iPad Pro M1 Review: The Ultimate Spec Bump!

[Music] [Music] hmm [Music] what's up mkbhd here and this is the new m1 ipad pro it looks almost exactly the same as the last one that's because if the screen's not on it almost is the same as the last one but there are a couple things that are new about this that make it even more of the ultimate ipad which again naturally raises the question of like well what is an ipad anyway and what is a computer i'll get to that later so the last ipad pro wasn't that long ago you can watch the review from last year but in short it had an a12 z chip and that was a spec bump from the previous ipad pro which had an a12x now of course there were other small bits and things that made last year's ipad new but now again in 2021 we have an even more powerful chip so this ipad pro has apple's m1 inside now the a12x and the a12z were already apple designed silicon for the ipad so while we know m1 is a different breed since it's also apple designed silicon it'd be tempting to think maybe that's not that big of a jump like those chips were made for the ipad how good could m1 be that'll be wrong this is a massive performance leap forward m1 in this new ipad pro means that now internally this tablet is basically the same as the m1 macbook air a full-blown computer that means an 8-core cpu eight core gpu 16 core neural engine and for the first time apple is just openly telling us how much ram is in the ipad so that's eight gigs in the lower storage versions and 16 gigs of ram in the one terabyte or the new two terabyte ipad configurations 16 gigs of ram in an ipad so it turns out yeah this thing flies again through ipad os i'm sure it's shocking to you that an even more powerful even faster chip continues to crush ipad os in its latest version but there's a couple other like specific unique ways i've noticed this first of all even the heaviest most graphically demanding apps that i use are snappy and blazing fast that's probably also as you'd expect but also with all this ram and this is a one terabyte ipad so it has 16 gigs of ram it really seems like nothing ever needs to drop from memory it's kind of wild like we're already used to a bunch of the most recent apps staying in ram on the ipad and that's great but here even the oldest heaviest apps in my multitasking tray just pick right up where they left off like lightroom from hours ago games streaming apps it really feels like this ipad's super power here stuff just happily sits in ram all day and is always ready to go but even that doesn't really fully explain the speed so let me just so so numbers people we like benchmarks right they're the easy way to contextualize the differences in performance so remember when the a12z ipad pro last year was already pretty far ahead of most other tablets on geekbench for example that was hitting somewhere around 4500 to 4700 on multi-core and so was the a12x this m1 ipad hit 6900 points sometimes breaking 7 000. that's just in a completely new stratosphere that's actually higher than the 16-inch macbook pro on the longer more detailed antutu benchmark the a12z was a small bump up over the a12x so it went from 717 000 to 723 thousand then m1 ipad pro just casually drops a score of 1 million 84 000 points so it's literally 30 to 45 faster than the last ipad pro which was already faster than pretty much every other tablet it's like you just don't see these types of performance increases year to year that often uh so we knew apple silicon was special but i mean it's just kind of ridiculous it's actually kind of a struggle to find the places where a regular user might find this extra performance here like i guess that's the point a regular user is never going to use all of this performance they'll get an ipad air but hey this is called the ipad pro for a reason and so there are actually a few pro workflows that might be taxing the current ipads or might benefit from the extra headroom in the new one i did a one hour imovie export test the last ipad pro crushed it in 17 minutes the m1 ipad did it in 12 minutes flat so there's another 30 improvement for you if you're doing a bunch of batch lightroom imports and exports for example or just a bunch of heavier things like that in succession then of course this new ipad is going to be great and then all that ram makes the heavier edits in lumafusion or bigger projects with a lot more layers in photoshop that type of stuff more snappy that's that's the real high-end benefit here but there are a few other new things with this ipad pro too aside from just performance uh it is a little bit thicker and heavier actually it's it's barely you might not even notice but it's uh we're talking half a millimeter thicker and 50 grams but it was enough for me to notice so i'm mentioning it to you uh and it's actually to accommodate the new m1 stuff the new display which i'll get to but also a little bit of a bigger battery physically speaking in this bigger one so would you look at that apple making a product slightly thicker for a slightly bigger battery nice the cellular option which i'm holding is also now 5g which is pretty sweet so now in addition to the antenna bands the cellular ipad now has this little plastic cutout at the bottom next to the speakers just like the 5g iphones have on the sides and that usb-c port at the bottom now that there's an m1 chip inside is now a thunderbolt port with usb 4 speeds up to 40 gigabits per second throughput which is massive so if you want to plug in an ethernet dongle here you can get 10 gigabit ethernet which hey if your setup involves plugging your ipad and ethernet more power to you but also that's a huge win for faster file transfers again if you're importing like a ton of photos straight from the camera through a cable or even videos it's enough bandwidth to now really make a difference you can also plug straight into the pro display xdr and drive it at full resolution 6k again not sure whose setup that is but more power to you but maybe the most interesting unexpected change to this new ipad is now actually the front-facing camera so no they didn't move it to the middle at the top where it should be but they did add an ultra wide camera now listen i'm never gonna advocate for taking photos on the ipad it's just it's just not gonna happen but something i do on the ipad pretty often is video calls video chats face times and this new camera setup with a 122 degree field of view is great for that so basically when you open the camera app for a selfie you'll see the normal view but when you zoom out you'll see a whole lot more of the scene with that ultra wide now it's heavily distorted near the edges even with distortion correction turned on in settings not sure that is actually correcting anything but hey an ultrawide camera is really useful despite not solving the problem of being in the wrong place now when you're in a supported app there's a new feature called center stage that kicks in and does a pretty good job of basically following a face around that ultra wide frame so it zooms in a bit and focuses on the face and keeps it kind of near the middle and if more than one face gets into the frame it also tries to stay wide enough to keep them both and follow both of them overall it's pretty simple just a sort of a neat touch but it works pretty smoothly most of the time and i found it a nice addition that just makes a lot of sense on the ipad also if you ever want to turn this off you can jump into the settings app pick the app that you want to turn it off in and then within the settings you'll see a center stage checkbox so there's no other settings or adjusting it you can just turn it on or off so if you want to keep it on in facetime but turn it off in zoom then you can make that happen if you're thinking this might also finally let face id work for more angles it doesn't it's it's literally just the camera so the dot projector and infrared stuff is all working the same way it normally does just the camera's wider okay there's one last feature that is new on this ipad pro and really does make a pretty big difference and that is this screen this new screen here so on the bigger one just the bigger one the bigger 12.9 inch ipad pro you've got a new liquid retina xdr display it's pretty sweet but this smaller 11 inch ipad pro basically has the same screen as last year but this new screen is awesome mainly it just it gets way brighter which is immediately noticeable way more visible if you're near a window or in bright environment and it's a mini led display with 2500 local dimming zones made up of 10 000 mini leds all to say you're going to get a couple things brighter highlights up to 1600 nits for peak brightness full hdr support and better contrast so you're at a million to one contrast ratio now to me honestly it looks just about as good as oled i mean the thing about so much of the content you watch on the ipad is you almost always have those black bars because of the aspect ratio and those look way closer to black now with the black bezels plus there's all this local contrast and specular highlights just look awesome so now any shows or videos you want to watch in hdr look that much more impressive and a full hdr creation workflow is sort of unlocked now from beginning to end so if you want to shoot and edit and export and upload hdr videos or photos you can do all of that from this ipad so now remember when i was saying the you know the iphone 12 started shooting dolby vision hdr video but it turns out there wasn't that many places to actually view it well here's one more great place to view it on the larger new m1 ipad pro now the question that i'm sure is on plenty of minds like it was on mine when i saw the announcement why no mini led on the smaller m1 ipad pro i'm i'm thinking it's a cost thing this is just me speculating you know it is more expensive oled is also more expensive but not quite as bright so this is a great tech to see in the ipad but it's kind of a shame because i really like this smaller ipad pro that's the one i personally use from back in 2018 actually so because this new one doesn't have this mini led display it's yet another performance bump that i don't need so i feel like i'm not going to upgrade i'm gonna keep using my two generation old 11 inch ipad pro but yeah this one is nice everything else though about this m1 ipad pro is pretty much exactly the same as last year's which is to say really really really good so the quad speakers are still super loud and sound great the microphones are still awesome the body is still all metal same design and the dual cameras plus lidar are still here on the back and still great for a tablet plus actually the m1 chip now allows for smart hdr3 from the rear cameras for all you ipad photographers out there please don't uh but then again ipad os is still ipad os which to me really gets me thinking that the ipad os 15 update that's coming up has got to be a pretty significant change to what we have now in ipad os 14.5 like it's got to be right but there's been some rumors floating around now about some pretty big home screen changes widgets being able to drop anywhere on any home screen and maybe some more significant multitasking improvements on the ipad i might keep my eye out at wwdc for something like that but yeah i mean other than that it's again it's it's another ipad pro doing the same stuff even faster so if you had some some bottleneck issues if you had those heavy pro workflows then you'll really notice the difference between m1 ipad pro and the already fast a12z ipad pro but yeah it's getting kind of ridiculous at this point alright a couple other miscellaneous things that didn't quite fit into the full review there is a new magic keyboard for the ipad pro people were wondering about slightly different uh but it's functionally exactly the same really is just adjusted slightly for the half a millimeter of extra thickness for the ipad so you can still totally use the old magic keyboard i tried works perfect it just might feel a little bit snug when it's closed that's all no biggie and the battery life even though a bunch of variables have changed still feels about the same maybe a little bit worse if anything because you gotta factor in so now if your battery life is here you add a more powerful m1 chip you add 16 gigs of ram that tons of apps are staying in you add a mini led display that's much brighter but also a larger battery capacity so we've ended up about the same rating so at the end of the day it's rated for the same 10 hours as the last one i feel like the magic of the m1 is really giving me great standby time but i was able to run through the battery a little faster at full brightness with high intensity stuff going on especially when connected to the magic keyboard not a huge surprise this m1 ipad pro is the ultimate spec bump because again fundamentally it's just crushing the same things that any previous ipad pro could do just even faster with a better screen and that's going to be great for a lot of people but i'm just i feel like i'm just impatient for like a better use of all this power if that makes sense like it feels like i'm like like upgrading to a ferrari but sitting in city traffic all day you know what i mean or like strapping rockets to your car when what you really wanted was a pickup truck i don't know if i'm making any sense right now my point is if it's a computer you're after uh the m1 macbook air is the same computer but uh it's cheaper it's thinner it's lighter it's better balanced overall as a computer with the keyboard and the screen it's not an ipad you know it's not a touch screen it doesn't have 5g no center stage but if it's a tablet you're after with the touchscreen with 5g with all the apps with the apple pencil with the xdr display all this stuff this is the goat it's the goat of tablets i'm saying it it can also sort of convert partially into a computer if you want it to but as i explored in this video right up here it isn't really ready to be like a full-time computer for a lot of people just quite yet but as a tablet it's the goat matter of fact here's a theory to think about is this new ipad too good meaning like it feels like the only thing holding this ipad back is apple protecting the max a little bit because honestly think about it if this ipad got the ios 15 makeover that i want if it got final cut and it got like a serious keyboard dock that you just plug into and it's weighted properly and it doesn't suck on your lap i wouldn't have a macbook honestly i would just use this like would anyone need a laptop if the software really made the difference something to think about i'll uh entertain that in the comment section below anyway that's basically it thanks for watching subscribe if you haven't already what are you waiting for catch you guys in the next one peace

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 4,060,054

Rating: 4.9586449 out of 5

Keywords: M1 iPad, iPad Pro, M1 iPad Pro, iPad Pro review, M1 iPad review, M1 iPad vs, MKBHD, iOS 15, iPadOS, iPadOS 15, iPad widgets, benchmarks, M1 iPad benchmarks

Id: eY9dXcjkVx8

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021

Reddit Comments

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[u/cfescript]

Summary: its faster, but nothing can utilize it and the screen on the big boi looks prettier.

I really hope WWDC has some bombs to drop for us.

[u/motorboat_mcgee]

Every reviewer: the hardware is amazing! Buuuuuut iPadOS holds it back, no real reason to upgrade for most.

[u/HonestMarketeer]

Being a YouTuber, he’s sticking with his 2018 Pro. Lmao, that’s all anyone can do with iPadOS.

[u/koalatybee]

Holy shit I thought that was an Apple intro right there

[u/uacoop]

The M1 is amazing and the screen looks great but I honestly have never felt like I've even approached pushing my 2020 pro to its limits so an upgrade seems really unnecessary right now.

I am pleased that the 2020 magic keyboard does work despite apple saying it's not compatable.

[u/Roodiestue]

Has anyone (US based) 12.9in shipping updated at all?

Mine still just says delivery Friday May 21st on UPS tracking website. Doesn’t say where it is or any history of the parcel though. Do others see anything here?

I don’t have the my UPS thing though

[u/Lord_Nihilum]

Between this and Dave2D, I’m convinced I don’t need the XDR display. That was the only reason I was going with the 12.9 size.

[u/Treekogreen]

Awesome hardware once again limited by the software, this is an instant take-my-money-now buy if undocked (iPad), docked (Mac OS). They use the exact same chip architecture now so the only thing stopping it happening is an upper management's decision.

The worlds most vertically integrated company is so-near yet so far 😖 I've got all fingers and toes crossed for WWDC.