Some new Apple products have a whiff of "finally" about them. The new MacBook Air, with modern accoutrements such as a Retina brandish forth with an first-class keyboard and a respectable 256GB of storage, for $999? Finally!

The new iPad Pro, even so, is the furthest thing possible from a "finally" product. Later all, the previous iPad Pro, which shipped in November 2018, is hardly an antiquarian. In fact, information technology's and then capable that its operating organisation, iPadOS, is still playing grab-up with the hardware's potential.

Still, just a petty more than 16 months afterwards that auto's arrival, Apple is back with some other new iPad Pro. It'south an incremental upgrade to its meaty predecessor, which trimmed down the tablet's bezels, souped up its processor, incorporated Face ID and USB-C, and added ultra-clever magnetic inductive charging for a new version of the Pencil stylus. This time effectually, Apple gave the iPad Pro another performance boost and substantially upgraded its camera system. In a beginning for an Apple product, it also congenital in a lidar scanner for augmented reality distance-measuring.

Judged on its existing and new merits, this tablet is a highly evolved delight. Merely if you already take the 2018 iPad Pro, you would demand to exist awfully serious well-nigh tablet photography and/or AR to find it a compelling upgrade, at prices that start at $799 for the 11″ model and $999 for its 12.9″ large brother.

Coming in May: The Magic Keyboard example (correct) that turns the iPad Pro into a newfangled sort of laptop. [Photo: courtesy of Apple tree]

Hold on, though. In May, Apple tree plans to release an accompaniment that may have more bear upon on the way people employ an iPad than the new version of the tablet itself will—and information technology's compatible with both the 2020 and 2018 models. The Magic Keyboard case volition give the iPad Pro a laptop-caliber backlit keyboard and trackpad, forth with the power to swivel the tablet to the angle of your choice and charge it without commandeering its USB-C port. For those willing to pay the price ($299 for the xi″ version, $349 for 12.9″), information technology looks like a productivity game changer. (Lower-end iPads will get cheaper, less extravagantly innovative keyboard/trackpad cases from Logitech.)

For the past week, I've been living with a new 12.nine″ iPad Pro provided past Apple tree. I used information technology with the $129 Pencil and $199 Smart Keyboard Folio (an existing keyboard case available in a slightly updated version) to perform tasks such every bit writing this article. I likewise tried iPadOS's new cursor support by using Apple tree's Magic Trackpad. As someone who'due south spent—this is a conservative guesstimate—2,500 hours working on a 2018 iPad Pro, the new one largely felt like the old one. Mostly, I felt like I was priming myself for the era that will brainstorm one time the iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard bring the virtually laptop-similar iPad experience still.

Built for pros

In the early days of the iPad, before Apple started taking the device's cameras seriously, it was pretty much conventional wisdom that shooting photos and video with a tablet was non merely a bad idea but kind of embarrassing. Today, iPad photography may remain a niche activeness. In a wholly unscientific Twitter poll, I asked iPad users how much they used the rear camera: Just 3% reported doing so "frequently." Xiii percent said they used it "sometimes" and a whopping fourscore% said "never or almost never."

The iPad Pro'due south large foursquare bump holds the new ultra-wide photographic camera and lidar scanner. [Photo: courtesy of Apple]

Using an iPad Pro every bit a camera in the way nosotros use smartphones equally our constant photographic companions still isn't fun; at a pound and up, they're as well unwieldy. And did I mention you lot can't stick one in your pocket?

But fifty-fifty Apple isn't positioning the tablet equally a snapshot taker. Instead, information technology sees a market for the iPad Pro among filmmakers, YouTubers, and other creatives for whom the tablet can be an all-in-one studio in a way that even a powerful MacBook Pro is not. With that in listen, it added an ultra-wide camera (complementing the existing wide-angle ane) and 4K video shooting, matching features available with the iPhone xi. It besides upgraded the tablet's v microphones to "studio quality" units designed to pick up sound ameliorate in tricky situations, which volition benefit even non-and then-pro experiences such equally FaceTime calls and Zoom conferences.

Along with these audio/visual upgrades, the new iPad Pro sports Apple's new eight-core A12Z Bionic processor. Information technology's not a dramatic advance on the old model's A12X. When I ran the GeekBench 5 benchmark on the previous and new tablets, the CPU scores were a wash: around 1,100 in both cases. In the compute (GPU) tests, the new iPad Pro got a score of most ten,000, xvi% faster than the earlier model's score of 8600.

As a camera, the iPad Pro is more studio equipment than handheld snapshot taker. [Photo: courtesy of Apple]

Benchmarks, however, don't tell the whole story. Apple says that improvements to the new iPad Pro's thermal engineering assist the tablet bargain better with computationally-intensive tasks of the sort that content creators perform. My experiments here were encouraging. An 82MB photo that took five seconds to open up in Photoshop on the previous iPad Pro opened in 3.5 seconds on the new model—snappier enough to make a departure. Exporting a 2.6GB video from iMovie took five minutes 24 seconds on the old iPad Pro and iv minutes five seconds on the new one.

The new iPad Pro's hardware feels like it has sprinted ahead of most available software.

A more striking factoid: Exporting the same video from iMovie on Apple tree's new MacBook Pro took a hair over 14 minutes, more than three times every bit long equally on the new iPad Pro. That might not be due solely to processor functioning, since the Mac and iPad versions of iMovie aren't identical. But always since the first iPad Pro debuted in 2015, Apple tree has been proverb that the tablet is faster than most laptops—and it's nice to see that the company isn't washed optimizing information technology for industrial-strength tasks.

It'll be nicer withal when more than pro-level iPad creativity apps get in to harness all the tablet's computational horsepower. That's happening, just slowly; like the 2018 iPad Pro, the new ane feels like its hardware has sprinted ahead of almost bachelor software.

All in on AR

Apple tree calls the new iPad Pro "the world's best device for augmented reality." That claim surprised me until I looked dorsum and saw that it said the same affair about the previous iPad Pro. It's just that final fourth dimension around, there was so much new stuff that the AR attribute wasn't paramount.

Is the relatively hefty iPad Pro indeed the ideal gadget for consuming AR? Definitely not if you're gallivanting around capturing Pokémon (a pastime that is best to postpone at the moment in whatsoever event). But many AR scenarios are closer to dwelling house, such as measuring stuff, positioning virtual furniture in real-world spaces, and playing games that don't involve much roaming. In these cases, the tablet's large screen makes for a more immersive feel than peering at the hybrid real/digital world through a phone screen.

An upcoming version of the Ikea Place app scans rooms and detects their current furnishings. [Photo: courtesy of Apple]

The new iPad Pro's new lidar scanner—which sits with the cameras on the back in an iPhone 11-like crash-land—can quickly detect objects (and people) up to five meters away and determine how they're positioned in relation to each other. That's a boon for AR applications, which demand to have an understanding of your real-earth environment then they tin can lay digital imagery on pinnacle of it. The implications that arrive beyond the new iPad Pro: Our own Mark Sullivan has reported that Apple plans to add similar engineering science to the next iPhone. When and if Apple releases AR glasses, lidar could also exist a major part of the recipe. (The tech might too help with photographic effects—like background-blurring bokeh—but is used simply for AR in the new iPad Pro, which limits portrait-mode photos to its forepart-facing photographic camera.)

As of now, with existing apps written using Apple tree's ARKit framework, lidar's impact is noticeable but not transformative. With the old iPad Pro (or an iPhone), orienting AR apps involves an inelegant process of waving the tablet around while information technology displays messages coaching y'all to continue your jostling until information technology'due south identified apartment surfaces. Thanks to lidar, the new iPad Pro dispenses with this rigmarole and is ready to go nigh instantly. This speedup certainly enhances apps such as Apple's Measure (a virtual tape mensurate) and iScape (a landscaping app that lets you plant digital foliage in your yard).

With lidar, AR apps such as the iScape landscaping tool are set up to go almost instantly.

But the existent reason to be excited about lidar is its potential to unleash new features in apps that are written specifically to accept advantage of it. Apple has been teasing several such products as part of its iPad Pro rollout. A new version of Ikea Place, for instance, volition scan your room, place the furnishings y'all've already got, and advise new items to complement them. And a game called Hot Lava volition plop downwards virtual patches of lava for you to jump over, positioning them with more sophistication than existing AR apps, which tend to by and large notice the most obvious surfaces such equally tabletops and floors.

What AR needs most of all are killer apps that teeming masses of people want to employ. The app industry is all the same struggling to come up with them, which is why the four-year-oldPokémon Become remains the category's become-to instance. Lidar may provide some of the necessary inspiration. Ultimately, I'm more excited about the engineering science in telephone class than on a tablet: The 1.4-lb. 12.9″ iPad speedily got irksome when I held it upwardly for extended AR sessions. (The 1-lb. eleven″ model would be less of a scattering.)

Here comes the cursor

Total disclosure: Afterwards using diverse iPads as primary computing devices for more than than eight years, I've never craved mouse or trackpad input. When I reviewed the original iPad Pro in 2015, I even helpfully pointed out that "THE LACK OF A MOUSE IS THE WHOLE Bespeak!!!" (yes, in bold caps with iii exclamation points). I remain grateful that Apple devoted its intellectual uppercase to building a impact-first platform rather than trying to split the difference with the PC, every bit Microsoft's Surface has always done, to uneven effect.

But . . .

Having spent a footling time with the iPad Pro and Apple'due south Magic Trackpad, I'm sold on the new cursor support. It's available for all iPads in the latest iPadOS update, but leaves me even more impatient for the iPad Pro's trackpad-equipped Magic Keyboard to show up in May.

Rather than grafting the Mac's venerable pointy cursor onto the iPad interface, Apple tree rethought what mouse-mode input should be like in a mostly touch environment. The cursor is a circle—evoking a fingertip—that morphs with balletic grace as you slide it over elements such as buttons. It'southward one of the nearly polished pieces of software functionality that Apple tree or anyone else has introduced lately, and the starting time major payoff of Apple tree's decision last year to rebrand the iPad's version of iOS as iPadOS.

Using the Magic Trackpad—a colossal-size external Bluetooth model—I selected jumbo blocks of text, used two fingers to scroll through documents, and right-clicked to reach heretofore inaccessible menus in web apps. Everything just worked. (Well, 99% of everything—the Todoist app didn't always annals clicks on its checkboxes; an update is in development.) Developers that want to shape-shift the cursor in ways tailored to their apps will be able to practice so through software updates. That customization seems like it will be particularly important for productivity apps; Apple itself plans to release new versions of its Pages, Numbers, and Keynote soon.

Historically, Apple tree has often been at its best when it'south ignored pleas for new features until it'south felt like it has something that'due south fully baked. Ane classic case: cut and paste, which didn't come to the iPhone until two years after the smartphone'southward 2007 release. In the case of mouse-cursor support, Apple is delivering something that people began request for close to a decade agone, when the iPad was new. But we're getting the kind of carefully considered support the platform deserves. And it's here for every iPad that can run iPadOS thirteen, non simply the new iPad Pro.