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Apple’s new iPad Pro is beautiful, fast, and

painfully expensive.

APPLE DOESN’T have a particularly hectic release schedule—some of its gear is untouched for years—but when it does make a major revision, people take notice. Whatever your views on Apple, it makes tantalizingly desirable stuff. It’s just launched a refreshed MacBook Air and Mac mini, but the star of the show is a brand new iPad Pro. It’s thinner, lighter, and much faster.

The new iPad Pro comes in two sizes—11 and 12.9-inch— and the display goes that little bit closer to the edge. Its Liquid Retina screen first appeared on the iPhone XR. It’s not OLED, but as LED screens go, it’s good, boasting the most accurate colors of any in the business, and a 120MHz refresh rate. A 12MP camera faces outward, capable of 4K 60fps video, and a 7MP camera with TrueDepth faces the other way, which you need for the Face ID logon, which also comes over from the iPhone. There’s a new Pencil, too, which magnetically snaps to the case to recharge.

All good stuff, but it’s inside that we get the main upgrade: the A12X Bionic SoC, with eight cores, and seven GPU cores. It’s built using a 7nm process, and sports 10 billion transistors (an Xbox One’s SoC has half that). It also has an eight-core neural engine for real-time machine learning. All this adds up to a 35 percent improvement in single-core performance, and 90 percent in multicore over the stock A12.

Apple is being bullish about performance, claiming it makes the iPad Pro “more powerful than most computers” and “faster than 92 percent of all portable PCs.” Bold stuff, but it isn’t far wrong if early tests are to be believed. It was demonstrated running Photoshop without a stutter, and graphical performance is likened to an Xbox One S. The performance is roughly roughl on a par with a MacBook Pro Pr sporting a Core i7-8750H. So S it’s quick. Battery life does doe take a bit of a hit, though, as it’s quoted at 10 hours.

Can the new iPad replace the laptop? The launch event made constant comparisons, but the short answer is no. It’s still a tablet, and doesn’t offer a consistent experience with full systems. To replace a laptop it needs the same OS, a trackpad, and be easily expandable. Nice try, but we are unconvinced.

We know that when Apple gives with one hand, it takes away with the other, often by removing ports we were using. There is no Lightning port, and out goes the Home button. All you get is one USB-C port, and that doesn’t support external storage. You can’t plug in so much as a flash drive without third-party help. So, none of your old iPad accessories work, and you can’t use cheap external storage. You need an adapter to connect nonBluetooth headphones, too, so you’re stuck with the built-in speakers until you do.

The next problem is a hefty one. The 11-inch model starts at $799, and the 12.9inch one at $999. If you start playing with the configuration, it can reach $1,899. If you want 4G cellular connection, for example, it adds $150. You’ll probably also want the new $129 Apple Pencil and $179 Smart Keyboard Folio. Ouch.

Slipping out alongside the iPad Pro is a new MacBook Air, also thinner and lighter, with a new 13.3-inch 4K screen. You can now log on using Touch ID, and it keeps two Thunderbolt 3 ports. Prices start at $1,199, and run to $2,599. Also refreshed is the Mac mini. This gets more capable insides, faster processors, more memory, and storage. It still has a good set of ports, too, including Thunderbolt, USB 3, and 3.5mm jack. Prices start at $799 and run to over $4,000.

Apple undoubtedly makes lovely gear; the new iPad is pretty close to awesome, but all this svelte power is crushingly expensive. Quite who needs such power in a tablet is questionable. How often have you needed to run Photoshop on a small screen without a mouse, when out and about? Yep, those creative types Apple seems so keen to impress. It is a beautiful halo product, though. Of more interest is that A12X chip: Mobile does not necessarily mean slower anymore.