New Apple iPad Pro M1 Review 12.9-inch Mini LED Display

Apple iPad Pro M1 Review

Here is the Apple iPad Pro M1 Review this is the Apple iPad Pro 12.9-inch M1 2021 otherwise known as the one with the apple M1 CPU inside apple silicon and the mini led display so yeah, the m1 CPU you can get an iMac you can get an iPad crazy times that isn’t it and that probably means good things for the iPad we’ll talk about that.

Also, we’re going to talk about this mini led display which is stunning drop-dead gorgeous verges on OLED for contrast levels and colour saturation but I know you have some concerns about that and we are going to look at those now.

So, the display on this is the same aspect ratio as the previous-generation iPad and it’s what they call their XDR display technology a retina XDR whatever anyway it’s mini LEDs which are becoming the rage in TVs now and we are going to see this in more laptops and what’s with this led thing and how good is it.

It looks shockingly good if you’re watching movies that’s where you’re going to notice it the most the hdr effect is overwhelming it has 600 nits of brightness for normal use it can go up to a thousand nits for the whole screen when watching movies or 1600 nits at small locations in a video so that means I was watching the series the rain on Netflix.

This is beautiful cinematography and it came alive in ways that I just haven’t seen before in terms of the bright points being bright and the dark points being nice and inky black and often, I watch using an OLED laptop.

So, you would think hey you can’t get better than that well you can because one of the drawbacks with OLED is they can’t get that bright so this one highlight in the scene where that much brighter the colour saturation is excellent we would come to expect that from apple.

Honestly, I know some of you pick an iPad Pro instead of a MacBook in part because you want a touch screen and apple ain’t doing that on macs and because the display quality is even better than what you get on a mac well you got full p3 coverage here and the colour saturation is excellent and it’s done in the usual apple way which is to say towards colour accuracy you still have your true tone going on here so it can adjust the lighting as appropriate you know a little warmer or cooler depending on your ambient light.

But the colours they’re just beautiful looking on this and I did compare it to an OLED we have a Samsung galaxy s7 plus which is an OLED tablet to compare it to and even when looking at LG’s hdr demo videos to show up their TVs or TVs and stuff.

I can’t say that I could see a difference in terms of the contrast between the two now you have 2500 local zip dimming zone and 10 000 led backlights on this the only drawback with mini led and I know this has become a thing for some people already is there’s alike about a one-millimetre-wide border around the screen that’s a little bit less white when you looking at a light background just a slight bit of shading.

Because the LEDs can’t go out beyond the display or otherwise you’d have the opposite effect a bright white halo around the edges of it but I mean you have to be looking for it and it doesn’t bother me certainly you’re not going to see it when you’re watching a movie and even when creating art, I use my iPad nightly for procreate to draw it doesn’t make enough of a difference to affect what I’m doing

Because you’re not colourizing every pixel when you’re drawing, you’re looking at the bigger picture and you’re often zooming in and when it comes to drawing on the edges it’s not the easiest thing, I think many artists do what I do which is to move the canvas over more towards the centre when working on the edges of a canvas anyway.

So, it’s good stuff the other issue that some people are worried about is blooming so when you see a black background, they can show off the amazing contrast of the displays and you won’t see OLED light blue typically because each pixel is individually lit where it has its kind of like a pattern of every four pixels with mini led you to know

Because of local dimming, it’s possible to see a little bit of light blooming but you have to be looking at it and to me, it borders on maybe you’re worried about this too much if you’re obsessing on it.

If you use a camera which is sensitive to light still camera beats your phone down it sees differently than your eyeballs do so it can exaggerate the light blooming.

So light blooming is pretty well controlled certainly better than looking at an IPS display when it comes to that and nothing that’s at all disturbing now, I did fire up the kindle app and I did use the night mode so you have a black background and white text and really, I didn’t see big blooming around the paragraphs either there it was fine.

I don’t know if kindles already updated something or whatever the deal is and when using the apple pencil and testing in procreate background drawing in white then I don’t think this is an issue.

It’s a stunning display and it should be because this is an expensive product right it starts at 10.99 for the 128 gigs WI FI only model.

Apple iPad Pro M1 Specs:-

So as ever it’s potentially more expensive than buying a 13-inch MacBook Air or a 13-inch MacBook pro you have to want the iPad experience now this is an age-old discussion and I’m not going to talk about is a tablet is better or is a laptop better for you I think at this point this canoodle has been around long enough you probably have an idea a lot of people get by using an iPad as a primary computer.

It’s fine if you’re doing office work it’s fine if you’re doing light photoshop sort of work photo editing it’s fantastic if you’re using something like procreate, I mean this is a tool that a lot of professionals use when they’re at home and they’re working on their art concepts and all that sort of thing.

When it comes to using the apple pencil on this as delightful as ever there are two things, I would add about the display number one right away I saw on first blush the colours and the colour temperature was easier on the eyes without looking fake yellowy or something like that it was just natural and non-straining on the eyes I don’t know how else to put it I couldn’t see any PWM on this there is this is laminated display so there is no air gap.

I would say that the display layer with the glass on top is a little bit thicker but not really enough of a difference to make a difference with the apple pencil and again I’m somebody who does spend almost every night drawing on the couch while watching tv.

So just a slight bit more there’s no parallax there’s no offset it’s good to be almost like a computer though then you’re gonna have to buy something like that 350 magic keyboard so it gives me more spending and by the way, the apple pencil to is another 129 so this is not an inexpensive product for those of you who can afford it and those of you who want it those.

Who wants the best possible performance in a tablet with the best tablet OS sorry folks but really google hasn’t done anything with android for tablets to make it super desirable have that we know this now and for those who want the best display I mean nice right you might say the tab s7 plus is giving it a run for its money and stuff?

But it’s an android tablet that still hurts in terms of application support and the OS support for it also the thing to keep in mind is every year when I and other people review iPads, we say the hardware is leaps and bounds almost beyond where it should be.

So hopefully iPad OS will catch up and there’s a new version coming soon io iPad OS 15 right and wwdc is coming up next month so you know we’ve been through this for years I’m going to say that take that with a grain of salt so far Apple has done a wonderful job of creating a tablet experience here one that works on big screens one that is fluid powerful easy to use with your fingers fine with the pencil even adequate now with the keyboard and the accessory ecosystem that’s around it.

But that still doesn’t mean that Apple is going to take it to the next step with iPad OS 15, things like yes we have a basic file manager and some file structure thing but it’s still a headache sometimes when I have to get things on and off, especially things that are corner cases they’re not like what you would put on the iCloud drive you’re doing this stuff for work you’re transferring databases around any of that sort of thing.

So again you know who you are if this does the job for you for college work for some people this can be just fine for other people like me I manage websites I do web development I do video editing and all that sort of thing and I have to work with massive storage recording 4k video on external cameras and that’s just still a nightmare to try to get into the iPad and do it in something like I me a movie or Lum fusion which by the way do fly on this and that’s not something that’s even up for grabs.

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The performance on that’s fine but it’s the ecosystem experience, by the way, the keyboard case they have revised that you have probably heard about this to make it a fraction of a millimetre thicker because this iPad is ever so slightly thicker.

I’m using the last generation one it fits it’s not squeezing the screen or anything like that so if you have the previous generation one don’t worry about now some of the things that are indication this is getting more computer-like here.

We have the m1 with the 8 core CPU and the 8 core GPU so that’s the higher in configuration if you are buying an iMac a mac mini or a MacBook Air that’s interesting and for the first-time apple’s actually tell you how much ram the product has where they never used it before you had to use a utility to figure out.

So the base model from 128 gigs to 512 gigs has eight gigs of ram if you go up to the one terabyte model or the two terabyte model yes that’s a thing then you get 16 gigs of ram do you need 16 gigs of ram probably not but for those who are actually trying to do something like 3d modelling on this or more so multitasking with a couple of heavy applications then maybe that’s worth considering.

If you want that two terabyte model through the process for storage, get exponentially more insane once you go up to one terabyte is 17.99 and then it’s 21.99 if you want two terabytes if you want cellular which is now 5G by the way and I’ve seen good speeds on this 5G we do have good 5G coverage I tested on T-Mobile here that’s 200 more so pricey stuff going on here.

But some things that are more computer-like in this day of zoom calls apple is doing things to improve face time at least on the front-facing camera so now there’s a feature where basically especially they’re acknowledging that depending on orientation you’re holding it in the camera might be offset a little bit.

It tries to keep you in the frame and it even follows you when you’re walking around it works pretty well it looks pretty good that’s pretty neat you also have five microphones on here, they’re talking about their studio-quality audio like they have with the max and the quality again is pretty good the speakers on this are ever a good multi-speaker system sounds better than most laptops in the 13-inch size range and even the 15-inch size range making it a wonderful media consumption device.

Says always or for those of you who are doing things like doing a little audio editing work on this with garage band that and there’s one more thing there’s the USB C port now supports thunderbolt 3 as well and it’s USB c4 which that doesn’t make a huge difference honestly but the thunderbolt actually works I attached the thunderbolt drive worked no problem I attached the display,

I attached a thunderbolt 3 dock and that worked and then I attached the display to the dock and a Samsung t5 SSD and Io and behold it all worked again we are getting a little bit more computery a little bit more powerful the drawback still with using external displays with this is it still only mirrors the iPad screen.

So, you don’t get a multi-monitor set up like you could if you were using a mac or any windows pc and to me, that is a bit of a drawback thus it maintains the 4×3 aspect ratio of the display which is pretty weird for your average 16 by 9 monitor big black bars on the left and right for a tablet the cameras on this are stupidly good that hasn’t really changed.

You have your main wide and an ultra-wide camera you have a lidar sensor on this and it does portrait mode so you can do portrait effects and studio lighting effects thing granted with a 12.9-inch tablet you’re probably not going to be waving this around taking pictures much but you know again.

I think artists buy this a lot maybe are taking pictures to use as reference or something like that or vertical market medical folks who all need imagery and it’s got that in spades by tablet standards particularly so for the battery the tablet has a 40.88-watt hour battery

It comes with a meter long USB C cable for charging and a 20-watt wall-wart charger the usual small compact apple thingy and they claim 10 hours of use on WI FI for web surfing and streaming video or nine hours with cellular and that’s pretty much accurate you know this is not going to actually beat a 13 inch MacBook air with an m1 anymore.

When it comes to battery life which is an amazing thing it’s pretty decent it’s fine if use it all day for work you definitely are going to charge it when you get home from work let’s put it that way but it’s fine so that’s a 2021 iPad pro 12.9 inch with the m1 CPU and the new mini led display.

If you’re interested in the 11-inch size that one doesn’t get the mini led display it does get the m1 so less of an exciting reason to upgrade from the previous generation but that one’s only 7.99 which hurts somewhat less so obviously as is often the case with products.

If you have the previous generation, maybe you’re not just leaping to upgrade okay the CPU multicores performance is almost twice as fast but I don’t think a lot of people felt their old iPad was slow but that mini led display is probably the tipping point for some people if you do a lot of media consumption witching movies in other words.

If you have a couple of generations old iPad you just want to move into the pros this is a pretty exciting time you’ve got the new m1, and you’ve got the beautiful display so there’s that’s definitely a yes if you are willing to spend this much money on a tablet. Also check out our: Best Guided Meditation Apps For Android and iOS.

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