Review: Apple iPad Pro

Apple—or at the very least, its CEO—thinks the iPad is the future of computing. It's not shy about that idea. "Why would you buy a PC anymore?" Tim Cook, who reportedly does 80 percent of his work on the device, asked the crowd at an Apple store in London this week. "No, really—why would you buy one?" Steve Jobs once said tablets are cars and laptops are trucks. And Apple is making deals with IBM, Cisco, and anyone else it can find to put enterprise apps on tablets. But the iPad's always had one key problem: It's ill-suited to the work people do at work. The apps don't do enough. The tablet isn't powerful enough. The screen isn't big enough.

All that's changed with the iPad Pro.

The iPad Pro is plenty powerful, and it's plenty big. But to call it "just a bigger iPad" is like calling the Millennium Falcon "just a bigger falcon." In making it bigger, Apple made the iPad Pro different. This is Cupertino's attempt to prove a tablet can replace and outgun your laptop. Perhaps more importantly, it is Apple's best idea about how to give you a tablet that is more than a slightly bigger version of your big smartphone. This tablet does things your phone and your laptop can't do. Are they solutions in search of a problem? Perhaps. But the iPad Pro is the best tablet, and the best case for tablets, anyone's ever made.

You've seen an iPad, right? So you already know what the iPad Pro looks like. The gold, silver, and space gray color options. The slightly rounded edges with the gleaming accents. The home button on the front, the power and volume buttons around one corner. (It's tempting to call them "top" and "bottom," but there is no such thing here.) The way it feels balanced in your hands, sturdy without being heavy.

Well, OK, the iPad Pro's a little heavy. The 1.57-pound weight isn't so much a problem—you notice it next to an iPad Air, but you can handle the difference. It's much lighter and thinner than the Surface Pro 4, too. Still, it's just ... big. There's no good way to hold it in one hand without it starting to tip away from you. In two hands, it's fine, though there's a whole middle section of the 12.9-inch screen you won't be able to reach unless you have hands like LeBron James. If you want a tablet to use on the subway, buy a different iPad. This one's for other things.

The Pro's a little thinner than other iPads because there's so much room to spread the battery out. (This makes holding it easier, too.) More noticeably, the four speakers around the Pro's edges have more space to resonate, so they produce shockingly loud audio—you'll finally be able to hear the iPad without needing an anechoic chamber. Its software also makes sure you're always getting stereo sound, playing mids and highs out of the two speakers facing to your left and right no matter how you hold it. It's pumping bass through all four speakers all the time.

Its battery lasts a dozen hours or so, which means you'll probably charge the Pro just once or twice a week. The A9X chip and 4 gigabytes of RAM make everything fantastically fast: even on a huge, high-res screen, I couldn't find an app or game that would stutter. The best way to make the iPad do more stuff was to give it a processor that can handle the load; Apple did that and then some.

The goal with the iPad has always been that you never think about everything I just mentioned. It's all supposed to disappear. The 12.9-inch display is the only thing about the iPad Pro you're ever supposed to care about. In this case, you're gazing into the depths of a 2732x2048 panel, which is 264 pixels per inch. 5.6 million variably-refreshing pixels, offering 78 percent more display space than the iPad Air. Those are big numbers. Big numbers are good, and so is this display.

The extra space shows up in subtle but important ways. In iMovie, you can see your library, timeline, and a full-res 1080p view of your final product, all on a single screen. When you play FIFA, you can use the on-screen controls without obscuring any of the actual gameplay. You can comfortably see the entire week in the calendar, from 8am to 9pm. Slack has a new Jumbo Mode that shows you your messages, menus, and files all at once. Many of the first apps to be optimized are analytics tools—you can see so much stuff now! On the iPad Pro you spend less time moving—scrolling lists and thumbing through menus—and more time doing whatever you're doing. Apps aren't forced to feel like dumbed-down tablet versions.

Apple doesn't think of the Pro as a fundamentally different device from the smaller iPads; like the 15-inch MacBook Pro or the 27-inch iMac, this one's just the biggest in its family. That's wrong. Apple knows better than anyone that a bigger screen can change things; that's why it made the iPad in the first place. This time, it built a bigger iPad, and discovered a bigger iPad offers and demands something different.

That's where the accessories come in.

What Apple's really launching today is a three-device ecosystem. There's the $799 iPad Pro, the $99 Apple Pencil, and the $169 Smart Keyboard. Total price of entry: $1,067.

The Pencil is the more important accessory. This long, white, paintbrush-looking stylus is central to the notion that the iPad Pro is for doing anything, any way you want. In apps that support it, the Pencil is an unbelievably accurate, fine instrument for creation or control. When you write or draw, it feels like ink is coming straight from its tip. You can shade with the side of the Pencil, write in beautiful calligraphy, or sketch with amazing accuracy.

The Pencil works so well because it gets special access to the Pro's software. To set it up, just plug it into the Lightning port. After that, whenever your iPad detects the Pencil touching the display, it doubles the screen's read rate so it checks for movement 240 times a second. That, plus pressure sensitivity and real-time measuring of the Pencil's angle and position, means the Pencil puts out much more data than you'll get from any other stylus. You can use others, but the Pencil is special.

The Smart Keyboard, on the other hand, is just one of what surely will be many accessories you can attach to the new Smart Connector. The connector's three round contact points can provide power and data like a Lightning port, and may well be Apple's next hub for chargers and accessories. Apple says developers already are building accessories for it.

The keyboard is built into one of those fabric Smart Covers that you fold into a triangular stand for the iPad and then unroll to cover the screen when it goes into your bag. The stand-up mechanism is a little awkward—you have to grab the tablet and sort of swan-dive it into place—but the cover is lighter, thinner, and handier than most keyboard accessories. Since it's part of the cover, it's also much more likely to actually be there when you need it. You'll use the keyboard a lot—the iPad Pro feels most at home propped up on your desk, like Microsoft's Surface Pro 4. Its fabric keys are big and clicky and easy to get used to. You can even use the whole setup on your lap. Sort of. As long as you don't move too much.

A strange thing happens when you sit down at a 13-inch device with a keyboard, though: you expect it to work like a laptop. And the iPad Pro doesn't. Its split-screen multitasking is handy, but only lets you do two things at once. The Smart Keyboard doesn't support keyboard shortcuts in most apps, at least until developers add them. (Handy tip: press and hold the Command key in any app to see all available shortcuts.) You can Command-Tab to switch between apps, Command-Shift-H to go home, and Command-Space to open Spotlight. But why can't you change the volume with the keyboard? Or turn the tablet off? Where's the escape key? Why can't you just start typing when you're on the home screen to bring up the search, the way BlackBerry used to do it? Why isn't there a search key that works in every app? Seriously, where is the escape key?

Apple's answer to all these questions is, that's not the point. This is not a Surface Book. You can't just use keyboard and mouse if you want to. This is a touch-first device, and screw you if you don't like that. The accessories are great, but Apple still wants you to touch the screen with your finger. It’s tough getting used to that.

My iPad Pro's default status looks like this: It's sitting on the coffee table, propped up by the keyboard cover. I sit on the couch, leaned over, typing on the keyboard. (That's what I'm doing right now.) In a minute, I'll lean back, do the awkward dance of separating the tablet and the keyboard, and watch another episode of Property Brothers. Happy Saturday.

This sort of shape-shifting multimodality suits the iPad Pro perfectly—you want an easel one minute, a typewriter the next, a game console after that. The Pro can hang. Since I've had a big smartphone, I've had no need for tablets. Now, between the pen, the big keyboard, and the sheer size of the screen, I find myself reaching for it all the time. It's easy to use anywhere, and capable of doing anything. For creative folks, the iPad Pro is an amazing accessory. WIRED's designers told me they're excited to use the Pencil for sketching and brainstorming, but that they'll wind up back in InDesign on their desktops soon enough. The Pencil and the apps that support it are a great new piece of the creative process, but they're not killing your laptop yet.[#cneembed: script/video/564258ca61646d1d5d000008.js]
Long-term, Apple is betting you don't need all the things your laptop does, that you're only holding onto them because they somehow feel comfortable. You don't need hard drives when you have iCloud (or something better than iCloud), you don't need crazy trackpad gestures and complicated keyboard macros when you have a touchscreen. You don't need to have seven apps open at once, when you can only pay attention to one or two anyway.

For years, we've wondered when Apple would fuse its two operating systems, turning iOS and OS X into a single platform for all its devices. (I maintain it should be called iOSX.) I'm starting to think the answer is never, that iOS is just going to win.

In Apple's mind, the future doesn't look like a liger. It won't be a combination of iPad and MacBook, or "the tablet that can replace your laptop." Apple's hoping that people who have never bought a laptop never will. It'll just be the iPad. For the billions of people around the world for whom A Computer looks more like a smartphone than a laptop, who don't have the muscle memory and anachronistic love of hardware keyboards, that's not such a crazy idea. (In the meantime, if you want a laptop, Apple will happily sell you a MacBook Air for pretty much the same price.)

For those of us who still cling to laptops and desktops, the iPad Pro just doesn't feel like a serious machine for serious work. We need our keyboard shortcuts and our mice, our apps that work just how we like them. We need our accessories. A touch-first interface just doesn't feel right, and the iPad Pro can't overthrow our existing workflows and tools. Maybe we'll catch up to Tim Cook's vision of work someday. Maybe. But for right now, we have work to do, and no time to reinvent how we do it.

Nobody's going to toss their iMacs and ThinkPads into the garbage tomorrow and instead lay a 12.9-inch tablet on everyone's desk. If there's a touchscreen revolution underway, it's going to happen slowly, an app and an accessory at a time. That's OK. The iPad Pro is a fantastic tablet, not to mention the first iPad in ages that has an obvious value next to our giant smartphones. It starts as a big, powerful, beautiful screen, and with the right accessories and apps can be almost any kind of device you want. So, yeah: size matters.