2018 iPad Pro review: “What’s a computer?”

The 2018, 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard Folio.

Samuel Axon

The 2018, 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard Folio. Samuel Axon

The 2018, 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

Samuel Axon

The 2018, 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Samuel Axon

The iPad Pro is just one-fourth of an inch thick.

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The iPad Pro is just one-fourth of an inch thick. Samuel Axon

The 2018, 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Samuel Axon

The iPad Pro is just one-fourth of an inch thick. Samuel Axon

The rear camera on the iPad Pro, with a vertically aligned flash.

Samuel Axon

The Smart Keyboard Folio turns it into a laptop—sort of.

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This screen is enormous, which is great for drawing.

Samuel Axon

Early this year, Apple ran an ad that featured a young girl using an iPad as her primary computing device. An older woman asked the girl a question about her computer, and she responded, “What’s a computer?”

The ad was widely mocked. For starters, an iPad is a computer. But also, the hypothetical future when kids don’t even know what a desktop or laptop are seems very distant at best. Yes, tablets and smartphones have replaced laptops and desktops among large numbers of young people for personal uses like social media, Web browsing, and games. But despite some high school students who sometimes write their papers on their smartphones, mobile devices are still not where the real work gets done. Real work is done on a laptop or desktop.

But now Apple has released an iPad Pro that it has very explicitly positioned as a, uh, computer for doing that real work. Really. Apple’s “Why iPad Pro” page says, “Here are a few reasons why your next computer just might be iPad Pro.”

After using 2018’s new 12.9-inch iPad Pro for a week, I almost find myself wondering just what a computer is, too. This device breaks a lot of rules and challenges some preconceptions about what a real productivity machine looks like—especially for creative work.

But the 2018 iPad Pro is both awe-inspiring and deeply disappointing. It offers performance unlike anything we’ve seen before in a mobile device. Its Pencil accessory is a truly powerful art tool. And a select few robust applications like Photoshop and AutoCAD are making their way to the platform, challenging assumptions that a tablet should be a stripped-down, pinch hitting experience.

But it became obvious within a day of use that iOS, otherwise an excellent operating system for phones, is still not designed with that kind of real work in mind. Limitations with how the new USB-C port can be used ultimately undermine the pitch that this tablet is a real workhorse.

The new iPad Pro tries to redefine computing, but in many ways, it feels like a tech demo for that redefinition, not the final product. Despite an incredible leap forward in performance, the software seems to be lagging just a bit behind.

Specifications

We’ll dig in on the silicon (possibly the most exciting thing about this device) in a moment. First, let’s get some other specs out of the way.

Starting at $799 but ranging up to $1,899, new iPad Pro comes in two sizes: 11 inches, and 12.9 inches. The 11-inch unit measures at 9.74 x 7.02 x 0.23 inches (247.6 x 178.5 x 5.9mm), and the 12.9-inch one at 11.04 x 8.46 x 0.23 inches (280.6 x 214.9 x 5.9mm). Apart from size and screen resolution, technical specifications for both are identical. Both come in configurations with or without LTE support. The smaller one weighs 1.03 pounds (468g) and the larger one weighs 1.4 pounds (633g) for the LTE model or 1.39 pounds (631g) for the Wi-Fi only model.

You can configure them with 64GB, 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of flash storage. Oddly, developers using the devices have discovered there are two different RAM configurations, and they’re not advertised. The 1TB configuration appears to come with 6GB of RAM, but the others come with 4GB—the same as last year’s iPad Pro, and this year’s iPhone XS or XS Max. Our 1TB review unit has 6GB of RAM. Apple likely bumped up the RAM on the 1TB configuration because users who need 1TB of flash storage need it to, for example, open massive Adobe Photoshop files. More RAM would help that run smoothly.  (A full-featured Photoshop is coming to the iPad Pro next year.)

Both units have a number of sensors used for various features: an accelerometer, a barometer, an ambient light sensor, and a three-axis gyro.

The 11-inch model has a 29.37-watt-hour battery, the 12.9-inch one has a 36.71 watt-hour battery. Apple promises the same battery life in these models as in last year’s: 10 hours of Web browsing over Wi-Fi or consuming music or video content.

The A12X

The star of the show is Apple’s custom system-on-a-chip, the A12X. It follows the A12 in 2018 iPhones and the A10X in 2017 iPad Pros, which were both already the best in their respective product categories.

The A12X is the first tablet SoC manufactured in a 7nm process. That means it offers better performance while using less power and taking up less space. It houses a central processing unit (CPU), a graphics processing unit (GPU), an image signal processor (ISP), a neural processing unit (NPU) Apple calls the Neural Engine, a storage controller, an integrated memory controller, and more.

The CPU has eight cores—four high-performance, and four high-efficiency. Unlike with prior iPad Pros, all the cores can be engaged simultaneously when needed. Apple says the A12X’s single-core CPU performance is up to 35 percent faster than the A10X in last year’s iPad Pro and that multi-core CPU performance is up to 90 percent faster. The company hasn’t been forthcoming with many technical details about the architecture, but a recent deep dive at Anandtech with its iPhone counterpart, the A12, suggested that increased cache sizes might be part of the equation.

Apple also claims nearly double the graphics performance of last year’s iPad Pro thanks to improvements to its GPU in the A12X. Thanks to the 7nm process, Apple managed to squeeze another core in to the GPU, bringing the total to seven.

We ran benchmarks to verify these claims and found them to be largely true, which puts the iPad Pro in spitting distance from some of the most powerful workstation laptops, including most recent MacBook Pro models.

The other development of note here is that the Neural Engine has come to the iPad for the first time. The first iteration of Apple’s machine learning silicon was introduced in the A11 SoC in the iPhone X, and a second generation arrived in the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR earlier this fall. Whereas the A11’s Neural Engine could handle 600 billion operations per second, the A12 and A12X can handle 5 trillion. The Neural Engine helps with Apple’s computational photography features, Siri, search, palm rejection when using the Apple Pencil, Face ID, augmented reality, and more.

The A12X is the most interesting thing about the iPad Pro, so we went into considerably more detail in a related article—that piece also includes our interview with representatives at Apple about the company’s in-house silicon strategy.

USB-C

There is only one port on the iPad Pro, but in a big shift from Apple’s previous iOS device strategy, it’s USB-C, not the proprietary Lightning connection. This is a very welcome change, and it brings many advantages. At first glance, it looks like we’re headed for the dongle-free (or at least dongle-lite) utopia we’ve long dreamed of. USB-C means external 5K display support, support for a wider range of headphones, USB-C charger support, and more accessory support in general—at least in theory. It even means you can charge devices like your iPhone, an Android phone, or even a Nintendo Switch from your iPad Pro.

USB-C is here, and it’s a welcome change.

Credit: Samuel Axon

There’s no question that the iPad Pro’s port situation is now all-around better than it was with Lightning. But there are infuriating caveats and limitations.

First and foremost, iOS does not offer file system access for external drives over USB-C. Frankly, that’s ridiculous. Yes, apps can access files on external drives under certain conditions if they’ve been specifically built to do so, but that’s not enough. No device that calls itself “Pro” should ship without this basic capability. Apple has for a while offered a “Files” app for browsing file systems, but it doesn’t work for this.

It’s a similar situation with external displays. Yes, there is OS-wide support for mirroring the iPad Pro’s native resolution on external displays. But extending to a display instead of mirroring requires app developers to specifically implement support for that. I’ve no doubt that very popular and high-profile pro apps will do just that, but this should be built right into the operating system like it is on, say, a MacBook Pro.

Oh, and the (oddly short) USB-C cable that comes in the box? It’s USB 2.0, so you need to buy an additional cable to do a lot of this.

On paper, it looks really exciting that the iPad Pro now uses USB-C, and it is. Like I said, it’s better than the previous state of affairs. But it does not bring all the promise pro users projected when they first read rumors this was coming. I’m quite certain these are all limitations in iOS, not in the hardware. Apple could fix this, and maybe it will in next year’s major iOS release. But until then, USB-C feels half implemented—at least when it comes to pro and power users’ specific needs.

That’s very disappointing. The applications of USB-C here are sufficient for a consumer device like an iPhone, but the iPad Pro carries the pretense of being for professionals, who need these capabilities. If Apple had implemented this the way this product’s target users wanted, I would have spent half this review joyously sharing all the nifty, powerful new things you can now do with an iPad. Sadly, these limitations mean there’s not much more to say for now.

Display

Both iPad Pro sizes have LCD displays, not the OLED seen in the iPhone XS. The 11-inch model has a resolution of 2,388 x 1,668 pixels—slightly higher than that of its predecessor, but only in the sense that more pixels were added in the parts that used to be bezels. It’s the same story for the 12.9-inch unit, with a resolution of 2,732 x 2,048. Pixel density is therefore 264ppi for both sizes, which theoretically could be better, but which few would complain about.

The iPad Pro displays have a 120Hz refresh rate, and the OS keeps up with this at all times. It’s nice to look at, and it makes the iPad feel even more responsive, especially when drawing with the Apple Pencil. It’s one of the best things about using an iPad Pro.

According to Apple, the iPad Pro display is both “fingerprint resistant” and has “antireflective coating.” Nevertheless, it accumulates fingerprints like there’s no tomorrow, and it’s pretty reflective. But it maxes out at 600 nits of brightness, which is high for a mobile device, and that helps it fight some reflection sources.

Apple calls the display on the iPad Pro a “Liquid Retina” display, a meaningless name that indicates that it is HiDPI and that it uses LCD tech—two things that are true about the majority of Apple’s products (some of which don’t get this label). As best as we can decipher, Apple uses this to refer to its new LCD displays that have rounded corners. That is an impressive engineering feat that required a creative sub-pixel anti-aliasing method, and it makes for a nice effect. A screen this close to the edges that didn’t have rounded corners would look kind of disjointed somehow, given that the chassis has rounded corners.

Generally, most apps play nicely with the rounded corners, but there are exceptions. Apple insists that developers support it in the future though, so the apps that don’t are already a dying breed.

Apple claims that this iPad Pro is “all screen,” but that’s obviously untrue. There are still bezels, they’re just a lot smaller, and they’re the same size on every edge as noted above. They’re just thick enough to prevent the iPad Pro from having a notch. The notch in the new iPhones never bothered me, but if you’re among those who hate it, you’ll like this approach a lot better.

The iPad Pro’s display features P3 wide color, and the color accuracy is extremely good—better than maybe any other product anywhere close to this class. The screen was clearly made with creative professionals and artists in mind, and they will not be disappointed. I can’t say enough positive about this aspect of the display; it’s great.

The screen also supports Apple’s True Tone tech, which uses ambient light sensors to read the room and adjust the white balance of the display to match, purely for eye comfort.

Audio

Because the previous iPad Pro’s speaker system would not fit in the new chassis, Apple redesigned the speakers for this iPad Pro. There are now four sets—a woofer and a tweeter in each corner.

In keeping with the notion that there is no “correct” orientation for the iPad Pro, the speakers work regardless of how you’re holding it. Mid and high frequencies always come from whatever two speakers are oriented at the top, and bass always comes through all four.

I was surprised by how full the sound from the speakers sounded. With mobile devices, speakers are often good enough for speakerphone Skype conversations, or to share a funny YouTube video with your friends. But I would listen to music or watch a movie on these speakers. They’re obviously not as good as something audio-centric like a HomePod or Sonos One, but they’re great for a mobile device.

But with a mobile device, there are situations where you’ll need to use headphones, and this is where things get frustrating. Like recent iPhones, the iPad Pro drops the 3.5mm headphone jack. This means that unless you use wireless headphones, you have to use the one port for your wired headphones. The good news is that the iPad Pro supports both analog and digital audio through the USB-C port, so your wired headphone options are strong. But you probably need that port for your music-making device or something else.

So, barring an elaborate and very unportable specialized setup, you must turn to wireless headphones. Apple has made wireless headphones very viable for iPhone owners. Aided by Apple’s proprietary W1 chip, AirPods don’t get enough credit for being a revolutionary product. They work great for consumers.

But here’s the problem: they do not work at all for professionals or serious hobbyists. The iPad Pro promises to be a good device for DJs, electronic music producers, and people who record in home music studios. AirPods deliver sound quality that’s too poor for those use cases. Apple’s W1 chip is also available in some Beats headphones, but as nice as those are for listening to certain kinds of music, any audio professional will tell you they are way off the mark in terms of representing sound accurately.

So you have to get headphones without Apple’s W1 chip. We’re already making big compromises at this point, but it gets worse. If you’re performing or producing music, any latency at all is unacceptable. But wireless headphones without the W1 may have some latency.

There are workarounds for these problems, like a powered USB hub, but such solutions are a huge hassle, they limit portability, and they cost more money. Depending on the hardware you have available, you may literally have to choose between an instrument to play and headphones to hear it on.

Even if Apple can defend removing the headphone jack on iPhones, it absolutely cannot defend that on a device like this—not without offering more than one USB-C port.

Wireless

The iPad Pro has 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi with support for simultaneous 2.4GHz and 5GHz dual-band. It also has Bluetooth 5.0 and GPS.

Here are the LTE bands Apple says the tablet works with:

• UMTS/HSPA/HSPA+/DC‑HSDPA (850, 900, 1700/2100, 1900, 2100 MHz); GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)
• Gigabit-class LTE (Models A2013 and A2014: bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30, 34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 66, 71)

The iPad Pro also supports eSIMs.

Look and feel

The iPad Pro is available in two shades of metallic grey: one called silver, and the other called space grey. They’re the same shades seen on today’s MacBook Pros.

Regardless of which shade you pick, you’ll notice right away that this iPad is an aesthetic departure from its predecessors. Instead of the gentle curve from the edges to the aluminum back, the new iPad Pro has a distinct aluminum band around the edges—it’s rather similar to the iPhone 5 or iPhone SE in style.

There are bands of plastic jutting into the aluminum enclosure at various points, and since they’re a slightly different color, they seem like deliberate accents even though they serve a function (allowing wireless signal to pass through). Punctured holes for four speakers are subtle but visible on the top and bottom. The top is home to the wake button that also performs some functions previously performed by the home button, and the bottom is also home to the USB-C port. On one side, you’ll find two metallic buttons for turning the volume up or down, a SIM tray, and a slightly off-color spot where the Apple Pencil clings magnetically to charge. There’s not much to see on the other side—it’s almost clean, unbroken aluminum.

The back has the camera, a flash, a fairly subtle Apple logo, the word “iPad,” some etchings like model number and “Designed by Apple in California,” and the keyboard folio’s smart connector in a new spot directly below the iPad label.

Everything about this design makes the iPad Pro seems aesthetically closer to a MacBook Pro than to an iPhone, or even an older iPad. This is likely a deliberate choice on Apple’s part.

In a rambling interview, Apple design chief Jony Ive recently pointed to two things when asked what makes the iPad Pro special from a design perspective: the rounded screen corners, and the notion that there is no longer an optimal or correct orientation in which to hold it.

It’s kind of true that with the bezels greatly reduced and made uniform on all edges, the iPad Pro feels a little more freeform in that regard. But it’s also kind of not true for two reasons. First, the Apple logo on the back is still oriented in such a way as to suggest that portrait is the right way. Second, while Face ID now works in landscape orientation, you may find that you accidentally block it with your thumb a lot when holding it that way. It feels less like portrait is the default orientation than it used to, but it still ultimately feels that way a little bit.

Speaking of those reduced bezels, there’s no longer room for a home button, so there’s not one. iOS 12 added iPhone X-like gestures to replace it for most interactions already. I like these gestures a lot, and don’t find that I miss the home button. Also, I never found myself accidentally touching the screen while holding it.

My first thought when picking up the iPad Pro is that it’s really light, and it’s quite thin. It’s much easier to hold than the previous iPad Pro—especially the 12.9-inch model. Still, I wasn’t able to use the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the Keyboard Folio on an airplane tray in coach. It was too tall.

I like the design of these new iPads better than the old ones. They’re more portable, they’re nicer to hold, and the screens dominate the experience.

Peripherals

The iPad Pro can be augmented with two key peripherals: the Apple Pencil and the Smart Keyboard Folio. They replace similar peripherals for the prior iPad Pro.

They’re key to major functionality for the iPad Pro, but they’re not included in the initial purchase of your tablet. The Smart Keyboard Folio costs $179 for the 11-inch iPad Pro and $199 for the 12.9-inch model. The pencil will set you back $129. If you’re buying both of these for your tablet, you’ll set yourself back at least $300 in addition to the money you spent on the tablet itself.

The good news is that they’re both pretty good—the Pencil in particular.

Apple Pencil

The previous Apple Pencil was responsive, easy to use, and powerful—a far cry from most styluses you’d find in other devices. The new one is still all of those things, and it adds some new bells and whistles.

The Pencil isn’t just a device that uses the iPad screen’s touch sensitive capabilities. It has a force sensor that measures how hard you press it down, which can produce different results in art apps, often naturally mirroring what would happen if you did so using the real art tool the application emulates. The Pencil also has sensors that detect the angle and orientation at which you’re holding it, which allows for special interactions, like imitating real pencil shading when you tilt it a certain way.

The new Apple Pencil.

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The new Apple Pencil. Samuel Axon

It attaches magnetically to the iPad Pro.

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It attaches magnetically to the iPad Pro. Samuel Axon

The new Apple Pencil. Samuel Axon

It attaches magnetically to the iPad Pro. Samuel Axon

There are a number of new Pencil features, too. You can double tap the side of the pencil for contextual, app-specific interactions like switching between drawing tools.

Recent iPhones (and this iPad) support tap-to-wake, a feature that wakes the screen when you tap it with your finger. Tap-to-wake with the Apple Pencil is now supported in the iPad Pro, but it works a little differently. When you tap the screen with the Pencil while it’s off, you’ll be taken straight to Apple’s Notes app. This is nice, but it would be nicer if there were more options for which app to launch; not everyone uses Notes.

The new Pencil and iPad Pro also solve one of the biggest problems with the old Pencil: charging. Previously, you had to take an easy-to-lose cap off the Pencil and plug the entire object into the Lightning port on the iPad Pro. It jutted out awkwardly, looked silly, and probably wouldn’t fit in your bag. Thankfully, that’s no longer how it works. The Pencil now clings to the iPad Pro’s side magnetically when you place it there. Doing so causes the iPad Pro to immediately sync with the Pencil and begin charging it wirelessly.

The magnetic grip is strong enough that it won’t fall off unless knocked pretty hard or deliberately pulled. It’s not quite strong enough that you can trust it will stay attached in your bag no matter what happens, but it’s close. And the iPad and Pencil always align perfectly for charging. You’ll even get an on-screen indicator letting you know what the Pencil’s charge level is.

The Apple Pencil is a powerful drawing tool, and it’s a natural-feeling way to interact with the iPad Pro generally—though if you’re not an artist at all, you’ll be just as happy using your fingers. I’m not very practiced at the visual arts, but I shared the iPad with my fiancée, who makes a webcomic. She did some sketches and seemed impressed. In the past, she has used a Wacom tablet. She seriously pondered buying an iPad Pro instead only minutes after using it. It really is a great tool for sketching and making art, and it’s a big part of the iPad Pro’s appeal.

Smart Keyboard Folio

The Folio is simpler to use than its predecessor, and it now offers two viewing angles: one intended for your lap and the other for your desk. It’s a nice touch, though some competing products offer more customization still.

When you open the folio and wrap it around the back while holding the iPad Pro as a tablet, your fingers press up against the (thankfully inactive) keys. This is the case in a number of 2-in-1s, but I’ve never liked it—and it wasn’t the case with the previous iPad Pro keyboard.

The iPad Pro attached to the Smart Keyboard Folio in one of two configurations.

Samuel Axon

The iPad Pro attached to the Smart Keyboard Folio in one of two configurations. Samuel Axon

This is the new Smart Connector on the iPad Pro.

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This is the new Smart Connector on the iPad Pro. Samuel Axon

The iPad Pro’s camera and flash peek out of the cover.

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The iPad Pro’s camera and flash peek out of the cover. Samuel Axon

This is the new Smart Connector on the iPad Pro. Samuel Axon

The iPad Pro’s camera and flash peek out of the cover. Samuel Axon

Keyboard preferences are usually subjective, so it’s difficult to pass judgment here. I think most users will agree that it’s not as nice to use as a laptop keyboard, but it’s not terrible.

However, I’m a writer and editor, and I spend a lot of time not just typing text, but going back and tweaking it. I read over every paragraph in my reviews at least a dozen times, asking myself questions about whether they are effectively worded before making tweaks both large and minute. And I edit the work of others, which is entirely about diving into existing sentences and fixing a typo here, rewording a phrase there, moving a word from here to there. All of these things are frustrating to do on an iPad.

Text selection in iOS is good enough for texting, but it’s nowhere near as efficient as using a mouse or trackpad for getting real work done in a word processor or content management system. It wouldn’t even be enough for lengthy emails. There are a lot of limitations that keep the iPad Pro from being a laptop replacement, but for my situation, this is one of the worst. The keyboard for Microsoft’s Surface Pro has a touchpad, and I won’t be alone in wishing for one on the iPad Pro.

This is not something that could just be solved by a new peripheral. It would require big changes in what iOS offers. Tellingly, I broke down and wrote the majority of this review on a MacBook Pro, not the iPad Pro, after initially telling myself I would use the latter.

Camera

The camera is never really a key component for an iPad. The cameras Apple includes are never as good as what you probably have in the best iPhone, and few people who would spend more than a thousand dollars on an iPad Pro for photo editing would actually take photos on the iPad instead of a professional or prosumer DSLR camera.

The camera in the iPad Pro is fine. As with the iPhone XR, there’s just one camera on the back, accompanied by a quad-LED flash. It’s a 12-megapixel camera (ƒ/1.8) with a five-element lens. It has many of the same features that you’ll see in a recent iPhone camera, like Smart HDR and Live Photos.

A daytime outdoor shot from the 2018 iPad Pro’s rear camera.

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A daytime outdoor shot from the 2018 iPad Pro’s rear camera. Samuel Axon

A daytime outdoor shot with the sun in view from the 2018 iPad Pro’s rear camera.

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A daytime outdoor shot with the sun in view from the 2018 iPad Pro’s rear camera. Samuel Axon

A daytime close-up shot from the 2018 iPad Pro’s rear camera.

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A daytime close-up shot from the 2018 iPad Pro’s rear camera. Samuel Axon

A daytime outdoor shot with the sun in view from the 2018 iPad Pro’s rear camera. Samuel Axon

A daytime close-up shot from the 2018 iPad Pro’s rear camera. Samuel Axon

A low-light shot from the 2018s iPad Pro’s rear camera.

A shot dense with detail, shot with the 2018 iPad Pro’s rear camera.

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Another daytime shot on the 2018 iPad Pro’s rear camera. We’re setting this one up for a zoom shot…

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The digital zoom on the iPad Pro’s rear camera is not great.

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You can record 4K or 1080p video at either 60 or 30 frames per second (fps), or 720p video at 30fps. It can take slow motion video and can take 8-megapixel still photos while recording video. As you can see in the photos above, it’s not going to wow anyone, but it’s pretty good.

The front-facing camera and Face ID

In many ways, the front-facing camera is more interesting. It’s 7-megapixels (ƒ/2.2 aperture) but also supports Portrait Mode and Portrait Lighting, two machine-learning-driven features introduced in last year’s iPhones. This setup lets you simulate dramatic lighting effects, like an all-black background behind a person’s face. I have been consistently unimpressed by this feature when reviewing those phones—there are often distracting imperfections in the image, like the background peeking through someone’s glasses when it shouldn’t, or weird distortion around hair. But if you like it, it’s here.

Like the rear camera, it also supports Smart HDR, a feature that takes several frames when you take a picture and uses machine learning to optimize highlights and other elements in the resulting photo after analyzing them all. The front-facing camera can also record 1080p video at 60 or 30fps.

Even more interesting, though, is the fact that the iPad Pro now sports the TrueDepth sensor array first introduced in the iPhone X. This is a collection of sensors that can make a 3D map of your face and use that for a number of new features, including Face ID. Face ID replaces Touch ID as the authentication method for the iPad Pro. Instead of pressing your finger against a home button that doubles as a fingerprint reader, you simply let the front-facing sensor array see your face, and the iPad unlocks immediately upon seeing it.

We went into a lot more detail about Face ID and the TrueDepth array in our iPhone X and iPhone XS reviews, including security and privacy considerations. For now, just know that it almost always works as a natural way to unlock your iPad. It can also be used for various facial recognition features in third-party apps with your permission, like sentiment analysis, accessibility, and more. There aren’t a lot of apps that support it yet.

Whereas the iPhones can only recognize your face when held in portrait mode, the iPad Pro’s TrueDepth array works in both portrait and landscape.

The iPad Pro will display a message on the screen if you are covering the Face ID camera—that’s a feature that the iPhone doesn’t offer. But unfortunately, it’s offered because it’s necessary. I frequently found myself accidentally covering the camera when holding the iPad Pro in landscape orientation. It’s right where my thumb somehow always wants to be, and I doubt I’ll be alone in that. This is obviously not a huge problem, but it can be an irritant.

Performance

The iPad Pro’s A12X SoC impressed in every performance test we put it through. Apple is positioning the iPad Pro not just as a tablet and an iOS device, but as toe-to-toe competitor with laptops. During the press conference announcing the product, Apple claimed that it is faster than 92 percent of all portable PCs sold in the last 12 months.

Based on our tests, it is faster than the majority of laptops. We put it up against prior iPad Pro and iPad models, plus one Android tablet, and against recent iPhones and one recent Android flagship. But we also compared it to Apple’s top-of-the-line Macs and one Dell 2-in-1 that is aimed at a similar audience.

Before we look at the results, here’s a list of products that appear in the benchmarks.

Tablets

Phones

Desktops and laptops

CPU

We used Geekbench to test the CPU and compare to not only other Apple devices, but across platforms. Here are the results.

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The 2018 iPad Pro offers slightly faster single-core performance than its immediate predecessor, but the leap in multi-core performance is immense. The fact that all of the A12X’s CPU cores can be engaged at once is probably a major factor. The 2018 iPad Pro also bested both Android devices we compared it to and the Intel and AMD-driven Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 in most tests. It hardly seems fair to compare the iPad Pro to a recent iMac or iMac Pro, but it’s nevertheless surprising how well the iPad Pro holds up.

All of the above paints a good picture, but I want to focus particularly on this benchmark comparing just against the last three years’ 15-inch MacBook Pro models.

Geekbench scores comparing the iPad Pro and recent MacBook Pro models.

Credit: Samuel Axon

It’s not often we see something like this when reviewing a product, so I’m going to briefly dispense with the usual reviewer’s cautious dispassion and admit I find this astonishing.

This is in a device that’s less than a quarter-inch thick, with no fan. It costs around $1,000 to get roughly this performance. And it outperforms all but the single most powerful MacBook Pro Apple offers, which costs more than three times what the iPad Pro does.

You sometimes see recovering Apple fanatics lamenting in forums that Apple doesn’t stun them every year like it used to, that it doesn’t innovate in huge ways with each new iteration of a product. Well, consider me stunned. It seems Apple is simply innovating in completely different areas than before.

Apple blogger John Gruber recently wrote that the iPad Pro is “like a computer from an alternate universe” where “Moore’s Law still delivers year after year.” I couldn’t have put it better myself.

GPU

Apple claims the A12X offers nearly double the GPU performance of the A10X, and that’s exactly what we found.

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The iPad Pro’s GPU doesn’t hold up as well against the very best discrete GPUs as the CPU does against laptop CPUs, but it still smokes all the iOS and Android devices we compared it to, and it is within range of the MacBook Pro. It’s going to be better than the Intel integrated graphics in competing laptops and 2-in-1s. It takes a discrete laptop GPU to beat the iPad Pro’s graphics solution.

Browser tests

The 2018 iPad Pro beat every tablet and phone we compared it to in three different web benchmarks, and it closely rivaled the top-end 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro. However, it was unsurprisingly bested by a 2017 iMac in some tests.

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Battery life

Credit: Samuel Axon

Apple promises the same battery life in this year’s iPad Pro as last year’s, but we actually measured an improvement. Note that screen size is relevant though; our review unit is a 12.9-inch model, as was the 2016 unit used in the test. But the 2017 unit was a 10.5-inch iPad Pro.

Software and applications

With that kind of performance, the iPad Pro seems like it should make a strong case that it can replace powerful laptops as a designer, photographer, video editor, musician, or artist’s primary on-the-go workhorse. Unfortunately, that incredible potential is hindered by insufficient software support.

iOS is excellent software for phones, but it is not up to the task of driving creative professionals’ power user ambitions on a tablet—not even close. Copying, pasting, and editing text is an enormous hassle if you’re doing anything other than scribbling a couple of notes or shooting off an email. The multitasking features expanded upon in iOS 11 are still neat, and the iPhone X-like gesture for swiping quickly between apps like you’d swipe between Spaces on a Mac is powerful. But using this machine, you’ll be laboriously swiping between apps constantly to do the smallest things.

I already talked about the iPad Pro’s frustrating limitations of the USB-C connection and the lack of OS-wide support for external drives. This stuff is essential for power users, and iOS just doesn’t deliver. If you’ve ever used an iPad for productivity before, you know what I’m talking about. It’s infuriatingly close, and it gets marginally closer with each passing year, yet it never quite seems to arrive.

The problems here are surprising in part because they are very un-Apple. The company’s pitch to consumers and professionals alike has always been about the advantages of end-to-end integration, and that includes software and hardware built to work well together. But iOS feels like it is built for a completely different device, given that the new iPad Pro’s ambitions are much greater than those of prior iPads, or of the iPhone.

Then there’s app support. The OS’s limitations would be more tolerable if third-party (and first-party) apps picked up the slack, and the development tools were there to make it happen. Unfortunately, too many of the “pro” apps for the iPad Pro are deliberately stripped down for the tablet. And there are numerous tools that creatives and professionals would love to see on the iPad that just aren’t there.

Photoshop is coming, yes, and so is AutoCAD. A brief Photoshop demo that Adobe gave me illustrated that there really are reasons you might use this instead of your desktop. The value proposition is real, and based on that demo, the iPad version of Photoshop ought to prove to everyone that the iPad Pro doesn’t need reduced functionality when running apps we’ve used on the desktop before.

But what about full versions of Illustrator or Premiere? Or Apple’s own Final Cut, for that matter? What about Xcode? What about Logic? What about… this could go on.

Apple has accomplished something remarkable with this hardware, but the software is letting it down. It almost makes me angry on the hardware’s behalf, because it’s frustrating to see such an achievement wasted on an operating system and on apps that don’t seem to have any interest in capitalizing on it.

Duality

Let’s get one thing out of the way before the final verdict: Apple has accomplished something amazing in terms of performance on this tablet. In many cases, it rivals real workstation laptops. If a “computer” is a machine on which we can do real work, the A12X’s performance makes a case that the definition can expand.

But this is a highly specialized product. I can think of a dozen types of creative professionals who would salivate over this hardware and what it can do for them in very specific tasks—tasks that would be more efficient and more effective with the Apple Pencil and this hardware than on a MacBook Pro. For them, it may be an amazing product. It puts more power at their fingertips than they’ve ever had before.

There is no universe in which this is a laptop replacement for most, or even many, people. It is a digital art creation engine. It is a secondary, on the-go video editor and monitor. It is a screenwriter’s minimalist, distraction free digital notebook. It is a DJ’s on-stage backup. It is many other things, and if it’s something relevant to you, you probably are already thinking about it as you read this.

But if you’re not thinking about that one thing that would be a delight to do on this hardware instead of your laptop, there probably isn’t one for you. For you, it’s just a really cool toy, or at least an astonishing feat of engineering. That’s because the new iPad Pro works beautifully for some specialized tasks, but it does not work as an all-around, cohesive professional computing system.

The thing is, that shouldn’t have to be the case. The limitations come down to two things: iOS is designed for a very different relationship with the user (even on the iPad), and there just aren’t enough pro apps on the platform that are as powerful as they are in macOS or Windows.

These things could be solved. Maybe—just maybe—this feat of design and engineering will inspire Apple’s iOS team to branch out an iPad Pro-specific version of the OS that takes off the training wheels. Maybe—yes, just maybe—this tablet will make such an impression that it draws developers to bring their pro apps to the platform, or to update the stripped-down versions they already offer to unleash their full power.

That’s a lot of maybe. Yes, a small number of ambitious digital creatives who can afford both this and a MacBook Pro or iMac are going to be very happy with what this thing can do for them today. If you’re one of them (and you know who you are), this product is very easy to recommend as a secondary device.