You’d expect me to be excited about this new iPad Pro. We’re app reviewers, and I suppose a new app with revolutionary capabilities and features would excite us more. Expected, right?
They released an iPad Pro in 2020; we weren’t expecting another one so soon. Of course, this one has some game-changing technology – the amazing M1 chip. Honestly, all of Apple’s new products are ‘game-changing’ and ‘revolutionary’. Five generations later, could this finally be THE ‘PROEST‘ iPad Pro Apple has ever made?
It packs an 8-core CPU that is 75x faster than the first-gen iPad Pro and has 1500x faster graphics performance. Impressive, right? Indeed it is! But to what end? When are we going to get tired of shinier, faster and cooler gadgets we actually don’t use?
2TB storage, Thunderbolt and 5G are sort of impressive. The beautiful new Liquid Retina XDR display will be great for creators. I wonder how many serious creators would choose an iPad over a Mac though. But that’s a story for another day. The specs on the new iPad Pro 2021 are targeted towards pro-end users.
The last iPad Pro I got was the 2018 12.9 inch, 1TB iPad Pro. From where I stand, 2TB might be tempting, but I don’t even use half of the 1TB I already have. This is partly because I have iCloud and OneDrive cloud services that give me an extra 2TB combined. We hope Apple will come to realise that the iPad Pro has already been overkill since its launch. What it needs now, more than a faster CPU, is an operating system to match its hardware. We’re still waiting for Photoshop, which was meant to come with the iPad Pro 2018. Could this new iPad Pro finally bring the full desktop experience of Photoshop to the iPad Pro? I doubt it, but I hope I am wrong.
If you’ve never had an iPad Pro before, or you’re using the first-generation iPad Pro with 128GB, perhaps the new 2021 iPad Pro will be worth buying. It’s not worth upgrading if you’re on a newer version of the device. We certainly don’t feel the pressure to upgrade our devices.
