This is the new 13-in iPad Pro and this is the new 11-in iPad Pro both of them new for 2024 and they're both running Apple's new M4 chip but this product here is my trusty 2018 iPad Pro this thing is almost 6 years old at this point but I've never really been tempted to upgrade this product I feel like this has been all the iPad that I could possibly want but when I went to New York and checked out these devices I was
Like they were so tempting and then after this review period I absolutely will be finally upgrading this uh 2018 device it's going to be to this 13-in device but it's not for the reason that it originally thought so first thing a quick note on the unboxing so typically when it comes to Apple products there's usually some kind of sticker inside the package it could be like a white sticker or a colored sticker depending on the product but usually there's some kind of
Plastic sticker in there but seemingly in an effort to reduce their plastic consumption the stickers and Apple products are gone but the second thing that was interesting is that on the 13-in iPad Pro and only the 13-in not the 11-in iPad Pro you get a black charging cable the part the brick is still white but black charging cable and the thought that I had was like why are they separating the 13 and 11 in and typically when Apple includes like a
Black accessory it's like the pro product it's the thing that makes it like the most Pro and you'll see in terms of the performance the 13in is actually a a more Pro device in the 11 so I just found it strange that they included a black charging cable only on the 13 this is crazy I'm talking about colors of charging cables but that's just how Apple does things all right let's talk about these displays because these new OLED panels are arguably the
Most interesting things about these new iPads they both have these new super bright OLED panels and the tech required to get them this bright is incredible so it's a pair of OLED panels run in Tandem and they have these incredibly energy efficient display engine to be able to pull it off uh but despite these very bright screens they still have very good battery life and even when I crank the olid panels to full brightness it still has excellent run times these are
Amazing displays and I actually think these are the first devices out there of like consumer Tech that uses the type of screen Tech it's really visible in bright environments like if you're using it right beside a super bright window or Outdoors on a sunny day these new OLED screens are way better than the stuff we've seen before but if I'm being honest with myself aside from the brightness of these screens outdoors I don't actually think that these new
Panels are that much better than even my 2018 iPad Pro like if you compare these products in terms of their generation side by side yes it is noticeable but you got to have them side by side if I'm looking at them individually I feel like they've been amazing displays since 2018 like the 2018 or newer 11-in iPad Pros they're just regular IPS panels but they're so high quality that even 6 years later they still look good and then the 12.9 in iPad Pros with the mini
LED panels those have a little Bloom sometimes but they look awesome and when I'm indoors yes these new OLED panels look amazing but SoDo is basically any iPad Pro since 2018 that's just the conclusion I think many people would draw there is one exception it's that if you really need color accurate screens like the best color accuracy is going to come from the newest Tech uh so if you work with photo and video and you really need that Perfect Color accuracy these
Are going to do a better job also there's another thing it's the ghosting that has appeared in the previous generations of I guess iPad Pros so yes 2018 and onwards they've all had 120 HZ promotion but the response time on these older panels have been a little on the slow side so if you played like fast-paced games at high refresh the response time was slow enough that you see some ghosting it doesn't have that issue on these news screens because OLED
Tech has very fast response time uh okay the other thing that's changed the other major change is the dimension and weight so both the 13in and the 11in are thinner and lighter than the previous generation of these products and it's pretty significant on the 13-in device this is 5.1 mm thin it's really thin and quite a bit lighter than the previous generation um I'm someone who's always appreciated the pursuit of thinness and the reduction of weight and the way that
Apple did it here it's like even more commendable because they did not reduce the performance and they did not reduce the battery life on these products even when they shrank them down like this so that's really cool I will say that there's something about me that just doesn't trust a 5.1 in thick or sorry 5.1 mm thick device like these are review units they're loner so I'm not I'm not going to bend them there's no way I would do that um but I'm sure
Someone out there's going to do some testing where you just crank it 5.1 mm is so thin so we'll see how it holds up over time they're also both lighter and the 13-in one again is particularly impressive but for me I typically have my iPads like mounted on a stand or something or just sitting on a table so the weight reduction isn't that critical to me but for people that carry these things around all the time they're on a job site they're just walking around
With these things or in a hospital that weight reduction is a nice bonus okay the M4 chip this is the first device or these two devices are the first devices that have the new Apple M4 chip incredibly fast but still very energy efficient now both of these are able to handle their heat output well but the 13-in one is fractionally better that's why it has the black cable all right uh the thing is though aside from these synthetic
Benchmarks it's actually really hard for me to tell the M1 chip devices from these new M4 chips like they're so similar and from the perspective of me who's trying to replace a 2018 device even then the 2018 model I have benchmarks way worse than these M4 devices but in terms of the stuff that I do like streaming shows or taking notes and the occasional drawing app it still feels really Snappy even compared to the new M4 okay I want to move on to the
Conversation of the new Apple pencil Pro so this is the new Apple pencil Pro that I cannot really use properly because I'm not an artist but my niece is so I let her draw in it for a couple hours and these are some thoughts she had the bar roll feature where the gyroscope inside the apple pencil Pro can sense the rotation degree of the barrel it's neat but it's seemingly very situational like very few brushes and or markers can actually take advantage of it so it's
Not necessary for most digital illustration but the squeeze gesture she really liked that so in the beginning she found a little bit cumbersome because it would trigger a few times by accident but once she got used to it you could tell that she was able to switch colors and access different tools a lot quicker than using the traditional UI and she liked that and then the last thing is the haptic motor that's inside the apple pencil Pro so when you squeeze
The barrel and you do that squeeze gesture you you get this little taptic bump that just tells you that you squeeze it it's just to make the whole process of squeezing the barrel and then like selecting things feel a little bit more deliberate it's like a very subtle thing it's nothing crazy but it again it's just a nice little feature ad on this device now the issue that I have with this whole product the whole apple pencil Pro is that this is only
Available on the new iPad Pros you cannot use this new new apple pencil Pro with the old generations of iPad Pros even the one that came out 2 years ago and to me like okay the reasoning behind is that because the front-facing camera is now mounted on the landscape edges right on the sides of these iPads and it's a great position right you get just get better FaceTime angles on the side there and Face Unlock is a little bit better on that side
But it just kills me they're claiming that because the camera's positioned there the magnetic and charging system had to be tweaked and therefore these new ones can't work like it just feels a little too convenient that now if you want this uh new apple pencil Pro with all its new features you have to buy a whole new iPad toble to get it and I mean it might be true it's probably true but it just still kills me that that's the state of how you get the new Apple
Pencil Pro to work I also want to talk about these new keyboards so this here is the new magic keyboard for the new iPad pros and again you can only get this new keyboard with the new uh iPad pros and the whole keyboard feels very good like this is a very similar keyboard to in terms of like the feel and even the Aesthetics to the keyboards that are on the existing MacBook lineup and it's got this metal keyboard deck and a trackpad that is also like a a
Haptic trackpad this is not a trackpad that you depress and like it physically moves up and down down there's a bit there's a bit of movement but the tap that you feel the kind of click that you feel is from a motor on the inside that generates that kind of tactile feedback just like their MacBooks but typing on this keyboard is awesome I type as fast on this thing as I would on basically any laptop keyboard it just feels like a better typing experience than the one
You got from the previous generation of magic keyboard like the keys on this just feel a little bit more responsive uh and also it's a aluminum surface which some people might like the older one has that like soft touch rubber which I didn't mind but it does feel more premium on this new product but the pricing between the two magic keyboards is still the same so this year with the new iPad Pros you just get a way better product all around right you get a
Better screen better chip better pencil better keyboard better front-facing camera position and all while the device is being thinner and lighter the price has gone up by about a 100 bucks depending on the configuration uh but it does have a higher base configuration than before so it is more expensive to get into this whole product line but the the fact remains this is a just infinitely it's a better product compared to anything I've had before now
When I went to New York and I got to see these things I was like okay for sure I'm going to be I'm going to be upgrading but then having gotten the review units in I'm starting to get a some cold feet because everything I'm comparing it to to my 2018 I'm like it's better but the overall experience didn't really change for me especially for the stuff that I do but then yesterday just as I was like Gathering my thoughts around this stuff I had this crazy
Epiphany so the way that I shoot my videos right now if you guys have noticed I have multiple cameras all running at the same time usually two sometimes three or four and they're all being fed to one computer that's running OBS and I try to edit my videos in real time like I'll switch camera angles and try different transitions while I shoot my videos and I do all of this through a stream deck I press buttons I can control the cameras as I shoot but in
Apple's keynote video they showed this multicam setup thing that was running on Final Cut for iPads and I thought it was kind of neat but then they showed me a demonstration of it in front of my face of like how it's all done and I was blown away I saw this thing being done I was like this is crazy like they were running four cameras kind of similar to what I'm trying to pull off but it was all done without any wires it was just done with a single iPad and it was
Controlling all things like the Zoom the focus like just crazy and this setup that I have here this took me like I don't know a week and a week and a half to really kind of configure it and even now I'm still like fiddling with it but this has 50 wires and there's so much stuff that I have to tweak and fix all the time not so much fix but there's so much stuff that I need to fiddle with and all of this thing hinges on that computer right there a very Decked Out
Mac Studio now before I had that Mac I used to run it on a regular Windows PC I had an rxx 490 and a 13th gen Intel system I also tried an AMD system those PCS were way too loud for what I'm doing because we have four 4K cameras that are being fed into a thing it's encoded live and sometimes I would stream this stuff out so all of that processing it can handle it on a regular Windows system but the fan noise was really annoying to work around it so I tried running the
System in a separate room but it's just like I wanted access to the computer like it was a pain so I got this M2 or this M2 Mac Studio in but it's a borrowed unit this is not mine it has to go back and I was like okay if I have to do this whole setup using a stupidly expensive Mac computer or I could use this iPad and do the same kind of thing with no wires I'm like I want to try that I need to try that thing now unfortunately that app is
Not available for testing right now so I'm like I couldn't even I the idea was that I would be able to play with it and talk to you guys about it but I'm pretty sure that that's the setup I want to switch to it just seems so fluid and effortless and just easy to use and because I try to do my stuff live and interact with it live I mean like that's the dream of what I like how I want to make content so I'm totally picking up one of these 13-inch devices uh again
These are laners they have to go back but I'm going to buy one and hopefully I can do what they showed in the marketing material now you might be looking at this being like dude that's just a that's marketing material it's that's not going to work maybe it won't but I think when I see that I see what that thing could do and same thing goes with like the the logic pro and like the whole like the whole ecosystem that is available on the high level iPads right
Now is incredible like it's actually kind of strange mean it's changed the perspective of how I view these products like the very first time I reviewed one of the kind of more expensive iPad Pros and it's still the same sentiment that's today the whole idea is that it's cool Hardware but there's nothing to do on these crazy tablets these crazy powerful tablets but I think it's changing like you just have to be open to the idea of what these things can do I really think
That that that new Final Cut workflow with the multiple cameras being run simultaneously where you can control focus and and zoom off of a single iPad with all these cameras feeding into it that is crazy cool to me okay but that's my iPad Pro review it's a weird one but I hope you guys enjoyed it thumbs if you liked it subs if you loved it I'll see you guys next time
