Transcript
by Josh Teder
It’s been 6 months since I bought the new M4 iPad Pro with its stunning OLED display, slimmer design, updated Magic Keyboard, and Apple Pencil Pro, but the question I’ve kept returning to when thinking about it is: Why would anyone spend this much for an iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard when you could get an iPad Air with a Magic Keyboard, or even a MacBook Air for much less? After spending 6 months with this thing, I think I know the answer to whether or not Apple’s most powerful tablet is worth its premium price tag.
The Display
First, let’s start off with the highlights. The first is that gorgeous tandem OLED display. Coming from the previous Mini LED display, the difference was immediately noticeable to me. There’s no blooming around bright objects on dark backgrounds, the contrast is absolutely stunning, and it gets even brighter than before, peaking at 1,600 nits for HDR content and 1,000 nits for SDR content. Thanks to that new tandem OLED tech, which can get way brighter than typical OLED displays of this size, for watching content, it’s hands down the best display I’ve ever used on a portable computer or tablet. It just makes everything look great, and because of this iPad’s excellent contrast ratio, I’ve also found it to be a great reference display when looking at photographs, especially when I was traveling in Ireland and Iceland and wanted to view all of the shots I got on a particular day.
Weight and Design
The second major highlight for this iPad is weight reduction. The 13-inch version I have, combined with the Magic Keyboard, basically weighs the same as my M3 MacBook Air. Compared to the previous generation, this Magic Keyboard is 34g lighter, and the iPad Pro itself is 103g lighter. It just makes it so much easier to carry around compared to the previous version.
The Magic Keyboard
Speaking of the Magic Keyboard, it got some pretty significant upgrades. First, we finally have a function row. The keys have excellent travel, slightly reduced from the previous version, and the larger trackpad now has haptic feedback. The aluminum construction feels premium, though it is going to show fingerprints, and the outer polyurethane material does show dust and dirt as well. If you’re looking at both colors of the Magic Keyboard, I’d probably suggest the black version over the white. The exterior material for the white version is more susceptible to color bleed.
Real-World Usage
So that’s some of the new stuff with the iPad Pro, but what have I actually been using mine for over the past 6 months? One of my primary use cases has been as a travel device. When I’m flying, I often reach for the iPad over my MacBook Air because of that beautiful display for watching content. Plus, while I still think the MacBook’s keyboard and trackpad are a hair better, the Magic Keyboard is good enough for me to write on.
Studio and Professional Use
I’ve also found myself using it quite a bit in my studio setup. It’s great as a teleprompter, and I use GarageBand on it frequently for jotting down quick musical ideas or melodies that come into my head for projects that I’ll probably work on later.
Camera and Face ID
Another highlight with the new iPad Pro is the camera placement—it’s finally in the correct place if you keep your iPad mostly in a landscape orientation. Face ID is another standout feature. It’s incredibly convenient for quickly authenticating into the iPad, and while Touch ID is great, having Face ID in a form factor like the iPad with its Magic Keyboard does still make me wish Apple would put it in their MacBooks.
Document Handling
The last two things I found myself using my iPad for are occasionally scanning and signing documents. Apple said they’ve updated the flash on this iPad Pro so the scanning documents functionality should be better, but I haven’t really noticed giant improvements—my previous iPad Pro already scanned documents pretty well.
Apple Pencil Pro Experience
Those are the highlights I found with the device and what I’ve been using mine for over the past 6 months, but what have I not been using with the new iPad Pro? The biggest one is probably the Apple Pencil Pro. While I’m by no means an artist, so I can’t really talk to how good it is for drawing and users who want to use Procreate a lot or how well the new barrel roll feature works with the Pencil Pro, I am a digital notetaker, and I haven’t found the writing experience on the iPad Pro to be as enjoyable as it is on an e-ink screen like my Kindle Scribe. There’s just something about writing on e-ink displays with that textured surface that just feels a bit more natural. You can get screen protectors for the iPad to mimic this feeling a bit, and I’ll leave links to a few of those in our blog posts, but I haven’t used them because I don’t really want to compromise display quality when doing non-writing activities. E-ink displays are also just easier on the eyes for long reading sessions or note-taking sessions, and with devices like Kindles and reMarkable tablets, there are no distracting notifications, which is not the same case with the iPad Pro.
Apple Intelligence Features
The other big thing I haven’t found myself using on the iPad is Apple Intelligence. Besides the new pretty Siri animation and smart replies in Messages, I haven’t really found much use for the other stuff so far, though more Apple Intelligence features should be rolling out to iPadOS in the coming months, like being able to create your own emoji or Siri knowing your personal context. But as of now, it hasn’t made that much of a difference in how I use my iPad.
Compatibility Issues
Now let’s talk about the downsides with this device, and there are quite a few that I’ve encountered. The first one involves compatibility. To achieve the new camera placement, Apple had to adjust their magnet placement for the Apple Pencil charging, so the new iPad isn’t compatible with the Apple Pencil Gen 2. It’s also not compatible with older Magic Keyboards either because its size is slightly different.
Price Comparison
An even more significant downside with the iPad Pro is its price. For comparison, an M3 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage retails for $1,099. The iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage will set you back $1,648, and if you want to add in an Apple Pencil Pro, that list price shoots up to a total of $1,777. Ouch! That’s a $600 premium over a MacBook Air—and for what? A device with a better display that has a touchscreen? Well, yes, but also a device that has worse battery life.
Battery Life
The M4 iPad Pro is rated for up to 10 hours of battery life for web browsing or video playback over Wi-Fi and up to 9 hours when using cellular data. That is one benefit of getting an iPad Pro versus a MacBook—you can get cellular connectivity built into the iPad but not on a Mac. While yes, both devices have generally been able to last me all day, I do notice the iPad Pro’s worse battery life compared to the MacBook Air’s, especially its standby battery life, which appears to be quite a bit worse than the MacBook Air’s.
iPadOS Limitations
So yeah, when you go with an iPad Pro, you are getting a device that does have worse battery life and a more limited operating system with iPadOS. That is by far the biggest downside with this iPad and all iPads for that matter—iPadOS’s limitations. You can’t download apps from the web because of Apple’s business model. They have total control over the iPad App Marketplace, unlike with Mac, and because of that, the experience is just worse. It limits the types of applications and games people will develop for the iPad, and because of that, the software that you can download onto it is just not as diverse or interesting as what’s available for Mac.
Browser and App Limitations
Would you like the full version of Chrome with browser extensions like Grammarly on your iPad? You can’t. Apple, as of this recording, only allows Safari WebKit browsers to be used as the iPad’s browser. While you can download the Chrome browser, what you’re actually downloading is a Google Chrome wrapper around Apple Safari browser technology. Want to use advanced features like shortcuts across the entire OS for apps like Notion or ChatGPT? Well, you’re out of luck on iPadOS. Same thing if you want to download free open-source software from the web like FileZilla, which I use to connect to my website, or FreeFileSync, which I use to back up my video edit drives.
Gaming and Professional Apps
Games are also limited to what you can download through the App Store. You can’t download games straight from Steam on the iPad because you can’t download Steam like you can on a Mac. And while apps like Final Cut Pro, Adobe’s Creative Cloud, and others exist for the iPad, they’re often missing features and not as fully fleshed out compared to their Mac counterparts.
M4 Chip Performance
It’s almost a bit ironic that Apple put their really powerful M4 chip into this iPad Pro because often when you use it, you would never know that. It doesn’t really feel like the iPad is taking full advantage of the chip that Apple put in, at least from its OS level. Sure, there are some applications you can run on it that will gladly take advantage of that chip, and yes, to be fair to the iPad, there are applications developed for iPadOS that you cannot run on a Mac or any other device, so the iPad does have utility for specific types of things you want to use it for. But if you want to use it as your main computer, it is also missing some pretty basic operating system features, even simple things like advanced multitasking window management. Apple Stage Manager is still a bit frustrating to use compared to the more freewheeling window management on the Mac, where you can now just easily snap windows into place. And if you’re a developer, as of this recording, you still cannot run Xcode on the iPad.
Multi-User Support
And the last downside with this iPad and all iPads—the original sin of the iPad, if you will—14 years later, the iPad still does not have multi-user support. So you cannot, like on a Mac, share this device with multiple people in your family and have different user accounts on it. And that’s just a deliberate and ruthless decision by Apple at this point because from their standpoint, they’re just going to be like, “We’d rather you buy two. What are you going to do, you’re going to go get an Android tablet that’s worse?”
Final Recommendations
So do I recommend the iPad Pro for most people? No. If you just need a computer and don’t specifically need the touchscreen functionality or that gorgeous HDR OLED display, you’re better off getting a Mac. It will have better battery life and, more importantly, a more powerful and flexible operating system. If you need a device for taking digital notes, you could get an M3 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and a Kindle Scribe and still spend less than you would on an iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil.
Who Should Buy It
The only people I’d recommend this device to are those who have a specific need to run applications that can only be run on iPadOS, they want that touchscreen functionality, and for whatever reason, you want to splurge on this model over the less expensive iPad Air and Magic Keyboard—most likely for that better designed Magic Keyboard and the bonkers gorgeous tandem OLED display. And I do get that—this display is awesome—but that’s about it.
Closing Thoughts
And for me, the iPad is just kind of a weird device. I use mine every day, but I’m always left with this feeling of wanting more from it. Perhaps in a world where Apple didn’t implement its restrictive App Store model, we’d finally have a device truly capable of the brilliant hardware Apple has built for it.
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