With an open mouth. This is how I would describe in two words the quality of the mini-LED screen of the new iPad Pro M1. If that's what matters most to you about a big-screen tech product, you can stop reading. Go to a store and buy it. However, I think there are many more details about the new Apple tablet that are worth talking about.
On the outside, the new iPad Pro 2021 has the same design as last year's model ; the weight, dimensions or location of the front camera are basically the same. This year's 12.9-inch model, though, is a half centimeter thicker – probably to accommodate the new screen.
The two new models are also compatible with the Apple Pencil, have the same speakers as before, have the same rear camera with LiDAR sensor and support the same versions of both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth .
How is this iPad Pro 2021 different from the model presented last year? Fundamentally, in five things:
The Apple M1 processor. The 12.9-inch model has the new Retina XDR display, which welcomes the mini-LED technology. The front camera is significantly better thanks to a new 12 megapixel wide-angle sensor. In addition, it has a new technology called Centered Framing. It is compatible with 5G networks. It has a Thunderbolt connector.
Are these improvements, especially the new processor, reason enough to buy a new iPad Pro? Welcome back to my journey with this device, which I love and hate in equal measure, practically since its arrival on the market in April 2010.
Retina XDR: the excellence and possibilities of a display well made mini-LED
Let's start with what I consider to be the best thing about the new iPad Pro : its screen. It is absolutely brutal. One of the keys is the new mini-LED panel that, in theory, achieves the best of OLED screens – high contrast with very black blacks – without sacrificing the virtues of LED panels.
In mini-LED screens the pixels are not self-illuminated as in OLEDs. Behind the screen is a panel of 10,000 LEDs, divided into 2,596 zones capable of being turned on or off individually to increase contrast. You can easily see the benefits of this technology by playing a YouTube or Netflix video in full screen. By doing this, in addition to perceiving a better contrast, you will see how the black stripes that are usually shown around the content are actually black. Why? Because that part of the screen is actually off. That, until now, was only possible with OLED screens, whose pixels are turned on or off individually – as in the iPhone -.
The screen of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro is, therefore both extremely good. And I'm not exaggerating at all. It has a very high resolution, the colors are very exact, the contrast ratio is very high and the HDR content looks tremendously good. In addition, it supports ProMotion, the name that Apple gives to the adaptive refresh rate, which reaches up to 120 Hz.
Another important piece of information about this screen is the maximum brightness. In any normal use, the XDR Retina display reaches a maximum brightness of 600 nits. If you browse in Safari, search for a song in Apple Music, write a text or work on a presentation, you will see it just as bright as the screen of the 11-inch iPad Pro or 2020 iPad Pro.
But if you watch a video or photo in full screen, it goes into “XDR” or Extreme Dynamic Range mode, as Apple calls it. The maximum brightness in this case is 1,000 nits. And to render the brightest areas of a scene in HDR, the panel can boost certain portions of the screen up to 1,600 nits.
In person, the result is quite impressive. Watching movies on the iPad Pro is insane, as is viewing photos in full screen. It's hard to convey how well it works, but at the same time I am sorry that I don't have this display mode running more often.
I suppose a lot of people use an iPad, in large part, to consume content . After all, we live in a time when streaming platforms are delivering us more series and movies than we could ever see in our entire lives. But, as surprising as this extreme HDR mode may be, I don't think it's everything when it comes to choosing a professional rig. There's a lot more to consider.
Apple M1 on iPad Pro
Let's continue with the processor – actually the system on chip – which was one of the surprises of this product. Many of us had considered that the arrival of Apple Silicon chips to the iPad would occur at some point, but it seems that Apple is accelerating the unification of technologies between devices faster than we even imagined.
As is Naturally, the iPad Pro with the M1 is much faster than previous generations. And all this without the device suffering autonomy, since it continues to have the same as the 2020 model.
The new iPad is even a little faster than a MacBook Air as tested by Geekbench . And it's also faster than a 16 “MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 processor , which is insane, because it's three times cheaper.
The possibilities of this team, therefore, are tremendous. It is difficult to describe in words what it feels like to have a team with this screen, this power, this chassis so light, so much autonomy …
But, at the same time, all that is absolutely irrelevant. Apple has been capping and limiting what we can do with an iPad for eleven years. It is frustrating. And, in 2021, it is not understood that they will continue doing it.
It's an iPad, for better and for worse
The iPad with or without the M1 is an iPad, for both good and bad. All the excitement that I have felt for years at the prospect of having a super smart, super powerful piece of glass breaks every time I try to work with the device and find that iPad OS, even with all the improvements it has had, is still that. : a great limitation to the huge hardware of the product.
Apple makes a lot of effort to communicate the possibilities of this iPad with professional apps like Procreate , LumaFusion , Photoshop or Lightroom , but the reality is that, except for photo editing, everything else works worse than on a Mac. Photoshop It is still quite limited, editing videos in LumaFusion is a nightmare and Procreate, while useful, only serves a small number of people. Not even Apple offers its professional applications (like Final Cut, Logic or Xcode) on the iPad. If you want to harness the true potential of the M1 chip, you have to go and buy a 13-inch MacBook Pro .
Then there is the news that even on the 12.9 “iPad Pro with 16GB of RAM (the 1TB and 2TB storage versions), The operating system does not allow an app to access more than 5 GB , significantly limiting the possibilities of professional apps. WTF, Apple?
The iPad, therefore, is still an iPad . The M1 processor has not changed anything of the things that I have lived for the last years of daily use of the device. There are still moments of utter frustration, especially when trying to use it as a professional device and work with it.
The introduction of the pointer has greatly helped reduce those frustrations. But in some cases it has increased them. There are interface implementations that seem to be half finished. Tr As eleven years of operating system versions and six years of the first iPad Pro , one would believe that these things would already be solved. But no.
There is talk of the possibility of running Mac apps on the iPad Pro , but I see it unlikely. Hopefully I'm wrong and a surprise announcement falls on the WWDC 2021 . I dream of being able to run Premiere Pro on a device like this and really squeeze the M1 . A dream that, by the way, could be fulfilled now (the hardware is already there), but for now Apple does not want to.
We have been asking for years to remove the handbrake from the iPad and become what it was meant to be from day one, but it does not stop happening. I imagined arguments such as the limitations of the hardware, or how much the battery could suffer, but in its current state with the Apple M1 the excuses are over. What's inside this iPad is the same as what we have in Macs.
In other words: I have a XDR Retina
screen with a brutal color gamut that I can't squeeze out because I can't run professional applications that really take advantage of it. That is the current state and I think it explains my frustration. If Apple had put a A14 —the SoC of the iPhone 12— instead of an M1, for all practical purposes no one would have noticed . The possible performance is so limited and the overall software experience is so integrated and optimized, that I have not noticed any differences in usage between the iPad Pro 2020 (with an A12Z) and the iPad Pro 2021 (with M1). Even though the latter is almost twice as fast. To this, in addition, we must add many other limitations of iPadOS . If we connect an external monitor to the tablet, it only works in mirror mode. Come on, practically useless. And the same happens with the integration of external microphones or docks, which, in many cases, is still a nightmare because the operating system is blocked. With the arrival of COVID-19, the meetings of Zoom arrived. In the post-pandemic world, where we are beginning to leave lockdowns behind, video conferencing seems to hold up. In a way this is good news, since there is less commuting. But it also means looking at people in poor quality, low resolution and poor lighting. Apple, with the iPad Pro 2021 , try to solve at least the first two problems. The front camera has a significantly higher quality than previous generations. It is also far superior to the cameras found in today's MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. It now has 12 megapixels of resolution, but more importantly, it also has 122 degrees of view. This is intentionally optimized for video conferencing. Let more of you be seen when making a call via Zoom or FaceTime , but it also has a new feature that is quite practical. https://hipertextual.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/large_2x.mp4 This is how Centered Framing works (Video: Apple) It's called Centered Framing , a technology that, through machine learning, to try to always keep you in the center of the image. If you move, the camera “follows” you, in addition to zooming in and out as needed. If more people join the call, the iPad also does an automatic reframing. It is similar to the smart camera of the Facebook Portal , but it works a little better. Those who have been in a videoconference with the device of the social network will notice that it can become quite aggressive when it comes to zooming in or out as the person moves, to the point of being somewhat strange and peculiar. Apple's Centered Framing rendering is a bit more subtle, I would say refined. It follows you when necessary and the zoom-in and zoom-out are not continuous, as is the case with the Portal. This new feature, by the way, is at the operating system level, so most video conferencing apps can take advantage of it immediately. App has updated the Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro from 2021 with a new white color and a slight redesign to accommodate the model's new thickness of 12.9. It's beautiful in white, but it's also more prone to smudging and dirt showing up much quicker after carrying a device with you all day. It is not a coincidence that the keyboards of most laptops are dark in color. Still, on the face of it, it is super pretty. And it is striking that they do not offer Magic Keyboards in more colors, in the same way as the new iMac. If you have a iPad Pro from 2020, I would wait a couple more years before doing an update. Of course: if the issue of screens mini-LED is extremely important in your workflow or consumption habits, then perhaps you should consider it. This is the best display on a portable device I have ever seen. Point. It is impressive. If you intend to migrate all your professional activity to the iPad, then I have bad news. It's still better to invest that money in a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon . Although there are advances and improvements in the productivity decks, everything is still far behind what is available on a Mac. What choice to make between a iPad Pro 11 and 12.9 inches? I would definitely go for the 12.9 model. Just for the XDR screen and having more space to work, it's worth it. Many of us iPad enthusiasts live in a strange limbo, where we get excited about having a huge hardware, with a processor impressive, incredible autonomy and super capable multi-touch screens. But at the same time we get frustrated with a very limiting operating system and a significant lack of applications. Will the latter change with iPadOS 15 ? In a few days we will see if, again, the second part of the story of the iPad Pro 2021 with an M1 processor has the next version of the operating system. The front camera of the iPad Pro 2021 is tailored for the post-pandemic world
Revamped Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro 2021
Should you buy the iPad Pro 2021?
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