Apple iPad Pro 10.5 Review: The Most Impressive Workhorse Tablet
The latest iPad iteration makes the best use of Apple Pencil and the attached keyboard.
Last year’s first generation iPad Pro was a big bet for Apple, not only because it represented Apple taking the familiar iPad form factor and throwing in everything (and the kitchen sink!) – the best audio, the best screen technology and without doubt, the absolute best in mobile performance on a tablet.
It was also the first time the iPad made the shift from a consumption device to a creation and productivity device.
The 10.5-inch iPad Pro is refinement on the original in almost every perceptible fashion, and is the tablet for those who want the best and are willing to pay the hefty price of admission for it.
Pros:
- Class-leading display
- Pro-grade performance
- Portable form factor, just the right size
- Good battery life
Cons:
- Expensive accessories
- iOS 11 will unlock the iPad Pro’s true potential
What’s Good?
The move from the 9.7-inch display of the smaller iPad Pro that the new 10.5-inch version now replaces is more than just adding the 0.8-inches along the screen diagonal.
With the higher screen resolution of 2224 x 1668 pixels and the thinned out bezels, you’re effectively getting about 20% more screen real estate without really changing the overall form factor much – great if you liked working with multiple apps in Split View.
Of course, the larger but identical in capabilities 12.9-inch iPad Pro gives you more space to work with, but the 10.5 is a good balance between portability and productivity.
Apple’s cherry-picked the best screen tech for the iPad Pro – the True Tone feature that matches the colour temperature to the ambient light, a max brightness of 600 nits and the wider P3 colour gamut that makes it one of the most accurate tablet displays.
Where Apple’s hit one out of the park is the new ProMotion variable refresh rate on the display. At a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz, you get double the number of frames per second as compared to any other mobile displays, which means smoother animations, text that’s readable even when you’re scrolling by quickly and, if you’ve spent the pretty penny on the Apple Pencil, a screen that’s twice as responsive when you’re interacting with the Pencil on the screen.
Now, ordinarily, pushing out 120Hz video at all times would murder the battery. And the iPad Pro maintains its 9-hour battery by intelligently ratcheting down the refresh rate to 24 or 30 frames per second when you’re watching a TV serial or reading some static text on an e-book.
And instantly pushing it back up when you switch to a drawing app. As hyperbolic as it may sound, once you’ve used this screen for a few days, it’s difficult to go back to regular 60Hz screens.
Now, iPads have been no slouch in the performance department, and the new A10X chip is a beast in sheer computing power, and has graphics performance to match it. Coupled with the 4GB of memory, the difference is discernible over the first generation iPad Pro, and scores higher on benchmark tests than most 13-inch MacBook Pro models.
The new Affinity Photo photo-editing app serves as a great testament to the iPad’s computing prowess – applying certain complex brushes, the kind that would make my 2016 MacBook Pro pause and think, is a blink-and-you-miss-it affair on the new Pro.
You may not notice it if you confine yourself to productivity apps on the iPad Pro, but try editing a 4K file in iMovie on the iPad Pro and you’ll realise how much you can push this tablet on more desktop-grade apps.
Plus, with this iteration, you can even spring for a 512GB storage model, and the Lightning port now supports USB 3 transfer speeds so moving large amounts of data onto the iPad isn’t as tedious as before.
I’m not the one who advocates using a tablet as your portable shooter, but if you’re so inclined, the camera is now nearly top-spec stuff, matching the iPhone 7’s sensor and lens assembly, so you get really crisp, bright images and gorgeous 4K videos.
It will most certainly benefit Apple’s new augmented reality (AR) apps and note scanning capabilities in iOS 11. The quad speaker setup is pretty good too, though I still prefer the setup on its bigger 12.9-inch sibling.
What’s Bad?
Despite the thinned bezels on the front, the design is very iPad and very, very familiar, so while it is in no way dated, some may argue that the design hasn't been changed in a while.
But one aspect of the design troubled me a bit – the camera bump, courtesy the iPhone 7’s lens assembly, sticks out like a sore thumb, more so if you want to set your iPad down on a table and have to constantly think about whether that is scratching the lens.
As with the previous generation of iPad Pros, the Smart Connector makes it easy to connect accessories like the Smart Keyboard, which go a long way in making this is a near-laptop replacement, and then there’s the Pencil which earns an easy recommendation for anyone using this for art or design.
There’s even a new optional leather sleeve for protection, which finally has a slot for the Pencil at the top. All said and done, these accessories are few and far between and are eye-wateringly expensive. Before you know it, you’ve spent over twenty grand on a couple of accessories, pushing the landed cost of owning one of these uncomfortably close to the 80-grand mark.
Finally, while I’ve tested the iPad Pro 10.5 on iOS 10.3.3, I have had the chance to run the iOS 11 beta on the older 9.7-inch iPad Pro, and I have to say – the iPad-specific upgrades in iOS 11 means that while Apple’s already launched the iPad Pro 10.5, it will really come into its own a couple of months down when iOS 11 hits.
Why Buy It?
So should you get this iPad? Absolutely – if you’re looking for a portable work machine and understand you’re going to be spending as much as a capable laptop to pick one of these up.
If you need something purely for entertainment, the regular non-Pro iPad would probably work out cheaper, and the Pro is simply overkill.
With apps that are slowing taking advantage of the iPad’s power and impending operating software upgrades, the iPad Pro is quite frankly the most impressive tablet money can buy.
(Tushar Kanwar is a technology columnist and commentator and has been contributing to India’s leading newspapers and magazines since 1998. He can be reached on Twitter: @2shar.)
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