Apple plans biggest iPad Pro update since 2018
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I use my iPad Pro a lot, with video watching in bed, in the dark, being a big use cases. I drool at the prospect of an OLED screen to this on with it's true blacks. At the price of an iPad Pro it will be a hard to justify upgrade on its own.
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I've been using an 11" iPad Pro 2018 model. It still works perfectly except that it's only got 64GB of storage. I'd like more, but the cost of an iPad Pro is so expensive - and the updates since 2018 have been so minor - that it's been impossible to justify replacing it. Hopefully an OLED display and new design finally solve that.
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macosandlinux
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Will we also get the superior OLED on Macs? Is the possible burn-in no issue for Apple anymore?
Typing this on an OLED laptop and never going back to LCD.
Typing this on an OLED laptop and never going back to LCD.
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It would be pretty hard to max out the SOC on an iPad. These are getting M3 because by then that will be the default Apple Silicon chip.
It is possible that the M3 is more efficient than the M2 and there could be battery and heat benefits to getting an M3.
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Wondering if “Crisper” in this case refers to no blooming on white text on black backgrounds. I find it really distracting on my current gen iPad Pro
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Hard Thoughts
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Unless this comes with an expansion to the capability of iPad OS, my m1 pro will be just fine for years to come
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I understand some pro users like to do a lot of video and photo editing, I imagine that appreciates the extra horsepower. But the rumor mill is saying that the M3 chips will be more efficient, so there could be heat and battery life benefits there even if there isn't much increase in processing power. I think they're also adding hardware support for additional video codecs.
For me, I've been using a 4th-gen iPad Air (A14, 4GB RAM, 256GB storage) and I've not found it slow in any of my day-to-day uses of browsing, streaming, occasionally playing a game, etc. I think for most even the standard iPad will be more than capable for regular use.
But if you really need the extra storage and processing capabilities, and you don't want to get a Macbook, well, there's a halo product available.
(The one thing I'd have liked out of the Air is better support for an external display, which I understand came with the 5th generation refresh (M1 processor, 8GB RAM). I have occasionally experimented, trying to use it as my sole computing device; I find myself wanting to use the actual monitor when I do but it only supports screen mirroring and that is awkward for me.)
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Divinity Orifinal Sin 2 will do the trick. And given that it’s also by Larian a Baldur’s Gate 3 iPad port wouldn’t be completely shocking.
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Call me old-fashioned, but I just can't imagine doing any quality video or photo work on a tiny screen without a mouse.
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A smaller trackpad might be welcome for some people, I keep finding myself causing unintended zoom gestures on my 2019 MBP when I relax my left hand such that it contacts the trackpad.
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OrangeCream
Ars Legatus Legionis
Are you asking what software exists that can use all 4 pCores at max clock?
Final Cut Pro clearly uses the M2 to great effect:
https://ymcinema.com/2023/01/19/apple-mac-mini-m2-good-enough-for-professional-video-editing/
Autocad:
https://www.autodesk.com/support/te...nload-and-install-AutoCAD-on-an-Ipad-Pro.html
Final Cut Pro:
https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro-for-ipad/
Several competing video editors such as Premiere or Resolve:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/2...ellent-options-for-professional-video-editors
I’m sure there are more I don’t know about.
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We still have a 10.5" iPad Pro in the house from 2017, IIRC. It's still working perfectly well, and I also haven't found a reason to replace it yet. It still does everything it's needed to do.
Yes, it's tough - I'm typing this on a laptop with a 4K 15.6" OLED touchscreen, and it's difficult to go back to LCD. I'm not sure why burn-in would still be an issue. PC companies have used a number of techniques to deal with it successfully, like pixel shifting, auto-hiding static elements after so long, pixel refresh screen savers, etc. and I am sure Apple could do the same. In fact, I believe Samsung and LG are making the OLED panels for iPad Pros (and doesn't Samsung make the OLEDs for the iPhones?), and they've been doing OLED for quite some time.
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marcopolomint
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The keyboard redesign is a hint (I hope...) that there will be a productivity overhaul of iPadOS. It has been years now that the iPads Pro have been way overpowered but artificially and embarassingly limited by the OS.
Otherwise it would just be a cynical redesign for the sake of sheer profit margins, forcing incompatibility with previous generations, surely?
Oh, I just remembered this is Apple we're talking about. Silly me.
Otherwise it would just be a cynical redesign for the sake of sheer profit margins, forcing incompatibility with previous generations, surely?
Oh, I just remembered this is Apple we're talking about. Silly me.
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I think doing away with backlight bleed/bloom (especially with white-on-black text) would still qualify OLED screens to be called "crisper" than LCD screens of the same resolution.
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All iPhone apps are iPad compatible unless the vendor specifically bars it in the store. But they don't pretend they're anything more than literally scaled up phone apps. Users and vendors tend to not want that sort of crap so vendors do a proper job of making real apps already.
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Having a display that doesn't have significant reflection problems when used outdoors or in places with bright lights, and is bright enough to compete with bright daylight, is the most important thing.
Earlier iPads were very much "Designed in California, for rooms with low intensity indirect lighting". Newer ones have got a bit better, but if Apple really want a tablet to go anywhere, they need to make sure their OLED display has a very good antireflective coating, including remaining antireflective after the user has put their fingerprints on it, and is very bright.
Earlier iPads were very much "Designed in California, for rooms with low intensity indirect lighting". Newer ones have got a bit better, but if Apple really want a tablet to go anywhere, they need to make sure their OLED display has a very good antireflective coating, including remaining antireflective after the user has put their fingerprints on it, and is very bright.
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Oh, so now you're telling me Minsc doesn't edit video.Boo is a miniature space hamster, NOT A MOUSE!
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OrangeCream
Ars Legatus Legionis
You realize Apple pulled this off over a decade ago now?
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/07/09/ios-7-beta-3-ipad-2x-apps-retina/Today, I want to talk about the iPad’s 2x compatibility mode. Hasn’t it always bothered you how iPhone apps run pixel-doubled on your iPad mini and other non-Retina iPad devices, resulting in jagged corners and edges and just all-around pixelated appearance?
From 2010:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...ad-2x-mode-and-iphone4-retina-display-for-devI have several questions about non-native iPad app in iPad 2x mode
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My iPad Pro 12.9 is plenty bright, and the blacks are just fine. An OLED won’t make much difference in the black level, and the saturation is exactly where it’s supposed to be, so I don’t see much change there. But other tablets with OLED screens aren’t that great. That is, they aren’t all that bright. That’s because the technology is different from the top phone screens Apple and Samsung offer. It’s got much more in common with Tv OLED screens which also don’t have brightness much above 600 nits for the better models. It’s an accomplishment if they can get brightness to the 1,200 - 1,600 level of the phone and current miniLED iPad. But that will be expensive. I’ve read that Apple will be using a dual layer,OLED. I don’t know if that’s true.
when he says crispness he might mean the sometimes reported halo effect from miniLEDs which can fuzz the edge of an object when the contrast is high there (though the only time I ever notice it is when the iPad turns on after an OS update and the big white Apple logo comes on). Theoretically, an OLED screen should have much less of that, though even there, there is a slight glare. Crispness is more of a micro contrast thing than a resolution thing.
what I’ve not seen mentioned lately is the possibility of (finally!!) putting the FaceTime module on the top side, rather than the side, er, side, as it is now. While I’ve had a couple of people tell me that they, and most people they see using iPads, use them vertically, I really don’t believe them. I see iPads everywhere, in airports, in conferences, trade shows and the like, and they’re almost always horizontal. The only things I use it for vertically is for reading magazines, viewing vertical photos, maybe looking at long lists and I can’t think of anything else right now, though there must be something. I don’t even know of any cases that are specifically meant to hold them vertically, though some do open that way as it would be clumsy to have them open from the short side.
when he says crispness he might mean the sometimes reported halo effect from miniLEDs which can fuzz the edge of an object when the contrast is high there (though the only time I ever notice it is when the iPad turns on after an OS update and the big white Apple logo comes on). Theoretically, an OLED screen should have much less of that, though even there, there is a slight glare. Crispness is more of a micro contrast thing than a resolution thing.
what I’ve not seen mentioned lately is the possibility of (finally!!) putting the FaceTime module on the top side, rather than the side, er, side, as it is now. While I’ve had a couple of people tell me that they, and most people they see using iPads, use them vertically, I really don’t believe them. I see iPads everywhere, in airports, in conferences, trade shows and the like, and they’re almost always horizontal. The only things I use it for vertically is for reading magazines, viewing vertical photos, maybe looking at long lists and I can’t think of anything else right now, though there must be something. I don’t even know of any cases that are specifically meant to hold them vertically, though some do open that way as it would be clumsy to have them open from the short side.
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I think the list of iPad models that will fall off the trailing edge of OS support with the next round of upgrades is more important than than the continuing small improvements in the iPad Pro. My Air 3 will likely be on that list and I’m not looking forward to replacing it.
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As an M1 Pro owner agreed.
For those who wonder how the iPad Os limits professional workflow look here:
View: https://youtu.be/2CFLoVlrrJ4?feature=shared&t=350
(Criticism notwithstanding, for private use, I enjoy it!)
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I agree here. The iPad has lacked a real advocate in Apple for doing real work on it for too long. The iOS 11 update showed some commitment to the platform, but it's been slow going since then. Stage Manager has been steps in the right direction, but managing multiple apps remains clunky and slow, and moving content or work products between them still requires painful indirections such as "select, share menu, open in app, specialized import routine for each kind of content".
When the iPad was introduced in 2010, I was convinced that the laptop would be dead within a decade. I was wrong. I hate to invoke Steve Jobs, but the iPad was his baby, and it seemed to have no real advocate in Apple after his passing. The hardware steadily improved every single year, but the OS was treated as "iphone with a few extras", not as its own thing.
The next iPad Pro may be a big deal hardware wise, but it's the software, not the hardware, that will make it a hit or not. My 2018-vintage iPad Pro 11" still has more than enough horsepower for anything I throw at it. It's the software that prevents me from throwing much at it.
My iPad Pro is my large-screen portable device, but it's not as capable as a Mac or Windows machine. I have to return to my desk to do anything much more intensive than writing an email. I'd love to update my '18 iPad Pro with fresh hardware… but until the overall platform experience gets an overhaul, it's not going to.
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Nothing described in the article seems much more beyond the normal incremental tweaks. Now, bringing back the fingerprint button. THAT would be cool.
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I could, especially with the stylus.
I won't though, because I don't commute any more (so I'm going to be by my desktop most of the time anyway), because the storage space on Apple products kinda sucks, and because Capture One still hasn't ported the full app over yet (just tethering+monitoring so far.)
But Apple's screens are always really good, and it's certainly big enough considering I've done editing on a 12" Macbook Air just fine.
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My Samsung s5e is almost perfect for my usage - 16:9, OLED, slim and light. All I use it for is as a portable TV. It's not bright enough for outdoor use however - you can just make out Voyager if you squint! - so I bought a cheap Chinese LCD tablet purely for watching tv while my car is charging. I'd much prefer a single tablet with a better screen, but the iPad Pro is difficult to justify, when I bought both my Androids for £330 in total. And of course the 16:9 thing... maybe if I used it for anything else I might prefer a different screen ratio.
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The main ways to address OLED burn-in have traditionally been 1) pixel shifting and 2) brightness limiting, neither of which are really desirable in professional monitors. Pixel shifting literally slightly moves content on-screen randomly, and brightness limiting would be a major annoyance for anyone, say, editing HDR video. This is all fine for TVs where content is generally changing often and people won't notice a movie occasionally shifting a pixel or two during playback. Not so much for professional monitors. A Mac monitor is also likely to have things like the menu bar and dock always on the display in static positions for hours on end, unlike a TV or even an iPad.
Low brightness has also been a major weakness of larger OLED screens - until quite recently, most OLED TVs only got about half as bright as the "XDR" displays on Macs. Bad for outdoor use on MacBooks or iPads, and bad for HDR playback anywhere but a very dark room. HDR looks so much better on my 16" MacBook Pro than my LG C1, honestly.
I think these are the sorts of problems Apple wants to solve before moving Macs to OLED, and why they've been using mini-LED in the meantime. Much higher brightness and much lower burn-in risk at the cost of some blooming around high-contrast areas.
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Software is still the biggest issue.
It’s so weird. My MBP can run iOS apps (they are binary-compatible). Technically that means macOS apps can run on iOS. Apple just doesn’t ship the needed frameworks in the OS.
Especially in trackpad + keyboard mode, there’s no technical reason an iPad couldn’t run a pro app such as Xcode. Apple just refuses to allow it, and thereby keep the iPad in a weird niche where it has more power than it knows what to do with.
It’s so weird. My MBP can run iOS apps (they are binary-compatible). Technically that means macOS apps can run on iOS. Apple just doesn’t ship the needed frameworks in the OS.
Especially in trackpad + keyboard mode, there’s no technical reason an iPad couldn’t run a pro app such as Xcode. Apple just refuses to allow it, and thereby keep the iPad in a weird niche where it has more power than it knows what to do with.
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It really goes to the issue of use cases. The original pitch for the Mac was as the Jef Raskin information appliance, "the computer for the rest of us." The iPad is the ultimate manifestation of this: single-view immersion, with high utilization (at least in terms of software). Apple all but eliminated dealing with the file system under some deranged notion that file systems are too complicated for users to understand (another Jobs quote). It eliminated windowing because that added to the complexity of the user experience. It pitched the iPad against its own computers, emphasizing battery life above all else.
The problems started when hardware capabilities increased--as did cost. So users wanted more bang for the buck. So we got Files. We have the incredibly lame and obfuscated split-screen capabilities. iPad equivalents for all the major basic productivity packages were released. In effect, users wanted and started to turn their iPads into... Macs. After the Surface came out, Apple saw the iPad as a potential competitor, and started reframing it as a Surface alternative, complete with kickstand and keyboard.
But now the high-end iPads are turning into Macs (and vice-versa, with both sharing the same processors and power utilization characteristics converging), and are rapidly encroaching on (or exceeding) the low-end Mac price points, so the question that should be asked is, what's the end game? For too long, the minimalist slab doctrine has ruled: thinner, lighter, longer battery power. Which is all great, but it's utilization that matters.
I think all paths are leading to a ruggedized iPadMac with a 180° folding (or separable) hinge and touchscreen capabilities. There will certainly still be need for information appliances--mainly for industry--but they should be focused on the $100-$300 price point range with streamlined, simplified software deployment capabilities. I could see Apple focusing on the iPadMac and licensing iPadOS to the companies who can make a buck in that market.
I'd hate to be a hardware marketeer in the industry right now. Product differentiation is a nightmare.
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Highly unlikely iPad will receive the OS update that´ll allow them to compete with Macbooks. The M3 update is for manufacturing rationalization, i.e. cost savings more than anything else (and as a bonus, Apple could use the argument of a more powerful processor to increase price: cost savings and increased income, yay!).
That said, my iPad Air 2 (2014) keeps giving.
That said, my iPad Air 2 (2014) keeps giving.
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