It’s everything you love about the iPad, only bigger, and with some new tricks – but also a little more confusing…
Evolution of the biological kind is a tough thing to follow, because it happens glacially slowly. It’s not like you can just throw a rat off a cliff and it’ll sprout wings halfway down to save itself. Yet it sometimes feels as if that’s largely how evolution works in the tech world – and with the iPad Pro, it feels like we’ve caught the process halfway down. The result, while impressive and definitely welcome as the ground rushes terminally upwards, is just as odd and sometimes as unsettling as a rat sprouting wings.
At one level, of course, you can say the iPad Pro is just a big iPad, because to no small degree that’s exactly what it is. You can now choose between the 7.9-inch iPad mini, 9.7-inch iPad Air and now the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, and in theory, the only major thing that differentiates them is screen size. But by now we know that changing the size of the screen can make a big difference to iOS devices – the idea that the iPad isn’t important because it’s “just” a big iPhone is long dead.
For a start, that big screen is just glorious – not only in its detail and size for things like showing photos, but for the extra utility you get out of having more space when drawing and painting, or editing movies. For much of iOS, having the larger screen doesn’t make that much of a difference, but when your favorite app adds extra tools and options that make it faster and easier to use, on a larger screen where it’s all clearer, it can be quietly transformative. While the 12.9-inch screen initially strikes you as comically large, the whole thing is lighter than you expect, and its scale soon stops seeming silly. It’s surprisingly comfortable to wrangle in an armchair, though you may find it’s something you look down at, more than lift up, when reading at length.
The speakers – proper stereo speakers, which switch orientation with the device – are far richer and fuller than any other iPad; you probably still want an external speaker for really enjoying music, but they are surprisingly effective for video, especially. (Had the speakers taken up less room internally, Apple could probably have pushed the iPad’s battery further than its now standard 10 hours, but we think most will be happy with that trade-off – especially since extra battery capacity would have meant more weight.)
Of course, with its “pro” name, it’s also ridiculously powerful and flexible as a computer, too. The A9X chip is a dual-core processor, running at 2.25GHz – much faster than any other Apple CPU to date. Apple says it can take on tasks that only Macs/PCs could do before, and that proves to be true – up to a point. Simple synthetic benchmarks suggest that it’s at the right level: its single-core score in the Geekbench processor benchmarking tool was 3233, while a 2014 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro scored 3245, which is effectively no difference at all. (The iPad Air 2 scores 1434, for comparison.) Many simpler computing tasks use a single core in practice, so it’s easy to think the Pro has reached MacBook Pro levels of performance. The MacBook Pro’s Intel processor posts a bigger lead for multicore benchmarks, where it scores 6966 compared to the iPad Pro’s 5496 – which suggests that for intense pro tasks, the MBP would still have a small edge. (The iPad Air 2 scored 3100.)
But synthetic benchmarks are… well, synthetic. There are many factors that affect performance in the real world, so we gave the iPad Pro some measurable practical tasks to see how it and the MacBook Pro dealt with them. We started by using the WinZip app on both platforms to compress and encrypt a 670MB folder (using AeS 256-bit encryption). The iPad Pro managed the task in 35 seconds, while the MacBook Pro worked through it in just 15 seconds – a much bigger difference than the benchmarks would suggest. The iPad Air 2 took 47 seconds, which roughly fits with its multicore benchmark difference from the Pro.
However, when we tried a test of exporting two minutes of 4K video footage (with the “Blast” filter applied) in iMovie on both platforms, things were reversed. The MacBook Pro took 271 seconds to complete the export, while the iPad Pro took just 37 seconds. even the iPad Air 2 took only 50 seconds.
What’s the conclusion from results that swing like that? The first thing to note is that, because our tests were across different platforms, they’ll never be perfectly equivalent – but since we’re measuring practical results, we still get a good idea of what kind of working speed you actually get from them. But quite possibly the main takeaway is that we can’t think about the iPad Pro’s computer power in Mac-based legacy terms. The WinZip results are roughly what we might have expected from putting a desktop processor that draws more power against the tablet chip, even if the benchmarks indicate they’re closer – but the video export times suggest the iPad Pro may use hardware acceleration for video encoding, while iMovie on the Mac isn’t.
This is the thing: with Apple developing its own chips, it’s adding custom extra features, such as its DSLR-class image processors for taking better photos. Instead of relying on a more powerful CPU to do everything, it can add special sauce to make certain difficult tasks faster. So while we can still compare the results to a Mac, it means it’s not always a “fair fight,” and that looking at benchmarks alone won’t tell us very much.
SPEED BEYOND HARDWARE
Indeed, in practice, the differences in speed working on the iPad Pro compared to the MacBook Pro are likely to come from your software’s interface rather than the device’s hardware. Some things are faster in apps that rethink stale workflows. Some things are slower in apps that jettison useful shortcuts and other power-user tricks. Some tasks are slower on a device with no visible filesystem and limited windowing. In many cases, the hardware only needs to be up to a certain standard, after which speed (or lack of it) is down to the software or user level. And when we talk purely about speed, the iPad Pro is probably at that standard. Just using it – opening apps, moving between them, searching and so on – is simply beautifully fast.
But we’re still waiting to see how many apps will scale up in power for the Pro, and whether they’ll match their desktop equivalents when they do – for example, at the time of writing, Pixelmator canvasses are limited in size compared to the Mac version, and you can only have a certain number of layers before having to flatten them to continue. iMovie can only do two video tracks, with no Final Cut equivalent to step up to. Fast hardware is great, but the software has to match it. This isn’t explicitly a criticism of the iPad Pro, but it something to think about if you’re looking at one as a Mac alternative.
THE NEW MAC?
Using the iPad Pro in practice day to day, the fact that Apple has made an optional keyboard cover for it, plus iOS 9’s support for running more than one app at a time with Slide Over, Split View and Picture in Picture, plus its simple sheer size, does prompt you to think of it not as an iPad at all but as a more traditional notebook. We know it’s not one – it’s a tablet. That’s fine – great, even, depending on your needs – but after decades of using desktops and notebooks, when presented with something that, when docked in a keyboard case, looks a lot like a notebook, your brain starts to think it will work like a notebook – and when it doesn’t, you’re more reminded of iOS’s limitations than its benefits.
Some of the things that trip you up are big, system-level ones: iOS doesn’t support a mouse, and we lost count of the number of times our thumbs twitched towards a non-existent trackpad when the iPad was propped up in Apple’s keyboard case. Clearly, this has always been the case with iOS, but the iPad Pro’s size and the fact that we’ve been using it plenty with a keyboard case makes it even more apparent.
Some, likewise, are tiny. iOS now supports an app switcher, but because of how iOS handles running software, it’s limited to just your 10 most recent apps, and you can’t hit Q with an app highlighted to quit it. These aren’t inherently bad things, but they can cause tiny moments of confusion throughout the day when things don’t work as long-term Apple users expect them to. While in the past you wouldn’t have even had that expectation, the fact that iOS has adopted some of OS X’s conventions, but without perfect fidelity, creates a slightly uncomfortable tension when your muscle memory fights with reality.
Likewise, iOS 9’s split-screen multitasking stuff is genuinely fantastically useful here, even more so on the Pro’s bigger canvas compared to the iPad Air, letting you write in one app while having Safari open on the right of the screen for research, or draw in one while looking at source material in another. Indeed, with the sheer size of the screen, it can feel odd having something like Safari open fullscreen – we often brought in a second app just to balance things out a little. But while these features are very welcome, there is confusion and compromise. Apps have to be updated to allow them to run as these “secondary” apps on the right (and it does have to be the right). Plus, because the way the apps can display themselves boils down to “behaving like iPad apps” when the divider is in the middle of the screen, and “behaving like iPhone apps” when it’s in its only other position further towards the right edge, their interface can change completely.
Take Safari. On an iPad, you add a tab by tapping a plus icon at the top right; on an iPhone, you tap the overlapping squares icon at the bottom right, and then a plus icon. So depending purely on where the dividing line between apps is on your iPad Pro, a control might not just be in a different place, but in this case behind an entirely different button. This just adds unwelcome friction.
It’s not that the iPad Pro is a bad machine – it really, really isn’t – but as long-time Mac users, we felt aware of these small chafing moments, and if you plan to use it with a keyboard, you might too.
So, do you buy this, maybe adding the Smart Keyboard (see p67) rather than, say, a MacBook? It is – or at least, depending on configuration, can be – cheaper, even with the pricey keyboard, yet depending on your needs it can be both a simpler and more fun computer, all while doing most of what most of us want a notebook to do – as well as some stuff a notebook can’t do, importantly.
If you’re of an artistic bent or spend a lot of time sketching diagrams, it’s currently an easy decision; the Pencil is such a joy that you should buy the iPad Pro, whose larger canvas suits creative work – though we expect Pencil support to be rolled out across the whole iPad line in 2016.
For everyone else, it’s much less clear-cut. The iPad Pro is a genuinely wonderful piece of tech – powerful, pleasing, impressive, joyous – though we can’t help but feel the iPad line in general is at an awkward point in the process of evolving into something new. Once it grows its wings it’s going to fly, but it’s still becoming fully formed.
On one hand, hard to criticize – everything that made an iPad great, made bigger, plus the wonderful Pencil. But on the other, the pure iPad experience is slightly tarnished with new complexities.