iPad Pro (3rd-gen, 12.9in)
Not just the king of iPads, but of all tablets
From £969 from Apple, apple.com/uk Features 12.9in IPS display, A12X Bionic chip, USB-C port, Smart Connector, 64GB, 256GB, 512GB or 1TB storage, Wi-Fi (add £150 for mobile connectivity)
The question of whether tablets are real computers or not is long dead. Even before companies started putting ‘pro’ on the end of the names, people were using tablets for business, creativity, gaming, personal admin… you know, things you use computers for. The follow-up question is whether you might buy the new iPad Pro instead of a MacBook next time you upgrade, and that’s where it gets complicated. The third-generation iPad Pro is the best tablet ever made, and is a marvel of engineering, but it still might not be right for you.
Cutting corners
This year’s iPad Pros feature the biggest change in Apple’s tablet design since the original iPad’s creation, dropping the Home button and pinching the curved corners from the iPhone X. This is a much bigger deal than it seems at first, because it has made the footprint of the 12.9in model dramatically smaller, cutting the chunky area at the top and bottom (when held in portrait orientation). The old version felt massive and almost ridiculous in the hand – this new design just feels like a good, usable size. It’s still on the big side, sure, but there’s also an 11-inch model (starting at £769), which is essentially identical other than screen size (it’s a wider aspect ratio than the still 4:3 display on the 12.9in model) and screen resolution of 2388x1668 pixels (still 2732x2048 pixels here).
The iPad Pro’s reduced thickness of 6mm and 631g weight also help make it easy to handle. Compared to a 13-inch laptop, it’s so breezy to carry, or pull out of your bag and use, that it doesn’t feel like a hassle to just grab it, open a file and get down to work.
One part about the design that surprised us was the flatness of the sides; they’re more reminiscent of the iPhone 5 than the front’s mimicking of the iPhone X and XS. That isn’t a bad thing, and it’s almost certainly been done to accommodate the far superior way the secondgeneration Apple Pencil works, but it’s a weird mix of Apple design past and present.
The Pencil now magnetically attaches to one side of the iPad, and wirelessly charges while it’s there. It’s impossible to overstate how much of an improvement this is, for so many reasons. For a start, the magnets are strong enough that this is the best way to store the Pencil in general, so it’s always to hand with your iPad. It also means it’s always charged and ready to go, whereas with the last Pencil,
The third-gen iPad Pro is a marvel of engineering, but it might not be right for you
you might’ve had to plug it in to the iPad to get some power, making for a giant, inconvenient contraption. So many times in meetings we’d pull the original Pencil from its storage, write on the iPad and… nothing. No juice, no digital ink.
The write stuff
As a result of all this, we’re using the Pencil so much more than on the last Pro – grabbing it to annotate maps or sketch notes we wouldn’t have bothered to do before. You can tap the Pencil to the screen of a locked iPad to jump straight into a new note, too.
The Pencil works pretty much the same, with pressure and tilt sensing. There’s now a flat edge to avoid it rolling off a desk, and you can double-tap near the nib to trigger one of a few actions. That’s configured in the Settings app, where you can choose to switch between the current tool and either the eraser or the last tool used, show the colour palette or turn off the gesture altogether. We settled on the convenience of toggling to and from the eraser; as much as we liked the idea that Apple might make the other end of the Pencil into an eraser, so we could twirl it around, that would be a needless recreation of a traditional tool. What Apple has done works better. The Pencil’s new
matt finish makes it much easier to grip and use for long periods, too.
Of course, the Pencil is still an optional extra at £119, so isn’t exactly a cheap add-on, though it is similar in price to Microsoft’s Surface Pen. Alas, the older Pencil doesn’t work on newer iPads, and vice versa.
One of the strengths of Pencil compared to the (nonetheless great) styluses on the Microsoft Surface Go or Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 is the iPad’s ProMotion screen. It can shift how often it refreshes, up to 120fps, so you see an instant response to your movement, aiding precision.
ProMotion isn’t new to this generation of iPad Pro – in fact, the screen is essentially identical to the previous model. Its 2732x2048pixel resolution looks pin-sharp, the brightness and wide colour gamut of the display make everything vivid and gorgeous, and the True Tone feature that adjusts colours to match the ambient lighting of your surroundings is kind on the eyes. It’s a bit of a shame it doesn’t have the contrast depth of the Samsung Tab S4’s OLED display, but it has its own advantages.
About face
To unlock the iPad Pro, Apple has replaced the Home button and Touch ID with Face ID, which made its debut in 2017’s iPhone X. There’s just one face-scanning camera, so it’s easy to accidentally cover it and stall yourself getting into the iPad, but the tablet points an arrow at where your hand is in the way, subtly reminding you that you’re a foolish human.
Face ID works pretty much as well as on the iPhone, but you definitely get more failed attempts using it in your lap and similar positions. With the iPad propped up with a keyboard, Face ID is perfect – reminding us that we’d love for Apple to put it in iMacs.
Hidden behind the screen are four speakers, with a woofer and tweeter in every corner, giving impressively full sound that’s properly stereo, whichever way around you hold it.
Speaking of sound, Apple has ditched the 3.5mm headphone jack, along with swapping Lightning for USB-C as the only port. Dropping the headphone jack is a really weird decision – Apple kept it on the MacBook Pro, saying that it recognised that audio professionals need a low-latency wired connection, yet this is a pro device too. The USB-C headphone market is not exactly bustling, but you can get a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter for £9.
Having a USB-C port is great in general, though. It means SD card readers or docks can work directly with the iPad Pro, and it can even output to 4K and 5K displays – apps such as video or photo editors can show the results on
A USB-C port means the iPad Pro can output to 4K and 5K displays
the big screen and the editing interface on the iPad. It can even be used to charge your iPhone if you buy an additional cable. It’s still limited, though – you can’t just plug in a storage drive to get at files like on a Surface Pro, for example.
Pushing the limits
When it actually comes to pro use, the phrase ‘it’s still limited’ is kind of a recurring theme here. Apple’s A12X processor is pro levels of powerful, that much is clear. It outperforms all but Intel’s latest six-core laptop processors in benchmarks and handles absolutely anything we’ve thrown at it without skipping a beat.
But there’s more to speed than just power. Last year, we said the iPad Pro was the best tablet. This year, we’re still saying that, but Apple is starting to face competition from Microsoft’s Surface Go and Surface Pro, which might be better for some people when it comes to pro use. The iPad Pro is the better device overall, but even the cheaper Surface Go can do all the things Windows does; the interface may not be very touch-friendly, the performance may be less slick, but it’s happy to support any obscure thing you need from it.
Meanwhile, iOS hasn’t developed at the pace we expected. Take working with files: the inability to access external storage to transfer, back up or find existing files is going to hold some people back. Even if you could do these things, though, you’re still limited. There’s no way to open two instances of the same app, so you can’t have two Pages docs, say, open side-by-side like on a Mac.
Rumour is iOS 13 will have a huge amount of new features like this, but that’ll make it two years between updates that improve the iPad Pro’s usability to a meaningful degree. That pace is too slow.
Most of the things we’re talking about are things that only a tiny percentage of people want to do, which is why we’ve still awarded The Pencil is an expensive addition, but the new matt finish makes it easy to grip and use for long periods. the iPad Pro five stars – well, that and all the things that are good about iOS – but if there are 10 missing features that each affect just 1% of users, that’s 10% of people for whom this isn’t the right device – and that adds up. On top of that, it’s a £1,000 computer – quite beyond the £319 9.7in iPad on which we heaped praise for its affordability – so it’s already only for elite users, really.
Smooth operator
Assuming you don’t hit a wall with working on iOS, the iPad Pro is a fantastic tablet. Running apps in split-screen on a tablet this size keeps everything really usable, and there’s a good number of powerful, pro-level iOS apps designed for touch-based use – a huge advantage over rivals.
Keyboard shortcut support is growing in apps, too. That’s good, as we expect the iPad Pro will be used in a notebook-style mode a lot. However, we wish Apple’s (wildly overpriced) £199 Smart Keyboard Folio had a trackpad, even if it only moved the text insertion point. That would mean not having to reach up to the iPad’s display to do that.
The iPad Pro still has huge battery life, though laptops are starting to match tablets these days. We’ve found our unit has been losing more power on standby than previous models, but it’s faster to charge if you have a high-power USB-C brick. (See ‘Supercharged’, top left.)
It comes down to this: the third-gen iPad Pro is the best tablet you can buy today. It’s slick, the design is classleading, and it’s incredibly powerful, which means it’s only going to get more capable with updates as time goes on.
But it’s not a laptop replacement for everyone just yet (despite the cost), so be sure to buy whichever kind of Apple device works best for you.