OLED iPad Pro gathers praise in early review, battery life surprisingly impressive despite powerful M4 SoC and thinner design
Apple unveiled updates to its iPad Pro lineup during its recent 'Let Loose' event earlier this month, marking the first refresh to the lineup in nearly two years. Equipped with the brand new M4 SoC and a tandem OLED display, the latest iPad Pro models offer welcome improvements while featuring an admirably slim design at just 5.3 and 5.1 mm for the 11- and 13-inch versions respectively.
Prominent tech YouTuber Dave2D has already shared his review of the device, indicating largely positive impressions. Interestingly, Dave, who has been sticking with his A12X-powered 2018 iPad Pro and hasn't felt compelled to upgrade in the past 5 years, has finally deemed the latest iPad Pros worthy enough for him to upgrade to.
Dave praised the revamped displays featuring a tandem OLED configuration, incorporating dual emissive layers to achieve iPhone-level brightness of up to 1000 nits on the much larger iPad screens. OLED characteristics such as true blacks, exceptional colour accuracy, and impressively low response times - now just 5 ms as opposed to the mini-LED version's 39 ms - make the new iPad screens better than ever before. However, iPad Pro users will now have to deal with the fear of burn-in, something that users of the previous mini-LED version never had to deal with.
Moving on to performance, the M4 performs similarly as expected from the leaked benchmark scores, with the M4 absolutely smoking its predecessors in synthetic benchmarks such as Geekbench. However, as Dave notes, the practical differences between the M2 and the M4 iPad Pros may not be readily discernible to users, particularly for everyday tasks, which portrays the role of iPadOS as being a limiting factor for maximising the device's true capabilities. Pro apps, especially from Apple, do take advantage of the new M4 SoC in certain professional workflows, but third-party Pro apps for the iPad are still few and far between.
Despite the massively enhanced processing power, tandem OLED screens, and the significantly slimmer enclosure, the new iPad Pros maintain respectable battery life, albeit being marginally worse than the 12.9-inch mini-LED version as per Dave's testing. While streaming Netflix at maximum brightness, the 13-inch OLED iPad Pro lasted an impressive 6 hrs and 12 mins, while the 12.9-inch mini-LED version lasted slightly longer at 6 hours and 42 mins. Further, when running Genshin Impact at maximum brightness, the OLED iPad Pro even managed to beat the 12.9-inch min-LED version (curr. $1,128 on Amazon), which speaks for the efficiency of the new M4 SoC.
Other aspects of the new iPad Pro were also praised, including the lighter and thinner design, the new placement of the webcam which allows for better use in landscape mode, as well as the new Apple Pencil Pro, whose new squeeze feature was deemed especially useful by the reviewer.
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