The 2018 Apple iPad Pro (11-Inch) Review: Doubling Down On Performance
by Brett Howse & Andrei Frumusanu on December 4, 2018 10:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Apple calls the 2018 iPad Pro the iPad they’ve always dreamed of building. The new iPad Pro offers a completely new design, with some great new features, so it’s not difficult to see why they say that. The first thing anyone will notice is the new thinner bezels, offering up a modern take on the iPad idea.
Let’s start with the display, since it is really a highlight of this iPad. The performance of it is simply outstanding, and Apple offers arguably the best display in any consumer device with the iPad Pro. The 120 Hz ProMotion makes scrolling incredibly smooth. The True Tone adjustment brings a pleasant look to the display in any lighting condition. 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.
Apple’s SoC efforts have been leading the industry, and the A12X in the iPad Pro offers plenty of performance, but without breaking the power budget. With four Vortex cores for performance, coupled with four Tempest cores for efficiency, and all eight cores available all the time, you get both the burst performance needed for everyday workloads, along with the incredible battery life you’d expect in a tablet. On the GPU side, the seven GPU cores offer 75% more GPU hardware than the iPhone XS, and more memory bandwidth as well. The GPU and CPU both share the sameLPDDR4X memory, with up to 6 GB, and the performance is excellent.
Apple’s new Pencil is also a nice improvement over the outgoing model. A small thing like one flat side makes the Pencil not roll away on you, and also doubles as a connection to the iPad Pro where it magnetically docks for charging. It is a much-improved design over the original, and it is double improved by having a capacitive button on near the tip which can do various functions depending on the application being used.
The new Smart Folio Keyboard is also a nice improvement, offering a much easier setup, but it is not as clear of a win as the Pencil. The extra slot for a second position is nice, but it makes the iPad a bit wobbly and unstable if used anywhere but a nice, flat desk. The keys also don’t offer backlighting, and the definitely should for the price. iOS also shows from time to time that it was not originally intended to be used with a keyboard, which can be frustrating.
And while the hardware is fantastic, iOS is starting to feel like it is holding back the iPad Pro in the productivity realm. There is a lot of performance on tap, but getting access to it can be difficult. It really comes down to the app developers to pull the performance out of this iPad, but due to the fragmented iPad market, they may just target the lowest common denominator, which is often the case. A game like Civilization VI comes by default running at a very low resolution so that it will work well with the older iPads Pros, and will take a developer update to unlock any more fidelity, since the end user has no control over that on iOS for the most part. It makes it easy, but it isn’t always the best experience.
At least on an app basis, the silver lining here is that Adobe bringing their Creative Cloud suite to the iPad is definitely a big win for Apple. Done well, and it should showcase the performance of the tablet, along with the Pencil, in ways that many other apps won’t take advantage of.
If you are a fan of iOS, and you have a workflow that is suited to its operation, there’s little doubt the new iPad Pro models are going to be a great addition, but considering the price increase over the base iPad, you really have to need that performance to justify the iPad Pro 11-inch. Apple also charges a pretty hefty sum to upgrade the internal storage, and the accessories really add on to the price tag as well.
With all of that said, there’s no doubt in my mind that the latest iPad Pro is the best iPad ever. It’s the fastest. It offers great battery life. The display is second to none. But it is still, at its nature, an iPad. Apple has been working on the productivity angle for a few generations now, and while this is their best stab at it yet, the iPad Pro is still in that awkward gap between a content consumption device and a traditional laptop or the Windows convertibles that the original iPad inspired. What you get then is a device that's certainly a lot more professional than the base iPad and a lot more useful for productivity use cases, but also something that feels more like a larger, more expensive iPad than the kind of top-tier machines the iPad Pro is intended to compete with.
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melgross - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
Eh, OLEDs don’t do it either. Last year I went to an audio trade show I go to every year, and Sony was demo’ing among other things, two large TVs. One was an OLED, and the other and LCD. Both were expensive at $9,000.I asked the engineer which he would recommend for HDR and he said the LCD. The truth is that OLEDs simply don’t get bright enough. Black levels aren’t as important.
Spunjji - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
I'm not sure that's entirely accurate, except for from a strict ""adherence to specifications" view. In reality, past a certain level of brightness, a TV with better contrast will look superior in an environment with controlled lighting than a brighter display that has visibly worse contrast.mlambert890 - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
These reviews all seem to ignore that the iPad Pro 10.5 ever existed.This is weird because for all the talk of “this is the iPad Apple always wanted to make!” its largely the iPad they made last year, but for a fair bit more money and with more marketing hype.
Sure the CPU/GPU is even faster than the A10X, and there is now ML acceleration, but hardware hasn’t mattered on the iPad since the Air 2. There is literally nothing that runs poorly on the 10.5 at all. It even has the same 120hz “Liquid Retina” screen. Unless you are in the tiny niche of people who edit 4K video *on the iPad* (or pretend to need to), there is really no benefit from the extra CPU power.
The “revolutionary design” looks exactly the same to 99.9% of people. Especially once in a case. And in exchange for this design, you get .5” of screen, but lose the home button, fingerprint reader and headphone jack. You also lose accessory compatibility in both directions. So there is real drawback there.
For someone wanting to jump on an iPad Pro now, the new one obviously makes sense. But this is always true. Pretending that this latest iPad is more than just iterative is really disingenuous, yet every single article is treating it like we’ve gone from Air 2 -> Pro 11”
markiz - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
I don't get it why do you think it's so hard to compare performance between OSes and devices?Who cares what are the absolute scores for the SoC itself, what matters is real life performance.
Is there no such benchmark, that would measure some common (or less common) scenarios, like:
- take a camera where you have some video
- transfer it to a pc
- do whatever editing you need to do
Or, like, loading and scrolling through 100 most popular webpages?
Paying your bills in online banking?
Buying a thing on amazon?
The Garden Variety - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
Well thank goodness you so clearly defined the methodologies—"do whatever editing you need to do"—so it should be a totally clear and reproducible set of results within your comparison. Oh wait. What are we measuring using your system, again? Time? Against what scale? What if one task requires a different set of procedures on one operating systems than the other, which is your baseline?I don't mean to be a complete prick, but I don't think I'm too far out of bounds here to call your entire message one of the stupidest fucking things I've read yet today. But the day is young, so you've got that going for you.
sonny73n - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
Many fanboys here are praising A12x which is faster than A11 but considering the price of the iPad, is it faster than the mobile Ryzen 5 or the Core i5? And for an additional 936GB of storage, you have to pay $750 more. I thought 1TB of NAND flash cost about $130 now. What a ripoff! This is straight up robbery and I refuse to be the victim.WasHopingForAnHonestReview - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
Comments are filled with paid social media posters. This thing is absolutely overpriced and you STILL dant do everything you want on it. (Ios)Oyeve - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
At the end of the day it's still an ipad. ios is so limited. Why doesnt apple just make a MBP in an ipad sized format?blackcrayon - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
With an A12X chip? I think they're working on that.With intel chips, you're basically asking for a 12" Macbook - iPad sized, but hampered by what intel is able to give us in that form factor.
Also at the end of the day a MBP is just a MacBook Pro, so I'd still prefer they offer what the iPad can do as a separate product for now.
isthisavailable - Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - link
Please compare this to the Core M series fanless chips from intel. Apple is probably already ahead of core M.