iPad Pro M1 Review: The Ultimate Spec Bump! By Marques Brownlee

Hmm, what's up MHD here, and this is the new m1 iPad Pro. It looks almost exactly the same as the last one. That's because if the screen's not on it almost is the same as the last one, but there are a couple of things that are new about this- that make it even more of the ultimate iPad, which again naturally raises the question of like well, what is an iPad anyway, and what is a computer I'll get to that later? So the last iPad Pro wasn't that long ago you can watch the review from last year, but in short, it had an a12 z chip, and that was a spec bump from the previous iPad Pro which had an a12x. Now, of course, there were other small bits and things that made last year's iPad new. But now again in 2021 we have an even more powerful chip, so this iPad Pro has apple's m1 inside now the a12x and the a12z were already apple, designed silicon for the iPad. So, while we know m1 is a different breed, since it's also apple designed silicon it'd be tempting to think.

Maybe that's not that big of a jump like those chips were made for the iPad. How good could m1 be that'll be wrong. This is a massive performance leap forward. M1 in this new iPad. Pro means that now internally, this tablet is basically the same as the m1 MacBook Air, a full-blown computer.

That means an 8-core CPU, eight core GPU, 16 core neural engines and for the first time apple is just openly telling us how much ram is in the iPad. So that's eight gigs in the lower storage versions and 16 gigs of ram in the one terabyte or the new two terabyte iPad configurations, 16 gigs of ram in an iPad, so it turns out yeah. This thing flies again through iPadOS. I'm sure it's shocking to you that an even more powerful, even faster chip, continues to crush iPadOS in its latest version, but there's a couple other like specific, unique ways. I've noticed this first, even the heaviest most graphically demanding apps that I use are snappy and blazing fast, that's probably also as you'd expect, but also with all this ram, and this is a one terabyte iPad, so it has 16 gigs of ram.

It really seems like nothing ever needs to drop from memory. It's kind of wild like we're already used to a bunch of the most recent apps staying in ram on the iPad and that's great, but here even the oldest heaviest apps in my multitasking tray, just pick right up where they left off like Lightroom from hours ago, games streaming apps. Furthermore, it really feels like this iPad's superpower here, stuff just happily sits in ram all day and is always ready to go, but even that doesn't really fully explain the speed. So let me just so numbers people we like benchmarks right, they're, the easy way to contextualize the differences in performance. So remember when the a12z iPad Pro last year was already pretty far ahead of most other tablets on geek bench, for example, that was hitting somewhere around 4500 to 4700 on multi-core, and so was the a12x.

This m1 iPad hit 6900 points, sometimes breaking 7 000. , that's just in a completely new stratosphere, that's actually higher than the 16-inch MacBook Pro on the longer more detailed an tutu benchmark. The a12z was a small bump up over the a12x, so it went from 717 000 to 723 thousand then m1 iPad Pro just casually drops a score of 1 million 84 000 points, so it's literally 30 to 45 faster than the last iPad Pro, which was already faster than pretty much every other tablet. It's like you just don't see these types of performance increases year to year that often uh, so we knew apple. Silicon was special, but I mean it's just kind of ridiculous.

It's actually kind of a struggle to find the places where a regular user might find this extra performance. Here, like I guess, that's the point, a regular user is never going to use all of this performance. They'll get an iPad Air, but hey. This is called the iPad Pro for a reason, and so there are actually a few pro workflows that might be taxing the current iPads or might benefit from the extra headroom in the new one. I did a one hour, iMovie export test, the last iPad Pro crushed it in 17 minutes the m1 iPad, did it in 12 minutes flat, so there's another 30 improvement for you if you're doing a bunch of batch Lightroom imports and exports, for example, or just a bunch of heavier things like that in succession, then, of course, this new iPad is going to be great and then all that ram makes the heavier edits in suffusion or bigger projects, with a lot more layers in photoshop that type of stuff more snappy.

That's that's the real high-end benefit here, but there are a few other new things with this iPad. Pro too aside from just performance uh, it is a little thicker and heavier. Actually it's its barely. You might not even notice, but it's uh we're talking, half a millimeter thicker and 50 grams, but it was enough for me to notice, so I'm mentioning it to you uh, and it's actually to accommodate the new m1 stuff, the new display which I'll get to, but also a little of a bigger battery physically speaking in this bigger one. So would you look at that apple, making a product slightly thicker for a slightly bigger battery nice? The cellular option, which I'm holding is also now 5g, which is pretty sweet so now, in addition to the antenna bands, the cellular iPad now has this little plastic cutout at the bottom.

Next to the speakers, just like the 5g iPhones have on the sides and that USB-C port at the bottom. Now that there's a m1 chip inside is now a thunderbolt port with USB 4 speeds up to 40 gigabits per second throughput, which is massive. So if you want to plug in an Ethernet dongle here, you can get 10 gigabit ethernets, which hey. If your setup involves plugging your iPad and Ethernet more power to you, but also that's a huge win for faster file transfers again, if you're importing, like a ton of photos straight from the camera through a cable or even videos, it's enough bandwidth to now really make a difference. You can also plug straight into the pro display, Dr and drive it at full resolution, 6k again, not sure whose setup that is but more power to you, but maybe the most interesting.

Unexpected change to this new iPad is now actually the front-facing camera. So no, they didn't move it to the middle at the top where it should be, but they did add an ultra-wide camera. Now, listen, I'm never going to advocate for taking photos on the iPad. It's just it's just not going to happen, but something I do on the iPad. Pretty often is video calls video chats face times and this new camera setup with a 122 degree.

Field of view is great for that. So, basically, when you open the camera app for a selfie, you'll see the normal view, but when you zoom out you'll see a lot more of the scene with that ultra-wide. Now it's heavily distorted near the edges, even with distortion correction turned on in settings, not sure if that is actually correcting anything but hey an ultrawide camera is really useful, despite not solving the problem of being in the wrong place. Now, when you're in a supported, app, there's a new feature called center stage that kicks in and does a pretty good job of, basically following a face around that ultra-wide frame, so it zooms in a bit and focuses on the face and keeps it kind of near the middle and if more than one face gets into the frame, it also tries to stay wide enough to keep them both and follow both of them. Overall, it's pretty simple, just a sort of neat touch, but it works pretty smoothly most of the time, and I found it a nice addition that just makes a lot of sense on the iPad.

Also, if you ever want to turn this off, you can jump into the settings app pick the app that you want to turn it off in and then within the settings you'll see a center stage checkbox, so there's no other settings or adjusting it. You can just turn it on or off. So if you want to keep it on in FaceTime, but turn it off in zoom, then you can make that happen if you're thinking this might also. Finally, let face ID work for more angles: it doesn't it's its literally just the camera, so the dot, projector and infrared stuff is all working the same way. It normally does just the camera's wider, okay, there's one last feature that is new on this iPad Pro and really does make a pretty big difference, and that is this screen this new screen here so on the bigger one, just the bigger one, the bigger 12.9-inch iPad Pro you've got a new liquid, retina Dr display it's pretty sweet, but this smaller 11-inch iPad Pro basically has the same screen as last year, but this new screen is awesome, mainly it just. It gets way brighter, which is immediately noticeable way more visible if you're near a window or in bright environment, and it's a mini LED display with 2500 local dimming zones made up of 10, 000 mini LEDs, all to say, you're, going to get a couple of things brighter highlights up to 1600 nits for peak brightness, full HDR support and better contrast, so you're at a million to one contrast ratio.

Now to me, honestly, it looks just about as good as OLED. I mean the thing about so much of the content you watch on the iPad. Are you almost always have those black bars because of the aspect ratio and those look way closer to black now with the black bezels plus? There's all this local contrast and specular highlights just look awesome. So now any shows or videos you want to watch in HDR. Look that much more impressive and a full HDR creation.

Workflow is sort of unlocked now from beginning to end. So if you want to shoot and edit and export and upload HDR videos or photos, you can do all of that from this iPad. So now remember when I was saying the know: the iPhone 12 started: shooting Dolby Vision, HDR video, but it turns out there wasn't that many places to actually view it. Well, here's one more great place to view it on the larger new m1 iPad Pro now. The question that I'm sure is on plenty of minds like it was on mine when I saw the announcement why no mini led on the smaller m1 iPad Pro, I'm I'm thinking it's a cost thing.

This is just me speculating. You know it is more expensive. OLED is also more expensive, but not quite as bright. So this is a great tech to see in the iPad, but it's kind of a shame, because I really like this smaller iPad Pro, that's the one I personally use from back in 2018. Actually so because this new one doesn't have, this mini LED display it's yet another performance bump that I don't need.

So I feel like I'm not going to upgrade. I'm going to keep using my two generation old 11-inch iPad Pro, but yeah. This one is nice everything else, though, about this m1 iPad Pro is pretty much exactly the same as last year's, which is to say, really really perfect. So the quad speakers are still super loud and sound. Great.

The microphones are still awesome. The body is still all metal same design and the dual cameras, plus LIDAR are still here on the back and still great for a tablet, plus. Actually the m1 chip now allows for smart hdr3 from the rear cameras for all you iPad photographers out there, please don't uh, but then again, iPadOS is still iPadOS, which to me really gets me thinking that the iPadOS 15 update, that's coming up, has got to be a pretty significant change to what we have now in iPad. Os 14.5 like it's, got to be right, but there's been some rumors floating around now about some pretty big home screen, changes, widgets being able to drop anywhere on any home screen, and maybe some more significant multitasking improvements on the iPad. I might keep my eye out at WWDC for something like that, but yeah I mean other than that.

It's again, it's its another iPad, pro doing the same stuff, even faster. So if you had some bottleneck issues, if you had those heavy pro workflows, then you'll really notice the difference between m1 iPad Pro and the already fast a12z iPad Pro but yeah. It's getting kind of ridiculous. At this point, alright a couple other miscellaneous things that didn't quite fit into the full review. There is a new magic keyboard for the iPad.

Pro people were wondering about slightly different uh, but it's functionally exactly. The same really is just adjusted slightly for the half, a millimeter of extra thickness for the iPad, so you can still totally use the old magic keyboard. I tried works perfect. It just might feel a little snug when it's closed, that's all no biggie and the battery life, even though a bunch of variables has changed, still feels about the same, maybe a little worse, if anything, because you have to factor in so now. If your battery life is here, you add a more powerful m1 chip.

You add 16 gigs of ram that tons of apps are staying. In you add, a mini LED display, that's much brighter, but also a larger battery capacity, so we've ended up about the same rating. So at the end of the day, it's rated for the same 10 hours as the last one. I feel like the magic of the m1 is really giving me great standby time, but I was able to run through the battery a little faster at full brightness with high intensity stuff going on, especially when connected to the magic keyboard, not a huge surprise. This m1 iPad Pro is the ultimate spec bump.

Because, again fundamentally, it's just crushing the same things that any previous iPad Pro could do just even faster with a better screen and that's going to be great for a lot of people. But I'm just, I feel like I'm just impatient for like a better use of all this power. If that makes sense like it feels like I'm like upgrading to a Ferrari but sitting in city traffic all day, you know what I mean or like strapping rockets to your car, when what you really wanted was a pickup truck. I don't know if I'm making any sense right now. My point is: if it's a computer you're after uh, the m1 MacBook Air, is the same computer but uh it's cheaper.

It's thinner! It's lighter it's better balanced overall, as a computer with the keyboard and the screen, it's not an iPad. You know it's not a touch screen. It doesn't have 5g no center stage, but if it's a tablet you're after with the touchscreen with 5g, with all the apps with the Apple Pencil with the Dr display all this stuff, this is the goat. It's the goat of tablets, I'm saying it. Furthermore, it can also sort of convert partially into a computer if you want it to.

But as I explored in this video right up here, it isn't really ready to be like a full-time computer for a lot of people just quite yet, but as a tablet, it's the goat matter of fact. Here's a theory to think about is this new iPad too good, meaning like it feels like the only thing holding this iPad back is apple, protecting the max a little because honestly think about it. If this iPad got the iOS 15 makeovers that I want, if it got final cut, and it got like a serious keyboard dock that you just plug into, and it's weighted properly, and it doesn't suck on your lap, I wouldn't have a MacBook, honestly. I would just use this like. Would anyone need a laptop if the software really made the difference? Something to think about I'll uh, entertain that in the comment section below anyway? That's basically it thanks for watching subscribe.

If you haven't already, what are you waiting for catch you guys in the next one peace.

Source : Marques Brownlee