Apple’s M1 iPad Pro review: ALL the pieces coming together By CNET

I've changed a lot over the past year. What about Apple's iPad Pro apple's recent macs have all been changing over to a new custom, m1 processor that supercharges the max and gives them better battery life. The new m1 processor is also in the iPad Pro models that just became available, and I've been living with that iPad Pro for about a week to try to see what the differences are compared to 2020 now, speed wise, as you might expect that m1 is superfast and equals the speed of the m1 max that we've seen at CNET, which is great. Does it make the iPad a replacement for your Mac, or does it make it some sort of potential future alternative to what a mac is? It's getting really close. Let's talk about it, so I've thought for years about the idea of having an iPad, be my everyday computer. I've talked about it since 2012, at least it now feels like the iPad Pro 2021 has all the hardware pieces, or nearly all of them to build that dream.

Computer. The one thing that's missing is the software to tie it all together that software right now runs on ipad os is very much like iOS on iPhones. It's been slowly differentiating, and it's been adding things like multitasking, and it adds things like a lot of pencil support and really nice support in browsers for a growing number of apps. That start feeling more like the things you do on Chromebooks and laptops, but iPadOS is really a very different beast. The apps that it runs are pretty different, there's a different class of creative apps.

I feel right now, as I hop back and forth between a m1 MacBook Air and the iPad Pro that there are a lot of apps. I really love on the iPad, and then there are apps or at least browser experiences that I gravitate back to on the mac. Now, of course, if you're a creative person, I think that's really the person that's going to be buying this iPad in the first place, you're going to be looking at it for things like art or for photo editing, it's going to cost you with accessories easily over a thousand dollars for whatever configuration you get. If you think that you're going to get maybe at least an Apple Pencil or something like a keyboard, the starting price is at 7.99 for the 11-inch model.10.99 for the 12.9 inch model are a lot more expensive than you know. If you go all the way down to the entry level iPads, they start around.

Three hundred dollars now you're getting a lot more in the picture with the iPad Pro, but you probably want to get more storage than the base.128 gigabytes and you might want to add things like optional cellular, which costs more, and it doesn't come with a keyboard, and it doesn't come with an Apple Pencil. So, let's break down some top things to keep in mind on this iPad Pro one that display there is a new mini, LED display. That's on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro it's not on the 11 inch and that mini LED display promises to have a color accuracy and brightness and contrast ratio that equals apple's pro Dr display. I don't have a pro Dr to compare two, but in using if it's really vivid, and it reminds me a lot of the OLED display on the iPhone pro models but made larger. The black levels are notably super black side by side.

When you put it next to a previous iPad Pro or the 11 inch, you can see the difference, but in everyday use for people who aren't comparing directly side by side or in dark rooms. Would you notice the mini, led uses an array of small LEDs to backlight and do basically more controlled, focused uh backlighting to get to that higher contrast ratio? Now the brightness is supposed to get to a thousand nits or even like a comparative 1600 nits in super focused targeted areas uh. It does seem really bright. I used it outdoors, and it also seemed nice now. The camera has also changed on the front-facing part for the iPad Pro it's a wider angle, camera, and it also has this new technology called center stage.

If you've ever used something like a Facebook portal uh, you might have noticed these types of digital zooms that follow you as you move around. That's what apple added to the iPad, and it's really useful, and it's like uncannily good. At times, it pans around and follows me as I'm talking now, it's enabled to work on FaceTime. It's already enabled to work on zoom and apple's uh promising support for all. You know the major video conferencing apps it's available as a toggle in settings.

If you want to turn it on and off, and video recording apps have it as well. Let's see what happens when it actually uses a recording of my face. Maybe it also follows me right now: sometimes it does uh, which is fine, because there aren't that many times when I'll be using a recording of my head. I think weirdly enough apples own camera app does not have support for it, but the wide-angle video camera also could be used to record yourself at a super zoom selfie stick type distance. I mean it's really wide angle.

The camera on the iPad Pro is still on the shorter end, which is your know. The top portrait end um up there as opposed to being put over here, and the reason that would be so great is that we're docking iPads with keyboards all the time to be able to talk with people like on a laptop, and I want eye contact. I still find that my eye contact drifts over to the side, and it makes me look like I'm not really looking at people now, it's already a perfect zoom computer for a lot of people- and I have to say the cameras on the iPad Pro are already a lot better than the cameras on say a MacBook Air, but I think that center stage is a technology that is destined to be on all of apple's. Other products.5G is also on these iPads and I got to have a test sim on both of the iPads to test out 5g on Verizon around my house, because I don't go much farther than that. I'm kind of laughing, because I've never been that big on cellular and iPads, and that's because I would just rather tether to my phone and not pay the extra fee.

Now LTE has been available.5G is new and Apple still doesn't have cellular options on its laptops, which is weird, but maybe at some point considering their m1s as well. Maybe they will. The 5g really depends on how fast your 5g is in my area. It was about 280 megabits per second, which is kind of like what it was with LTE, just fine, it's faster than my home Wi-Fi. But you know it's not like you know, knock my socks off now.

Let's talk about the processor, the m1 processor. That's on here is super superfast, probably not a surprise, because already on the max, it's shown that it's incredibly fast. I think it's a little of a bigger deal at the moment on the max, because MacBook airs, for instance, were super laggy when it came to running multiple tabs in something like chrome and then that went away with the m1. Everything runs. Silky, smooth, huge battery life gain very dramatic on the iPad.

iPads have already been very efficient on battery life and iPads and iPhones have used apple's chips already, so the leap to m1 is more like another ramp up on the scale. It feels like a huge step forward on apple's existing chips. That being said, the speeds and benchmarks that we've tried to show like almost approaching doubling on you, know: multi-core speeds, which is very dramatic um. You know, leaving even things like the iPhone 12 Pro in the dust, and it seems to match the speeds on even the recent iMac. So you have the raw performance that seems to match.

Ar is a very interesting use. This is technically apple's most powerful AR device, and this is the only m1 device that has had that AR capability in it, because it has the cameras, and it has LIDAR. So, for things like you know not just displaying AR, but for recording, um 3d scans of things, you can use the LIDAR display and the cameras to be able to capture pretty impressive 3d captures of objects and landscapes. I was playing around with that with a couple of different apps and the ability to process that is faster on the m1 and for people who are creating that type of content. They might really choose to get this type of device, but what I'm really waiting for is for apple to kind of unlock, all the rest of it.

There aren't right now any m1, optimized apps that I've really been able to find pre-launch to play with, although there are one's like procreate that are coming out that are enabling all sorts of extras, and I'm waiting for apple to announce its pro apps like, for instance. Where is logic you know, where's Final Cut Pro and also the ability to multitask even further. The iPad Pro is basically limited to two pain, multitasking plus kind of floating third app. You can bring up and the monitor support. While you can support higher resolution monitors on the iPad Pro, that's still only for a couple of apps that might use it for output.

It's not a true extra monitor, like you would get on a computer now, if apple unlocks, that on the m1 with iPadOS 15 that could be really cool. The other thing that I thought about when I was using this is thunderbolt. Now I really didn't play much with it, because thunderbolt again is a theoretically powerful thing if you want to plug in a lot of high-speed peripherals already, the iPad Pro had supported USB, and I feel like that was the big leap in terms of getting to a lot of mainstream accessories, uh plugging into monitors and all sorts of stuff that you might have that other devices use too I mean it sounds like a full computer, and yet I feel like the iPad. Pro is not entirely for me that full computer, and I'm kind of feeling confused by that. So where does it leave us? I mean if I had infinite money.

The iPad Pro, especially the 12.9 inch version, is beautiful. It kind of reminds me of again: would you want to pay up for the know, iPhone 12 Pro max and get that super fantastic screen and the camera, and all these other things I mean apple- adds a lot to the equation with the pro models. The speakers are fantastic, the microphones are really great. The cameras are great, the processor you know all across the board, so there's a lot to bring to the table. That makes it feel very luxury, but I would feel weird spending that much into it again, you could be spending easily close to two thousand dollars if you start tricking this out.

I think the hardware is spot on just move that camera, and it's pretty much everything that I've ever wanted in an iPad Pro. What I'm really waiting for is the rest of the software and, if apple, can transform that and make me be able to do everything in a multitasking way, then maybe the iPad really has started to become the future beyond the mac or alongside it.

Source : CNET