Five Days With the New iPad Pro: A Big Upgrade, But Do You Need It?

It depends on how many days a week you already carry an iPad out the door. What it is for hasn't fundamentally changed.

Propped against a desk, the new iPad Pro — which officially ships on November 6 — doesn't look much like an iPad. It looks like a computer.

I mean that in the literal sense of "looks." The edges no longer carry the shiny 45-degree chamfer; in its place is an aluminum band running perpendicular to the screen. From the front it looks like a MacBook Pro with the bottom half cut off.

The curved back the iPad family has carried for the past eight years has been flattened too. The new iPad Pro has hard, straight lines; only the signature rounded corners remind you this is an Apple product.

The uniform black border on the front, the deeper space gray, the matte finish — all of it pushes the iPad Pro closer to the Pro laptops. But the resemblance to a Mac stops there.

My review unit is the 11-inch version, the smaller of the two new models. It weighs 468 grams, one gram less than last year's 10.5-inch model. In the hand it still has the lightness an iPad should have, and the hard edges have been finished so they don't cut into your palm.

The bigger change is the screen.

Face ID works better here than on the iPhone — and it makes the iPad Pro less of a family device

With the Home button gone, the new iPad Pro's bezels are the same width all the way around: 9mm on all four sides of the 11-inch model.

That is hard to call an all-screen design. For comparison, the iPhone X leaves only 2mm between screen and edge, or 4mm counting the raised rim. Last year's 10.5-inch iPad Pro had 7mm on the long sides.

It isn't the ideal form — a front that is nothing but screen — but once you are absorbed in an app you stop noticing how wide the black border is.

Replacing the Home button is Face ID, at the top of the screen (top meaning whichever way the Apple logo on the back points). It works the same way it does on the iPhone X, but it is more accurate in practice, mostly because of how you hold the thing.

Picking up a phone, Face ID can fail because your face is too close, or because the iPhone hasn't been raised to the right height by the time recognition starts. Neither is likely on an iPad. You aren't going to hold something this big against your face, and it only starts scanning after you tap the screen — by which point you are usually already square in front of it.

In five days the only failed unlock came when my finger covered the Face ID camera, at which point a bouncing arrow and a line of text appeared on screen to tell me so. Almost all the time, Face ID is fast enough that you forget it is there.

As for why the iPad Pro unlocks in any orientation while the iPhone is stuck with one, Apple's only explanation is that the iPad collected fresh samples and retrained the algorithm. If the difference really is only in the algorithm, the iPhone may get landscape unlocking in a software update too, which would help with games and video.

The convenience of face recognition is obvious, but once you have signed into your accounts and downloaded the apps you use, you won't reach for it as often as you do on a phone. You aren't carrying an 11-inch tablet in your pocket around the clock — your biggest overcoat probably can't take it either. And because you tend to use an iPad for a long stretch once you pick it up, unlocking isn't as frequent as it is on a phone.

At the same time, Face ID makes the iPad less of a household computer. Like the iPhone, it holds at most two faces. Touch ID took five fingerprints, which meant up to five users.

Until Apple allows multiple user accounts on iOS, the iPad Pro suits one or two people.

The iPhone X's gestures have come to the iPad, and the interaction has gotten complicated

Dropping the Home button also changed how you drive the thing. Starting with iOS 12, Apple brought the iPhone X's bottom-edge gestures over:

Drag up from the bottom with one finger and the gesture first pulls out the Dock; stop here and you can pick an app from it. Keep going without stopping and the gesture opens the multitasking view; stop here and you can switch to another app. Keep going again and you leave the app for the home screen.

If that sounds complicated, that's because it is. We recorded a few GIFs:

One gesture, three stages, three different results. The iPad already had plenty of gestures, but they were simple and direct:

• One-finger swipe up: bring up the Dock;
• Multi-finger pinch (the gesture for grabbing something): leave the app, return to the home screen;
• Multi-finger swipe up: enter multitasking;
• Multi-finger swipe left or right: switch between recently opened apps.

The old gestures all still work, but the new ones have made them more complicated. The new logic treats apps as three layers — full screen, multitasking, home screen — so the pinch and the swipe-up, which each used to do one thing, have become the same multi-purpose gesture: stop halfway for multitasking, go all the way for the home screen.

The logic isn't hard to follow, but it does take a beat of thought at first, and it leads to more mis-taps afterward.

The one good change: multitasking now behaves more like the Mac, and you can switch between different combinations of apps.

The screen is close to flawless

The iPad Pro uses the same Liquid Retina display as the iPhone XR. The image seems to float on top of the glass, and black goes deep enough that most of the time you can't tell where the bezel ends and a black status bar begins.

Peak brightness is only 4 percent below the latest iPhone's, and the screen stays readable in noon sunlight.

The only flaw on the spec sheet is pixel density, still the 264 ppi it has been for years, lower than a phone's. But you will rarely get close enough to the screen to see the jagged edges.

From the iPhone X line to the Apple Watch Series 4, Apple has used narrow borders and rounded corners to redefine what a natural-looking screen is — flexible panels, anti-aliased rendering and a string of other technologies exist only so the curve of each screen corner matches the curve of the body.

The iPad Pro's screen corners are far less rounded. The curve of the screen and the curve of the border appear to match, but it doesn't look as natural as it does on the new watch or the new phone. A narrower border would change that.

It makes a decent power bank, but the system still limits what USB-C is good for

The new iPad Pro drops the 3.5mm headphone jack. That's understandable: a standard 3.5mm plug is 15mm long and 3.5mm across, and there is no way to fit that into an iPad Pro whose widest border is 9mm and whose body is under 6mm thick.

The other change at the port is that Lightning has become USB-C. That's good news. USB-C devices don't have to pass Apple's expensive, slow MFi certification, which means accessories can be cheap.

Anker and Xiaomi both sell USB-C chargers that put out two or three times the power of Apple's bundled one and cost less. I tried Apple's and Anker's USB-C (TB3)-to-HDMI cables, and both push the picture out to a 4K display — good for browsing photos or watching a film, because those are the only times it fills the screen; ordinary apps still come out at the iPad's own aspect ratio, with black bars on either side. Accessories with more complicated jobs remain to be tested.

The more useful function is charging an iPhone. With Apple's own USB-C-to-Lightning cable I charged an iPhone X by 27 percentage points in 30 minutes (from 42% to 67%), while the iPad Pro's own charge fell from 59% to 42%. Carrying both out for a full day is no problem. In the same half hour a MacBook Pro adds 29 percentage points to an iPhone — not much of a gap.

Still, USB-C or not, what you can move across it is limited to photos and video. You can plug in the USB-C card reader you use with a MacBook and import pictures, but you can't plug in an external drive, or an iPhone, and read documents or other files off it.

If you live inside Apple's ecosystem, AirDrop solves a lot of transfer problems. But it really isn't as convenient as a Mac or a PC.

The new keyboard cover has two angles, but typing on it feels about the same

Apple's new Smart Keyboard Folio protects both sides of the iPad Pro at once. But pulling the iPad Pro out of a bag and unfolding it, I often had to check which side I was opening — unless my hand happened to land on the camera.

With the Folio on, the 11-inch iPad Pro goes from 467g to 766g. Another 200g and it would match a 12-inch MacBook.

What that weight buys is a keyboard that feels acceptable.

Setting aside the review unit Apple lent me, the Apple keyboard devices I have bought myself over the past three years are: the 2015 iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard; the 2015 12-inch MacBook; the 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro; and the 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

The worst-feeling keyboard of those is the 12-inch MacBook's, then the iPad Pro's Smart Keyboard, then the 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro (which had reliability problems), then the 2018 13-inch. The new iPad Pro keyboard types no differently from the 2015 version: usable, but not crisp. Worth noting that the iPad isn't the worst of the bunch — which tells you what has happened to the Mac.

As for the newly added stand angle, I'm not sure what it is for. The previous cover's tilt wasn't steep to begin with — on your lap it doesn't put the screen square in front of your eyes — and the new angle is shallower still.

A better choice is to carry a Magic Keyboard: standard Apple layout, more key travel than any Mac laptop, thin and light, and it doesn't make the iPad bulky. Canopy makes a keyboard cover for the Magic Keyboard that doubles as an iPad stand, and it will still work when you replace the iPad. It's a little heavier — 400g with the keyboard.

If you need to type on an iPad for long stretches, the Magic Keyboard is the cheaper and better option.

Apple has changed the iPad's aspect ratio for the first time, and it has broken a lot of apps

Every iPad of the past eight years, including the newly announced 12.9-inch model, is 4:3. Only the 11-inch model uses an unusual ratio: 1.43:1. Against other devices:

• Other iPads: 1.33:1 (the classic 4:3)
• A4 paper: 1.41:1
• Google Pixel C: 1.42:1
• iPad Pro 11-inch: 1.43:1
• Surface Pro 4 / Google Pixel Slate: 1.5:1 (3:2)
• MacBook Pro line: 1.6:1 (16:10)
• iPhone 5-8 line: 1.78:1 (16:9)
• iPhone X line: 2.17:1

The likely explanation is that its side borders are already wider than the 10.5-inch model's, and Apple wanted the new Pro to have a screen that sounds bigger without making the body too wide. We usually describe a screen only by its diagonal, and under the new ratio the 11-inch model's actual screen area is no larger than the 4:3 10.5-inch model's — it just sounds larger.

If the change of ratio brings any practical benefit, it is that most video is shot at 16:9 or wider, so the 11-inch iPad Pro leaves less black above and below.

But you can't have that benefit yet.

Right now almost every video app plays back at 4:3. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youku, Tencent Video, iQiyi — all of them (below are screenshots; the huge black borders on all sides are all part of the screen's display area):

Games are the same:

Of these two kinds of app, the only one that seems to have escaped is YouTube.

YouTube fills the screen properly because it supports Split View multitasking. Apple opened Split View to developers at the end of 2015, and supporting it requires an app to handle screens of different widths.

Apps that support Split View get stretched wider on the 11-inch iPad Pro, then get a black bar top and bottom: the top one for system status, the bottom one the same sort of bar as on the iPhone X.

Apple could drop the bars and go edge to edge, but then buttons at the bottom of an app might be blocked by the strip that replaced the Home button.

As of publication, the only apps that truly fill the screen are the handful Apple ships with the iPad — even Pages, Numbers and Keynote get the black bars.

Why do so many apps still not support Split View, three years on? That's simply the state of iPad apps and games.

Even Adobe Lightroom displays at 4:3, and Adobe was one of the companies on stage at the 2015 iPad Pro launch.

I didn't test the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, but it shouldn't have these problems.

Most apps that don't fill the screen will be fixed in developers' next updates, but certainly not as fast as they adapted to the iPhone X.

The old iPad Pro was already an excellent drawing tool; the new Pencil makes it better

The second-generation Apple Pencil is no different in pressure sensitivity or drawing performance. Everything else about it was designed from scratch.

The barrel is no longer as slick as a child's toy; it is now white matte. The perfectly round shaft has gained a flat side, which makes it look more like a pencil and keeps it from rolling off the desk.

The absurdly positioned Lightning charging plug is gone, replaced by a magnet that sticks the Pencil to the side of the iPad Pro and charges it wirelessly. Every time you set the Pencil against the edge, the screen pops up a charging notice with the current battery level. The one worry is knocking the Pencil off while you walk around; it happened to me, and to more than one of Apple's demo staff.

Because of these new designs, the second-generation Apple Pencil doesn't work with earlier iPad Pros.

Still, the improvements are all about ease of use — the functions haven't changed at all. The only new one is a double-tap shortcut on the Pencil itself, and every professional drawing tool has gesture shortcuts.

The tip hasn't changed either; writing still feels like drawing on glass, and the feel isn't as good as a Wacom's. But a Wacom isn't something you carry, and the path from your hand to the image on screen is indirect, unlike the iPad, where the image appears under the nib. Each has its trade-offs.

There is already a rich set of illustration tools, and quite a few illustration courses now list the iPad Pro plus Apple Pencil among the equipment they recommend to students.

Three years on, apps outside design still have plenty of problems

When the iPad Pro launched in 2015, doubt about whether tablets had a reason to exist was at its peak. Apple brought Adobe and Microsoft on stage and, with a run of new features and accessories, declared its goal of turning the iPad into a personal computer.

At the time Tim Cook said an iPad Pro and an iPhone were all he needed on the road. It's fair to say a CEO has an easier time picking tools than most people. When Steve Jobs demonstrated email on the iPad, he typed one line, didn't bother with a subject, and hit send. That kind of work an iPad can certainly do.

Three years later, the good news is that nearly every productivity tool still being updated has been optimized for the iPad Pro. The document editors, drawing tools and time managers you have heard of all support Split View.

Most of them, though, support only part of it.

I used Google Keep to jot down notes for this hands-on, then wrote the piece in Ulysses.

Both apps support Split View. But when it came time to write, I couldn't select a passage in Google Keep and drag it into Ulysses, and it didn't work the other way either. The problem is that Google Keep doesn't support that.

Or copy a block of text and images from a browser and paste it into Spark to email: every image disappears. Paste the same thing into Apple's own Mail and it comes through fine.

Google's reputation and ability as an app developer are not in question — YouTube is basically the video app with the best support for the iPad's new features — but Keep has a problem. As for Spark, this mail client has many strengths and has been featured by the App Store more than once; when I interviewed Phil Schiller, Apple's head of worldwide marketing and the executive who oversees the App Store, I saw he was using it too.

You can get around Google Keep's limitation with Cmd+C and Cmd+V — in fact almost any drag-and-drop problem between apps can be dodged through iOS's built-in sharing. But if you can't be sure how an operation this basic will behave in a marquee app, how are you supposed to trust it as a productivity tool?

When you want to use the iPad Pro as a light everyday computer, you still can't be sure its apps support features Apple shipped three years ago. You have to try different apps to make sure you won't hit a wall when you need one.

A lot of work — text editing, say — can be moved onto the iPad from end to end, but there is always something inconvenient. When work a PC or a Mac handles easily takes a round of fiddling on an iPad, and may take even more time later, where is the incentive for people to switch over?

Tech enthusiasts will do it — someone finished a novel on a Pocket PC phone more than a decade ago — but that doesn't make it a tool for most people.

Never mind all the work that can't be finished on an iPad at all: compiling an iOS app, encoding video and exporting it to several formats (the hardware is theoretically fast enough), web tools that need a full browser, complex CAD drawings. It is the system and the apps, not the performance, that limit what an iPad can do.

Even in games, which the iPad used to be good at, your choices today are no better than a year ago.

The iPad's big screen suits strategy games. But most of the games from the biggest publisher in that field were pulled after the iOS 11 upgrade: iOS 11 required apps to be 64-bit, which meant rewriting the game engine, and the money the iPad brought in didn't make that worth doing.

Every year the iPad's processor gets tens of percent faster, but with users unwilling to pay, fewer publishers bother porting paid games over.

iOS 11 made Doom, Rage and several other id Software games disappear, and the publisher has no plan to support the new system. Meanwhile the real Doom and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus from the PS4 and Xbox One have both been ported to the Switch. The Switch is slower than an iPad, but people there pay.

Likewise, FTL has been featured by the App Store countless times. But its maker, Subset Games, said when it released its new game Into the Breach this year that it had no iPad plans yet; so far it is out on PC, Mac and Switch.

These are probably part of why, from the big iPad Pro overhaul in 2015 until now, the iPad has sold less every year, and better hardware hasn't got most people upgrading their iPads again.

There may be room between the phone and the computer, but the iPad hasn't moved fast enough to fill it

A few days ago the tech analyst Ben Thompson described the trouble his daughter, an elementary school student, ran into. Her school asked every student to edit a document in Word on a school computer and then save it into a folder. She grew up on an iPad and couldn't grasp the concepts of saving a document, creating a folder, copying a file. Walking her through it, Thompson said, made him realize how unintuitive a lot of this is.

He's right. PCs and Macs are things schools have to teach; any three-year-old can pick up an iPad and play with it all day. Touch is simply more intuitive than learning a keyboard and mouse.

The younger generation grows up with fingers flying across touchscreens, and then reaches primary and middle school and has to learn the less intuitive mouse and keyboard, because no touchscreen device is good enough to replace them.

None of that is settled. The generation that used nothing but keyboards once doubted what value there was in inefficient tools like the mouse and the graphical interface. Today even the programmers most dependent on the keyboard are mostly no longer hardcore enough to work from the command line and shortcuts alone.

But every changeover of that kind needs sustained investment, and a product good enough to justify it.

And the iPad hasn't moved quickly these past few years. The Pro line arrived in 2015. In 2016, iOS did nothing for tablet interaction and Apple put out a cheaper 9.7-inch model. In 2017 there was new hardware, with Dock support and slightly better multitasking. In 2018 genuinely new hardware arrived, but the bigger software changes have to wait until next year.

The many limits of iOS have become the bottleneck for the iPad, and they haven't gone away quickly. A feature update every two years may be enough for a phone that is already very mature; it isn't enough for a tablet already in decline.

Meanwhile more and more of what could go on a tablet is going onto phones instead. Not because Apple suddenly invented some distinctive phone interaction, but because most people have been using phones all along, and app developers and internet companies can make money there.

And the iPad hasn't given them much reason to support it these past few years.

As for this generation of iPad Pro itself, it comes down to how much you depend on Apple's tablet.

If you already carry an iPad Pro out with you every day, this year's upgrade is a real improvement: lighter and better-looking, a bigger and better screen, more accessories to choose from, and it can charge your iPhone. The only problem may be the price — the 256GB version now runs 7,699 yuan.

If your iPad only comes out on planes, in hotel rooms and on the couch, these handsome upgrades won't help you much.

Photos in this article by Zhou Shaohong.