Tech Youtuber Marques Brownlee, popularly known as MKBHD, has reviewed Apple Inc.’s AAPL latest iPad Pro and iPad Air models, saying that no matter how powerful the devices are, they are still iPads.
What Happened: On Wednesday, Brownlee posted a video on YouTube titled, "M4 iPad Pro Impressions: Well This is Awkward."
He started by saying, “We’ve been saying this for years: it kind of doesn’t matter how powerful they make the iPad; it’s still an iPad.”
“We’ve seen gigantic improvements in the M series chips and these iPads are like the most powerful chips ever on paper, but they're still iPads. So the last thing we need after all this time is just another spec-bumped iPad,” he added.
He noted that the new iPad Air now comes with an M2 chip and for the first time there's a larger model as the latest device has two sizes: 11-inch and 13-inch.
"I had to clarify just because the last one was 10.9 inches so are they just simplifying the name like is it actually bigger? And turns out, yeah, there is just a little bit more screen here. Great, but other than that it’s pretty predictable. It’s a spec bump."
Brownlee then spoke about the new iPad Pro, highlighting that the device is Apple's thinnest product innovation. "That’s including phones, that’s including like old iPods and everything. The 11-inch is 5.3 mm thin and the 13-inch is 5.1 mm thin. So that’s literally thinner than the iPod Nano ever was. It’s nuts."
The YouTuber also mused who would have asked Apple for a thinner iPad Pro, but that's the update they went with. "There's kind of no denying that it's at least physically impressive to look at."
The new iPad Pro also comes with new M4 chips, but there are no improvements in the battery life. "Apple’s going ‘Hey we think that that was enough battery life in the last gen so we’re just going to match that' and that means we can go way thinner with less battery because the new chip is more efficient."
According to Brownlee, the most interesting part of the whole tablet event was Apple introducing the new tandem OLED display with iPad Pro.
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"You can basically think of it as two different OLED displays stacked on top of each other and then the new display driver on M4 can address both layers simultaneously. So that’s what’s allowing them to get really high local brightness," he stated.
Adding, "That’s 1000 nits of peak full-screen brightness and 1,600 nits of peak HDR brightness on an OLED on an iPad size screen, and in person, it looks well it looks like a really bright OLED it looks super colorful.”
The YouTuber also touched upon the new Apple Pencil Pro saying it’s "surprisingly precise" and could be a handy tool in the hands of artists. However, the Pencil Pro is only compatible with the newly launched iPad Pro and iPad Air.
About the new Magic Keyboard, Brownlee said that it is lighter than the previous generation model, and the trackpad is bigger. "There’s a whole function row at the top now that is super useful and the pass-through charging is even faster."
In the end, he circled back to his initial point, that "we just got another set of specs-bumped iPads." He also said that there's nothing these new iPads can do that the M1 models cannot.
“We have these really impressive spec-bumped iPad Pros, the most powerful iPads of all time the thinnest Apple devices literally ever made, but the list of things it can do, is the same as my 3-year-old M1,” he said.
He was referring to the “awkward” timing of the release, given that Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference or WWDC is just around the corner, where significant software updates are expected.
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Photo courtesy: Apple
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