Review: Apple iPad (2018)

Apple's newest iPad looks and behaves very much like the last iPad. Truth be told, the two devices are almost exactly the same. The dimensions, weight, materials, and colors remain unchanged from last year. The new iPad lets you do all the same iPad stuff like play Netflix shows or Plex movies, scroll effortlessly through web pages, explore Monument Valley 2, and AirPlay baseball games to your Apple TV. The new iPad is even the same price as the old one, $329.

The single major difference in the hardware between new and old is only noticeable if you crack the thing open: The processor has gotten an incremental upgrade that brings the iPad closer, performance-wise, to the rest of Apple's modern product line. It's a 64-bit A10 Fusion processor, Apple's own, that has better graphics capabilities and lets you do stuff in augmented reality.

New chip, big whoop. Far more exciting is the fact that the 2018 edition of the iPad now offers full support for the Apple Pencil. If you've always wanted to use Apple's $99 digital stylus to draw on one of the cheaper iPads instead of the more capable, more expensive iPad Pro, well, now you can. Pencil support brings with it fuller access to the drawing features in creative apps that utilize the Pencil such as Procreate and Adobe Photoshop Sketch. It also gives the iPad many more ways to serve you—drawing with the digital pen is fun and addictive, and now you can scribble comments on documents or become that annoying person who uses their iPad to take notes in meetings. Lookin' at you, Jason.

Pencil support also introduces a big question: If you can use the stylus with the $329 iPad, why bother spending $649 on the cheapest iPad Pro? It's a good question. To be clear, the iPad Pro is a much more robust and capable machine. Brawnier performance, stronger battery, better camera, better wireless radios, much better screen, four speakers instead of two. But even though the experience of drawing on the cheaper iPad isn't as delightful as drawing on the iPad Pro, sketching and painting on the lesser device is still much more elegant than you'd expected.

If you're familiar with how the Pencil works and feels on the iPad Pro, you'll notice the experience is almost the same on the new iPad. The latency of the Pencil is a bit more noticeable on the cheaper machine. When you drag the Pencil across the screen, you can see the line of digital ink flowing out not exactly beneath the Pencil's tip as it slips across the glass, but just behind it, as if it's eagerly trying its damnedest to catch up with the stylus and just falling short.

All digital pens have some level of latency. On the iPad Pro and other high-end pen-input devices, like the Wacom Intuos Pro tablet, it's barely noticeable. On the cheaper iPad, it's easier to spot, but still not bad at all. Unless you're moving the Pencil quickly, you may not even see it.

The other thing you lose when drawing on the new iPad is accuracy. The iPad Pro has a stunning display. When you're drawing on either the 10.5-inch Pro or the larger 12.9-incher, it appears as though the screen's pixels are pressed directly against the outer surface of the glass. Place the Pencil on the iPad Pro's screen and you get the sense that you're actually drawing with a pen on (very smooth) paper. It feels kind of miraculous.

When you place a Pencil to the screen of the new iPad, however, you don't get the sense that the tip of the stylus is touching the lines you see beneath it. There's about a millimeter of open space between the tip of the Pencil where it touches the top of the glass and the pixels that appear on the screen below. People who care deeply about iPad design call this sliver of dead space the "air gap." An apt name; it does feel like you're slightly disconnected from what you're drawing. It's especially noticeable when you're doing detailed line work.

If you're knowledgable enough about things like latency and air gaps to critique them over IPAs with your friends, then you will most certainly notice the shortcomings of the new iPad right away. Most people, however, won't be able to spot them even after hours of use, and if they do, they may not care. After all, the new iPad with a Pencil is hundreds of dollars cheaper than the least expensive iPad Pro with a Pencil. Professionals and enthusiasts who can't justify making that tradeoff will buy the pro-level equipment. Everyone else can buy this setup, spend far less, and be happy.

Even more visible than the thousands of digital-era Thurbers who sketch and paint on their iPads are the legions of free thinkers who've converted their iPads into laptop replacements. This is the One Noble Use of the iPad. Snap it into a keyboard folio case, prop it up on the communal table at the coffee shop, and you're in business. The slip of metal and glass is only 7.5 millimeters thick and just barely over a pound—much thinner and lighter than any laptop. Even when you add a keyboard, the weight and bulk still practically disappear in your bag. There are some computing tasks you still can't do on an iPad, but it gets you 90 percent of the way there.

The iPad Pro has a Smart Connector, Apple's proprietary docking mechanism that lets the tablet connect to (and share power with) accessories like keyboards. Because the iPad Pro supplies the juice, users never have to worry about charging a smart keyboard. The new 2018 iPad lacks the Smart Connector present on the more expensive Pro, so if you want to use a keyboard with it, you'll have to use a Bluetooth keyboard.

But that's OK. While there are dozens of Smart Keyboards for the iPad Pro, there are literally (probably) millions of Bluetooth keyboards that will work with the iPad, your computer, your TV, your phone, whatever. And while Smart Keyboards are pricey, Bluetooth keyboards are super cheap. Get two!

Apple announced this new iPad at a flashy event in a Chicago high school. If the choice of venue wasn't on-the-nose enough, the hour-long presentation offered highlights of all the great things Apple—and its iPads—are doing to improve schoolwork. There are apps for kids, apps for teachers, fun activities and coursework ideas designed to take advantage of the Pencil and the iPad's (pretty great) camera.

As an in-classroom device, I think the iPad works perfectly fine for younger kids. Let them take pictures of insects and make fun movies about the Serengeti. But once they're composing 500-word papers and compiling research files and writing lab reports, they're probably going to want to step up to something more capable. Or maybe not. Maybe like so many of us, they'll just slap a keyboard on it and call it a laptop.