The IT Nerd

Apple released the new iPad Pro on Tuesday. The headline feature of this iPad Pro is that it comes with the M2 chip. But before you rush out to get one, I would say that you shouldn’t get one. Here’s a list of reasons why you should give this iPad Pro a hard pass:

• The M2 chip doesn’t give you a whole lot more: With the exception of better Pro Res encoding and decoding, the M2 chip is by Apple’s own marketing only gives you a 15% bump in speed. That’s odd because the new MacBook Air gets an 18% bump in speed. Neither of these pieces of hardware have a fan so you would think that they would be similar in performance. But clearly there’s either some sort of difference that made Apple bring down the performance of the M2 in this new iPad Pro. And keep in mind, that 15% is likely peak performance. Which means the real speed increase will be less.
• The M1 chip in the iPad Pro was already overkill: Given that the iPad Pro with the M1 chip was already destroying every other tablet out there, you have to ask yourself if you really need something that is even faster. I would argue that unless you need something specific like the better Pro Res encode and decode engines, likely not. Plus I am dubious if you would actually see the difference between the M1 and M2 variants of the iPad Pro.
• The camera hardware is already 2 years old: Apple didn’t bother to change any of the camera hardware in the iPad Pro which is the same hardware that was in the iPhone 12 Pro phones. Which means that it doesn’t support Dolby Vision which the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 14 Pros do. And pro users which this iPad Pro targets will want to use the best camera available. Which means that this isn’t it.
• Speaking of the camera hardware, there’s no landscape camera: The budget iPad got a landscape camera this year. But oddly enough the iPad Pro which is aimed at pro users allegedly didn’t get that landscape camera. That means that users on Teams and Zoom calls will still look like they are not looking at the camera. How does that make sense on a “Pro” tablet?
• The Apple Pencil hover feature isn’t new: Apple is marketing that the iPad Pro’s hover feature is new and cool. The thing is it is not new. Samsung did this on its tablets ages ago. So this is Apple’s marketing at work using the “reality distortion field” to try and sell iPad Pros.

All of that really doesn’t make the new iPad a good value. But there’s one more thing. Does the iPad Pro Come With WiFi 6E? I ask because when you look at the the spec sheet, it says this:

This is something that I have to admit that I find puzzling because the way Apple defines WiFi 6E, it seems that they are using both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands to improve bandwidth and increase range based on your distance from the router. Likely because those bands have better ranger than 6GHz. But my understanding of WiFi 6E is that there is no WiFi 6E without the 6GHz band. This article on WiFi 6E from Cisco seems to support my understanding of how WiFi 6E works. And I cannot find this dual band use case. Though if there is one, I would love it if someone can point me towards it. In any case if you accept that there is no 6E without the 6GHz band, what is Apple doing here? I admit that I am pretty perplexed by this because I cannot see them making this sort of mistake by saying that the iPad Pro has something that isn’t technically possible. I guess we’ll have to wait until someone gets their hands on one and lights it up on a WiFi 6E router and tells the world what happens next.

So, instead of buying this iPad Pro, what should you get? Well that depends on who you are:

• If you have an iPad Pro before the M1 version came out, go to Amazon and buy the iPad Pro with an M1 in it.
• If you don’t have an iPad Pro, the above advice apples to you as well.
• If you have an iPad Pro with an M1 processor in it. Don’t upgrade.

To me, this iPad Pro is all about Apple doing as little as possible to try and get a bump in sales for iPad Pro models. If that is the case, pro users should really skip this model as there’s not enough here to justify a purchase. Instead you should wait for Apple to come up with an iPad Pro that has enough that is new and different to justify you giving them your hard earned money.

This entry was posted on October 19, 2022 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.