixel sensor with an ultra-wide 120 degree view. This enables a really neat new feature called center stage, which is able to crop in to focus on the subject as they move around the room.

It's a really natural result. So it's able to correct for distortion, especially barrel distortion because of this wide-angle lens, as well as correcting for exposure as the subject moves farther away. So here we are testing out the front-facing camera and the microphone array of the 12.9 inch from last year versus the m1 12.9 inch from this year, which definitely has some benefits with that ultra-wide angle, and you can crop it in if you prefer, but definitely a nice feature to have and the microphones are similar in terms of overall performance. The camera hardware is largely carried over from the previous generation, so we get two cameras and a LIDAR scanner for depth mapping. So the main camera is 12 megapixels, with an f 1.8 aperture without optical image stabilization. We also get an ultra-wide 10 megapixels, with an f 2.4 aperture, and both of these cameras are good for 4k up to 60 frames per second. Although the camera hardware is the same, what's new is the m1 chip which brings with it a much more powerful, ISP or image signal processor.

So one of the new features it brings is smart hdr3, which is the same technology used on the iPhone 12s. So we get very similar HDR performance to those phones. Although I'm not a huge fan of smart hdr3, I think it tends to be a little more aggressive than I think it should be. But of course, a lot of people prefer something that really pops right out of the camera. The LIDAR scanner is something we've seen on the iPhone 12 Pro and the previous iPad Pro, and this time it's combined with the m1 processor for even more impressive AR results.

So under the cool new demos is within the apple clips app, which allows you to experiment with this feature. So the LIDAR scanner can map every surface in the room and then apply effects to those surfaces and that's pretty fun to play with. So it knows, what's the table-top versus, what's the floor, ceiling walls and objects within that area, one of the other benefits of the m1 chip is that it brings USB 4 and thunderbolt to the iPad for the first time. That means this port can support up to 40 gigs per second, that's enough to drive a 6k Dr display at full resolution and, if you're, a video editor that makes it a lot easier and a lot quicker to transfer large 4k files from a SD card or an external SSD over the USB connector. Although we have support for an external display, most apps are not optimized for it, so we still have some way to go in terms of software before this becomes a really useful feature.

Otherwise, it's mostly mirroring or full screen video or photographs. So we're pretty familiar with the m1 chip. That's in this iPad Pro because it's in the iMac, the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro and the Mac mini, and we get the full 8 core, CPU and 8 core GPU model, which is kind of interesting when you consider that a lower end version of this chip has a 7 core GPU, which is offered on the MacBook Air and the iMac either way. This is a substantial improvement over the a12z. It replaces we're up 50 on the CPU and 40 on the GPU in terms of what this means to the iPad Pro, it doesn't mean the lot right now, because it really depends on the software to drive that hardware and right now, iPadOS and the apps aren't really optimized for this architecture.

Just yet so, hopefully we're going to see improvements pretty soon. Let's take a quick look at iPadOS on the new iPad, so you can see I'm kind of blocking the camera right there. So once I move my hand, it scans my face really quickly, and I can swipe to get into my home screen so on the home screen. I have this widget panel, which I can swipe in and out of or scroll through, and I can also edit as well, so this will take me to my editor and I can customize the widgets that are in that panel. This is always very useful to have all right in terms of the main home screen layout.

We, of course we have our dock down, below which you can customize just tap and hold until you get to the wiggle, and then you can move the apps out of there. You can see in the dock. We have our recent apps on the right, so these are our three most recently accessed apps swipe down from the upper right corner to get to your control center, which you can also customize, but here we have our controls for our display, such as our dark mode, which we can turn on and off night shift and true tone. Of course, we get to our notifications by swiping down below, and you can also swipe from that screen to get to those widgets as well in terms of multitasking there's a few ways you can do this. You can use a four finger gesture on the screen to quickly swipe between your apps like, so you can also swipe up to see the overview of all of your apps, but you can also open up apps side by side.

So, for example, if I open up the Apple TV app, I can swipe up to get to the dock to dock another app on the side. So let's go ahead and try the home app here. So all I have to do is drag it to the side, let it dock. And now I have a split screen view between these two apps, so I can interact with my smart home on the right side, while navigating through my media on the left. I can also undock this app and tuck it to the side like so and swipe it back in when I need it, and I can continue using both apps side by side, but the apps do need to support this split screen view and this arrangement is safe.

So if you go back to the app you can swipe in again to get back to your pair. For the most part, the software experience on both of these iPads is identical, but there's a slight difference here in terms of the keyboard. So because we have more room on the 12.9 inch, you get a number row at the top, which is not here on the 11 inch. But a good tip to know about using this on-screen keyboard is that you can resize it. So it's a little more manageable.

So I have to do, is tap and hold this keyboard icon, select floating, and then you get the floating keyboard which you can reposition on the screen like, so you can even toss it around like that now to re-dock it just swipes down and let it dock at the bottom, and it expands back out. So when it comes to choosing between these two sizes, I think the 11 inch is ideal if you primarily intend to use this for media consumption or for traveling or just using it like a regular iPad. But the 12.9 inch is pretty large and kind of cumbersome to use as a tablet. So I think this is the best tablet to use as a laptop replacement. The screen is certainly bigger than most laptops and I think it's the best size for an attached keyboard, and the other thing is that it gives you the best display on any Apple device you can buy today.

But, as always, the iPad Pro seems to be overpowered for what it can do today. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it gives you plenty of headroom for software updates in the future and for apps that can really take advantage of the hardware. So, just to recap, the laundry list of features on this iPad from the integrated Apple Pencil charger to the usb4 port, the ultra-wide true depth camera with face I'd still, the only iPad that has it the quad speaker design, which makes this the best sounding iPad by far the studio grade, 5 microphone arrays and the LIDAR scanner for augmented reality, not to mention 5g, Wi-Fi 6 and up to 2 terabytes of storage with up to 16 gigs of ram. So this is one of apple's, most capable and feature packed devices, but the software story could use some improvement. Alright, guys hope you enjoyed this look at the iPad Pro.

If you did, please give it a thumbs up to. Let me know, and I'll see you again in my next video.


Source : DetroitBORG

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