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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lilmoe - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
ok......Sc0rp - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
Well, I have to disagree with you on one thing here. I don't think Apple has any blame here when it comes to software. iOS9 is faaaaaaaar more powerful and capable than Mac OS 8 and 9 that I used to run on my power PC's back in the late 90's. Those computers were certainly productive. There's nothing on a software level that's really stopping developers from making productive software for the iPad Pro or even the Air. There is an interface challenge, much as there was an interface challenge when GUI's first came out. As I recall, people lambasted GUI's and mouses as being toys and not for serious work back then. The endless whining over the iPad Pro is just a reverberation of that. People don't like change and they don't like things that rub against their doctrine. But, consider this... While many adults actually have some difficulty adapting to this new computing paradigm, youngsters adapt to it like a fish to water.I think it is a wild boast to call an iPad Pro a 'useless toy'. I certainly have made a ton of use of mine. Of course, I'm an artist so there's that. Not to mention that my iPads have been my primary communication hub for the last five years.
Jumangi - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
iOS blows as an actual productivity system. It is made for smartphones first(Apple's cash cow) and everything else second. Put a version of Mac OSX on this and you have something. Right now this is an expensive artists toy.strangis - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
> While many adults actually have some difficulty adapting to this new computing paradigm, youngsters adapt to it like a fish to water.That's why I, as someone of the Commodore Vic 20 era, has to show relatives and clients 25 years younger than me how to use their phones, tablets and computers every week. Regardless of age, some people get it, some don't.
Similarly, I've never seen the value of an iPad Pro when, as an artist), I need to finish in Photoshop or After Effects. The creative tools available on the iPad Pro are limiting for those of us used to more, and considering its price, better to buy something that will get the job done.
Murloc - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
I have no doubt people will only use tablets once they'll be able to interact with the interface with their brains.Relic74 - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
Yea but at least Mac OS had a proper file-system, allowed it's users to select their own default apps, appsdidn't require API's in order to talk to the system, all applications used the same resolution, when a new feature was added to the system every app was able to utilize it immediately and didn't require it's developer to update their apps, the user was ablue to customize their desktop and even the UI, supported widgets, applications were windowed and ran desktop software. Actually, I take it back, Mac OS's UI was a lot more powerful, the system not so much, which is reversed in iOS, the UI isn't very powerful, it's actually pretty vanilla, though it's BSD underpinnings are extremely powerful. If I was able to access the BSD system, I would dump iOS's UI in a heart beat and install a X desktop environment like Gnome 3, which actually works fairly well as a tablet OS. Than maybe the iPad Pro would actually be a Pro device. I'm running Arch Linux on a Xiaomi MiPad 2, love it.NEDM64 - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
Dude!If you were in the 80's, you'll be advocating text user interfaces instead of graphical user interfaces.
If you were in the 70's, you'll be advocating separate terminals connected to computers, as opposed to "all-in-ones" or "intelligent terminals" like the Apple II, Commodore PET, TRS-80.
Opinions like yours, with due respect, don't matter, because people like you, already have their rigs in place, and aren't in the market.
Apple's market position is for people that want the next thing, not the same ol' thing…
RafaelHerschel - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
Apparently the next thing is a larger iPad. I'm going to be bold and predict the next next thing. It's going to be a slightly thinner version of the larger iPad. Awesome.Murloc - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
you aren't understanding tilmoe's posts.You can spend millions developing software for a superpowerful tablet.
You will still never be able to fit Photoshop's whole interface and abundance of options and menus into the tablet in a way that the user is easily able to reach them, without scrolling through pages of big buttons.
At the end of the day, you'll get a crippled version of photoshop and the user will have to get on a traditional computer (a WORKstation, not because it's more powerful, not because software houses invest more in it, but because it has human interaction devices and a big screen that enable humans to get work done faster) to get stuff done.
Tablets are mostly content consumption products exactly because of the limited interfaces. They have the advantage of portability and ease of use, you just open apps while on the couch, and that's why they master content consumptions better than say laptops.
Constructor - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
It's by now become a quasi-religious belief system for some that "mobile devices cannot ever be used for any professional purposes whatsoever!".At the same time more and more people (and businesses!) don't care about such beliefs in the slightest and simple use those devices very much professionally and in many cases with more success and higher productivity than they'd had with conventional computers.
Part of the reason is that agility and flexibility often beats feature count, all the more so since professional workflows very often just can't afford to even consider most of the myriad theoretical options some desktop programs offer. Heck, most professional uses actually don't need much more than a browser interface anyway!
Yes, there are some uses for which desktop or mainframe computers will be the only really viable option. But what you and many others didn't seem to have noticed is that those domains have been shrinking rapidly over the last decade(s).