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iPad Pro unboxing and first impressions [Video]

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Today we’re taking a look at the iPad Pro. On the surface, it may look like a giant Netflix machine, but well… it kind of is. This is the biggest iPad ever without a doubt, that packs a 12.9-inch display and obviously has a much larger footprint when compared to the iPad Air 2, this is larger by 78 percent actually. But enough with the small talk, let’s take a look inside of the box..,

As far as specifications go, Apple’s iPad Pro is packing the A9X processor inside, with 4GB of RAM, and either 32GB or in my case 128GB of internal storage. As I mentioned, there’s a 12.9-inch display with a resolution of 2732 x 2048 which is good for 265ppi.

Check out our iPad Pro unboxing and impressions video below:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNuMOhpvyeI]

The display is pretty clean as well. It’s obviously not as pixel dense as some of the smartphones we look at, but it’s on point with a Retina MacBook Pro. The technology for the display makes it extremely power efficient as well, at least according to Apple. The display features a variable refresh rate that can detect when the content on it is static. From there is drops the refresh rate from 60 to 30 in order to save power.

Taking a look at design, this thing is massive. Like really big. Luckily, it’s not as thick as it is big. It comes in at just 6.9mm and weighs 1.57 pounds, which isn’t too bad at all. Along the bottom end, you’ll find a Lightning port for charging, and surprisingly here, Apple has implemented four side-firing speakers inside of the iPad Pro (2 on each end) for a rich multimedia experience.

Screen Shot 2015-11-11 at 6.33.53 PM

On one side you’ll find the volume buttons and a couple of microphones, while the other is home to Apple’s new Smart Connector, which can be used for accessories like the new Smart Keyboard, which is actually not available to ship immediately at launch, but third-party manufacturers like Logitech have swooped in to save the day. And if you really want to be that guy, there’s an 8-megapixel camera on the backside, capable of up to 1080p video recording. Trust me though, you don’t want to be that guy. Also, around the front, there’s a 1.2-megapixel camera, making it great option for Skype and FaceTime calls.

Screen Shot 2015-11-11 at 6.37.18 PM

So basically, when the iPad Pro’s Smart Connector makes contact with a supported accessory like Logitech’s CREATE keyboard case, it powers and charges the keyboard so you’ll never have to worry about that. Pretty neat feature in my opinion and also one of the things that makes the iPad Pro a bit different than the other models. And obviously because the iPad Pro is so large, a keyboard case like this will actually have full-size keys, which is miles better than typing on something cramped in a smaller form factor.

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Apple also makes the iPad Pro useful for a wide variety of other people with Apple Pencil, and I’d love to share my experience about this with you, but unfortunately this too was not available to ship instantly at launch.

I think the iPad Pro is a nice idea overall, but the main issue here is that it runs iOS instead of something that may be a bit more useful to “professionals” like you know.. maybe OS X? The truth is, that even Microsoft’s Surface may appeal to anyone looking to get more out of productivity than iOS has to offer, but that doesn’t make this a bad product. Having laptop-like screen real estate in a tablet form-factor is a nice thing. Especially when paired with a full size keyboard. Drop in the rich multitasking found in iOS 9 and you’ve got something that can definitely appeal to a lot of people. And you know what? Sometimes folks just don’t want to deal with a desktop operating system.

Screen Shot 2015-11-11 at 6.36.17 PM

For me, the iPad Pro feels pretty well-built and obviously the quality is on point with what you’d expect from Apple. That being said, it’ll take me some time to figure out whether or not this huge tablet is something I need in my life, but I’ll definitely give it a shot. What do you think about the iPad Pro? Did you pick one up?

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Comments

  1. Joshua Glowzinski - 8 years ago

    I am going to save $250 a month and get the best one I can next year. I draw a lot. Have a copyright on a cartoon and what not. This thing will be great. I can carry it with me and when I have an idea, just draw it. I will have to get the pen as well. I look forward to the day I get this thing.

    • dcj001 - 8 years ago

      This sounds great! But make sure that you get the Apple Pencil. Anyone selling a pen to be used with the iPad Pro would be trying to scam you.

  2. robkow86 - 8 years ago

    i want one.

  3. RP - 8 years ago

    As anyone who has used a touch screen Windows rig knows, it’s not a great experience and probably never will. It is a legacy machine for legacy apps. iOS is what this device needs. The ecosystem, apps and developers. Something that has sailed for Windows.

    And as great as Apple’s chips are, don’t fret about pro power apps. There will be far more within a year specifically for iPad than touch apps for Windows. Windows has hit a dead end.

    And as someone who still uses an iPad 2 every day for 4 years now, chances are pretty good I’ll be using this one 4 years from now.

    I don’t think they’ll be supporting Surface 4 years from now.

  4. zuki (@mannyf87) - 8 years ago

    i really like your decoration, specially your coffee table. where did you get it if i may ask.

    • Dom Esposito - 8 years ago

      American Furniture Warehouse hah

  5. taoprophet420 - 8 years ago

    Dom there is a problem nobody talks about that makes OS X hard to do on a tablet. The App Store for OS X is a barren wasteland, yes you can go to developer websites to download the apps, but the lack of apps in the Mac App Store are severely disappointing.

    I think Apple for now needs one major iOS update specifically for iPad and one 6 months later for iPhone. For way to long iOS has been a blown up version of the iPhone. All we got on iPad is split screen apps. iPhone plus gets a editing keyboard in landscape and a more dos of apps on the homescreen. Control center for iPad could gain more features on the iPad since you have more room.

    I was hoping either iPad Pro or the MacBook would get a hybord OS or2 different UI runtimes. I still think Should put its own chips in the MacBook it is underpowered and besides th screen I don’t see why anyone would choose it over a MacBook Air.

    • viciosodiego - 8 years ago

      I agree with you.
      Even if apple gave them an iPad running OS X, they would cry because of the lack of apps and horrible interface, Just imagine os x on a touch screen.

  6. Nancy (@knitterati) - 8 years ago

    My Air is 7yrs old, my iPad2 is 3(Ithink). I need to replace my Air, but waited until the new MacBook came out. It was introduced, but I just wasn’t ready, I wanted to see what the iPad Pro had to offer. I use my old 2 with a Zagg keyboard/case every day at work and home. The battery on my Air is awful. Thre are 2 reasons I didn’t order one today. #1 is that Verizon is not listed as a carrier and I have my iPhone with them.. Does anyone know why? #2 does anyone know if Word and the other Office suite mates work the same as it would on the laptop? I know you can multitask with them, but is it limited at all? I had an Apple chat late lst week and the person on the other end didn’t even know that the launch was scheduled for today. My questions weren’t answered. My local Verizon store didn’t know anything either.

    • viciosodiego - 8 years ago

      office on iPad works mostly like its desktop counterpart.
      However you should be aware that its missing some features, but that should not put you off from buying one, unless you really need those features.

    • Anthony Wolfe - 8 years ago

      You should buy a new battery for the Air and voila it’ll work like new

  7. rogifan - 8 years ago

    Why do people just assume it would be easy to put OS X on a touchscreen ARM tablet? If anything I think making iOS more powerful will be a lot easier than porting OS X to ARM. And no way is Apple ever designing a tablet with Intel hardware. The A9X chip is powerful enough to run desktop class software. We just need Apple and app developers to take advantage of it.

    • taoprophet420 - 8 years ago

      How many millions of lines of code did Apple write in less then 9 months for the switch from IBM PowerPC chips to Intel? Its not that hard to write OS X for ARM. I don’t think Apple could do it as smoothly as it could have under Jobs, because software engineering has faced many delays or bugs since Jobs died. I don’t know who Apple is hiring for all its new campus spaces in Austin or the bay area. It damn sure does not seem to be a software team or quality control.

      Apple could take advantage of the powerful chips if they optimized IOS for iPad’s.I really think they need 2 major iOS updates a year. The current mostly iPhone and new API’s IOS update we see at WWDC then a .5 update in the winter or early spring with iPad specific features. iOs for iPad has to long been a blown up version of the iPhone UI. I think with the mini, Air @ and Pro all now with split screen apps and high performance chips and 2-4 GB of ram we might start seeing high performance apps from Apple and developers.

      • Nasir Barday - 8 years ago

        OS X took much longer than 9 months to port from PowerPC to Intel. Apple was secretly compiling OS X for Intel for 2 years before they announced it to the world. That said, the guts of iOS come from OS X.

        Without a major overhaul, OS X wouldn’t hold a candle to Windows 8 or 10 on a tablet. iOS is Apple’s “major overhaul” of OS X for touch.

        Given the similar pricing for a Surface PC though (or even a MacBook), that Pencil would have to be a real charming device to make this setup successful.

  8. drboxing - 8 years ago

    Not really sold on the iPad Pro right now, seems I’d be purchasing a large iPad. I’m happy with my Surface Pro 3

  9. Display makes it for me

  10. Jonas Graae Rasmussen - 8 years ago

    I think the iPad is an amazing device. I have been using the air 2 the last year, and have noticed a progress of being able to do more and more tasks on this instead of my macbook. Many task as surfing the web, writing a quick mail and so on, have always been easier on a tablet.

    When i iOS 9 got released, i decided to add a brydeair keyboard to my iPad. Think the capabilities of the iPad took a huge step forward when the split screen and PIP was available with IOS 9. Since then i have used my iPad regularly for word documents, excel, wordpress, learning code with lynda and team treehouse, and even used it for minor tasks in photoshop! I would love to se what could be possible with the iPad pro, i think the larger screen will make split even better and adobe will be awesome on this thing. Hope it can be my new partner for school!

  11. rambouillet26 - 8 years ago

    My favourite feature? Made by Apple.

  12. Bamley Grayson - 8 years ago

    Nice tattoos

  13. Daniele (@HolyByxe) - 8 years ago

    I always thought this would be the perfect device for my wife. She does not use a PC at work, she studies educational science (so she does not Need any specific Software). Until now she used an iPad 2, which is cool for Surfing and downloading/reading PDFs, but was always tricky to be used for writing studies. This definetly would be a use case for iPad Pro.

    At the end the idea Fails at one specific use case. There is that one TV Show on a regional TV channel which uploads their episodes to their media Center shortly after releasing it on TV. Whenever she misses the episode, she watches it online. Well, unfortunately this page is still flash-based. No iOS application, this show is not on Netflix, nor on Amazon prime and sky go (other Streaming Services in Germany).

  14. 89p13 - 8 years ago

    I bought one and picked it up yesterday morning. I have not had a great amount of time to use it, yet, but my first impressions was – “It Is HUGE!” I wasn’t sure if I could get used to this beast. My previous iPads were the iPad 2 / iPad Retina 1 / iPad Air 2 – so this is really an adjustment. Much like going from the iPhone 5s to the iPhone 6Plus last year. In my mind, that’s a really good comparison – may not be exact, but it’s realistic.

    It took about 4 days to get used to the iPhone 6Plus – and now, when I pick up the 5s or the 4s – they seem like toys compared to the Plus series. So, I have no fear that I will get used to it.

    My short term plans are to use the ipad Pro as a media machine – reading, consuming media and that ilk. Long term will be to replace my 2011 MacBook Air. I want to wait for a few months to evaluate all the keyboards that will be flooding the market. I will also be looking to pickup the Apple Pencil and wait to see what Adobe and the other graphics vendors release for the Pro. At that point I will step up to editing photos (hopefully) on the Pro.

    I went in to this purchase knowing that many of the apps that I use on the Air 2 will just scaled up for the Pro – but the developers will be quick to create updates or new apps to take advantage of the real estate on the Pro screen. I did not buy this with the expectation that everything would be per-optimized for this first Apple large screen device. For those of us who had the original iPad and the iPhone apps that it ran, remember that it wasn’t long before we got both new apps as well as Apple’s greatly improved hardware. It’s a growing market and we’re getting in on this new chapter.

    Am I glad I bought it – Yes as I see a lot of potential and future growth. Is it perfect – No, but nothing ever is, improvements are usually evolutionary, not revolutionary. Is it fast – Yes, but the apps are not fully tweaked for this new processor but that just means improvements will be forthcoming.

    I’m not normally an overly optimistic person but I am excited about this new product category in the Apple Universe and the promise it has planted. As an earlier poster said – “My favorite feature is it’s made by Apple.” To me that means it will grow and evolve.

    YMMV

  15. nsimons1983 - 8 years ago

    Great video!!!! Keep up the awesome work and I really appreciate your honest opinions!

  16. Great product, stupid name.

    Every review is going to blast it for not having the desktop like features and OS of the similarly named Microsoft product. Even though this product doesn’t need, and shouldn’t have, such a horribly compromised Janus approach. A larger format iPad, using an OS and apps made for specifically for a touch screen device, is exactly the right product to bring to market… interfaces made, from the start, for a tablet. There is nothing more “Pro” about this iPad anyway, it’s just bigger and has updated hardware under the hood. So, faster and bigger… things that’ll make it just as great for all those “non-Pro” people who’ll buy and enjoy it, as it does for the far fewer number of people who buy it solely of work.

    The hardware team have done well. The OS team have done well. I’m sure App developers will do well. The marketing team are idiots and have guaranteed unnecessarily bad reviews across the board. If this product doesn’t do well, it’s down to them, for such a poorly thought out product name.

  17. Randy Alava - 8 years ago

    i want one!

  18. Inaba-kun (@Inaba_kun) - 8 years ago

    The gaps between the homescreen icons are comically large now. Why not allow people to have more when the screen is so gigantic?

  19. triankar - 8 years ago

    Until iOS features fully-fledged system-wide file management (Google Drive for iOS sets the standard so far) and apps can open files from a “general” filesystem (instead of copying them inside their file-space), I’m staying clear from this “Pro” device.

    Give it also a decent PHP/JS/CSS/HTML IDE with SVN support and I might consider going for it. (Coda isn’t quite there yet, in my opinion)

  20. Joel Garrett - 8 years ago

    Super excited about sketching with the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. Please sign me up for the give away.

  21. Ray Robinson - 8 years ago

    Hi, great review. This just might be the product to get my wife off an old XP laptop and join me as an Apple user! Having converted to Apple this July, I now own a 27″ iMac and I’m blown away by it. My wife needs an upgrade so why persevere with Windows when Apple provide such a rich user experience. I can’t wait to stop hearing, “I can’t get on the network, windows has locked up again, Word won’t let me copy and paste, how do I save a jpeg” etc etc etc.. On my iMac it’s all so simple – no more defragging or messing about with missing DLL’s and all the other necessary user interventions placed on Windows users. My Mac has converted me from a life long Windows user (I’m 56) into finally seeing the light! I just need to get an iPad Pro for my wife and I think she’ll soon see it the same way…much love

    Ray
    Worcester
    UK

  22. I really like the iPad Pro, but can’t help thinking that if it really will be a ‘Pro’ device, capable of replacing a Mac, it needs better apps. I was hoping when Apple invited developers on stage at their September event, we’d see Adobe announce the next version of Photoshop and Flash CC would be on iPad as well as Windows and OS X, Apple would announced FCP X, Motion and Logic, Autodesk would announce Maya, etc. Microsoft gave us Office (albeit a subscription based one). Other than that, we got mobile apps.

  23. Thanks for the review. It will be interesting to see if this device catches on and how it evolves.

  24. I will love to see a pencil duo and interaction with Adobe software. Does the pencil work with all other iPad models?

  25. All I want is Apple to make an iPad with all the full adobe applications.

  26. Nick O'Mara - 8 years ago

    Still not sold. I use a surface pro for work and iMac at home. If it ran OSX it would be hands down the complete package, still i feel this could still be a possibility.

  27. Navin Thakur - 8 years ago

    Great presentation on ipad pro

    navin thakur

  28. Great one! looking forward to use it for new projects!

  29. Nie91087 (@Nie91087) - 8 years ago

    Sounds great! I’m now doubting on buying a macbook/macbook air or pro (13 inch) or this new iPad Pro next year… Would be even better to win it :)