First impressions of the new M1 powered iPad Pros announced at the Apple Spring Loaded Event! By Jerry Schulze

- New storage options, new connectivity, new displays, new cameras, and the new M1 chip? Hey, I'm Jerry, and Apple just announced the brand new 2021 iPads Pro 11 and 12.9 inches. And my first impressions? One seems better than the other. I think for the first time in the iPads Pro line, Apple has decided to make the display on the 12.9 inch version, better than the 11 inch version. But let's start with what's actually new on both of these. So first up on the iPad Pros 11 and 12.9 inch, we get the M1 chip. And this was actually quite a surprise.

Nobody was expecting an M1 chip to go into the iPad. Everybody was expecting that you'd get an A14X or some kind of A-series chip. But nobody thought that they would be an M1. But instead, Apple chose to take the actual M1 chip, the same chip that's in the brand new 24 inch iMac, the Mac mini, the MacBook Air, and the MacBook Pro 13, and cram it into a tiny little iPad Pro. Well, this one's a 12.9 inch, but you know what I mean. You're going to get the same eight cores of CPU and the same eight GPU cores as you get on the other M1 devices, and a 16-core neural engine, and this thing is just going to scream.

You're going to get up to 50% faster performance compared to the A12Z and the previous iPad pro that came out just about a year ago. And because it's an M1 chip and not some kind of A-series replica of the M1 chip, you're actually getting real Thunderbolt in these brand new iPads. So that means you'll actually get up to 40 gigabits per second, a transfer speed from the iPad Pro. So that means you can connect super fast SSDs. You can actually connect the Pro display XDR, that high bandwidth display, and actually display and not the cutoff version.

Apple says you can actually display in full native 6K resolution on the display, which is going to be kind of game-changing for people who want to use the iPad as their main computer. You're also going to be getting 5G with these brand new iPads which gives you supposedly blazing fast speeds. But I still yet to have found a good place in the Austin area where I can get 5G speeds on my iPhone 12 and 12 Pro. So, you know, thanks I guess. You also are going to have the option for a new two terabyte configuration.

Unfortunately, that is actually gonna cost you a pretty penny. That is gonna cost you an upgrade price of $1,100 to be able to get the two terabyte option for the iPad Pro. But if you are using your iPad Pro for things like video editing, things that need a lot of large 4K video files or large files in general, right? Two terabytes seems like a good option for you to have your one device that does everything. But, it is going to cost you. If I was still using LumaFusion for my bulk video editing, I would absolutely consider that two terabyte option.

Now, unfortunately, we didn't get any kind of, you know, camera in portrait mode on the middle of the iPad for sitting in the iPad magic keyboard, but they did add a new ultra wide camera to the iPad. But Apple did add this new feature called Center Stage to the iPad. Using the wide angle camera, it now keeps you in the center of the iPad when you're on the screen. So you can be moving around the iPad will kind of follow you and focus on you. And if somebody else enters the screen, it'll widen up and track both of you at the same time.

On the back you still get the wide and the ultra wide cameras and of course LiDAR. And the M1 chip is going to improve the picture processing, including low-light photos and Smart HDR 3. Now as I was saying earlier, things do diverge just a little bit when it comes to the displays on the new 11 and 12.9 inch iPad Pros. The 11 inch iPad Pro will continue to use essentially the same screen as it has for the last two generations, the 600 nits of brightness, True Tone, ProMotion, and P3 wide color gamut. And that display is no slouch.

I still have that same display on my 12.9 inch iPad Pro from 2018 which is amazing and I have no complaints about. But the brand new 12.9 inch iPad Pro does get a much better, a much upgraded display. The 12.9 inch liquid retina XDR display for the 2021 iPad Pro has many LEDs as the backlight. It's got over 10,000 of them, which allows that iPad to get up to 1600 nits of peak brightness compared to 600 on the 11 inch. It's got a 1 million to one contrast ratio which is basically OLED specs along with the P3 color, ProMotion, and True Tone.

Those 10,000 little mini LEDs just fit nice and tight in that little package. And the iPad is still just 6.4 millimeters thin. And all of those LEDs can be broken up into 2,500 local dimming zones to keep bright areas bright and dark areas dark. So you can have truly dynamic HDR scenes on the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. Design-wise the iPad pro is pretty much the exact same as the previous generation.

Of course, if you have the 2020 iPad you have the square camera bump on the back with the additional cameras, but it's still the same flat design, which is great. It's a little thicker, I believe, than the 2021 version. And it's 1.5 pounds which I believe is just slightly heavier. But my first impressions overall is it looks like a really good update to the iPads. You get the M1 chip which gives you up to 50% performance increase over the A12Z in the 2020 iPad Pros.

You get Thunderbolt so you can start connecting additional accessories. You get new cameras that include Center Stage to keep you focused in the frame when you're on a video call. And of course, if you get the 12.9 inch version, you get that brand new liquid retina XDR display which I'm really excited to try out. So, I can't wait to get mine and share my experience with you. Now, as far as pricing goes, the base price for the 11 inch version starts at 799 for wifi and 128 gigabytes.

And the 12.9 inch version starts at 1,099. So a little bit of a price increase from the previous version for 128 gigabytes and wifi. And of course you can add cellular to that wifi to get that 5G connection. And you can get up to two terabytes of storage if that's what you really need for, you know, a small little $1,100 fee. So those are my first impressions of the new iPads Pro that were announced today at Apple Spring Loaded event.

I'm really excited to get him in my hands and try him out. That liquid retina XDR display looks amazing. So, let me know below what questions you have about it, and I'll try and answer them below, on Twitter, or in upcoming videos. And speaking of videos, if you wanna know what my first impressions are of the 24 inch iMac that was just announced today running the M1 processor, check out this video right over here. Hit the thumbs up button if you liked it.

Hit subscribe to see more and I'll see you next time. (smooth music).

Source : Jerry Schulze