Just as it’s difficult to see your younger brother as anything other than a scrawny, My Chemical Romance-obsessed teenager with a perennially infected ear piercing, your opinion of the iPad probably heralds way back to its debut in 2010. It was the ‘big iPhone’ that shipped without a stylus, coincided with Netflix’s coming of age and even saw Rupert Murdoch launch a short-lived app-based newspaper alongside it. If all you want to do with the new iPad Pro is some iteration on this familiar theme, then there is still no better slab of wafer-thin glass to be sat on your coffee table. Come 2024, Apple’s tablet is capable of a whole lot more.
Since the iPhone, MacBook and Vision Pro all now exist alongside the iPad, its evolution has been quiet and often incremental. Thanks to its sheer versatility and an ultra-thin redesign, the Pro is one of the few devices available that can be used as both a portable recording studio and an in-flight sat nav for private plane pilots, or both if you’ve got an Eras world tour to be cracking on with. It’s a giant blank screen or ‘Room of Requirement’ for the perpetually restless, depending on how you look at it. In other words, it’s an iPad through and through, just probably not as you remember it.
Impossibly thin
As you might have heard already, the iPad Pro has the rare distinction of being the thinnest product Apple has ever made – even more so than 2005’s famously slender iPad Nano. Deep down, I know this shouldn’t impress me quite so much, but I’d challenge you not to look at this thing in the flesh and see your own lizard brain scratched quite so thoroughly. At just 5.1mm slim in its 13-inch incarnation – a 5.3mm 11-inch mode is also available – it’s a truly impressive feat of industrial design that’s somewhat akin to Bulgari’s credit card-sized Octo Finissimo watch or the aerodynamics on a Ferrari. The looks are mostly for show, but there is genuine utility behind them too. There is no backpack this iPad now won’t squeeze into. Better still for those who really like to push their baggage to its absolute limits, the 13-inch model weighs less than half what a similarly sized MacBook Air does.
The only misgiving I have about the Pro’s itty bitty aesthetic is how it holds up after a few knocks. Although Apple’s products are generally good at taking a day-to-day beating – I’ve lost track of the amount of times my iPhone has fallen off the bathroom sink – thinner products are generally more fragile by nature. Given this iPad’s starting price of £999, you’re going to want it to hold up in the long run.
As much as the new iPad Pro is impressive to behold as a design object, its new Ultra Retina XDR display is by far and away the most compelling reason to upgrade. It marks the first time Apple has brought the same OLED screen tech seen on home cinema-worthy 4K TVs to iPad, and required several new innovations to deliver untold detail and contrast for a tablet without sacrificing on brightness. Are you going to see all these benefits on a shoddy ITV Hub stream of the Euros 2024 action? Probably not.
