Hardware

If you need pure power on the go, the new iPad Pro certainly delivers – for a high cost

The new iPad Pro 11-inch is designed to offer users freedom. It’s an ultra-thin tablet fighting against the most powerful laptops on the market – and it’s giving as good as it gets.

Let’s not beat around the bush: the iPad Pro is an expensive device, especially when it doesn’t offer a desktop-class experience. The base price of £769 isn’t terrible, but you’ll be spending another £300 for the keyboard and Pencil, and you’ll probably want the LTE version, adding another £150 to the cost. So for the base 64GB storage size you’re spending £1,219 – roughly the price of a Core i5 MacBook Pro. If you want the maximum 1TB of storage, you’ll be spending over £2,000.

There are few tablets on the market that can even come close to the raw power of the A12X Bionic chip, though, an engine developed by Apple specifically for the new iPad Pro. In our benchmarking tests it outstripped the nearest device by nearly double, and thrashed a number of Windows laptops too, including the Microsoft Surface Pro 6 and the HP ZBook X360 G5. This power translates into speed. Combined with 6GB of RAM there’s very little this tablet can’t manage… as long as there’s a dedicated app for it.

We saw a demonstration of the forthcoming Adobe Photoshop for the iPad, and the speed at which it can zoom while managing over 100 layers was impressive. We’ve had no moments of slowdown with the

machine so far, and the only real issues are with apps not being optimised. But this will no doubt quickly change.

Apple loves to create a natural look with its screens, with the P3-level colour display erring away from the punchier colours of tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4. For those wanting truer colour reproduction for creative projects, Apple is claiming industry-leading quality in terms of the vibrancy and saturation on screen.

The 2,388x1,668 resolution translates to a 264-pixels per inch sharpness, and looked great for every task we tried. The peak brightness of 600 nits is on the low side, because it means the screen isn’t HDR-compliant – although the iPad Pro is capable of playing back HDR content.

The Apple Pencil has also been redesigned. It now magnetically clips and charges to the side of the iPad Pro, and there’s a double-tap function for switching between modes in apps.

Variable pressure levels and the capability to use the edge of the tip give a new dimension to input, and the range of apps set up to take advantage of the Pencil (with Pixelmator and Procreate strong favourites) is numerous. Lightroom is also available, and the aforementioned Photoshop is making its way in 2019.

There are a few new features for this incarnation of the iPad Pro, with Face ID replacing the home button and fingerprint scanning combo. The facial recognition is swift and easy to use, although we did manage to cover the camera most of the times we picked up the new Pro.

The lack of home button means the interface is navigated with gestures. It’s incredibly intuitive, and you can easily jump between apps and multitask across two apps.

For all its power and precision, though, the iPad Pro is still just an iPad. That means you can’t use it as a full laptop replacement, but as a second machine, you’d be hard-pushed to find better out there.

Combined with 64GB of RAM, there’s very little this tablet can’t manage… as long as there’s a dedicated app for it

The Apple Pencil can now magnetically clip and charge to the iPad Pro. Apple claims the vibrancy and saturation offered by the iPad Pro’s screen is the industry-leader.

It’s thin, it’s light, it’s powerful and it’s beautiful. But the iPad Pro does come with a hefty price tag. The A12X Bionic chip is crazy fast, so hook your iPad Pro up to a monitor and blaze through tasks.