What Does the New iPad Pro, Built for Work, Look Like? We Tried It at the Launch Event

10.5-inch iPad Pro + iOS 11

The iPad Pro looks more and more like a laptop.

At this year's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple announced a new tablet: a 10.5-inch iPad Pro. Ever since the huge 12.9-inch version a year and a half ago, the line has been trying to become the next generation of productivity tool.

Pairing the 10.5-inch iPad Pro with iOS 11 moves that goal along a little. We spent a short while with the new device after the keynote, and afterward installed the developer version of iOS 11 on a 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

This operating system, tuned further for the iPad, makes the iPad look more and more like a Mac. Apple also ran a new TV ad at WWDC:

The ad for the 10.5-inch iPad Pro

Hardware first: so how big is 10.5 inches?

Screen size is the biggest hardware change in the new iPad Pro, but at first glance you may not notice how big the gap is.

That's because the body is about the size of the 9.7-inch version, even though the numbers say it grew. The two devices are nearly the same width — 0.46 centimeters apart, to be exact — but the 10.5-inch model is 1.6 centimeters taller. Unless you compare them carefully, you won't feel that it got bigger.

The smaller details match too: the rounded frame, the smooth, gleaming cut of the edges, the flat metal back... From behind it looks almost exactly like the 9.7-inch model.

It feels about the same in the hand, too. The 10.5-inch and 9.7-inch versions share a thickness and a weight.

That's the first impression. The differences turn up fast. The 10.5-inch display adds 20% more area, so you see more at once. Because the body barely grew, the visual result on the front is narrower bezels — the whole face comes closer to being one single sheet of screen.

Picture quality looks no different from the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, at least to the naked eye. Because the screen is larger, resolution rises to 2224 x 1668, while pixel density stays at 264 ppi. True Tone display and low reflectivity are the same as on the other iPad Pro models.

The strip at the bottom that the Home button occupies now looks cramped, pressed up against the bezel. The button's job is in fact shrinking: iOS 11, tuned for the iPad, adds a lot of multitasking, so you press Home to switch apps that much less often.

Taiwanese suppliers had once put out word that the 10.5-inch iPad Pro would drop the Home button. That hasn't happened yet. But if the Home button does disappear one day, nobody should be surprised.

The iPad has a Dock for apps now, and it looks a lot like a Mac

Ever since the 12.9-inch iPad Pro in 2015, Apple has described it as a "laptop." iOS 9 was also tuned for the bigger screen: split-screen display, picture-in-picture video...

Then the effort stalled. Unless you regularly use productivity apps built for the iPad, most of the time the iPad Pro's interaction model is not much different from an iPhone's.

iOS 11 makes some progress. On the iPad Pro its features now sit closer to a Mac's. From our short time with it, the logic behind the new features rests on two things: multitasking and dragging files around — the two things that separate a laptop from a phone.

Start with the Dock along the bottom of the iPad: a white translucent bar with apps lined up on it, cut from the same cloth as the classic macOS Dock. Hold the iPad Pro in landscape and you get the illusion that you're looking at a Mac.

As on a Mac, you can press and hold an app on the home screen and drag it onto the Dock. Pinned apps sit on the left, recently used apps on the right — again, just like a Mac.

In our testing you can pin up to 15 apps here. As on a Mac, the more you add, the smaller the icons get.

How does it work? For one thing, it doesn't float at the bottom all the time the way a Mac's does. It hides once an app opens, and comes back when you swipe up from the bottom edge.

When you need to import a file, you can drag it straight onto an app in the Dock.

Multitasking is the more Mac-like part. Swipe up from below the Dock and you land in a brand-new screen. Apps you've just opened appear on the left; tap the X to close them. The left third of the space is a brand-new Control Center.

On macOS, the apps you're using are reached by a trackpad shortcut: a four-finger swipe up.

We didn't have long with it, but the Dock's effect was already obvious. Switching apps no longer requires a double press of the Home button; that button's remaining jobs are quitting an app and unlocking the device.

More computer-like still: files can move between apps

The other thing that makes the iPad more like a Mac is how apps work together — also part of switching between tasks and sharing between them.

Split screen has changed. The iPad could already show two or three apps on one screen, but they lived in a "divided" state, each carving off a piece of the whole display.

In iOS 11, press and hold an app in the Dock and it floats over one side of the screen. Only if you drag it again does it turn into the old divided split screen.

That floating window amounts to a small screen of its own: you can work inside it and drag it to the other side of the display. None of this changes the size of the app underneath.

On a computer, the most basic thing two apps can do together is probably hand a file back and forth by dragging. The iPad Pro can do it now too.

We opened Photos, held an image with one finger, pulled up the Dock from the bottom with the other hand, and dragged the picture into another app — a photo editor, say.

Selecting several images works differently than on a computer: you hold one image down with one hand and tap the others with your other hand to pick them all up at once. On a computer you can usually lasso a whole pile of files with the mouse. That isn't switched on in the developer preview anyone can download today.

Or say you want to put an image from a web page into an email. Put Safari and Mail side by side, drag the image across, and it lands in the body of the message.

Text behaves the same way. Select a passage on a web page, drag it into the email, and it becomes body text. No copy and paste.

For now, in the built-in Mail app, drag in a TXT file and its text drops straight into the body. A PDF won't do that, but it does become an attachment.

Third-party mail apps haven't caught up. Spark, for instance, won't take a PDF at all — only images and TXT files (the image becomes an attachment, the TXT file has its text copied into the body).

Probably because iOS 11 is still a developer release, parts of it weren't smooth in our testing. Dragging, for one.

We shot a short video showing how the new Dock and app switching work

Control Center gets a makeover

The new system feels fresh, with a lot of small things changed. The square VPN box now has rounded corners instead of right angles; every card's corners have picked up more curve and look "rounder."

Spotlight used to lay out two columns side by side; now it uses the iPhone's single column. Whether the final release keeps it that way is anybody's guess.

The most striking change is the new Control Center. It used to be one card. Now each function goes its own way, as a separate button.

It has also picked up a lot of animation.

You can now add your own buttons here to jump into apps — screen recording, Notes, text size, the alarm clock — by setting them up in Settings.

Volume and brightness are more visual as well: the cards turn into color bars; tap the rotation lock and the curved arrow spins once around; the text-size control shows a run of blocks to mark the steps.

The App Store has a new icon, and has turned into an app-recommendation publication

Open the App Store and its new face looks a lot like Apple Music's.

Everything is a card now. The first screen is "Today," which collects daily app picks and short how-to pieces along the lines of "5 tricks that make VSCO do more."

The bottom bar is split into "Today," "Games," "Apps," "Updates" and "Search." The old charts no longer get a section of their own; they are scattered through the various recommendation pages instead.

Picks made by human editors matter more than they ever have — nearly every app recommendation comes from one. Editors also write pieces like "VSCO and apps of its kind." The App Store doesn't seem to be running on the new model yet, though; the contents are still the ones demonstrated at the keynote.

Open an individual app and that page has changed too. The app's video plays by itself, and further down come the reviews, also chosen by editors before they are shown.

An app picked for a feature gets an "Editors' Choice" write-up, plus a rank and a score. All told, today's App Store feels more like a publication that recommends apps.

File management, screenshots, and a new keyboard

The iPad Pro's accessories have picked up a few work-related tricks as well, such as Apple Pencil's "Markup." You can annotate photos, screenshots and notes by hand with it, then share them.

Screenshots get a small feature too: once you've marked one up and shared it, the system assumes you no longer need the original and deletes the lot. That saves precious storage for photos.

iOS 11 also adds a file manager in the mold of the Finder, called "Files." It supports network drives including iCloud and Baidu Cloud, and everything on the device shows up here.

And although the iPad Pro itself hasn't grown much, the matching external keyboard has been stretched to full size. That, too, makes it feel more like a computer.

Apple also raised the screen's refresh rate from 60Hz to 120Hz. It can show more frames in the same span of time, so moving images look finer. We swiped through a web page a few times, and the added smoothness was easy to see.

Together with the low-end iPad released this March, Apple has reshuffled its whole tablet line again. The 10.5-inch version now replaces the 9.7-inch one outright; the older model has already been pulled from Apple's own store. The price went up a little: the cheapest 64GB version is 5,188 yuan.

As iOS 11 tunes itself further for the iPad Pro, the iPad edges closer to a computer. But from our short time with it, the device still sits between computer and tablet. If you spend every working day with a computer, it is hard to argue that an iPad can replace the tools you already have.

Part of the problem is that Apple keeps starting and stopping when it comes to remaking the iPad. After launching the iPad Pro and adding split screen in 2015, Apple seemed to forget the iPad Pro entirely through 2016.

Turning the iPad into a productivity tool is not a job for Apple's industrial design team alone. It needs the developers who make productivity software.

For years, Apple's app store has pushed download rankings, encouraged cheap products and offered no workable way to try software first — none of it friendly to expensive work tools.

Sales have slid in the past few years, and old machines like the iPad 2 are still in use, which suggests the iPad is still mostly a couch computer rather than a work tool. There are also far fewer iPads out there than iPhones, and the iPhone is what pulls developers' attention.

Apple needs to persuade the makers of productivity tools to bring over what they built for the PC and the Mac, and to rework it thoroughly for touch.

Remembering to tinker with it every other year is not enough. Apple has to keep remaking the iPad, keep adjusting the app store, keep courting developers — only then might people accept the iPad as a tool for getting work done.

Cover image and in-article photos taken on site