All right, so I’ve been using the new M4 iPad Pro for like two weeks now. I’ve been doing a lot of the same stuff I did with my M1 iPad Pro from three years ago: watching YouTube videos, browsing the internet, answering emails, listening to music. And spoiler alert, it’s almost exactly the same experience. The M1 iPad Pro was already super overpowered and very smooth and snappy and had great battery life. And this one now, even more so, of all of the same stuff. Not a very helpful review, I know, but I’ve also been thinking about some of the really interesting decisions that Apple made with this iPad. Specifically, some stuff that wasn’t like even really in the rumor mills, it kind of just came up, didn’t even show up in the keynote, but is unusual and different. So these are five of the most interesting choices that Apple made with the iPad Pro. So first of all, the new iPad Pro is thinner. We all knew that. It was already an interesting decision because I kind of felt like we were done with that a few iterations ago. Like nobody was asking for thinner iPads, But maybe they saw all the gushing over Samsung’s Galaxy Tab Ultra. Guilty. That thing is also ridiculously, impossibly thin. So iPad goes from 6.4 mm, which was slightly thicker than Samsung’s flagship, to now 5.1 mm, which just barely beats Samsung’s number. Now, you know, I’m not trying to start any beef that doesn’t already exist. You know, I’m sure if you ask Apple, they’ll just say, “Look, it’s the thinnest Apple product ever,” which is already nuts. It’s crazy thin. But I think it really feels like Apple is just looking for something to make this different, to make it feel different from the last couple of generations of iPad. And now there’s rumors that they may also be doing this to next year’s iPhone, just going with thinness. Honestly, it is noticeably thinner and lighter to me, someone who’s held the previous one quite a bit. Definitely less of a difference when you have a case on it, but this is also gonna naturally mean there’s less room inside the iPad. But weirdly, somehow, the 11″ iPad Pro M4 has a larger battery than the last-generation 11″ iPad Pro, and this new, bigger 13″ has like a tiny bit slightly smaller battery, almost the same size battery as last year. And so what you end up with is a really good battery life, again, awesome standby time. Really good battery when you’re actually using it. But what strikes me is Apple could have made, if they made this the same thickness as last year, they could have made an iPad with an enormous battery life. With the efficiency of the M4 chip, it could have had some insane long battery, or they could make something strikingly thin and have the same rock-solid battery life as always. But I would’ve loved to have seen option one. But anyway, there’s also a few other things missing from this tablet as well. So they avoided saying it during the keynote, but they got rid of the ultra-wide camera. Not a huge deal at all, obviously. They kind of have a huge cutout for the LiDAR on the camera square. It still kind of looks like it’s maybe a dual or triple camera setup, but nope, single camera, LiDAR, and a flash. And I was also curious if magnet paper could reveal anything new about the insides of this iPad. This was before JerryRigEverything, like tore his apart. But I know instinctively if you make something thinner and smaller, then the speakers have to suffer, right? They would be smaller. And magnet paper, fun fact, is a great way not only to see the magnets inside of a device, of which there are many here, but it also shows the iPad Pro has these new, much more circular quad speaker drivers as opposed to the more rectangular-looking ones from before. I’ve listened to them back to back, this one versus the last generation. And this one is a little bit less bassy, still loud, still some of the best speakers in any tablet and very usable, but physics. So less room inside, a little bit less bassy with these new speakers. Now, packaging wise, not a lot has changed. I mean, an iPad box is still an iPad box, but two things: one, no stickers anymore. So, sorry Apple fan boys, if were are hoping to keep collecting. Environmental things, no more plastic. They’re trying not to ship so much stuff. But the thing is, okay, they are still shipping these two things with every iPad. If you get a Space Grey iPad, you get a black cable, so the USB-C cable, but you also still get a brick with every iPad. Fine, but it’s this white 20-watt charging brick, which, okay, I know they stopped shipping the brick with the iPhone and they could use the same logic and stop shipping a brick with the iPad, but they’re still gonna ship you a brick. And if you do with this $1,500, $2,000, $2,500 iPad, could it at least be a good brick? Could you at least give us the fastest charging the iPad can support and maybe even match the color of the cable maybe. But anyway, maybe that’s nitpicking. Hopefully not though.
But let’s talk about this computer thing. So the knock on the iPad Pro for years now has been that it’s a ridiculously overpowered, amazing piece of hardware, but it’s still an iPad. Like it still does basically the same set of things that an iPad Air does. There’s a couple little things like Pencil hover and little stuff. It’s basically the same. So they’re not going to let this turn into a full-fledged computer because Apple has Macs to protect. So it’s kind of stuck as an overpowered iPad. And with this generation, well, yeah, it’s still kind of true. Again, this is the first time Apple is unveiling the newest-generation M4 chip, and it’s only in this iPad Pro for now, but it’s even more powerful at its peak. It benchmarks extremely well. It’s a second-generation 3-nanometer process. It has a larger and more powerful neural engine as well. I mean this chip is great, but as far as things that actually take advantage of that, the list is very, very short. And some of the stuff is even like coming later this year, like the new Final Cut app is just around the corner. So if you just do regular iPad stuff: watching Netflix, web browsing, all the classics, like this is gonna feel exactly the same, not just as the last M1 iPad Pro, but as an M1 iPad Air. You know, if you get this M4 version here you can play those, one of the like three games that support the new hardware-accelerated ray tracing on this iPad. You can use the new Stem Splitter feature in the new Logic Pro 2 app for iPad that actually looks incredible if you use Logic on the iPad. But the most interesting new thing to me about M4 is something that they didn’t really talk about. They kind of glossed over it. They didn’t really dive into it in the keynote and they don’t show it on their website very clearly. But okay, in the past when you were buying an iPad, all you really pay more for in a single iPad lineup is storage, right? That’s just, you start with, it’ll be 128 gigs, kind of a joke, but then you go up in price and you just pay for more storage and you can get different colors. And then a few years ago, very sneakily, we started realizing, okay, you actually also get more RAM in the highest-end models. So if you buy more storage, you’ll also get more RAM. So 8 gigs of RAM on the base ones and 16 gigs of RAM on the one and two-terabyte iPad pros. But now on this latest one, the stratification goes even further. Now it’s also CPU cores. So first of all, the base iPad Pro is 256 gigs now, thankfully. And you go from an eight-core CPU to a nine-core CPU with the M4, but that’s just with the base two versions. The top two versions get another performance core. So those are 10-core CPUs instead of 9. And then there’s also the nano-texture display option. And this is that matte finish one that I briefly got hands-on time with at the event. I haven’t gotten to see it since, but it does look pretty impressive even though I do have my durability concerns with it. But that anti-reflective finish is only available, again, on the top two options, the one and two-terabyte iPad Pros, the expensive ones. So now if you’re buying a more expensive iPad Pro, you’re getting different amounts of RAM, different CPU, different storage options and different display options. Very computer-like if you ask me. Now, the Tandem OLED display, to me, is the most interesting thing about this new iPad Pro under the hood. But in practice, it’s actually honestly just a bit of a brighter, more-contrasty version of the same thing we’ve been looking at for years. A perfect example of the iPad’s hardware outpacing the software is, obviously, a new OLED display would be great if you had like an all-black background and maybe showed just the time, maybe fed an always-on display, it could look super cool, but the iPad doesn’t have an always-on display. I don’t wanna bet money, but I wouldn’t be shocked if the next version of iPadOS did support an always-on display with just the Pros ’cause they have the OLEDs now, but it doesn’t. We gotta wait till WWDC and then maybe we’ll see it there. But I mean, aside from that, it still has less blooming for just like the perfect HDR content with pitch-black blacks. I love to see that. If you’re just watching regular SDR content though, or just doing any number of regular tasks, watching Netflix, browsing emails, or web stuff, I mean, you won’t notice much of a difference unless you’re in direct sun, max brightness. That’s a testament to how good iPad Pro displays have been for years in the past though. Now for your artists out there, they’ve also got this sweet new Pencil. No, the back still does not act as an eraser, as much as I wish they would do that. But the rest of this thing is better than ever. It supports Find My now, it has a new squeeze sensor inside for selecting different tools. Super intuitive. I started using it immediately. It also has a new haptic motor inside, so you can feel this little click as you squeeze, which is a nice little confirmation. Kind of surprised they didn’t add this earlier. And then it supports barrel rotation for a few tools that specifically change when you rotate the point. And look, it even has this fake shadow. So this is not a real shadow of the Apple Pencil. This is a fake, totally unnecessary computer-generated shadow that’s shown on the iPad’s display, and it actually matches the type of tool you’re using in real time, with rotation. That’s just ridiculous. And instead of just calling it the updated Apple Pencil, they’re continuing to sell the old Apple Pencil at the same price and they’re calling this one the new Pencil Pro. And look, I am not an artist. I am squarely outside of the target demographic for this thing, but what I do know is if this and its features are tempting to you, then you will need to buy a whole new iPad to take advantage of it.
And that was on purpose. See, they moved the camera to the landscape side of the iPad now, which is great. That’s where we wanted it to be the whole time. That’s where the Face ID array is now. It’s awesome. It’s an ultra-wide camera for FaceTime and all that, but that’s also where the Pencil has always magnetized and charged. So they actually had to rearrange the components inside to be slightly different to work with both now in the same place. So it still snaps on the top like that. But did they have to do that? Couldn’t they have put the Pencil on the top of the iPad or even maybe offset it so that the Pencil’s on one side and the camera’s on the other side, but no, they’ve got it just in the middle where it always is. And I put some magnet paper up to the back so I can see that they did in fact change the magnet layout inside. Like I tried pairing the new Apple Pencil Pro to my old iPad Pro and it kind of stuck on, sort of, but didn’t pair or do anything. All right, convenient. Look, I’m still personally not going to be buying one of these new M4 iPad Pros because of what I do on the iPad Pro and I already have a relatively new M1 iPad, so I don’t need one. But if you don’t have a relatively recent iPad, then yeah, this thing is great. It’s better than ever. But I think we’re all on the same page that we’re waiting WWDC later this year to see what’s new with the latest version of iPadOS to see if there’s anything actually interesting that this will be capable of that we don’t already know about. Because other than that, it’s kind of the same story as the last few generations of the iPad Pro. Speaking of things that are thin, though, dbrand iPad skins. Fun fact, you’d have to stack up 22 of dbrand’s iPad skins to make it the same thickness as the iPad itself. Trust me, I’ve tried. It’s exactly 22. Anyway, dbrand has been making the best leather skins in the business for a while now, which is great because Apple actually isn’t really making anything leather anymore. And this is good quality soft leather, like it’s not some sanded-down and stamped fake texture. It’s actually all-natural, full-grain leather. It’s plush and it’ll actually develop a nice patina over time since you can literally own these iPads for years. So if you wanna check out premium leather accessories for your iPad, check out channel sponsored dbrand. Link is in the description. Either way, that’s been it. Lemme know what you think.
