Just over a week ago, Apple provided select journalists an iPad Pro, with the restriction that they could not post reviews until yesterday morning. Normally, Apple lifts the embargo on reviews a day or two before new products go on sale, but this year, the iPad Pro started to show up in Apple Stores the same day that reviews were posted. Thus, I was reading the brand new reviews of the iPad Pro on my iPhone just moments before my local Apple Store opened and I bought one for myself. I’ll need to spend more time with my own iPad Pro before I’m ready to post my own review, and I hope to soon get access to an Apple Pencil (which I don’t believe are yet in any stores). But I can say this about my first day with the iPad Pro: the screen is huge!
If you are wondering whether the iPad Pro is right for you, here are the reviews that I found most informative from folks who have had a week to kick the tires on the new iPad Pro, the new Apple Pencil and the new Smart Keyboard for iPad Pro — plus some of the interesting things that they said in their reviews:
- John Gruber of Daring Fireball: “The iPad Pro is ‘pro’ in the way MacBook Pros are. Genuine professionals with a professional need — visual artists in particular — are going to line up for them. But it’s also a perfectly reasonable choice for casual iPad users who just want a bigger display, louder (and now stereo) speakers, and faster performance. Anyone tying themselves in knots looking for a specific target audience for the iPad Pro is going about it the wrong way. There is no single target audience. Is the iPad Pro meant for office workers in the enterprise? Professional artists creating content? Casual users playing games, watching movies, and reading? The answer is simply ‘Yes’.”
- Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal: “The Pro may seem wedged between iPads and MacBooks, but it will be your main computer in the future. As our phablets push smaller tablets into retirement, the big tablet and its accessories will do the same for our traditional computers. For now, however, it may be easiest to step back and see the Pro as a… really good, really big iPad.”
- Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch: “This new iPad is powerful — and for various reasons, this is the first time I feel that it’s actually possible to tell. Between this and the Apple TV, we’re seeing Apple’s A-series chips get pushed really, really hard for the first time, and what this thing can do is pretty damn impressive. It’s pushing over 5.5 million pixels at all times, but never stutters or lags.”
- Scott Stein of CNET: “You’d think a super-large iPad might feel absurd. But over time, it grew on all of us. It’s beautifully made, and its extra space can be surprisingly useful at times. But it still wasn’t a complete stand-in for an everyday computer for any of us…although it’s priced like one.”
- David Pierce of Wired: “The iPad Pro is plenty powerful, and it’s plenty big. But to call it ‘just a bigger iPad’ is like calling the Millennium Falcon ‘just a bigger falcon.’ In making it bigger, Apple made the iPad Pro different. This is Cupertino’s attempt to prove a tablet can replace and outgun your laptop. Perhaps more importantly, it is Apple’s best idea about how to give you a tablet that is more than a slightly bigger version of your big smartphone. This tablet does things your phone and your laptop can’t do.”
- Federico Viticci of MacStories: “The device is noticeably heavier than the iPad Air 2, but not too heavy: upon picking it up for the first time, I noted how I was expecting it to be much heavier – again, looking at the Pro’s body tricked my brain into thinking I was about to pick up an object as heavy as my 13-inch MacBook Air. Instead, the iPad Pro is surprisingly well-balanced: its weight distribution doesn’t make the device annoyingly bottom or top-heavy – in portrait and landscape orientations, both sides of the Pro feel equally balanced and sturdy.”
- Walt Mossberg of The Verge: “Apple has managed to design something thin and beautiful, yet capable. [However,] I found it just too big and bulky to hold and use comfortably for long periods. And that was when held horizontally. Held vertically, it was worse, because it felt unbalanced to me.”
- Ben Bajarin of Techpinions: “Your first reaction when you see it will be ‘it’s so big!’ Then you will pick it up and you’ll say ‘It’s so light!’ I had the same reaction, as did most people around me, when we first saw and got to touch and hold the iPad Pro at the launch event. It really is big and surprisingly light. That makes it easier to hold in a number of different contexts, from sitting on the couch and watching TV or reading the news, even holding while walking around. This is important for not just consumers but the many commercial uses for iPad I’ve studied over the past year. Doctors using them in the field, or on construction sites being used to replace 1000’s of pages of manuals and blueprints, or in colleges to replace a backpack full of textbooks. All these applications will benefit from the added screen size while not sacrificing the portability they need out in the field.”
- Sam Grobart of Bloomberg Business: “It’s a very nicely weighted implement that feels great in your hand. Working in concert with an amped-up, hyper-precise touchscreen, the Pencil can mimic pens, pencils, markers—you name it. Adjust the angle of the Pencil, and the width of your stroke changes. Press harder, and a darker line is drawn. Use a watercolor, and you can watch the color bleed into the ‘paper’ after you’ve taken your brush off the page. And, unlike with a lot of other stylus/tablet combos, the screen reacts instantly, with no lag or any interference to ruin the illusion you’re putting pen to paper. It’s uncanny.”
- Christina Bonnington of Refinery29: “It is entirely possible that this tablet is faster than your current laptop, and that is bonkers.”
- David Pogue of Yahoo Tech: “It’s safe to say that you’ve never used a stylus that’s more responsive than this one: the ink never lags behind your movement. If you’re scoring at home, the screen checks for the pen tip’s position 240 times a second. You can rest your wrist on the screen as you draw, no problem. You can also draw with your finger. And you can press harder for thicker lines. You can even draw with the side of the Pencil, for very fat strokes… Very, very cool.”
- Harry McCracken of Fast Company: “I’ve been living with the iPad Pro and its accessories, provided by Apple for review, for more than a week. They have their limitations, quirks, and at least a few outright bugs, and will be dependent on third-party developers updating their apps to take full advantage of what’s new. But if the idea of using an iPad for serious work strikes you, like me, as an appealing proposition—rather than a waste of time or an impossibility—they add up to a breakthrough package.”
- Daniel Bader of MobileSyrup: “The iPad Pro gives an awkward first impression. The human brain can quickly adapt to scale, but when you’re used to something being a certain size and weight, there can be an adjustment period. Upon first picking up Apple’s 12.9-inch slate, I had a disorienting Brobdingnagian feeling of being suddenly shrunken, the object before me a precise recreation of an object I know and use nearly every day. But whereas the iPad Air 2 mainly resides on my bedside table, for reading and catching up on Twitter, I could tell right away that the iPad Pro would likely live in the office.”
UPDATE: A few other reviews I found interesting after this post originally went up:
- Jim Dalrymple of The Loop: “iPad Pro represents the start of something completely new for Apple and its developers. The power, versatility, and promise of iPad Pro has not been seen since the original iPad.”
- Andrew Cunningham of Ars Technica: “The iPad Pro’s sheer size makes it a less-than-ideal fit for certain use cases, though. Holding the tablet with one hand for any length of time gets uncomfortable quickly, not because the tablet is especially heavy (at 1.57 pounds, it’s not drastically heavier than the 1.5-pound original iPad, something Apple pointed out onstage in September), but because it’s large enough that holding it that way feels unbalanced. That means there’s a class of apps that works well on the iPhone and smaller iPads but doesn’t work as well on the iPad Pro, particularly games that expect you to use the tablet with one hand while controlling action on the screen with the other hand. Admittedly, most people aren’t going to drop hundreds of dollars on an iPad Pro just so they can play Shooty Skies or Ridiculous Fishing on it, but it’s worth noting.”
- Lance Ulanoff of Mashable: “The responsiveness is exquisite and the Pencil tip material offers just the right balance between friction and smoothness on the iPad Pro’s touch screen. Pressure sensitivity is about as close as you’re going to get to actually drawing on real paper. It even supports shading, letting me hold the Pencil at an extreme angle to access a the virtual long-edge of a graphite pencil or wide magic marker. What’s more, there is almost no perceptible visual space between the Pencil tip and the digital line that appears on screen. All that combined with the iPad Pro’s impressively large canvas (I have room for a full drawing and reference material) make this a fantastic drawing experience.”
- Lauren Goode of The Verge: “So fundamentally, I know that the iPad Pro can’t do all of the things my MacBook Pro can do. And, as of right now, the iPad is still not quite the computing savior that Steve Jobs predicted it would be five years ago. But I would still consider this a worthy runner-up to a laptop, or the one (non-smartphone) device I would take with me next time I travel — something I’ve never felt confident about before when it came to the iPad. This new iPad is powerful, it’s fast, it has a large display, and it never lagged when I was multitasking or switching between apps. It’s not better than my laptop, but makes far fewer sacrifices than I expected.”