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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thunng8 - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
Yes, way ahead of Core M, especially for graphics. Something like 5-6X faster in gfxbench.Brett Howse - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
There's a few results in there already from the MacBook Air with Y Series.name99 - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
The most interesting thing, to me, is the cache topology.While everyone else at the high end has been retreating to private L2 caches, and a large shared L3, Apple has doubled down on a
- LARGE L2 that's
- shared by at least 4 clients
with L3 acting more as the communications/sharing space between different blocks like CPU, GPU, ISP, NPU.
Clearly it's working for them! It also suggests that when they scale even larger (the inevitable ARM Macs and [internal use] servers) they'll likely ship something that looks very different from not just Intel's high end (private L2, distributed L3 slice per core) but perhaps also the current ARM servers?
Do we know anything at all about the NoC that's in use on Apple SoCs, and, second best, on other ARM SoCs (eg QC, Samsung)? A ring? A crossbar? Point to point with direct links from each block to L3, but no block-to-block communication?
Railgun - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
These reviews lately are killing me. Zero consistency from chart to chart. Why in one metric are we comparing a tablet to phones, and others to other tablets...and nada against its predecessor? There are so many reviews like this.Brett Howse - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
Some of the tests are mobile only.Some of the tests are not.
This device bridges both so why would we not compare it to both?
Socius - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
Charging time with a proper adapter is insanely fast on the iPad pro. Using a 20,000mah battery pack, I was able to charge it up from 3% to 45% in about 30-35 minutes. That is absolutely incredible.Also, you can change the tip on the Apple Pencil as it is a simple screw off design. Apple itself doesn't sell different tips but I'm sure 3rd party would step in pretty soon.
One thing you didn't cover is the disk read/write performance. And it differs greatly based on which model iPad you get. The 12.9" 1TB WiFi model is substantially faster than other capacities. And the extra ram has helped keep apps/games in memory far longer than they would on my XS Max with its 4GB ram.
We'll be able to better compare the productivity performance of the iPad Pro once the full Photoshop CC port is released in 2019. But in the mean time, I'm editing through 4K videos using LumaFusion like it's nothing. This isn't a desktop. But with the right apps, it can come pretty close to being able to handle 90% of your workflow. In such a small and portable package. I find myself designing websites on it while sitting on the couch. The drag-and-drop feature between application windows in split view is such a big help as well.
Overall, I picked the iPad Pro over the Surface Pro due to the 120Hz display. And once Photoshop is ported over in a few months, I'll be able to do so much more of my work on it. I think my only gripe is that Microsoft Office is so weak on the iPad Pro. If only I had access to the full desktop version.
lilo777 - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
1. Don't work on your couch.2. iPad does not have 120Hz display
darklight69 - Thursday, December 6, 2018 - link
1. He/She can work wherever they feel like. What kind of control freak are you to demand otherwise from complete strangers.2. Yes it does, says so in the review's display section - https://www.anandtech.com/show/13661/the-2018-appl...
"In addition, Apple’s iPad Pro offers their ProMotion technology, which means it is a 120 Hz display, but one that supports variable refresh rates in order to lower the display's refresh rate for power management purposes."
WasHopingForAnHonestReview - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
Nonsense. How much are you paid for this co?mmentSocius - Thursday, December 6, 2018 - link
Which part of what I said do you disagree with or find questionable?