First impression of Apple iPad Pro 2018 – Incredibly thin!! – Confirmed??
Wrapping up a busy October that might sort of bleed into November a little bit, Apple just held its second fall event recently for some of their most creative products. We got to see the return of Apple iPad Pro 2018 which you could say a long overdue but it is even thinner than the original with a much better display and better internal so that gets added to the lineup.
They also dropped a new Space Gray Mac Mini again which was super long overdue with much-improved power and I/O which is interesting. Apart from that the highlight of the show was the last announcement which was the brand new Apple iPad pro. This is a complete redesign of which many of us are waiting. Basically, a refresh to make these iPads look more modern and kind of like new iPhones. There are two sizes, an 11-inch screen and a 12.9-inch screen and thanks to much thinner bezels as you can see on all four sides.
The 11 inches iPad has the same footprint as the previous 10.5 inch iPad but the new 12.9 inches has the shrunken bezels to be now smaller. It has super boxy shape as the sides are almost sharp to hold like a MacBook Pro and the entire chassis is 5.9 MM thick which is ridiculous, however, It doesn’t seem if the battery is going to suffer for this thinness but it’s very striking to look at and to hold, it just kind of feels as if you are holding a display. In fact, Apple iPad Pro 2018 is so thin that it now has a camera bump which kind of ruins the possibility of it is like this completely flat tablet on a flat surface also but people still use it to scan documents and things like that so it is still there and just the whole thing is so flat and boxy which looks better in person than the sloppier softer corners of the old iPads.
It is still an LCD panel with a very high resolution yet that taller aspect ratio so apps will be fine. The Apple iPad Pro consists of antenna lines, the speaker grille cutouts and the flat edges that can literally stand it up by itself like iPhone 5 and 5s, feels very new in this new shell. There is also now no home buttons, just face ID that works in any orientation so it doesn’t matter how you hold the tablet, it will unlock which is dope. The new internals with a brand new 12x bionic chip with an 8 core CPU and 7 cores GPU, a 7NM chip, with these features it is got to be powerful enough to push all these pixels. You cannot also forget the 120 Hertz refresh rate with more of the internal storage starting at 64GB that goes all the up to a terabyte.
And the most shocking feature coming out is these new iPads have USB type-c so you can plug in USB-C accessories, charged by USB-C and you can even now plug into an iPhone and charge that with the iPads battery over USB-C. So, clearly Apple sees the benefits of this port in their pro tablet and that is definitely a lot earlier to say that we would have an iPad with USB-C.
You might remember the Apple Pencil and the really unfortunate charging situation with lightning in the old iPad pro well with no lightning port that is obviously going to have to change instead this is way better, the new Apple Pencil has magnets and a flat side and a dedicated spot on the side of the iPad Pro where it just snaps on pairs and wirelessly charges right there, way better than the last one. This new Pencil now has a touch sensitive area at the bottom that supports taps and double taps so you can double tap in the Notes app, for example, to switch between the tools and the eraser. And, it looks like third-party apps will be able to support this too when it comes out so there was a photoshop demo on stage that uses this tapping for zoom. There is also a new smart keyboard case, of course. One thing that is missing from this new iPad Pro is that there is no headphone jack. Apple has introduced the new USB-C port which is the biggest breakthrough. We don’t seem to need it anymore but then we will be seeing them keep it around longer like desktops and laptops in places where it is definitely more often used.
So for the overall view just from the first impressions of holding Apple iPad Pro 2018, this is the best tablet on the planet. And, it is not like that is a surprise because the Apple iPad Pro 2018 is one of pretty much three tablets that are actually still worth buying. With this new iPad pro, the gap just got even wider for everyone to catch up too. It is also going to be expensive like the iPad Pro has been for a while, starting a $799 for 64GB. You can go to Apple site now and spec all the way up to 1,899 dollars for a 1TB, 12.9 inches iPad pro with LTE.
