iPad Pro 11 In-Depth Review : USB-C, Performance, Keyboard and Pencil and more By Lon.TV

Hey everybody its la inside, but now we're taking a look today at the brand-new iPad Pro 11 I've also got all of its expensive accessories added onto it as well. So we can get a full picture of this new tablet from Apple, and we're going to do a deep dive on this in just a second, but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that I paid for everything here with my own funds. All the opinions are about to hear are my own. Nobody is paying for this review. Nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you're about to see before it was uploaded. So let's get into it now and take a look at what this new iPad is all about.

So let's take a closer look now at the hardware. This is an 11-inch display. It is 23 88 by 16 68 in its resolution. That's 264 points per inch and, if you compare it to the prior addition, the 10.5 iPad Pro it is roughly the same size here, maybe just a little wider, but they are pretty much the same dimensions, but the screen is bigger. You basically pick up a half an inch of display here because they made the bezels here that you can see on the side of the old iPad, slimmer, and one of the things that Apple has been perfect at is detecting what your intent is.

So even though my thumb here is resting on the display, it knows, I don't mean to touch here, which is why you're able to get away with these thinner bezels on Apple devices, and we don't often see the same on competing devices they're just smarter about how they detect your placement on screen us as a result. Here you don't gain any real physical space, and you've got something now that has a larger display. What they've done with the 12-inch version of this has actually made it physically, smaller, with the same size screen. So if you were thinking that 12-inch, iPad was too big before you might want to go in and take a look at it and see if it's a little better now the price on this, though, is not cheap. It starts and I got the lowest end.

One here at $7.99, with 64 gigabytes of internal storage. There's no way that the user can expand that storage, so you have to basically get the size you need when you start it goes up to fifteen hundred and forty-nine dollars for a one terabyte model and what's interesting, is that the one terabyte model has six gigabytes of RAM, but all the other models have four gigabytes like this. One has the 12-inch starts at around $1000 and goes up from there pretty expensive just to get the tablet itself and then, of course, we've got the accessories, so the keyboard case, which I just put down over here, costs one hundred and seventy-nine dollars. For this addition and on the 12-inch model, the keyboard will run you two hundred dollars, but we're not done yet because you probably want to get the Apple Pencil too, and if you had another iPad that had the pencil, the old pencil doesn't work with the new iPad. You have to buy the new pencil for 129 dollars, so you can see very quickly how the cost escalates here, with this entry-level iPad, with the keyboard in the pencil I'm into it, for about eleven hundred dollars right now, which is pretty much a mid-range laptop price.

So I think you have to determine what your individual computing needs are. If you need more computing functionality than a computer is the better way to go. But if you are a light user and do a lot of content consumption, maybe the iPad is a little better. Just because you get a very high performing machine as you'll see in a few minutes with great battery life, they've significantly changed the overall look and feel of the iPad there's no more rounded edges on it. I think they've had rounded edges from the get-go here, so you can see it's very flat compared to the prior version, which had some roundness to the edges.

I did find it's a little easier to get the old one off the surface of the desk, just because this one sits rather flat, but that's kind of a minor complaint. It does feel pretty nice in the hand. It looks a little thicker, though than the prior Edition, even though it isn't, those sometimes curved can be a little deceiving. So it's just slightly thinner weighs about 1.03 pounds or 468 grams. It goes up to 1.7 pounds or 773 grams with the keyboard case, so very, very lightweight, but there are not much in the way of ports on this one. In fact, there's only really one port, which is a USB type-c port here at the bottom, and we'll see what kind of things we can do with that USB type-c port in a few minutes.

The good news is, you can use non apple accessories now, whereas before you needed at least some kind of Apple dongle to get anything to work, so that might be an advantage here. It's also going to charge faster through that USB-C port versus the standard power adapter that you used to get with the iPad battery life, though, is about the same around 10 hours or so, if you're doing basic tasks with it less if you're gaming or video editing or some other tasks that will tax the processor inside a bit more and there is no headphone jack on the new iPad here. So you'll need to get some kind of wireless headphones or USB headphones. In order to listen to your music, there are no adapters included in the box. Another thing missing from the new iPad is the home button, but it now has faced ID, which is something we first saw on the iPhone 10.

And so what happens when you want to get into your iPad? Are you just tap the screen or hit the power button? You look at the display, and it will unlock for you. It will unlock in either orientations, so it's very quick to get everything unlocked once it detects your face. You swipe up, and you're good to go if you are inside an app and want to get out of that app you swipe up from the bottom, just like on the iPhone 10. You can also go out to the multitasking screen here and select open apps, just by dragging up like so, and you can jump back and forth to different applications. It takes a little of getting used to, but I was surprised when I got my iPhone 10 last year that it didn't feel wrong.

It really felt very natural, and it didn't take me long to get used to it and, of course, without having the button there, you won't be reaching for it. So if you are a creature of habit, you might have to adjust a little here, but it isn't hard to get into it, and split-screen works very similar to how it does on other iPad models that do have the home button. You just pull up the little dock here at the bottom. You select the app you want to split screen, drag it over to the corner here and then get it working. The problem, though, is that many apps don't support split screen on the iPad, even though this feature has been enabled for quite some time, so you'll find some things that don't work.

Some things that do, and you'll just have to kind of deal with that and another thing, you'll notice on the new iPad Pro is that not all apps are optimized for the new display. So, for example, if we pop into the YouTube studio app here, you'll see that I've got bezels now on the left and right-hand side of the display here. Just because this app doesn't yet recognize the full display, and I was surprised because a lot of apps that were kind of the flagship apps of the iPad Pro like affinity photo and a bunch of other ones, don't yet seem to be working with these larger displays, and you would have thought that some of those developers would have been all over the new devices here. But that is not the case so over time I'm sure they will get some, but right now you may not gain all that much from the new screen until your favorite apps get updated for the new iPad like prior versions of the iPad. There is a camera here on the back.

It is a 12 megapixel sensor on it 1.8 aperture. It will do 4k video at 60 frames per second, but they did take out optical stabilization. That was a feature that was on the prior version of the iPad Pro this new one doesn't have it, so your videos may not look as good if you're walking around, for example, you'll have better luck with your iPhone, which does have optical stabilization in many models or with the prior version of it. On the front, you've got the face ID sensor, which also has a camera on there as well 7 megapixels for the front-facing camera. It will do 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second, and it also supports portrait mode because it does have that face sensor on it.

It actually works pretty nicely here. You can see what that looks. Like ice overall, not a bad camera system on here, but I would have liked to have seen some optical stabilization just because the prior version had it. But one thing I liked about the new iPad is how nicely the accessories integrate with it. They don't feel like Bolton anymore.

It's a real nice tight integration. So, on the back of the new iPad, you've got three Pogo plugs. Those will align with the pins here on the official keyboard cover I'd. Imagine there probably will be some third-party covers as well. That's what you do is just get your iPad placed down on top of it.

There are some magnetic guides to get it into place there, and then you just fold the keyboard over, and you are ready to go. The keys, though, will touch the screen. That's not a big deal, they're, not metal or anything like that, but it might leave an imprint if you've got dirt on the keys or some grease on the screen. The old one had a felt surface and the keyboard would kind of fold out from that. So this is a different approach to it.

The difference, though, of course, is you, don't have this bulge here anymore? It's a very consistent keyboard cover, and you also now have protection on the back and the front, but I think you might see some keys imprinted on it. Another thing I like about it is that you've got two different options for the display, so you can place it in a tighter angle like this or have it going a little more diagonally here by locking it down that way and the keys really do stay flat on the desk. My old one here started off okay, but then over time the keys, the keyboard kinda pops up from the desk here, and it was really getting quite annoying and Apple wouldn't fix it for me either, despite having paid so much for it a year ago. So far, this keyboard has been very flat, and I think it might hold up a little better than the other one did. But again it's just going to have those keys touch the surface of the display.

Another thing that might be a little disconcerting is that if you put it into tablet mode like this, with the keyboard attached, your fingers will be resting on the keys here on the back of the device. It won't register any key presses so, as I push those keys right now, you see nothing is registering on screen. It just might feel a little weird, but this is actually normal for what I've seen on a lot of Windows tablets and two-in-ones, you have the keys just deactivating, and they can be pressed, but nothing will happen so again. On the other keyboard, you had a felt surface there, and the good news is the typing experience on these keyboard cases is still very, very good, it's hard for me to type and talk at the same time, but it feels exactly the same way. The other keyboard cases have felt in this form factor good tactile feedback to them, small keys but well spaced, and it's very easy to get used to this and type on it pretty quickly.

I was pleased with how the keyboard I really did not change at all, at least insofar as how it felt. So that was a good thing, and I'm also really pleased with how the new Apple Pencil integrates with the new iPad. It's no longer this thing where you've got to plug the pencil into the back of your iPad to charge if it's much more elegant now so on the new iPad here all you have to do is take the flat surface on the new pencil, attach it to the side, and it will not only recognize that it's there but begin charging it, and that's because there is a capacitive surface here. It'll even do firmware updates through that as well. So it's a really nice integration here.

The Apple Pencil has always been a great writing tool for a tablet, probably the best in the industry very low latency. Here you've got pressure sensitivity. You can even do thicker lines here by putting it on the side like, so they've got a lot of great drawing apps for it, so really nice very, very low latency, with 120 Hertz display on this thing. Very, very pleased with it, I just wish I was a better artist. The other thing you can do now is tap on the side of the pencil here, and it will switch between tools and developers will be able to make use of this double tap in other areas as well.

So you've got really nice improved pencil here, but again you do have to buy a new one at 129 dollars, because your old one won't work with the new iPad. Now the big story with this new iPad is that it is dramatically faster than last year's iPad and whether you will notice that as a consumer remains to be seen primarily because they hadn't really made use of all the potential that the old iPad had, and now we've got even more speed available to us. So doing things like web browsing here is very, very fast. We'll switch over to some video editing here with iMovie. This is a 4k 60 frames per second video I've got loaded up on an iPad right now.

I can jump in here and even change filters here on the fly and get real-time previews essentially of this 4k 60 frames per second video. We can transition here, I have a photo running with a Ken Burns effect, and then we'll have a go to an another little transition and then another 4k 60 frames per second video. So altogether, it's just really, really fast for doing this kind of stuff, primarily because apples, processors have been optimized for this kind of work, and sometimes it's kind of funny that I can do some things with 4k video on my iPad that are faster than my MacBook Pro might be at times, and it's one of the optimizations you get here, but again what you just saw we've been doing on iPads now for a couple of years now, so it's really I think something where you probably won't see the full potential of this iPad, and so maybe the next one comes out. Gaming on it is pretty good as well. We've got this game that they were running at the Apple event.

The other day. This is MBA 2 k-19. Oddly, though it doesn't take advantage of the full screen, but the graphics really look nice, it's running at a pretty solid frame rate here, I'm noticing a few dips here and there, but generally it's running at a superfast frame rate. The graphics, look pretty great on this game here and, unfortunately, I'm not much of an iPad gamer I, don't think a lot of people are, but if you are into a lot of mobile games that think you'll be fine here, but just note that most developers are not targeting the horsepower that you have available to you on this iPad they're, targeting the iPads that most people have, so I. Don't think you're going to see a lot of apps out there that really take advantage of this device specifically and on the 3dmark sling, shot benchmark test.

We got a crazy score of 13,000 172. It is just light-years faster than last year's iPad Pro 10.5 with that same test, I couldn't believe just how much more performance they've packed into this thing. Only a year later, it's pretty remarkable. You can also see how it stacks up against the most powerful Android tablet. We've looked at the Nvidia shield k1 from a couple of years ago, and it's also faster than Nvidia shield TV set-top box again, both of those are Android devices.

So, as far as gaming goes, this has a ton of potential one of the things they said at the keynote is that it kind of has what you would expect out of an Xbox One. You know the base level Xbox 1s there and I would believe it actually based on what we're seeing on some of those benchmarks. It is a very capable tablet, and I'm, just not sure, we're ever going to see anything that really takes advantage of it, and I was kind of hoping that Apple might have some curated apps in their App Store. That would let you kind of play around with some of the potential that this iPad has, that the other ones can't do, but unfortunately, I couldn't really find anything to give you a better demonstration of the available horsepower other than that benchmark. But again, we've got a lot of potential here that will likely never be met all right.

One last thing to check out, and that is how well it works with USB type-c devices I've picked a bunch that are not Apple devices. These are relatively inexpensive things to experiment with so this first one here is an Amazon basics, USB type-c, 2 DisplayPort, and what Apple is saying on their product specifications is that the USB type-c output here will drive a 5k display at max, but will be able to do 4k displays at 60 Hertz. So you can see everything just came up right away there very little latency as I'm moving around will pull up a 4k 60 frames per second video that I recorded with the iPad. It looks like it's playing back properly here on the display using DisplayPort, so that's pretty cool. We were able to work with a relatively cheap adapter there, so that was neat to see I'm going to pop this out now and switch over to this little pluggable card reader.

That I use on my MacBook Pro upstairs I've got a card in here from my drone, and so I'm going to pop that into the side of the iPad here and I. Think what we should get on this is the ability up to import some photos or videos, and it's got a bunch of videos that my drone shot there. So that was a nice thing to see. So we're good on that for the next experiment. Here is something a little larger.

This is a star tech kind of mini dock. It takes power, delivery in and then has HDMI out along with a USB hub on here and Ethernet. So let's pop this in real, quick and see what we get, so we'll plug that in, and we are getting power now, it looks like I just have to switch modes on the monitor here, to go to the HDMI input on it and once I do that we should be back to where we were before, and we're good to go. So I'll go ahead and play the video here through HDMI, so we've got a multifunction dock with power delivery that seems to be working well. The only thing that doesn't work on this particular dock is the Ethernet, and this might be something you run into on some of the things you experiment with as well.

It's just not lighting up for me here, so that was a concern, but I did have another Ethernet adapter that did work, and I've got this card reader here plugged into the USB 3.0 port, on the hub portion of that dock, and if I go over to my card reader and just stick the card in there. This is the same card we had in the other device here that will pop up and start importing stuff. The big issue, though, despite the fact that this works with all this great external storage, is that you can't actually get access to anything on the card or a hard drive, for example. So if you are editing videos, you need to have enough space on your iPad to begin with. At the moment, you can't access the file system beyond just importing whatever you might want to get off of your cards and whatnot.

So that was a disappointment there, but I did find it worked with a USB type-c Ethernet adapter that I got from Amazon as well. So it's good to see that you have some more choices now I just wish. Apple would open this up with a little more flexibility so that you could perhaps use some external storage for some applications that need it. That's going to do it for the iPad Pro 11. This is a significant upgrade if you are in the market for a new iPad and haven't bought once in a while.

It's definitely a significant upgrade over the prior Edition, iPad, 10.5 and I. Think if you bought one recently see if you can trade it in and get this one from Apple, sometimes they give you some leeway when a new product is announced, because this is just a lot better. What I like about it is that it's just better integrated all the Sure's here just seem like they have a home. Now the pencil docks and charges, and you've got a really nice keyboard case experience now that wasn't so great on the prior version. The screen here, of course, takes up the full front of the device now with very little bezels, getting in the way it's just as an attractive, well executed product, and this new design really I think is a much better approach to the iPad versus the prior version of it.

The thing, though, that you probably won't ever take advantage of is the processing power that it has inside it might take developers a while to catch up and get us something that can actually make use of all the horsepower inside this iPad developers. Of course, don't sell their apps for all that much money, so they have to target what most consumers have, which is not an iPad. This fast, so I don't know if we'll ever see something that will really give us a good example of what the device is capable of and by the time you do see that it'll be a lot less expensive to get that same horsepower in an iPad. So if you are buying this I think the functionality is going to be a lot more important than the performance is going to be, but it's there if anybody ever decides to take advantage of it. But overall again a really nice solid design here from Apple I will say, though, for me I, don't use iPads as creative devices.

I typically do all of my production work on a computer, so I have a hard time. You know making a recommendation whether you should replace your laptop with this I know for some folks, like my mom, she can get a lot done on her iPad and that's great, but I think it's really a personal decision, and you have to kind of figure out what works best for you. So, for me, it's not a good idea to replace a computer with an iPad, but for some folks that might be the way they want to go, and I think this one gets us a little closer to having a device like this replace what we normally consider a computing device, so good stuff here from Apple, if you're willing to pay the price for it until next time. This is LAN Simon. Thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the Lon TV supporters, including gold level supporters, Chris allegretto, the four guys with quarters podcast Tom Albrecht too much sauce, Gerard New berg in Kellyanne Kumar.

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Source : Lon.TV