I have been using the 2021 iPad Pro for just over six months
and in today's video, we're talking about what I
love about it, what I don't like about it, and what I wish
I had known before I had purchased it.
I am my Mike Caputo and welcome back to Tech 24-7 TV.
The new iPad Pro delivers an unparalleled computing
experience thanks to its tight integration with iPadOS.
The iPad Pro is capable of outshining tablets from
competitors and really even outperforms some of Apple's own
laptops because it blends the best of both worlds.
You have power and efficiency that's traditionally associated
with a mobile device, as well as the performance that you get
from a desktop whenever you need it.
Now, let's be honest, it is certainly not perfect.
Now, if you've been wondering, the 2021 iPad Pro was
worth purchasing, whether you're upgrading from
an existing device or you want to purchase a brand new,
or you're just curious whether or not it's actually a
good tablet, you are in the right place because
in today's video, I'm going to talk about my usage over the
past six months with this device and tell you whether or
not you should purchase it.
Let's get started.
Now, today's video has broken out into different sections or
review context, and you'll find each of those contexts linked
right below the light button.
Now you are here to find out whether the 2021 iPad Pro,
which is probably the most powerful tablet available today
on the market if it's worth purchasing.
My six month review is not a deep dive into the specs of the
2021 iPad Pro.
Really, you can find those on Apple's website, and I'll link
them down below for your convenience.
Instead, after six months, I'll be sharing some my real
world usage experiences with my thoughts about various aspects
of owning such a high end product that Apple offers,
as well as where I like to see the tablet go.
This is the 2021 iPad Pro and is powered by Apple's eight
core CPU, eight core GPU M1 chip.
This is the same M1 chip that you find in the 13 inch
MacBook Pro, the 13 inch Mac Mini, 13 inch Mac Mini?
13 inch MacBook Air and the 2020 Mac Mini.
Now my configuration, I have one terabyte
of internal storage.
I have 16 gigs of RAM and this here is the 5G version.
Now you can get it in Wi-Fi only for $1799
or as configured, This will cost you one thousand nine
hundred ninety nine dollars.
Now, if you want to, you can add on the Magic Keyboard and
the Apple Pencil two, which is three hundred and fifty dollars
and one hundred and thirty dollars, respectively.
Now, I think these are really much essential accessories for
this device if you want to be productive on it.
These are two things I would really consider.
Now I do have some comments about the Magic Keyboard and
how the white version has held up after six months of
daily usage, so make sure you stay tuned for that coming up.
Again, depending on what your appetite is for paying
the additional money.
You could even reuse the Magic Keyboard that you have from the
2018 or 2020 iPad Pro, which I do have, and it does work.
There's a little bit of a gap when you close it, but it's not
like it's
necessarily non-functional.
It works exactly as expected, but it's really just more
personal preference if you want to continue to use that.
Now, before we go in the next section, if you like this
type of content where I rereview products, you know at
set intervals 30 60, 90 days six months out, let me know
that by hitting the like button on this video.
Which obviously will help you understand what type of content
I should make for you going forward.
And if you want to be part of the community where we
reviewed iPad, we talk about productivity and how you can be
more productive with your iPad.
Join the community, hit Subscribe button right down
there and let me know how I can help you be
productive in 2022.
Now, the storage configurations are available either
128 256 512.
Now, those storage configurations come with 8GB
of RAM, or you can opt for the one terabyte version like I
have or even there's a two terabyte version, both with 16
gigs of RAM.
Now this will allow you more multitasking opportunities that
you had in the past with previous generations of the
iPad Pro or really any other iPad, because it is a
bump up by at least.
I think that 2020 iPad Pro had six gigs of RAM, so you're at
least getting what it would be 33 percent more RAM
than you are.
Now, this is no slouch.
I don't necessarily think that many people would have a great
deal of trouble with using this device and have RAM limited.
You also have the ability of where the software is now more
robust and it has been in the past and I think that is the
trajectory of iPad OS, which I'll get into more in
just a few minutes.
For me, I thought the one terabyte version was the
perfect kind of middle ground, so to speak.
I don't want to upgrade every year.
I want to future proof myself, and it gave me the almost high
end tiers of storage with the high end configuration of RAM.
But that leads me to the first thing that I wish I knew before
purchasing the 2021 M1 iPad Pro.
While having 16 gigs of RAM is very nice, my workflow does
not consist of RAM intensive applications where I feel like
I'm pushing the iPad past its hardware capability, and I
don't see the added benefit of having more RAM on
this device.
The apps aren't there, the ecosystem isn't there.
Now.
What I am not saying is that there is zero need for having
16 gigs of RAM on the M1 iPad Pro.
But for my workflow and I think probably the majority of
people's workflow out there, their apps are not going to be
RAM constrained where they need to have a hardware, where it is
taking advantage of more RAM.
Now there are entitlements in iPadOS which allow certain apps
to request more RAM from the operating system.
But I'm not using very many of them or if I am using
those apps, I'm not using them to the degree which they're
being pushed past their limit.
Let's talk about design and durability of the
2021 iPad Pro.
In a world where every device is getting thinner
and lighter.
It's really surprising to me that Apple zigged here when I
thought they would have zagged and they would have went with
everyone else who's making devices thinner and lighter.
The iPad Pro is about 63 grams heavier in the 2021 version
than it was in the 2020 version.
It's not neccessarily very noticeable, but in
everyday situations, if you're holding up twelve point nine
inch tablet up in your hands, if you're looking at it,
it does end up getting a little bit heavy sooner than you would
expect it with the previous generation.
A most of my usage centers in using the iPad Pro inside of
the Magic Keyboard, and I also have the sleeve on the back,
which protects it from minor bumps and bruises.
Now, while the iPad itself is durable, I would say that
the White Magic Keyboard probably is not as durable.
And this brings me to the second thing that I wish I knew
before purchasing the 2021 iPad Pro and even the
White Magic Keyboard.
I don't regret buying it, but I do regret, I'd say,
probably being as gentle as I have been, and it's still
showing marks rank.
No matter what you come in contact with, it's going to
show wear marks or contact marks from that.
I don't necessarily mind at this point anymore.
I've kind of just given up on it.
Now let's talk about that display.
The new Liquid Retina XDR display on the 2021 iPad Pro is
a really big deal.
I, for one, find it kind of strange that Apple here only
included the XDR display on the 12.9 inch version.
Now I'm kind of conflicted of why they did that.
I think that Apple chose to exclude the XDR display on the
11 inch iPad Pro to greet more pricing tension and feature
tension between the 11 inch iPad Pro and the ten point nine
inch iPad Air four to possibly make way for a new iPad Pro
that is larger than the current 12.9 inch iPad Pro.
Now, if you're like me and you love a larger iPad Pro,
something like 15 inches, I think it would be very
compelling from a use case perspective.
If you want to see a video on that comment down below because
I do have a video planned for that.
But either way, I am a massive fan of the Liquid Retina XDR
display on the 12.9 inch iPad Pro.
It really makes it perfect for gamers on the go.
If you have productivity in a pinch, this display is
awesome to interact with.
It packs a typical brightness output range of six hundred
nits when mixed usage, a thousand nits during full
screen usage for standard dynamic range content and 600
nits when viewing HDR content.
One of the exclusive features that has only been found on
the iPad Pro, it has not it made its way down to
the lower cost.
iPads is the adaptive refresh rate.
This allows the operating system to dynamically
refresh content, allowing it to have pristine pixel quality as
well as save on battery life.
Now this brings me to the third thing that I wish I knew before
purchasing the 2021 iPad Pro, because as much as his battery
optimization is great, it does kind of fall flat for me.
All of Apple's devices have really like a 10
hour battery life.
I would say.
In my experience, my battery life has been less than that.
I'd say it's probably about three quarters of that with
daily usage of this device and where the display is somewhere
in the neighborhood of about 75 percent brightness.
Now, that, to me, is obviously largely almost unacceptable.
And I would say that Apple really needs to improve the
power consumption of this device on that display.
I think most of my use cases are probably whether it's
standard dynamic range content, and it's not
where I'm pushing the display to a brightness, where it
should be consuming more better life than what you would expect
in a normal kind of standard use case, which I talked about
a few minutes ago.
One of the big things that people talked about when the
iPad Pro first came out was blooming.
I think there is a individual calibration to blooming,
which certainly makes it worse for some people than others.
Now, is it perfect?
Absolutely not.
It's not perfect.
If I told you it was perfect, I would be lying to you.
But is it, I think, bothersome to the fact where I
will want to return the tablet?
No, it's not.
It's a great viewing experience.
It's great to play games on like I mentioned here a few
minutes ago, it's great to view movies that are in HDR.
I would rather much have the trade off of having this
mini-LED display the way that it is with blooming than having
a standard LCD display like you have on the older versions.
Because the viewing experience,
the contrast ratio, the dark darks, the bright
brights are so much greater on this display than it is
on another display.
It's not perfect.
It's never going to be perfect because of those tradeoffs that
you have when you implement a technology like this.
It's not really that big of a deal.
The iPad Pro has a four speaker stereo set up, two at the top
and two at the bottom, which can dynamically change
based on the device's orientation.
Hold the device in portrait mode in the left and right,
upper speakers push out mids and highs, while the two lower
speakers handle the lower frequencies.
Change the device's portrait orientation to landscape and
the top left and top right channel's take on the mids.
While the highs come at the lower channels push the bass.
I really think that the speakers on the 2020 iPad Pro
sound better than they did on the 2020 iPad Pro.
As a matter of fact, I did a comparison which I'll
link up above.
I am not one to think that the speakers
sound dramatically worse.
People who maybe have ears that are much more attuned to that
type of nuance think that they do sound worse.
But for me, I don't think they do, and I love the fact
that I can turn this on and it fills up, you know, this small
room to 10 by 12 room with good sound, and it sounds good
coming from the 2021 iPad Pro.
Now, I'm not going to fill, you know, like an auditorium or
I'm not going to feel like a dining room.
It's not that big of a deal to me, where it sounds
dramatically worse or even if it sounds, I would
say incrementally worse.
It may sound good.
Both devices, to me, this device sounds better.
Two of the other new features making their way to the 2021
iPad Pro come in the form of connectivity.
First, its Thunderbolt three and Thunderbolt three is a
transport protocol that allows data to be transferred in
between your iPad and the applicable Thunderbolt three
accessory much faster than it has been with USB-C.
Now, with Thunderbolt three, you can connect many different
accessories to what you connect docks, you connect high
speed storage, you connect displays.
And ideally, it would solve a lot of problems that you have
with connecting devices to your iPad to either pull data from
or to get data onto.
But unfortunately, it's Thunderbolt ecosystem in
respect to the iPad Pro is just not that mature at this point.
This brings me to the fourth thing that I wish I knew before
purchasing the 2021 iPad Pro.
I think that it's kind of disappointing that Apple is
touting the ecosystem and the benefits of Thunderbolt three
at this point, with still not having that clearer roadmap of
where the device needs to go in order to support
these features.
If you want to connect storage to your device, I mean,
you certainly can.
But the data that you can put onto your device, I would say,
is limited.
You can't store data permanently offline on the
device and access to through your iPad.
If you want to connect your iPad Pro to an
external display.
There are limitations because your iPad Pro does not work
in clamshell mode.
You can only use mirroring for the iPad, so there are a number
of limitations, which I think fingers crossed.
Apple will maybe start to solve this year with iPadOS 16.
It's a little bit of a disappointment, and I wish
Apple would have maybe a more of a thoughtful effort here
with adding Thunderbolt 3, maybe just tackling one or two
different use cases at first before adding on a number
of use cases.
So that's just me.
Let me know what you think about that down
the comments below.
Now, if you came to me today saying, Hey Mike, I need
to buy an iPad Pro, what do I do?
I would tell you first, let's start with 256 gigs
of internal storage.
I wouldn't necessarily buy up into a 512 where I wouldn't go
lower than at 128.
I would advise against buying into a one terabyte or a two
terabyte iPad Pro simply because you want more RAM.
Because again, I don't think the ecosystem is there.
I don't think that the apps are there.
It's just not really worth it.
The iPad Pro and its workflows in the way that you need to use
apps is really, I would say, a hindrance because you have to
jump through many hoops that should be easy to do on any
other machine, right?
Like if you were using the iPad Pro, it's a reflection of
the complexity of your workflow, and there's
nothing wrong with having simple workflows.
I use the 2021 iPad Pro in my professional day to day job.
I use here on the channel.
I use it kind of for living.
I do use it all the time, but I just don't think it's right for
a lot of people because of the current state of it.
Now there are rumors that Apple is going to be refreshing the
iPad Pro lineup this year.
What are they going to add the M2 chip?
And if they do add, you know, the M2 chip, what is it going
to do?
I mean, you are still constrained by the apps and the
ecosystem of what you can do.
Maybe they'll improve Thunderbolt in some way.
But if I had to buy a new iPad just to get
better Thunderbolt, I would be pissed.
I mean, seriously, I would be pissed.
I would be like,
Oh no, I'm not doing this.
And basically, I feel let down having purchased the 2021 iPad
Pro coming from the 2020 because it wasn't that much
of an update.
You know, hindsight's always 20 20.
No one's perfect.
I'm not perfect.
And listen, we knew what we knew, but I can at least try
and help you for making the same mistake that I did.
If you have any questions, comment down below.
My name is Mike.
This is tech 24-7 TV.
Guys, I'll talk to you in the next one.