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The 10.5-inch iPad Pro is one powerful tablet I unboxed some weeks back. You can read about my first impressions in that previous article. Just like the bigger 12.9-inch model, it has 4GB or random access memory, and that’s quite of a lot of power for an iOS device. The 10.5-inch finally replaced the iPad Air 2 I’ve been using for the past couple of years.
The A10x Fusion chip performs greatly and benchmark results prove this. Now, Apple claims this new line of iPad Pro is going to replace the PC. Is this possible? Well, there’s no short answer to this. For someone like me, this isn’t totally true. For some tasks, it might serve as a PC replacement, but no, it’s not a complete PC replacement for everyone.
Form Factor
The 10.5-inch still retains the regular iPad design we’ve been seeing since the iPad Air. There’s nothing really different here apart from the reduced bezels. A feature I consider great with the design are the 4 speakers on this thing. For a tablet this thin, the speakers sound pretty good. Some laptops don’t even have this kind of sound quality.
There’s a 7MP FaceTime camera at the front, a 12MP iSight camera at the back with LED flash. It’s the same camera on the iPhone 7, it takes great pictures and you can shoot in 4k.
For a tablet, the back camera is definitely an overkill. However, it’s not useful for everyone as it’s rather weird taking photos with an iPad in public.
A Great Display
The 10.5-inch iPad Pro has an amazing display. With the brightness at 600 nits, it’s much brighter than all previous generation iPads. It has a pixel resolution of 2224 x 1668 and a pixel density of 264ppi. It comes with a refresh rate of 120MHz and you can expect very smooth scrolling and pretty fluid content motion.
The True Tone display feature automatically adjusts the display based on lighting conditions so, the iPad knows when to make the display appear warm or cold.
For graphic artists and photographers, the P3 color gamut support is a much-appreciated feature. In short, the 10.5-inch iPad Pro has an amazing display.
Battery Life
The iPad Pro has a great battery life. The iPad has always been pretty good at battery management. Depending on the tasks you’re running and settings like brightness and background app refresh, you should be able to get up to 8 to 10 hours of constant use.
Performance & Software
The A10 X Fusion chip plus 4GB of RAM make the iPad Pro a powerful device. The benchmark results are awesome and real-life performance is outstanding. You could run several apps at a time without a problem. I used to have issues opening several tabs with Chrome on the iPad Air 2. By the time you check a previously tab, it’s already reloading due to memory issues. This isn’t a problem on this tablet.
The review video above was fully edited and put together on the iPad Pro using LumaFusion. Although you won’t get desktop-level apps on the iOS platform, things are changing and developers are taking advantage of the power the iPad Pro provides.
iOS 11 makes using the iPad fun. Multitasking features like slideover and split-screen increase productivity. The new drag-and-drop feature introduced in iOS 11 too lets you do things faster. Apple is trying really hard to make the iPad Pro a real professional tool and so far, I’ve been impressed.
Apple Pencil & Smart Keyboard
To my surprise, typing on the Smart Keyboard isn’t as bad as I thought. I could type almost as I could on my MacBook Pro except for one problem: My fingers keep hitting the screen every once in a while. That’s the only issue I have with it.
Apple Pencil may not really be useful to everyone, but if you take a lot of notes, you might want to buy it. Of course, creatives have no choice. Also, if you do things on your iPad that require the kind of precision you get from using a regular mouse, you would find it very useful. If you want a complete Mac experience, a keyboard case with trackpad like this iPad Pro case 10.5 would be perfect for you.
Why the iPad Pro isn’t a Real PC replacement
For a whole week, I tried using only the iPad Pro for work. I ditched my MacBook Pro and well, I was able to do a lot with just the iPad, but not everything. The iPad Pro is surely a complete PC replacement for some people. For those who use the basic 12-inch MacBook, the iPad Pro could be a PC replacement. With all the power it packs, it does so much. However, until Apple opens up iOS a little bit more, or until they customize the experience on the iPad further, it will remain a mobile operating system holding back this tablet that has so much potentials.
- You still can’t external storage. I would like to connect you hard drive with this thing and move some files around but that’s not possible.
- You still can’t use peripherals like a mouse. It’s not always convenient tapping the screen.
- Certain websites require a real PC won’t work. A good example is Apple’s own website for news publishers.
- Desktop-level apps are still missing.
For a Pro user, the iPad will never replace a PC. Of course, it does a lot of things you would normally do with a PC and it’s really powerful. And here is the thing: I’m definitely not taking my MacBook Pro on a trip anymore. I think this iPad should be able to fill in for it.