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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Ryan Smith - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
Unfortunately we don't have that one. These go back to Apple when we're done.MonkeyPaw - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
I have the 2017 12.9” 64GB model, though I’m not on staff and don’t have your benchmarking suite.MonkeyPaw - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
Not sure how this will for,at on this comment system, but here is what I got on my 2017 iPad Pro 64GB;TabletMark 2017
Overall: 1404
Web-Email: 1438
Photos-Video: 1372
Speedometer 2.0: 89.0
WebXPRT 3.0: 131
Kraken 1.1: 856ms
Slingshot 3.1 Extreme:
Graphics: 6,514
Physics: 2,602
Ice Storm Unlimited
Base: 55,609
Graphics: 118,335
Physics: 19,482
GFXbench Aztec Offscreen
High: 21.5
Normal: 59.3
melgross - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
They supply a 1 meter USB C cable because the usb 3.1 gen 2 spec for data transfer is 10Gbs for 1 meter, but 5Gbs for anything longer to about 3 meters, where it then peters off to about 3G s to about 4 meters.I imagine they’re concerned that people will complain that they’re not getting the 10Gbs speeds, and blame Apple and the iPad for that if they give a longer cable. Apple has difficulty communicating these problems for some reason. They should just state the data transfer speeds with different cable lengths so that people understand what they’re doing. I have a few USB 3 to USB C charging cables, and none are usb 3 anything. They’re all usb 2 cables with a 480Mbs transfer rate. Most people don’t understand the totally screwed up spec that usb is.
tipoo - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
They only use USB 3.0 anyways, so not that.melgross - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
What? It’s 3.1 gen 2. Just go to their site and read the speed spec for yourself..tipoo - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
I don't see 3.1 gen 2 anywhere on their specs sheethttps://www.apple.com/ca/ipad-pro/specs/
Last news I heard was the iPad Pros were the first to move to 3.0 while the phones were still on 2.0, I don't see anything corroborating 3.1 gen 2 on a quick google for the new ones.
https://www.cultofmac.com/397412/ipad-pros-sneaky-...
gailthesnail - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
The iPad pro's USB 3.0 functionality is heavily restricted and is only enabled for the lightning to SD card dongle. Anything else like connecting to iTunes to transfer media is limited to USB 2.0 speeds. This is what I've experienced so far on my 2017 iPad pro 10.5. I'm not 100% sure but I think it's the same for the new iPad pros as welltipoo - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
I hope iOS13 does remove most of the hurdles with working off iOS. The power is clearly there, if you chart out Apple device performance per dollar the 11 inch Pro is way ahead of the Macbooks, but you just can't do as much on it.Something as simple as working off of media off an external hard drive which you take for granted on any traditional OS you just can't do here. External hard drives aren't natively supported at all. Then there's lack of a trackpad and a cursor for fine text selection, Xcode, etc etc.
All this power seems like it was meant for an OS that was pushed back in favor of polish, and hopefully 13 really unleashes it.
HStewart - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
IOS and Mac OS ( or Windows ) are different OS - iOS is app centric OS while Mac OS and Windows is desktop centric OS. Apple is unfortunately in delusion that iOS and iPad Pro can replace the desktop / laptop devices.Even with Photoshop Creative Cloud on it - it nothing like the Photoshop CS5 ( which I owner ) and in my opinion it just and over larger iPhone.