The Apple iPad Pro Review
by Ryan Smith, Joshua Ho & Brandon Chester on January 22, 2016 8:10 AM ESTBattery Life
Battery life is important beyond any doubt. No one wants a tablet or phone that can only spend three hours away from a charger before it dies, no matter how good the device is. While such battery life might be incredible for a desktop replacement or anything else that realistically spends most of its life plugged into a charger, mobile devices are usually carried on the go and used far away from a charger for significant amounts of time. Probably the ultimate example of this is travel, where one might use a tablet to watch movies and browse the internet for a few hours over the course of a flight.
As a result, a significant portion of our reviewing efforts are devoted to determining battery life. In order to quantify battery life, there are inevitably a lot of test cases to cover. Some people might spend most of their time in an e-reader app, others might spend most of their time playing games or similarly intensive tasks on their phones. There’s no real standard for usage, so a tablet that might last a day for one person could last a week. As a result, the goal of our testing is to provide a useful relative comparison. In order to do this, we attempt to equalize for variables like display brightness by setting all displays to 200 nits for battery life testing. Due to the inability to completely eliminate the variables that come with live network testing, we also use strong network reception with high throughput on LTE to ensure that things like power amplifiers are either at a low power setting or bypassed entirely.
Our first test is the venerable web browsing test, in which we load a selection of web pages from full charge until the device shuts off from lack of battery charge. In WiFi battery life is pretty much identical to the iPad Air 2, which might be surprising given that the battery is only 41% larger. That might sound like a lot, but the display of the iPad Pro is 77% larger at the same 264 PPI pixel density, which means that there’s a pretty sizeable efficiency gap between the iPad Air 2 and iPad Pro. The improved display and SoC are likely to be the main reasons for this, as the 20nm SoC process that was used to make the A8 SoC was quite leaky due to its traditional planar transistor structure compared to the FinFET process used in the A9X.
Interestingly, for whatever reason when re-running the same test on LTE battery life is noticeably different when compared to the iPad Air 2, where LTE and WiFi battery life were relatively close. I suspect that RF power is pretty similar between the two devices, but due to efficiency improvements on the display/SoC side the difference in battery life due to additional RF power consumption is magnified.
The more interesting test result that I encountered over the course of battery life testing was our tablet video rundown test. For whatever reason, web browsing clearly lasts a decent amount longer. It's pretty unlikely that the web browser has a lower SoC load when video is basically entirely dependent upon fixed function hardware decode. The most plausible explanation here for me is that we're seeing differences that arise from panel self-refresh, which can kick in on our web browsing test while the same definitely doesn't hold for our video test, which basically requires at least 30 FPS refresh rate continuously for the entire duration of the test. Overall that this makes the iPad Pro worse for content consumption, given Apple's content creation goals, is an unexpected turn of events.
Moving on to the more SoC-bound tasks, we can start by looking at Basemark OS II, which is basically a CPU power virus that can be used to examine the upper bound for device TDP, in addition to nominal sustained CPU load. It’s evident from this test and some back of the envelope calculation that total device TDP excluding display power is roughly 5W, which is about right given the size of the device. This suggests that the A9X can be directly compared to Intel’s Core M in both performance and power, for better or for worse. Performance here is good, with relatively low throttling due to the use of a FinFET process and solid implementation of the Twister architecture.
In our GPU throttling test, the A9X has effectively made it impossible to actually use T-Rex as a throttling test as it’s essentially pegged at vsync for the entire duration of the test. The iPad Pro also lasts a similar amount of time here as on the Basemark OS II test, which suggests that this test is still reaching TDP limits for the GPU, even if it doesn't manifest in the form of reduced performance.
Charge Time
While battery life is important, any time you’re dealing with a mobile device the time it takes to charge the battery is important as well. The usual example here is travel, but simply forgetting to plug in a device overnight can show the importance of charge rate. In the case of the iPad Pro, Apple ships it with their usual 12W charger. One might be tempted to suggest that the battery would be charged in about 3.5 hours, but it’s necessary to get the data and avoid speculation on something like this. In order to test how quickly the iPad Pro charges, we measure the difference in time between first plugging in a fully discharged tablet and when the charge is complete based upon power draw at the AC adapter.
Interestingly, the iPad Pro takes a pretty significant amount of time to charge, at over a full hour longer than the iPad Air 2. While some might be okay with this, it’s definitely a sore spot for the iPad Pro as a higher voltage charger would be able to charge the device at a more acceptable rate. I’m not really sure why Apple decided to go this route, but there’s really no clear solution here unlike the case of the iPhone 6s Plus. The charger also definitely isn’t enough to ensure that you’re always charging the iPad Pro while in use either if the SoC is in overdrive/turbo states as thermally constrained power draw is already around 9-10W.
Despite the long charge time, overall the iPad Pro is quite mobile. However, it does regress somewhat relative to the iPad Air 2 due to its longer charge time, even if battery life is equivalent. Depending upon your use case though it might be difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference.
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nsteussy - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
Well said.Wayne Hall - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
WHAT IS MEANT BY PROFESSIONAL TASKS. I AM THINKING OF THE I-PAD PRO.gw74 - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
Why do Apple only want content consumers' money in mobile, and not creators' too? Apple are in business to make a profit. If there was money to be made building workstation apps for mobile, it would happen. Furthermore "exploit their owners commercially" is just a pejorative way of saying "sell them stuff in return for money", i.e. "business".Sc0rp - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
1) Apple made the pencil. I'm sure that they want creator's money too.2) The "Pro" market is incredibly small and fickle.
AnakinG - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
I think Apple wants people to "think" they are creators and professionals. It's a feel good thing while making money. :)Constructor - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
The iPad Pro is a fantastic device for all kind of uses – I personally also use it as a mobile TV, streaming radio (due to its really excellent speakers), game console, internet and magazine reader (since it is pretty much exactly magazine-sized!), drawing board, note pad, multi-purpose communicator (mail, messaging, FaceTime etc.), web reader, ebook reader and so on...As to the numbers: According to an external survey it seems about 12% of all iPads sold in the past quarter were iPad Pros. We're talking about millions of devices there at the scale at which Apple is operating – most other tablet manufacturers and even PC manufacturers would kill for numbers like thes at prices like these!
It's almost funny how some people completely freak out about the iPad Pro because it crashes through their imaginary boundaries between their imaginary "allowed" kinds of devices.
The iPad Pro is a really excellent computer for the desktop (if for whatever reason an even bigger display is not available), which also works really well on my lap (actually much better and almost always more conveniently than a "laptop" computer!) and even in handheld use like a magazine or notepad. It's very light for its size, has a really excellent screen, excellent speakers and is fast and responsive.
Yeah, you can find things which you at this moment can't do on it yet. But there are many, many practically relevant uses at which it excels to a far greater extent than any desktop or notebook computer ever could.
jasonelmore - Sunday, January 24, 2016 - link
so you basically use it as a consumption and a communication device.. our point is, a professional cannot use this as their only computing device. they need PC's or MAC's to supplement it, which all use Intel or AMD.Until this fact changes, intel is far from being in trouble. iPad sales are in a huge slump as well, not just pc sales. Actually, Notebook PC sales are great, its the desktop that slows down every 3-4 years. iPhone is about to become a 0 growth product as well. Apple see's the writing on the wall, and that's why they are exploring cars, and other unknown products. The Chinese market never turned out like they had hoped, with stiff competition at low costs with similar quality.
Constructor - Sunday, January 24, 2016 - link
so you basically use it as a consumption and a communication device..Among many other things! So let me guess, when you happen to play some streaming music on your workplace computer or if you're watching the news on it, does it automatically turn into a "toy" and yourself into one of those mythical "only consumers" as well?
This silly ideology is really ludicrous.
our point is, a professional cannot use this as their only computing device. they need PC's or MAC's to supplement it, which all use Intel or AMD.
Nope.
Some portion of workplaces actually requires a desktop OS. This portion is not 100% but substantially lower than that.
A very large portion of workplaces (likely the majority) could very well use iPads as well, but external circumstances make regular PCs or Macs just more convenient and practical.
And some other portion can and does use mobile devices already now as their primary tools.
The tedious and absurd conclusion from people's own limited knowledge and imagination to absolute judgments of the entire market is anything but new, but it's really old news by now.
Until this fact changes, intel is far from being in trouble. iPad sales are in a huge slump as well, not just pc sales. Actually, Notebook PC sales are great, its the desktop that slows down every 3-4 years. iPhone is about to become a 0 growth product as well. Apple see's the writing on the wall, and that's why they are exploring cars, and other unknown products. The Chinese market never turned out like they had hoped, with stiff competition at low costs with similar quality.
You should seriously get better sources for your information as your imaginations are rather far off from actual reality.
Intel is already in a tightening squeeze between the eroding PC market (especially regarding its crumbling profitability) and the ever-rising development costs they face with their creaking x86 antiquity. That their CPU performance is stagnating at the same time is also increasingly problematic, too, since it puts another damper on the PC market.
When you're talking about Apple you clearly live in a different universe from the rest of us: Apple is actually booming in China while the cheap manufacturers have run into unexpected difficulties against them, and your other imaginations of Apple's doom are neither original nor do they have anything to do with the actual reality on the ground.
Even the iPad is a massive cash cow on a scale the competition can only dream about – it's just dwarfed by the absolute gigantic profits from the iPhone.
But yeah, surely that spells inescapable doom for the company.
Sure!
Coldmode - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
This is the stupidest paragraph about computing I've ever read. It's equivalent to lamenting Bell's role in telephony because we managed to win World War 1 with telegraphs but now teenagers spend all their time hanging off the kitchen set chatting to one another about their crushes.ABR - Monday, January 25, 2016 - link
@ddriver I disagree with most of what you say in these contents, but, "today we have gigahertz and gigabytes in our pockets, and the best we can do with it is duck face photos," hits the nail on the head! The problem though is not that software developers don't try to do more, but that they can't make any money doing so. The masses just want to buy the latest duck photo app, and there's not enough of the pie left over to support much else. In the early days of the iPad this wasn't so, but nowadays take a look at the top charts in iOS to see what I mean. Games makes more than all others put together, and then even in categories like Utilities, you see mainly Minecraft aids, emoji texters, and a few web browser add-ons. Apple doesn't promote this in their advertising, but they do so in more subtle but effective ways like which apps they choose to feature and promote in the app store. In fact, the store is littered with all kinds of creativity- and productivity-unleashing apps if you search hard, but they all tend to die on the vine because they get swamped out by the latest glossy-image joke-text-photo-video apps and the developer loses interest.