The new M1 iPad Pro review we are going to see today. It looks almost exactly the same as the last one but there are a couple things that are new about this, that make it even more of the ultimate iPad. So the last iPad Pro wasn't that long ago you can see, it had an A12Z chip and that was a specification upgrade from the previous iPad Pro which had an A12X, but now again in 2021 we have an even more powerful chip so this iPad Pro has apple's M1 inside. The A12X and the A12Z were already Apple-designed silicon for the iPad so while we know M1 is a different breed since it's also Apple-designed silicon, this is a massive performance leap forward. M1 in this new iPad Pro means that now internally this tablet is basically the same as the M1 MacBook air, a full-blown computer that means an 8-core CPU 8-core GPU 16-core Neural Engine and for the first time, apple is just openly telling us how much ram is in the iPad, so that's 8 GB in the lower storage versions and 16 GB of ram in the 1 TB or 2 TB iPad configurations.
It's shocking to you that an even more powerful even faster chip continues to crush iPad os in its latest version like, even the heaviest most graphically demanding apps are snappy and blazing fast that's probably also as you'd expect but also with all this ram, it really seems like nothing ever needs to drop from memory like we're already used to a bunch of the most recent apps staying in ram on the iPad and that's great but here even the oldest heaviest apps in multitasking tray just pick right up where they left off like lightroom from hours ago, games, streaming apps. It really feels like this iPad's superpower here stuff just happily sits in ram all day and is always ready to go, so it's literally 30% to 45% faster than the last iPad Pro which was already faster than pretty much every other tablet. So we knew apple silicon was special but it had some ridiculous things also. It's actually kind of a struggle to find the places where a regular user might find this extra performance here, that's the point a regular user is never going to use all of this performance. There are actually a few Pro workflows that might be taxing the current iPads or might benefit from the extra headroom in the new one. There's another 30% improvement for you if you're doing a bunch of batch Lightroom imports and exports for example or just a bunch of heavier things like that in succession then of course this new iPad is going to be great and then all that ram makes the heavier edits in Lumafusion or bigger projects with a lot more layers in Photoshop that type of stuff more snappy, that's the real high-end benefit here.
But there are a few other new things with this iPad Pro too, aside from just performance. It is a little bit thicker and heavier actually. It's actually to accommodate the new M1 stuff the new display but also a little bit of a bigger battery physically speaking in this bigger one, so apple making a product slightly thicker for a slightly bigger battery. The cellular option is also now 5G which is pretty sweet so now in addition to the antenna bands, the cellular iPad now has this little plastic cutout at the bottom next to the speakers just like the 5G iPhone have on the sides and that USB-c port at the bottom now that there's an M1 chip inside is now a thunderbolt port with USB 4 speeds up to 40 GB per second throughput which is massive so if you want to plug in an Ethernet dongle here you can get 10 GB Ethernet, but also that's a huge win for faster file transfers again if you're importing like a ton of photos straight from the camera through a cable or even videos it's enough bandwidth to now really make a difference. You can also plug straight into the Pro display XDR and drive it at full resolution 6K.
The most interesting unexpected change to this new iPad is now actually the front-facing camera so now they didn't move it to the middle at the top where it should be but they did add an ultra-wide camera. This new camera setup with a 122-degree field of view is great for video calls, video chats, face times that so basically when you open the camera app for a selfie you'll see the normal view but when you zoom out you'll see a whole lot more of the scene with that ultra-wide. It's heavily distorted near the edges even with distortion correction turned on in settings not sure that is actually correcting anything. but an ultra-wide camera is really useful despite not solving the problem of being in the wrong place, when you're in a supported app there's a new feature called center stage that kicks in and does a pretty good job of basically following a face around that ultra-wide frame so it zooms in a bit and focuses on the face and keeps it kind of near the middle and if more than one face gets into the frame it also tries to stay wide enough to keep them both and follow both of them. Overall it's pretty simple just a sort of a neat touch but it works pretty smoothly most of the time and it a nice addition that just makes a lot of sense on the iPad also if you ever want to turn this off you can jump into the settings app pick the app that you want to turn it off, also finally let face id work for more angles it doesn't it's literally just the camera so the dot projector and infrared stuff are all working the same way it normally does, just the camera's wider.
There's one last feature that is new on this iPad Pro and really does make a pretty big difference and that is, screen which had a bigger 12.9 inch iPad Pro you've got a new liquid retina XDR display. it's pretty sweet but this smaller 11 inch iPad Pro basically has the same screen as last year but this new screen is awesome mainly it just it gets way brighter which is immediately noticeable way more visible if you're near a window or in a bright environment and full HDR support and better contrast. This M1 iPad Pro is pretty much exactly the same as last year's which is to say really good so the quad speakers are still super loud and sound great the microphones are still awesome the body is still all-metal same design and the dual cameras plus lidar are still here on the back and still great for a tablet plus actually the M1 chip now allows for smart HDR3 from the rear cameras.
There is a new magic keyboard for the iPad Pro, people were wondering about slightly different but it's functionally exactly the same really is just adjusted slightly for the half a millimeter of extra thickness for the iPad so you can still totally use the old magic keyboard which works perfect and the battery life even though a bunch of variables has changed still feels about the same so at the end of the day it's rated for the same 10 hours as the last one. The magic of the M1 is really giving great standby time but able to run through the battery a little faster at full brightness with high-intensity stuff going on especially when connected to the magic keyboard. This M1 iPad Pro is the ultimate specification upgrade because again fundamentally it's just crushing the same things that any previous iPad Pro could do just even faster with a better screen.