- Yep.
This is the brand new 12.9 inch iPad Pro,
and we're gonna unbox it.
But what's better than unboxing one iPad Pro?
How about two iPad Pros?
That's right.
We're going to unbox both the 12.9 inch
and the 11 inch iPad Pro today.
We're gonna see what's different.
We're gonna test out Thunderbolt drives
to see what kinda speed we get,
we're gonna test out a Thunderbolt dock.
And we'll check out a couple of cases.
This video is sponsored by ESR.
Hey I'm Jerry.
And yes,
these brand new M1-powered iPads Pro are here.
So let's check out the 12.9 inch and the 11 inch.
Both of these iPads are powered
by the super fast M1 chip,
that first Apple Silicon chip that powers the MacBooks Pro,
Air, the brand new IMAX, and then of course now
the new iPads Pro.
Now generally,
the base model of these two iPads is pretty much the same.
They both start with the M1 chip,
both have eight gigabytes of Ram,
128 gigabytes of storage, and wifi only.
You can do upgrades on both of these
to get a cellular connection, more storage,
and if you get one or two terabytes,
you can actually get 16 gigabytes of RAM
in a frickin' iPad, in a tablet.
So it's gonna be really interesting to see
over the next few months, if the iPad OS software
can catch up to the power of the M1.
So let's go ahead and get these guys open
and see what's inside.
Looks like there's a strip over here, there we go.
Awesome.
We're not even gonna pretend to be careful with this,
we're just gonna dig into them.
Alright.
I have not really used my iPad for the last few months
since the M1 MacBook Pros came out.
But I did use my 2018 iPad Pro
for almost two years straight.
And I was a 12.9 inch iPad guy because I liked it
as a real laptop replacement.
So when these were announced,
I was planning on just getting the 11 inch version,
because I kinda wanted to go back down to a smaller iPad
now that I was using my laptop more often.
But of course,
Apple gave the 12.9 inch version only the pro display XDR
with the 10,000 individual tiny little LEDs
and the 2500 light zones, so,
now I gotta try 'em both out
and maybe I have to stick with the 12.9 inch
because it's gonna have a better screen.
But maybe the smaller size of the 11
will draw me back down.
Alright, so let's get the top off of both of these,
and...
Look at that.
So it has been a while
since I've used an 11 inch, or smaller than 12.9 inch iPad.
I did an unboxing of the iPad Air Four,
but that wasn't mine,
I just did an unboxing, did a couple of tests,
and then I gave that to the person who actually bought it.
Well you can see,
there's quite a difference between the two,
and I went with silver,
'cause I haven't had a silver iPad in a long time either.
And I really liked the look
of the nice, bright, classic silver.
Alright, so inside both boxes we have,
looks like the regular documentation as expected
and probably some Apple stickers in here somewhere.
Oh, no Apple stickers.
Oh, there they are.
Thought they forgot.
You got a quick start guide.
It tells you a little bit about how to do a couple things,
swipe up for the home screen and whatnot, yeah.
You know all that.
We also have a power adapter and a USB-C to USB-C cable,
because Apple says everything should have USB-C, of course,
except iPhones and cheaper iPads
Over here, stickers.
Oh, and a SIM tool, it looks like we get a SIM tool
in the version with cellular.
And of course, the 20-watt power adapter
and the USB-C cable.
So I'm kinda nervous.
I really was planning on just using or getting
the 11 inch iPad Pro because I wanted the smaller tablet.
I've seen the iPad Air Four,
and I really liked the smaller size
compared to what I've been using
for the last couple of years, iPad wise.
But man, that display.
If it's as good as Apple's saying it is,
it might just keep me on the 12.9 inch iPad.
And this guy, God, it just feels good,
it feels like a good piece of solid technology.
And the size is just right
for holding for a long period of time.
If you're gonna be going with the larger iPad,
that weight does add up over time.
And you start to feel it.
So you might wanna get a case or a keyboard case
or something that's actually
gonna hold the iPad up for you.
Because this does get quite heavy after a while.
And this version,
the 2021 version is actually slightly heavier
than the 2020 and 2018 version.
But man, these things just look amazing,
they look and feel amazing.
Both of them are just gorgeous
with this bright silver display.
There's so much technology packed into these two little guys
that I never would've imagined it
with the very first iPads back in 2010.
Alright, so let's get these guys turned on,
and see if we can do a little bit of testing.
Well, I can't really see anything here
as far as the screen differences,
but let me go ahead and set these up real quick,
and then we'll do a little bit of testing.
Test out those Thunderbolt speeds,
test out a connection to a Thunderbolt dock,
and check out a couple of cases.
Alright, so we got both of these guys set up and signed in
and we're ready to go.
So externally, let's just see if there's any differences.
So starting with the top of the new iPads Pro or iPad Pros,
with M1, we have the speaker grills up top
'cause there's four speakers on the iPad Pros.
We got the power switch or sleep/wake switch.
We got the volume rockers, not rockers,
they got the volume buttons on the sides.
Below the volume buttons
we do have the little pass-through areas
to charge the Apple Pencils.
And I do have a SIM card slot on the 12.9 inch version.
On the bottom, we have additional speakers,
and of course the USB-C ports
And absolutely nothing on this side,
except it looks like a little microphone.
So I'll do some more tests over the next few weeks.
But performance-wise, these are running the M1 chip,
they're both running the M1 with eight gigabytes of memory.
And we know pretty much how well that performs,
when we look at the MacBook Pros, Macbook Airs,
Mac Mini, and of course the iMac that all run the M1.
So these should be pretty comparable,
but let's go ahead and run a quick Geekbench test
and just make sure.
So open up Geekbench on both of these iPads,
and we'll go ahead and run the CPU test at the same time
and see what those results look like.
And we'll hit Run Benchmark.
Alright, so as you can see,
these results are pretty close to each other.
There's always gonna be little variations
each time you run the test.
But as a comparison, the M1 iMac with 16 gigabytes of RAM
that I just tested, got a single core score of 1747,
and a multi core score of 7717.
So the single core on all of these devices
are pretty similar,
the iMac did get a little bit of a better score.
And my 2018 iPad Pro with the A12X
got a single core score of 1123.
And a multi-core of 4591.
So these new iPads are way faster than the A12 series iPads.
Alright, so the next thing I wanna check out
is the displays on these two devices.
That's where the biggest difference is going to lie,
besides the size of course,
of the 11 inch and the 12.9 inch version.
Both of these iPads do have Pro Motion,
so they both go up to 120 Hertz of refresh rate.
The 11 inch version gets up to 600 nits
of max peak brightness.
Whereas the 12.9 inch version
also gets that same 600 nits of peak brightness,
but with HDR, it can get up to 1600 nits of brightness
in certain areas of the screen.
So to check out the brightness differences,
I have an HDR video I'm gonna play
on both of these at the same time.
And we should be able to see a big difference,
well, I can see, and I already do see,
a huge brightness difference.
The flames on the 12.9 inch version
are much brighter, much more vibrant,
compared to the flames on the right side.
It's almost like it's glowing on the screen,
on the 12.9 inch version, coming out of the screen,
versus the 11 inch version,
it's very much more lifelike
coming out of the 12.9 inch version compared to the 11.
I mean, that's a pretty stark difference,
it's like, I'm amazed,
it really is a massive difference between the two.
It's just much more vibrant, colorful, and bright
coming out of the 12.9.
So the next thing I wanna check out
is local light dimming test videos.
That basically just has a white ball
or a white object running around a dark screen.
And you can see if there's basically light halos
or extra light around that object.
So this is a good way to see the difference
between the Pro display XDR,
and the regular iPad Pro 11 inch
without that Pro display XDR technology,
without all of those individual dimming zones.
Each time this square moves around the screen
or a white object moves around the screen,
it's lighting and unlighting
different lights behind the display.
The 11 inch is doin' the same
but it only has something like, I don't know,
40 zones or something like that,
there's 2,500 different zones on the 12.9 inch.
And a lotta people probably wonder
why they don't just go with OLED on the iPads,
versus this mini-LED backlight.
You know, OLED like on your iPhone 12 or some TVs,
or even some laptops have OLED screens.
Each pixel on an OLED display is its own light source.
And if a pixel is off on an OLED display,
like your iPhone or a TV or some laptops,
then that pixel is off, that is just black and dark.
But there are some downsides to OLED displays,
there can be burn-in and there can be screen retention
and some other things.
The mini LED display of the iPad Pro 12.9
tries to get around some of those issues with OLED,
while still giving you amazing local dimming capabilities,
and of course that amazing contrast ratio
of about a million to one.
So it's gonna be really hard
for you to see this on this video.
But when I look at these two displays, I have it paused.
I can see that there's a bit of a halo around this square
on the 11 inch iPad.
But on the 12.9 inch iPad,
once the white stops, it basically stops.
There is no halo,
there is no backlight bleeding into other pixels
surrounding that white circle.
And that's why there's a $300 difference
between the 11 inch version and the 12.9 inch version.
It's simply the screen display technology.
It's really good.
And if you want the absolute best,
it's gonna be worth that price difference.
So the next thing I wanna test out
out is a Thunderbolt drive speed test.
And Thunderbolt of course, is one of the also big upgrades
on these new iPads Pro.
You can now connect super fast Thunderbolt drives,
you can connect the Pro display XDR with up to a 6K display.
Thunderbolt is really going to bring
other expansion possibilities to the iPads.
Alright, so we'll just open up the Files app here.
And this is my Thunderbolt SSD.
We're going to just hold down on here
and we're gonna click on Move.
And then we're gonna select the local iPad drive.
And we're gonna click Copy, but we need to time it.
But since the iPad Files app is a bit limited
we're gonna have to basically time it
and do a quick calculation.
So we're gonna copy in three, two, one, go.
Wow.
So that was actually quite a bit slower
than I was expecting.
It took about a minute and 59 seconds
for the copy of 36 gigabytes from this Thunderbolt SSD
over to the iPad Pro.
And that equates to about 302 megabytes per second.
Now that's no slouch of course,
300 megabytes is pretty good.
And it's much faster than we got on previous iPads
using USB-C hard drives.
But it's nowhere near Thunderbolt drive capabilities.
Okay, so copying from the iPad to the Thunderbolt SSD
was about twice as fast, we finished in about 54 seconds.
And that comes out to around 666, 667 megabytes per second.
Faster than the copy to the iPad,
faster than previous iPads with USB-C.
But still, pretty slow for Thunderbolt speeds.
Just for a point of reference,
doing the exact same copy using the same drive
and the same files on my i7 iMac,
I got over 1.4 gigabytes per second transfer each way.
That's over four times faster on the iMac
than with the M1 iPad Pro and its new Thunderbolt port.
Alright, so now I wanna test out a Thunderbolt dock.
And for that, we're gonna be using this CalDigit TS3 Plus.
This CalDigit doc has 15 ports,
for Thunderbolt, USB-C, USB-A, audio,
and of course display out using display port.
And of course, because again, these iPads have Thunderbolt,
we're gonna use this Thunderbolt dock
to connect to a display via display port,
we're gonna connect to that same Thunderbolt SSD
that's connected now to the dock.
We have an SD card in here.
You even have audio ports on the front
so you can have headphones,
or even external speakers connected to your iPad Pro.
So all of this should be as simple
as connecting the single Thunderbolt cable
to the iPad Pro.
And in just a couple seconds,
we should get a mirrored display
up on this external Samsung display.
And there we go.
Look at that, that is super cool.
So now you can get a full 4K display, this is a 4K display.
You can even connect a 5K display like the LG UltraFine,
or you can even connect the Apple pro display XDR,
via Thunderbolt.
The XDR probably won't go through this TS3 Plus,
but you can connect that directly to the iPad
if that's what you wanna do.
Unfortunately, external display port on iPads
is still one of those iPad OS weaknesses,
where the software has not quite caught up
with the power of the M1 processor or the chips inside.
The iPad really just works in mirrored mode,
and you can turn it
and now we have it kind of in landscape mode.
So you get a little bit wider of a display,
on the external display, which is nice.
And of course from here, you can do just about everything
that you are already doing.
There's that video we were looking at earlier.
We can just go to Apple.com.
And scroll through here.
And if you're using some kinda professional app,
some kinda drawing app,
this just gives you a bigger display
to actually see what you're doing,
but there are some applications like LumaFusion
that can actually take advantage of that external display.
So if we open up an old project that I have in LumaFusion.
You can see, here's a bunch of video files.
This is an older video
where I talked about connecting different mice to the iPads.
But LumaFusion does have the option
to make the external display full screen.
So now you have the full 4K display
showing my entire video project.
And it's really nice to be able to edit this way
inside LumaFusion,
but unfortunately there's not a whole lot of apps
that can take advantage of this yet.
Maybe we'll see something big and new at WWDC next month,
that allows more options for external displays on iPads
now that we have an actual Mac-powered M1 chip inside.
But who knows?
You can even get a little bit fancier
and use a external mouse and keyboard,
if you prefer, to do your editing.
And a lotta the keyboard shortcuts
from Final Cut Pro actually come through,
so you can Command B to blade and things like that.
And if you're not comfortable with your iPad
just sitting up like this,
then you can always use something like, of course,
the iPad Magic Keyboard.
And this is, oops.
This is the iPad Magic Keyboard,
the original one from last year.
Which Apple says doesn't quite fit
the new 12.9 inch iPad Pro,
but it seems to fit just fine for me.
I have no issues with that, maybe it's a little bit tight.
I don't use a big glass screen protector,
but I do have a matte screen protector on my previous iPad
that I'll probably put on this as well.
And it looks like it fits just fine
in the original iPad magic keyboard case.
But if you don't wanna use a keyboard case,
because it's clunky and heavy
and always attached to your iPad,
and you want to use your iPad as an iPad,
your iPad as a tablet.
Then there's lots of great case options
like from our sponsor, ESR.
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for your new 2021 iPad Pro.
There's stands and silicone cases
and hard cases and trifold cases,
any type of option that you want
to protect your new iPad Pro.
If you prefer a silicone type case,
then the ESR Gear Clear Case
is definitely gonna make your iPad stand out.
It's gonna give you plenty of protection on all sides.
Still works with the Apple Pencil,
see, it can still click on right there.
And, you can see the full beauty of your iPad
on the backside.
But if you're looking for something
with more of a hard back in a trifold case,
maybe this ESR trifold case in black is the one for you.
It's got a nice hard plastic shell
to protect the outside of your iPad
from scratches and bumps and dings.
But you also get the full trifold experience,
so you can actually set your iPad up and use it.
Personally, I prefer the ESR Rebound case.
It is also a trifold case, but it's super thin.
The iPad attaches magnetically.
And of course it will also hold the Apple Pencil
nice and comfortably inside the case as well,
so you're not gonna lose it inside a bag.
And if you're interested in pickin' up this rebound case,
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And my thanks to ESR for sponsoring this video.
Alright, so that's my unboxing, my initial impressions,
my first look and first testing of the new iPad Pros.
With the M1 chip and Thunderbolt.
They are amazing at first glance.
I'm kinda speechless how good they are.
The Thunderbolt speeds that I'm getting out of them
are not quite as high as I would like them to be
or what I kind of assumed that they would be.
But the fact that they do have Thunderbolt,
you can connect them to things
like Thunderbolt docks for external displays
and Thunderbolt drives and SD card readers
and audio interfaces and all kinds of other things
is pretty amazing,
and I think that's gonna really expand the possibilities
of what iPad can do,
especially over the next couple of months,
And we'll see what comes out of WWDC.
But I'll be doing a full review, most likely,
and some comparison videos over the next couple weeks.
So if you're interested in seeing those,
definitely hit that Subscribe button,
and hit the bell for those notifications.
If you're interested in seeing my first initial impressions
of the brand new M1-based iMac,
check out the video that's over here.
It's pretty good.
Hit the thumbs up button if you liked it,
and I'll see you next time.