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2021 iPad Pro M1 2 Weeks Later - A User Review

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The 2021 iPad Pro is a very good… iPad. This isn’t a comparison with the iPad Air 4 or the 2018/2020 iPad Pro, but if you want and can afford the best tablet computer you can buy, buy the iPad Pro.

Design

It’s carried forward from the 2020 and 2018 iPad Pros: flat on all sides with rounded corners that feel good to hold. The edges are littered (not in a bad way) with speaker grills, mic holes, volume and power buttons, Apple Pencil magnet cutouts and the Thunderbolt port. It’s the sci-fi tablet from the movies I grew up on: clean and modern, a design Apple has been bringing to the iPhone, iPad Air and iMac (and the new Apple TV remote and rumored MacBooks).

Display

A beautiful, bright screen with P3, True Tone and a variable 120 Hz refresh rate that makes scrolling feel less digital. The 12.9-inch gets an upgrade over the 11-inch in 2021: the Liquid Retina XDR display with over 10,000 mini-LEDs in 2,500 dimming zones for a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and up to 1,600 nits of HDR, near OLED contrast, with bright whites and pure blacks. HDR content looks absolutely amazing; the easiest comparison is the letterboxing around a video on the 12.9-inch versus the 11-inch.

There are concerns about blooming (light bleed around bright objects on dark backgrounds, from the size of the zones) and a slight shadow around the edge of the XDR display’s border that other iPad Pros don’t have. In my opinion it’s overblown: when you watch a video and pay attention to the content rather than pixel-peeping, you don’t notice. If you’re wondering whether the XDR is worth the $300 upgrade over the 11-inch, let the decision come down to how much you want the larger screen, not the technology; the contrast differences fade away in regular use.

Speakers, Face ID and cameras

The four-speaker array still sounds amazing for the form factor, adjusting left and right depending on how you hold it, filling a small room with music, a podcast or a movie. Face ID appears identical to the previous iPad Pro: fast, accurate and consistent, by far my favorite way to unlock an iPad. The rear wide and ultra wide cameras don’t match the iPhone 12’s but are there if you need them. The LiDAR sensor: if you regularly use a LiDAR app that isn’t a technology demo, please tell me what it is, because I don’t know what to use it for.

The front camera has a much wider 122° field of view and Center Stage, which tracks you as you move in a video app, goes pretty far to the sides, and adjusts as others enter the frame; you can enable or disable it per app. My one complaint is that the camera is still on the side in landscape, which I use nearly all the time: even with Center Stage I look like I’m looking off to the side. It’s time to move the camera to the long side.

M1 and Thunderbolt

The same M1 as Apple’s computers: an 8-core CPU (four performance and four efficiency), an 8-core GPU, and 8 or 16 GB of RAM depending on the storage configuration. I’m skipping benchmarks, except to note Apple says it’s 50% faster in CPU and 40% in graphics than the 2020 iPad Pro. The 2018 and 2020 models were no slouches, so that seems like bragging, and only in a few tests (exporting video, opening a bigger game) did I see slight improvements; web browsing, documents, Netflix and YouTube feel about the same.

The M1 also brought Thunderbolt (40 Gbps) to the iPad. With the previous Pro, a USB-C dock gave external displays, SSDs, card readers and Ethernet; now you can also connect up to a 6K display and Thunderbolt SSDs. But Thunderbolt is held back by iPadOS (like the M1’s potential in general). An external display is just mirrored, with black pillars on each side; a few apps like LumaFusion use the full display.

What iPadOS needs

iPadOS 15 is being announced next week at WWDC, and I’m hoping for big changes in file and app management and hardware accessory support: maybe a more powerful Finder-like app, switching between built-in speakers and speakers on a Thunderbolt dock, connecting to a display with an external keyboard and mouse in clamshell mode, or even eGPUs. For nearly two years I used my 12.9-inch iPad Pro as my main computer, and a refreshed iPadOS with new pro apps could draw me back. We now have desktop-class hardware and memory in an iPad, so please, Apple, let’s get a desktop-class OS.

Verdict

The M1 iPad Pro is the best iPad you can buy, but it’s an iPad, for better or worse. If you want the best, get either model. If you want the larger screen, spend the extra, but don’t do it just for the screen technology if you prefer smaller iPads. I didn’t cover keyboard cases here; see my comparison of the Magic Keyboard and the Logitech Combo Touch.

Some links in this post are affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I may receive a small commission. See my ethics statement.

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