iPad Pro review: Mac-like speed with all the virtues and restrictions of iOS

Camera

The 8MP rear camera on the iPad Pro appears to be roughly the same one that Apple ships in most of its non-iPhones these days, including the iPad Air 2, the iPad Mini 4, and the sixth-generation iPod Touch. The iPad Pro’s size means that it’s going to make an even worse point-and-shoot camera than a regular iPad (not that it seems to stop people), but if you do decide to be That Guy you’ll get pictures with decent color and white balance, good-if-unexceptional noise and detail levels in outdoor and indoor light, and poor low-light performance. Your iPhone (or modern, high-end Android phone, in many cases) is the better camera. If the A9X’s new image signal processor is helping at all, the differences are subtle.

Internals and performance: The Apple A9X

Apple has become a fascinating chip company. The A9 that ships in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus is within spitting distance of Intel’s Core M in many CPU benchmarks, and Apple has amped that chip up even more for the iPad Pro.

Let’s go over the basics first: Geekbench reports that the A9X is a dual-core chip running at about 2.25GHz. The A8X used three CPU cores to boost performance, but the A9’s “Twister” CPU architecture and the big boosts in clock speed that Apple is squeezing out of it (up from 1.84GHz in the iPad Air 2) both apparently made that third core unnecessary.

These seem to be the same CPU cores we saw in the new iPhones earlier this year, just running 300-or-so MHz faster. That speed increase is reflected in the Geekbench and browser-based CPU tests. Also note that while the iPad Pro doesn’t look all that much faster than the iPad Air 2 in multi-core CPU tests, the fact that it’s doing that work with two cores means the single-core scores are drastically higher.

The A9X can’t quite get up to the level of a modern U-series Core i5 based on Broadwell or Skylake (see the 2015 MacBook Air and Surface Pro 4 results), but it’s roughly on the same level as a Core i5 from 2013 or so and it’s well ahead of Core M. And despite the fact that it lacks a fan, the A9X shows little sign of throttling in the Geekbench thermal test, which bodes well for the iPad Pro’s ability to run professional-caliber apps for extended periods of time.

Things are even more impressive on the GPU side, where the OpenGL version of the GFXBench test shows the A9X beating not just every previous iDevice, but every Intel GPU up to and including the Intel Iris Pro 5200 in the 15-inch MacBook Pro and the Intel HD 520 in the Surface Pro 4. Once we see Iris and Iris Pro chips from the Skylake family, Intel may be on top again, but those aren’t due out until early next year, and they only ship in the fastest of Apple’s products.

In the Onscreen tests, which render scenes at the screen’s native resolution rather than the standard 1080p of the Offscreen test, you can see that most (but not all) of that GPU performance increase is being dedicated to driving the higher-resolution screen. It’s still faster than the iPad Air 2 by a bit, but an A8X and an A9X rendering the same thing at their respective tablets’ native resolutions will look more-or-less the same. When Apple bumps the resolution of iDevices, it can sometimes take its GPUs a generation or so to really catch up (this was the case with the first-generation Retina iPad, the first Retina MacBook Pros, and the iPhone 6 Plus), but it looks like the A9X is more than up to the task of driving the iPad Pro’s screen smoothly.

The A9X is one reason to be optimistic that the iPad-Pro-as-laptop-replacement pitch will become stronger as Apple works on its software—the hardware is here. There’s no hesitation while manipulating multiple apps at once in Split Screen mode or jumping between apps. We’re looking at MacBook Air-class CPU performance and MacBook Pro-class GPU performance, so the iPad Pro ought to be able to handle more multitasking features with aplomb as Apple sees fit to add them. Professional 3D apps like AutoCAD and the Complete Anatomy app Apple showed off in September all seem to run just fine, too.

Battery life, power, and charging

The iPad Pro’s battery life is respectable and roughly in line with the other iPads, but it’s not mind-blowing or anything. The battery is bigger, but the SoC is more powerful and the screen is bigger too, so no surprises there.

Charging is more problematic. The iPad Pro ships with the same 12W adapter that comes with the iPad Air 2, but that adapter is tasked with charging a considerably larger battery (it ships with a much longer Lightning cord than usual, which is nice for the times when you need to plug it in while you use it).

As a result, it takes around four-and-a-half hours to completely recharge if you’re not using the iPad as you charge it—not a problem if you’re charging overnight, but it's annoying if you’re trying to grab a few percentage points in a hotel room or airport in between doing other things. And you definitely won’t want to try charging it with the little 5W adapter that ships with your iPhone, something that’s a bit slow but workable in the iPad Mini and iPad Air 2.

Cost breakdown

The iPad Pro starts at $799, which gets you a Wi-Fi version of the tablet with 32GB of storage (we had the larger 128GB version, but 32GB iDevices typically have somewhere between 25 and 26GB of usable space). Stepping up to the $949 version gets you 128GB of space, and for $1,079 you get 128GB plus 150Mbps LTE. We’re definitely talking about something that’s priced less like a tablet and more like a high-end Ultrabook.

Compared to the Surface Pro 4, pricing is generally in the same range; the $899 base model Surface includes 128GB of storage, 4GB of RAM, and a fanless Core m3. You can definitely spend more on a Surface if you want, though—the midrange model with a 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, and a Core i5 will run you $1,299. Windows is more flexible than iOS, but it’s happier with more resources, too.

As for accessories, the Smart Keyboard will run you $169 (compared to $130 for a standard Surface Type Cover or $160 for a version with a fingerprint reader, something already included in the iPad Pro) and the Apple Pencil costs an extra $99 (the Surface Pen is a free pack-in). A traditional Smart Cover without the keyboard is available for $59 and a silicone case for the back of the tablet is $79. As with the versions for smaller iPads, Apple has made the silicone case and Smart Cover so that they protect the entire tablet when used together.

Again, third-party accessory makers can save you here—Logitech’s Create keyboard case provides protection for the screen and the back of the tablet and only costs $150, almost $100 less than buying Apple’s Smart Keyboard and the silicone case together.

So, yes, the iPad Pro is expensive—it’s priced like a primary computing device, and while the base model is cheaper than all of Apple’s MacBooks you’re definitely getting into Mac territory with the 128GB and the LTE models.

An iPad-shaped peg for a Mac-shaped hole

I've been asked several times to sum up what I think of the iPad Pro, and it’s something I’m still struggling to articulate. As a reviewer, I try to be fully conscious of the fact that my use cases (and even many of our readers’ use cases) aren’t everyone’s use cases. The right product for me isn’t necessarily the right product for everybody. I don’t need or want a Mac Pro or a Linux laptop or a $4,200 gaming PC for myself nor would I recommend them for most people, but I can understand why others would want all of those things.

But I’m having a uniquely hard time putting myself in the shoes of a potential iPad Pro buyer, particularly those who Tim Cook believes will replace a laptop with a big tablet. Some of that is because the iPad Pro isn’t really for me, even as someone who already works on an iPad Air 2 with some regularity.

Even with a bigger screen and new accessories, the iPad still feels like a “sometimes computer.” I can take it with me on vacation instead of a MacBook and do pretty much everything I want, and I can even get quite a bit of work done on one (the majority of this review was written on an iPad Pro, usually while also chatting in Slack or Messages or firing off e-mails). But what really does it in for me are the many small ways in which the iPad Pro is not quite a traditional computer and iOS is not quite OS X.

That’s true for larger things like the limited multitasking UI and the lack of a precise finger-friendly pointing tool like a trackpad, and it’s true when you go to use iPad apps that haven’t yet been optimized for iOS 9 or the iPad Pro. It’s true every time you want to place two Safari windows side-by-side. It’s true when you run into little weird edge cases, like trying to format a long article in WordPress only to need to scroll all the way back to the top of the page to see the formatting controls or when you go to copy and paste text from Word for iOS into WordPress to find that all of the links and formatting have been stripped out (these are the kinds of things I do, but you’ll surely run into your own little frustrations). There’s no exposed filesystem, no easy official way to install apps from outside the App Store, no iOS version of Xcode for developers. Connecting external accessories (cameras or SD cards, mics or audio interfaces) requires dongles and adapters and, occasionally, external power supplies. There’s no true multi-display support to speak of. Even companies like Adobe and Microsoft, who seem relatively enthusiastic about adding iPad Pro and Apple Pencil support to their apps, don’t offer the “full” versions on iOS.

Does everyone need all of this stuff? Of course not. There are people who have stopped using Macs and other more traditional computers in favor of switching to the iPad full-time, and there are plenty of people out there who use iOS, not Windows or OS X, as their primary computing platform and aren’t bothered by its limitations. The (relative) simplicity that comes with these limitations can even be a bonus rather than a shortcoming. That's just not true for me, and it's not going to be true of a lot of happy Mac or Windows users.

It's best to think of the iPad Pro as a starting point, especially for iOS 9. These multitasking features are still brand-new, and there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick in future iOS 9 revisions and into iOS 10. My biggest gripes with the iPad Pro are with the software rather than the hardware, and that means that most of them can be fixed given enough time and enough feature requests. It took Microsoft three tries to really nail down the Surface Pro concept, and given a couple of iOS updates the iPad Pro has room to grow into a more versatile laptop replacement without necessarily giving up the things that people like about iOS.

For the rest of us, there's still the Mac.

The good

• Excellent performance—the A9X is Apple's fastest chip by a big margin and the iPad Pro has double the RAM of any other iDevice.
• Hardware is well-built and fairly light for its size.
• Smart Keyboard creates a surprisingly flat, stable typing surface for your lap.
• Nice speakers, especially in such a small, thin device.
• TouchID and in-app Apple Pay support.
• Smart Keyboard's keys provide a decent typing experience and happen to be waterproof.
• Smart Keyboard is also surprisingly good to use on your lap.
• Apple Pencil feels good to hold and to use, and it's useful for more than just drawing.
• Pricing is mostly competitive with Microsoft's Surface Pro 4, though MS will give you higher specs if you're willing to pay for them.
• Third-party accessory makers like Logitech will help close some functionality gaps for things like the Smart Keyboard.
• Good showcase for iOS 9's multitasking features, especially Split View.

The bad

• Expensive, especially for a tablet, and especially if you're adding $250 worth of accessories to it.
• iOS 9 has been out for two months, and we're still waiting for many apps to add support for the multitasking features (and, by extension, the iPad Pro's bigger screen).
• Larger size makes it awkward for some iOS apps, particularly games.
• Smart Keyboard can only hold the screen at one angle.
• Needs a safe place to put the Apple Pencil and its lid while you're not using it.
• Takes a long time to charge.
• Missing a few nice features from the iPhone 6S, most notably 3D Touch and always-on Hey Siri.

The ugly

• iOS 9's multitasking is still limited and occasionally frustrating.