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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melgross - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
I find Affinity Photo to be clumsy. It’s pretty buggy in some areas too. There are a number of pretty good photo apps for iOS though, in addition to Photo. I like Enlight and Lightroom CC as well.The Garden Variety - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
I've never understood all the obsequious praise for Affinity Photo, and all the Affinity apps, really. They're unbelievably buggy, the company that produces them, Serif, is constantly on the edge of financial failure, they've missed every single one of their publicly stated development deadlines, and their tech/customer support is basically non-existent. Their user forums are this uncomfortable mix of people praising them like the second coming of their lord and savior, or complaining bitterly about the most ridiculously basic features for these classes of software being missing or broken.This is the "Adobe killer" everyone keeps crowing about? Please. They'll be dead and buried inside of five years. Meanwhile, Adobe will hum along printing money.
ChrisH362 - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
In the article, you mentioned “A more telling test, perhaps, will be once Adobe has ported over the full-fat version of Photoshop to the iPad, which is expected next year.” Instead of waiting on Adobe, why not use Affinity Photo from Serif? They have working versions for iPad, Mac, and Windows and works just as well if not better than Photoshop.id4andrei - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
Since APIs and shader precision are different or obfuscated at times, how is this an apples to apples comparison? The same game might run different resources on ios compared to its windows versions. FP16 will always be faster than FP32 especially on custom built hardware for it.tipoo - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
I think it's still a worthy comparison, because the MX150 and 1060 can't use double rate FP16, so it's tailoring to the strenghts of what all of them can do.Landing so close to the 1060 is eye popping with almost no cooling. I can't wait to see these in clamshells with fans.
KPOM - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
Could you post charging times using a standard 60W USB-PD charger, to take chargers out of the equation? That would be helpful to know.tipoo - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
I'm not sure how to read the "peak" box in the corner of the GPU charts - are only the grey bar devices measured at peak?Brett Howse - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
No it just means the scores are peak results and not sustained.darkich - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
Well at this point I guess I can safely say I am disappointed by Andrei's methodology and conclusions regarding performance comparisons.He's missing the FACT that iPad Pro is shown to be FAR faster than any laptop shown here in the actual real life performance (4K video editing).
It will render the same material in the same way, much faster.
How is that not a legit and clear absolute performance metric??
darkich - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
..on a side note, NONE of this ultimately matters for one simple reason - the build quality, I.e. structural integrity.The iPad Pro is a POS that should be recalled.
A tablet that one can *easily* snap in half with bare hands, is not a legitimate product.