It isn’t for everyone though, on account of its large size and high price tag, and you may be better served by another more portable and affordable tablet, but make no mistake: this is the best of the best. The biggest caveats are that it’s incredibly expensive, and that it’s an overwhelmingly large device for those who don’t need a screen this big. This is slightly smaller and costs less than the 12.9-inch model, with a screen that measures just 11-inches across, but in terms of specs it’s an identical tablet. For those who can handle both the physical size and the price tag, though, the iPad Pro 2021 is an outstanding offering that boasts next-gen power, a fantastic display experience, and everything else we’ve come to love from Apple’s very best tablets.
The new Liquid Retina XDR Mini LED display is gorgeous, with max brightness levels unseen on other tablets – this slate can compete with the likes of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S7 Plus, which felt like a major upgrade for tablet screens just last year. Then there’s the power – much has been made of Apple’s M1 chipset, and this is the first time the company has included its new, own-brand silicon in an iPad.
Probably not, but if you want some truly impressive power that blows every other tablet out of the water, again the latest iPad Pro is a great choice. You likely won’t appreciate having this much power on tap unless you’re intensively gaming, using power-hungry apps, or pushing the tablet to its multi-tasking limits.
There’s a higher-capacity storage variant than ever before at 2TB, a new Center Stage camera feature that keeps you in the frame on video calls, and Thunderbolt 4 support in the USB-C slot.
Battery life is solid – in our testing we found that the tablet would last for around 10 hours on a full charge.
The iPad Pro 2021 is a phenomenal machine that’s a must-have if you’re an Apple evangelist, or if money is no object when you’re buying your next tablet. For a few weeks after launch, the iPad was pretty hard to buy due to supply shortages, but that’s long cleared up now.
The price for Apple’s top-specced 12.9-inch slate is remarkably high, and as we’ve mentioned, you’ll only want this tablet if you want the absolute best iPad on the market. The tablet has an aluminum rear and frame, and the front is glass with a scratch-resistant coating – but you’ll want to buy a case if you want to maximize protection against knocks and scrapes. Both look attractive, but at a time when the company is expanding its color choices for the new iMac with some striking tones, it’s a shame it isn’t giving us the option of a pastel pink or purple iPad Pro.
The iPad Pro 2021 12.9-inch measures 280.6 x 214.9 x 6.4mm, which means it’s a touch thicker than the last-gen tablet, although it isn’t a difference we particularly noticed in everyday use.
Don’t expect a dramatically different looking iPad Pro here from Apple; instead the company has focused on improving the internals, along with the display. The display is one area where Apple has noticeably upped its game for the new iPad Pro 2021, with a top-end 12.9-inch screen.
If you’d prefer a smaller premium tablet you can buy the 2021 iPad Pro 11-inch, but the screen tech isn’t as impressive on that device. The 12.9-inch Pro’s display features new Mini LED technology that offers a crisp image as well as improved brightness.
The company calls this a Liquid Retina XDR screen, and we’ve found it to provide a great viewing experience. It’s especially effective when you’re scrolling through social media feeds, or playing an intense game and need the image on the screen to keep pace with the action. The resolution is 2048 x 2732, which works out to 265 pixels per inch, which is similar to the quality you’d expect on a top Android tablet like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 Plus. This is one of the best visual experiences we’ve had on a tablet, and if display quality is an important factor in your choice of slate, the iPad Pro 2021 won’t disappoint.
Apple has included its latest M1 chipset, here, which debuted in the company’s top-end Mac products in 2020. If you’re a more typical iPad user, you may not notice this power jump in everyday tasks, but the new silicon is designed to make the iPad Pro a powerhouse device for those who need it, such as those who want to make music on their tablet, edit video, draw, or perform other power-intensive tasks.
That’s a huge gap between the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 Plus – which TechRadar currently ranks as the best Android tablet – that scored 2,846. 2TB of storage is the most we’ve ever seen on an iPad, and that’s impressively high if you want to be filling your slate full of video clips, audio and other files that take up a lot of space.
128GB does seem a touch limited if you’ll be filling your tablet with lots of apps, and media on top, so it’s something to be aware of before you make your purchase. There’s 5G connectivity on this tablet for the first time, which means you can make the most of next-gen internet speeds if you opt for a more expensive cellular version of the iPad Pro. Optional accessories are available for the iPad Pro, and the two main highlights are the existing Apple Pencil 2 as well as a new version of the company’s Magic Keyboard. We found that the iPad Pro was capable of lasting the full 10 hours that Apple claims, with us performing a variety of tasks including web browsing, streaming video, writing in a word processor, gaming, and bouncing around a variety of apps.
Unlike with Apple’s iPhone 12 series of smartphones, you do get a charger included in the box with the new iPad Pro 2021. Fast-charging isn’t that remarkable on the iPad Pro 2021, which means it takes a little longer to charge than some Android tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 Plus. If you’re looking for solid battery life that will last you a whole working day plus a bit extra, the iPad Pro 12.9-inch should suit you just fine. Your older tablet’s screen is looking tired One of the true highlights of the iPad Pro 12.9-inch is its gorgeous display.
If you just need a tablet that’s great for browsing the web, and can run a variety of apps and play most games, you probably won’t need the new iPad Pro. If this iPad Pro 12.9 (2021) review hasn’t helped you decide on which tablet to buy, perhaps these three alternatives might pique your interest. Samsung’s Ultra-tab is a potent rival to the iPad Pro – it’s not quite as powerful but it has a bigger, better-looking screen and a stylus that you don’t have to buy separately.
The Best iPad to Buy (and a Few to Avoid)
It has the same shape and size as its predecessors, so all current accessories will work, including the first-generation Apple Pencil and the Smart Keyboard. The A13 Bionic chip, which debuted on the iPhone 11, makes it one of the most powerful tablets for the price, and this generation brought other welcome improvements, like 64 gigabytes of storage instead of a paltry 32.
iPad Pro: Time to Buy? Reviews, Issues, More
The Magic Keyboard attaches to the iPad Pro through a magnetic connection, and it features cantilevered hinges that allow it to work on a desk or on a lap. A USB-C port is included on the Magic Keyboard for passthrough inductive USB-C charging capabilities, leaving the iPad Pro’s Thunderbolt port free for accessories like external drives and displays. 2021 iPad Pro models work with the second-generation Apple Pencil that was introduced in 2018. It features advanced palm rejection, extreme precision, and imperceptible lag for a paper-like writing experience that’s unmatched by third-party styluses.
Why the iPad Pro Isn’t Worth the Extra Money
The 2020 update to the iPad Air brought the same design language from the iPad Pro, which means no home button, thin bezels, and—more importantly—support for accessories like the second-generation Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard and Smart Keyboard. You get True Tone, an anti-reflective coating, and a P3 color display. G/O Media may get a commission Big deals Wayfair Surplus Sale Oops!
Instead, the iPad Air has a Touch ID sensor embedded in the Power button.
The iPad Pro takes the camera setup to a whole different level. While they’re both USB-C, the iPad Pro has a Thunderbolt/USB 4 port, which has a massive 40 Gbps throughput. The iPad Air, on the other hand, has a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port, which has a throughput of 10 Gbps. That’s where things get murky, because now you’re only $50 away from buying the iPad Pro, which has 128GB storage.
If you want 512GB or 2TB storage, you have no choice but to buy the iPad Pro (and pay Apple exorbitant rates—the 2TB version costs $1899). Just buy the base $599 model and spend that extra cash on the Apple Pencil or the Smart Keyboard. If you don’t need those things, buy the iPad Air.
Apple iPad Pro (2020) review: still a pro tablet worth buying?
From its improved screen, to its custom processor with extra memory, to its dual-camera setup with LiDAR, to its smart speaker array, we’ll explain why the iPad Pro is so good, but also who will actually benefit from these features. It may even be that for your specific needs, something like the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 would work better, especially if you’re looking for something that’s as much direct laptop replacement as tablet. We’ll also talk about Apple’s Magic Keyboard, which pretty much turns the iPad into a laptop while you use it, so you can see if that’s a sold-separately add-on you need. What you don’t get here is a 3.5mm headphone jack, which feels like a big miss for a pro machine that could be ideal for musicians.
There’s a small set of volume controls in one corner, and a sleep/wake switch just next to that, though generally you’ll just turn it on by tapping the screen. The iPad Pro uses Face ID security, which works great on the iPhone (when you’re not wearing a mask) because of how you tend to hold a phone. I tend to use the iPad Pro in landscape most of the time, which means I’m usually holding my hand over the middle of one of the short sides, which gives me a 50/50 chance of it being the end with the Face ID sensor in. Quality from the forward camera is good – it’s capable of Full HD video at up to 60fps, and takes 7MP stills with the option of Portrait Mode, thanks the Face ID scanning tech.
At 600 nits of brightness, the screen is brighter than most laptop displays (including the MacBook Pro M1), and a low reflectivity of 1.8% helps to make it clear enough to use even in sunlight.
It’s an LCD display, so it doesn’t have quite the same deep contrast as the OLED screen you’d find on Samsung’s high-end tablets, but it does offer incredibly colour accuracy and visibility even at angles.
The iPad Pro intelligently adjusts its frame rate depending on what you’re doing – start scrolling a page and it will increase it for smoother animation. The main use for the 120Hz screen is for drawing with the Apple Pencil 2, which is unchanged here from the previous version, and so still works excellently.
It’s also pressure sensitive, and has a kind of ‘button’ on the side: you can double tap its flat edge to trigger a command, such as bringing up the tool palette or undoing the last line. When you draw with the iPad, you’ll get a 120Hz refresh rate on the screen, because then you’re seeing the results of your movements more quickly, which helps with accuracy and fine detail. The iPad adjusts which speaker is putting out which frequencies depending on how you hold it, while also throwing in a genuine stereo effect.
And as an example of another spot where I personally stumble, I find image editing for my work on T3 much easier on desktop than on iPad – some of that is down to the specific features of the available apps, and some is down to iPadOS, where creating and editing a series of images and exporting the resulting JPEGs into one folder together takes so many more steps on iPad than it does on Mac.
It’s not like everyone in the world needs to do this exact task, but we all have some similar little flow in our work that would annoy us if it were disrupted, and for all the power of the iPad Pro, it’s still sometimes slowed by the simplicity in places of the software. In some areas, there are things I think Apple can do to improve iPadOS (the Share menu, in particular, is creaking under its own weight at this point), but in others this is simply by design to make the overall experience of the iPad touch-friendly, and you just need to be aware that it may hold you back.
The iPad Pro now supports mouse and keyboard control too, but rather than just slap on a cursor, Apple has made it work a little more iPad-y. The iPad magnetically attaches to the top, and it folds up towards you when it’s open so that the screen is basically hovering over the back of the keyboard.
The keyboard quality is excellent – great feedback, good amount of travel – and the trackpad size on the 12.9-inch model is just right (it’s maybe a tad tight on the 11-inch version, but understandably so). The Magic Keyboard also has a passthrough for charging, leaving the iPad Pro’s lone USB-C port free for an accessory. On top of it all, it comes in an extremely dull grey finish that picks up dirt like anything – it’s amazing how scruffy it ends up. When people have looked inside the Magic Keyboard, it turns out to feature elite engineering for its hinges to the point of overkill – much like the AirPods Max – which maybe explains its cost.
The only delays we’ve seen from it are when dealing with massive (hundreds of gigabytes) folders of short videos as it quickly tries to give previews of them all, and even then it’s just a small pause. When it comes to battery life, Apple’s usual target of 10 hours of light use (watching movies, web browsing) is given here, and that tracks with our experience of the 12.9-inch model.
It outlasts most laptops comfortable, though as with anything else, it depends on your use – fire up the latest and greatest games and you’ll chew through the battery in much, much less time. As a laptop replacement, it still has a way to go – for some people, it’ll work like a dream right now, but for others it has some hurdles you may or may not be prepared to clear.
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