The 2018 Apple iPad Pro (11-Inch) Review: Doubling Down On Performance
by Brett Howse & Andrei Frumusanu on December 4, 2018 10:00 AM ESTBattery Life
Apple is generally quite conservative when quoting battery life, and the iPad Pro 11 and 12.9 both are rated at up to 10 hours of web usage. The smaller model offers a 29.37 Wh battery, and the larger model offers 36.71 Wh of capacity. Both of these capacities are much lower than a Surface Pro 6, which has 45 Wh, or a typical Ultrabook, which would be well over 50 Wh.
Our battery tests are performed at 200 nits of brightness.
Web Browsing Battery Life
Our iPad achieved well over the rated ten hours, coming in at 12:13 on our web rundown test. This is a couple of hours longer than you’d get on an iPhone XS Max, and well ahead of the battery life on a Surface Pro 6 on this same test. This is one area where the efficiencies of the SoC, coupled with the operating system, pay big dividends compared to the PC space.
Battery Life Movie Playback
Movie playback is a unique situation where the workload can be offloaded to fixed function hardware in the media block, which is much more efficient than doing the work on the CPU. The iPad Pro achieved just over 15.5 hours of movie playback of a locally stored video. This is a couple of hours longer than you’d get on a Surface Pro with the same workload, despite the much smaller battery capacity.
Normalized Results
One thing we do on our PC reviews is to look at the efficiency of the device by removing the battery capacity from the equation. This shows the current gap between tablets and PCs. The Surface Pro 6 is one of our most efficient devices around, offering over 12 minutes per Wh of battery capacity, and the iPad over doubles that efficiency at almost 25 minutes per Wh. Or put in other terms, the iPad, on average, was drawing 2.4 Watts of power during the web test, and the Surface Pro 6 was drawing about 5 Watts. Considering much of the Surface Pro draw is the display, it shows you how effective Apple has been in driving down all of the power drain.
Charge Time
The other end of the spectrum is the charge time. Apple ships the iPad Pro with a USB-C power adapter with 18 Watts of output. That is quite a bit lower than you’d see on a laptop, and for example the MacBook ships with a 30 Watt AC Adapter. That means that the iPad charge time is quite long, despite the small battery capacity.
In addition, Apple ships an almost comically short USB-C cable with the iPad Pro. At three feet long, it will almost certainly be impossible to charge and use the iPad unless you happen to have an outlet right on your desk. At least with the move to USB-C getting a longer cable is not an issue, but for such an expensive device, this is a bit silly.
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MonkeyPaw - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
For what it’s worth, Affinity Photo on my 2017 iPad Pro performs much better than Affinity Photo on my 2017 5K iMac. Perfectly usable on iOS, not good at all on an i5-7500 with Radeon Pro 570.tipoo - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
That sounds specific to that program.As this article shows, a port going either way doesn't always go great for the secondary platform, and Affinity is mobile first.
thunng8 - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
incorrect, Affinity Photo for ipad is a port of the mac version.Spunjji - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
Just checked this out after responding another comment of yours - the results are interesting! The GPU in your iMac has something like 3x the resources of a Vega 10, which itself seems to be in the same performance ballpark as this Apple chip. Your iMac requires that the GPU do 4x the pixel-processing work your iPad needs to. It sounds like the performance difference is greater than just that, though - but we've already established that the iPad GPU is running at a lower precision. The GPU in A12X can also discard a lot of data before rendering that the Polaris GPU can't, so with those factors taken into account the performance difference isn't so shocking. Still impressive what Apple can do with solid optimisation, good design and a process shrink, though!vFunct - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
Apple should have really led the way in converting pro-apps to iPad pro.It really needs a pro video editor, like Final Cut Pro X, and not the cut-down iMovies editor, for location YouTube videographers.
It could also use some pro-level audio software like full Logic, and not GarageBand.
pvdw - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
I'd really like to see some comparisons to Chromebooks. There's a number of recent ones that are aiming for the same premium portable productivity category, e.g Pixel Slate, HP x2, etc.FrankGu - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
GRID™ Autosport is another choice of cross-platform game on iOS, which may be used for comparison. This game seems to require more performance than Civilization VI on graphics and it needs iOS 11 which looks like based on Metal 2. Although the game's graphic settings are not open to users now, but they should be similar to MEDIUM level on PC.Brett Howse - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
If you have that game on iOS does it have the benchmarking mode that is part of the PC install? The nice thing about Civ is that it does have the debug mode ported over.FrankGu - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
It doesn't have a benchmark mode on iOS version :(tipoo - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
". And the color accuracy is pretty much second to none. Really the only thing missing is HDR – and the battery life hit that would entail in such a portable device would probably not be worth it."Curiously the last gen iPad Pros did advertise HDR, but this year they stopped doing that, probably because the LCD doesn't have the 1000 nits to cover it (nor is it an OLED which could do it with 600). But, it does play HDR content as best it can, for a decent enhancement over not having it at all