New iPad Pro Features

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Ever since the launch of the original iPhone back in 2007, Apple has maintained a strong record of powerful presentations of its upcoming products that make the crowd extremely ambitious to buy them as soon as they become available.

With the success of the iPhone, Apple saw the potential of handheld touch devices and it didn’t take them long (3 years) to roll out the magical iPad. Back in 2010, We were pretty young and technology was really becoming more visibly innovative and the Ipad simply wowed us. It wouldn’t be too outrageous to say that the iPad had set the foundation for the tablet market across the world. Everyone wanted to have one and I mean everyone. Just look at how quickly 1 million iPads were sold.

There are 4 different iPads?

Yes! One of the reasons Apple has seen tremendous success for long continuous periods is because they are able to see what consumers want. This fact is highlighted by how Apple has been able to release 4 variations together for quite some time. The models are:

  • iPad Air
  • iPad Mini
  • iPad (standard)
  • iPad Pro

While sales have had some low periods, the expectations for the 2020 iPad Pro are high and for good reason. The upcoming iPad Pro is being advertised as a potential replacement for laptops and it’s interesting to even speculate that the time is near when we are comfortable giving up our laptops and notebooks for something much smaller. Before we dive into the fine details, let’s look at some of the more basics first.

Configurations and sizes

This iPad Pro will come in 2 different sizes, 11 and 12.9 inches. Another option that customers can choose from is whether the device will have LTE support or not. With data becoming ever so bigger in size, Apple has upped its game by dishing out the new iPad’s with a minimum of 128GB of storage. For more intense users, the 1TB option also exists. The cheapest variant will cost you US$799 and on the other end of the spectrum, the price reaches US$1649. If you’re not a tech-savvy person, this is how the sizes will increase:

  • 128GB
  • 256GB
  • 512GB
  • 1024GB (equivalent to 1TB)
These prices are for the 12.9-inch variant

Performance changes

What’s typical of Apple devices is that they don’t have dramatic physical changes. Normally what happens is that they get slimmed up, are fed more powerful hardware, and the camera is improved. This is pretty much the same as the upcoming iPad Pro.

The previous iPad Pro had a chipset called the A12X. It was a pretty good piece of hardware and trust me, we’re not gonna bore you with raw technical details that barely a few people can understand. We’re keeping it simple and just listing the very prominent and easy to understand changes. The A12X architecture has been upgraded to give better performance (and is called A12Z) and surprisingly has no additional CPU cores. The GPU, on the other hand, has an additional core now.

These minimal changes make this iPad Pro capable of heavy-duty tasks with performance in mind. It’s gonna take a lot to slow this piece of tech down.

If you’re the kind who likes to see benchmarks of different hardware, be sure to check out one such analysis over here.

More like a laptop? How?

So we talked about how this iPad Pro is aiming to make people start shifting towards moving away from laptops and towards the iPad. What they’re trying to do is make the iPad feel more usable when it comes to everyday tasks and one of the ways they’ve done this is by providing keyboard and mouse support in terms of additional accessories.

The Magical Trackpad

Although Apple had introduced a rather weak form of support for mice and tracking devices not too long ago, it wasn’t something too usable. It had its fair share of issues and the usability people were expecting from this was simply not up to the mark that Apple had intended for.

That changed when Apple made the smart decision of giving more usability by implementing an update in the form of iPadOS 13.4. This allows more streamlined usage and can really make working from an iPad a reality.

To highlight this new update, Apple has announced its own proprietary Keyboard and trackpad that unsurprisingly costs a ton (US$300 to be exact).

For most people, it would make sense to spend that amount on a gaming keyboard and mouse but if you’re really enthusiastic about completely switching over to an iPad for your daily work, this might be a viable solution. It’s also obvious that you would need to purchase these accessories to get the full benefit out of the new software, but that’s how Apple operates.

The trackpad has a pretty natural feeling and makes working very efficient, like how would with a normal keyboard. Apple has certainly implemented this well as it does not feel like a different tool that you would use on the iPad. The familiarity you have on a normal laptop is carried here with no exceptions.

A two-finger tap on the screen acts just like a right-click would behave. A three-finger swipe takes you to the home screen.

There will be cases where you will run into slight problems and will have to use the screen to perform tasks. Give it a while and updates will roll out to fix this.

The Cameras are pretty good, but not like the iPhone 11

The new iPad Pro will feature not one, but two rear cameras. Both cameras have a certain use-case to be more effective.

One camera is a 12-megapixel wide sensor that supports an f/1.8 aperture. The other one is a 10-megapixel ultra-wide module that has a 125-degree field of view.

Anyone who is into taking pictures would understand where each camera would perform better. When shooting videos at 4k-60FPS, you’re unable to switch between the cameras so you will need to carefully consider which one to use for your next project.

LiDAR sensor

by definition, LiDAR translates into light detection and ranging. This is Apple’s tool to make the detection of objects in AR apps smoother than ever before. The sensor captures how fast light travels to and fro from the cameras to judge the space we are in and provide the necessary data to AR apps to work properly.

Closing comments

Apple is famous for not going overboard with complete redesigns of its products and this iPad Pro is no different. It simply improves upon an existing design and provides meaningful improvements that make the user experience much more valuable.

If you have the last generation iPad Pro, it might make sense to stick with that device since it also provides valuable utility even today.

If you’re an Apple enthusiast, you should definitely go ahead and make plans for this purchase and to ditch the previous device behind since this model has just enough improvements to make you consider buying it.

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