Don't WASTE Your MONEY! iPad Pro M4 vs iPad Air M2 Explained

this is the M4 iPad Pro and the M2 iPad Air the newest iPads from Apple and while they don't look all that different from their predecessors there's more to these than you might think Apple added a host of new features on both of these models including some brand new accessories some that are going to be beneficial to everyone and some that are going to cater towards some pretty Niche use cases that ends up blurring the lines a little bit for one it make sense to pick one of these up over the other upgrading from previous generations or choosing accessories and that's what we're going to talk about today so if you're in the market for a new iPad and you want to make sure you get the right model and you don't waste your money or you're just curious to see what the latest lineup has to offer stick around and let's get into [Music] it hey everyone Kyle Ericson here iPads have become one of the most confusing sets of products in Apple's lineup over the last few Generations there's quite a bit of overlap between each model in terms of specs and functionality they all support different accessories and at a glance it can be hard to know which model is the right one for you the iPad Air and the pro were kind of notorious for this in the past especially on the 11-in models where you could often use the same cases the screens were very similar and even performance didn't feel all that different but this time around that does seem to be changing and that all starts with the design the M4 iPad Pro is now only 5.3 mm thick or 5.1 on the 13-in model where previously it was 5.9 on the 11 in and 6.4 on the 13 that might not seem like a whole lot given a millimeter is pretty Tiny But when you have it in your hands combined with a difference in weight it is quite noticeable the 11in pro weighs in at only 444 G while the 13-in model comes in at 579 which is down quite a bit from the previous genin that makes this substantially smaller than the air in both thickness and weight which kind of makes me wonder if it's even worth calling the iPad Air anymore given that the whole premise of the air was that it was small and light in any case the 11-in M2 iPad Air is pretty much exactly the same size as the previous generation I can actually still use my old Logitech combo Touch case from two generations back if I want to so if you've got a fourth or fifth gen error you can expect it to be pretty much identical now before we dive too deep into things both versions that I have here are the base 11in variants with the air coming in at 599 USD and the pro at 999 and they finally bumped up the minimum specs on these which I've been waiting for for years in terms of the overall design language or shape of these iPads you've still got the squared edges with the metal finish along the sides of each with the same button placement interestingly enough on the back of the pro you've only got one camera now instead of two which we'll get into in a few minutes and both the air and the pro now have landscape oriented front-facing cameras just above each display the displays themselves are noticeably different from each other this generation and frankly this is probably one aspect that people are the most excited about with a pro and for good reason on the pro you've got the allnew tandem OLED Ultra Retina xdr Display with 1,000 nit Peak brightness in SDR content and up to 1,600 with HDR which is a noticeable difference from the 11in M2 iPad Pro that only went up to 600 nits on an IPS panel what apple is doing with this display is stacking two OLED panels on top of each other to boost up that brightness level and the nice thing about this is you get the added brightness without sacrificing any contrast or black levels like you do on some other OLED screens on a lot of newer OLED monitors and TVs they'll use a quantum dot layer combined with the OLED panel that also lifts the brightness but it can also make the blacks appear more gray in bright settings and I honestly much prefer the iPad Pro screen to those you get those deep Inky blacks with great contrast in color with the 120 HZ promotion display it looks fantastic when you're watching content playing games and just generally using the thing this particular iPad that I have is just the regular glossy finish but now you can also get them in Nano texture if you want something that has a matte finish and that is only offered on the pro and only if you get the 1 tbyte in up models for some reason that will cost you an extra $100 and admittedly I haven't seen one up close yet I generally prefer glossy finishes because they're a bit sharper and cleaner but if you're using your iPad in bright areas quite often that can definitely be helpful while the pro makes a pretty big leap forward with its display the air is pretty much business as usual same 60 HZ display which I know a lot of you are probably going to be super happy about same 500 nits Peak brightness or 600 nits if you get the 13in version the difference between 500 and 600 is barely perceivable in the real world so I wouldn't say that that's a huge advantage but outside of the brightness levels and refresh rate for an IPS panel it is one of the best out there you've got pretty solid black levels again not on the same level as an OLED panel but really good for a back lit display both the air and the pro have P3 wide color and are very color accurate so if you're doing any color critical work like graphic design or editing photos and videos on either of these everything is going to look and work great both are compatible with the all new apple pencil Pro which I'm going to come back to in just a second but just speaking of using the pencil if you're doing a lot of drawing or taking notes and you want your iPad to feel more like you're writing on paper you're definitely going to want to check out this screen protector from this week's sponsor paperlike paperlike is a screen protector that helps you write or Draw on your iPad by using micro bead technology they call Nano dots Nano dots create a surface texture giving the right stroke resistance improving haptic feedback to make it feel more like paper without sacrif ricing in picture Clarity the Nano texture that Apple makes that I just talked about does not give you that so if you're really looking for that paper like feel to enhance your pencil experience paperlike is the way to go I've been using this one on my old iPad Pro and the feeling that you get with the pencil is far superior to the regular iPad Surface you also get almost no glare with it on and it protects your screen as well so there's a lot to like here you can order screen protectors for these new iPads and other current or past models as well so check out the link in the description if you're interested in picking one up all right so this is the apple pencil Pro and it works on only these 2024 iPads and has a fair amount of new features the one that most people will likely use if you're an avid pencil user is squeezing the barrel to bring up the tool pallet you don't have to squeeze it too hard but it's enough that you're not going to get any inadvertent touches or anything that's accompanied by the new haptic engine that's located in the pencil that gives you feedback any any time that you do squeeze or in some apps like procreate if you're snapping objects you can now also roll the barrel to rotate brush strokes and you still have all your pressure and tilt functionality so if you're an artist or someone who is really leaning into the pencil this might be of interest to you but I'd say if you're just taking notes and just occasionally using it the USBC pencil works on both of these and is also a lot cheaper as well just one other minor thing to note with the pencil functionality the M2 air finally introduced hover functionality which the previous versions did not have and were only available in the Pro which I found to be quite handy but that combined with the internals on the air brings this on a similar playing field to the previous gen iPad Pro both the 2022 iPad Pro and the 2024 air have an M2 Chip with an 8 core CPU and 10 core GPU while the new 2024 pro has an M4 with either a 9 or 10 core CPU depending on your configuration and also has a 10 core GPU I will say up front that in iPad os's current state any of these chips are likely more than powerful enough for almost anyone even my old M1 a was more than capable for editing simple videos and semi complex tasks if you are going to be doing any kind of resource heavy creative work both the M2 a and the M4 Pro have dedicated media engines for encoding and decoding video but the M2 iPad Air does not have prores encoding and decoding like the M4 and the pro does and the neural engine in the M2 is a lot less powerful so any kind of onboard AI features in Creative software is likely going to feel a little bit more Snappy on the pro the M4 iPad Pro also has Hardware enabled Ray tracing which the Air does not have which will not only help with GPU heavy creative work but games as well I've briefly ran a couple of benchmarks on these and the M4 blows the M2 out of the water but if you're gaming on either of these with stuff like apple arcade they're going to feel pretty similar now both of these models that I have here have 8 gigs of RAM but if you move up to the 1 tbte storage option in the Pro that gets pushed up to 16 where you'll also get the extra CPU core going from 9 to 10 and you'll still have Thunderbolt four speeds capable of 40 gbit per second as opposed to 10 gbits on the air so that does make the pro a much more capable device for me I'm not really doing anything other than editing photos and maybe an Instagram reel here or there so I don't really need a ton of power and I'd say that's probably the same for most people for anything like these videos I'm always going to use a Mac but I know a lot of folks like working on an iPad in different ways and I can totally understand why people would want to use this over a MacBook with the display and the size so it's definitely nice to have that option I'm not going to dive too deep into performance because I still have a lot more to test and these literally just came out this week but I will have in-depth reviews on both of these in the coming weeks so if future wants to check these out make sure that you're subscribed and those will drop shortly so there's still a couple of things worth mentioning on both of these some that I think are pretty important upgrades starting with the cameras both of these finally have landscape oriented cameras like the iPad 10 and have gone away from the awkward portrait ones that they had on the previous versions these are so much nicer to use on calls although the camera is about the same quality on each the iPad Pro also has a four mic array while the air only has two mics and just to give you an idea of what that looks and sounds like here's a sample of each all right so right now I'm on the iPad Air and as you can see it looks pretty good it's decent enough for video calls and things like that and I will say that the audio does sound pretty good just going through the internal speakers but now let's head over to the iPad Pro and see what that looks like and sounds like so now I'm on the iPad Pro and as you can tell things look relatively the same but they probably sound a little bit different due to to that 4 mic array and I also have access to different things on this camera that I don't on the error like depth and lighting effects but this is what the iPad Pro looks like and sounds like as you can see there's not a ton of disparity there they're essentially the same front camera with a 12 megapix f2.4 lens as are the rear cameras that both support a 12 megapix f1.8 lens you might notice the absence of the ultrawide lens the pro used to have which may seem like a downgrade but I'm not sure if how many people end up using those cameras anyway personally I rarely open up the camera app on my iPad except maybe to test for these videos and the pro replaced the ultra wide lens with a lar scanner for things like AR experiences which I think is much more fitting for realistic use cases on the iPad the pro also has an allnew Adaptive flash for scanning documents that works with your camera to take a bunch of different photos of a document and Stitch them all together to avoid any kind of Shadows which again I think if you're using this more for work makes so much more sense than what you'd historically use the cameras for the M2 air on the other hand hasn't really changed all that much from the previous generation with cameras and honestly on paper there's really not much else that's different on the ear from the last gen except for wireless connectivity it got a bump from Wi-Fi 6 in Bluetooth 5.0 to Wi-Fi 6E in Bluetooth 5.3 to match basically the rest of Apple's lineup I've mentioned this multiple times on the channel before but provided you have a Wi-Fi 6 router the speeds are quite a bit faster versus wi-fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 is generally a lot more efficient with external accessories speaking of accessories you can buy the new magic keyboard for the M4 iPad Pro that you can't get on anything else that does have relatively the same design as before but you do get a working function role in this model which you didn't get on the last magic keyboard and it has a new haptic touchpad made from glass that allows multi-touch which I've been really impressed with so far the air is still stuck with the older magic keyboard unfortunately although I don't know how likely it is that you're going to drop 300 bucks on a keyboard for your iPad that cost 600 outside of that you've got the same Biometrics same listed battery specs the speakers seem pretty much unchanged on both of these compared to their previous versions the pro sounds amazing and noticeably better than the airor as you do have four speaker audio versus the Dual speakers in the air I believe the 13 18-in air is supposed to sound a little bit better than the 11in but like I said the pro and the air are Worlds Apart in my opinion in sound quality so with all that being said which one of these should you choose if you're just strictly looking for a solid iPad with a decent display that's more than powerful enough to run most things I think the M2 iPad Air is a great device and probably the right choice for most people it's not that far off from the M2 iPad Pro you get some nice addition like pencil hover WiFi 6E and you can use the new Apple pencil Pro with that being said if you go take a look at one of these new iPad Pros if you're like me you're probably going to want it just strictly because of how great it looks and feels but from a practical standpoint if you're working with a lot of media and you need more powerful encoding or GPU features or if you're just planning on playing some more resource heavy tripa games the iPad Pro is definitely what I'd go for you're also going to get Thunderbolt 4 with a Pro which is going to make a world of difference if you're doing anything creative with large files or you end up using an external display so it definitely does have some practical advantages but it's also just totally fine if you want the best of the best as well even if you don't have a particular use case in mind I'm going to continue to put these through the paces and test out as much as I can so if you guys want to see anything show up in either of you for the M2 air or the M4 Pro let me know in the comments down below because I cannot wait to dig into these more that's all I have for you today I really just wanted to get this out there for anyone who is maybe considering picking either of these up and maybe was unsure so I hope it was helpful in that regard or at the very least you enjoyed the video if you did feel free to hit that like button if you'd like to see more Tech related content or help me build a robotic lawnmower that plays tag with Garden Gomes Please Subscribe thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next upload [Music]

Channel: Kyle Erickson

Views: 160,176

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Id: lSlXrmEZ59I

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Sun May 19 2024