Apple IPad Pro 12.9” 5th Gen 256GB

Design

The design has stayed the same which is fantastic. And this all the way to the minute details of dimension. I say this is cool because a lot of people out there have cases, the magic keyboard, and things like that, that already work with the existing Apple iPad Pro 11 2020 and 12.9 inch iPad Pros of 2020. So the fact that Apple kept them the same design is absolutely a good thing. Now, I will say that the new 12.9 inch iPad pro is heavier about half a pound heavier and is about half a millimeter thicker than the prior generation.

Fortunately, it’s only half a millimeter, so it shouldn’t make a huge difference for a lot of accessories out there. So same design pretty much overall. I did mention the magic keyboard. Now it does come in a new white color. There is only a black one currently available now. Included in the box, Apple is now upgrading the charger. It is going from an 18-watt charger to a new 20-watt charger.

Improved cameras

Turn this guy around and we’re going to talk about some cameras. Cameras, we’re talking about cameras. So Apple has upgraded the cameras of the Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2021). They call them pro cameras now, even though the wide and ultra-wide are still the same resolutions, 12 megapixels for the wide and 10 megapixels for the ultra-wide. But there are some changes here, thanks to that new ISP and everything. The new camera supports Smart HDR3 for the first time. We have a lens that corrects you for that ultra-wide-angle lens. We saw that on the iPhone 12 line. There is an advanced red-eye correction.

We have audio zoom which works this way. When you are doing the video, which actually kind of like zooms in the audio. So what you’re listening to far away, looks at that subject and boosts that audio a little bit. There also is an extended dynamic range for video up to 30 frames per second. There is cinematic video stabilization on 4k. Before it was available on 1080p and 720p. So new cinematic stabilization on 4k videos and it can record audio in stereo.

FaceTime camera

Let’s also talk about the new FaceTime cameras here. So Apple did update its true depth camera system. So I guess not a FaceTime camera, the true depth camera system. It’s been upgraded from 7 megapixels to 12 megapixels. There is a new 122 field of view super wide. And it has a feature called center stage, which is using that new neural engine and the new processor to be able to actually see the subject in the video and then scope in on them and always keep them in a frame and even move it around. On that new front-facing camera, there is a lens correction, which is important for that really wide point of view, smart HDR3,1080P video and there’s extended dynamic range for videos at up to 30 frames per second. And finally cinematic video stabilization.

Apple M1 chipset

Internally, Apple made some changes. Apple has moved to the M1 Processor on the iPad line with Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2021). Yeah, the powerful processor that I was running in its MacBook is now the same one on the iPad Pro. So the M! Is in here, which has a bunch of benefits. It is up to 50% faster in terms of the CPU. The GPU is up to 40% faster than the age 12Z bionic processor that we had in the last generation, iPad Pros. It has twice as fast storage things as that updated processor. And a new 16-core neural engine. The port on here. It is still a USB-C port. But Apple has moved from just a USB-C port to a new USB four-port with type C that also supports Thunderbolt. So we’re getting a lot of backward compatibilities here.

We get full Thunderbolt, which has 40 gigabits per second in transfer speeds. You can now do up to 10-gigabit ethernet. It also supports USB 4, which is 40 gigabytes per second, USB 3.1 gen two, which is 10 gigabits per second. And of course Thunderbolt 3. That includes the Pro display XDR up to 6K resolution which is pretty incredible. Also, we have 5G coming to the Apple iPad Pro 11 2021. 5G, just like we saw on the iPhone 12 line is now coming to the iPad. So that rounds it out.

Storage

Let’s round out this article. The last couple of things that I want to mention that are important, big changes from the prior gen to this one. We were seeing increased capacity. Now there are 2TB capacities that you can get before it was capped at one terabyte. The Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2021) RAM has been increased. The base models before had the highest option 6 gigs of RAM. Now we see 8 gigs of RAM on them. And then the higher 1 terabyte in 2 terabyte sizes have 16 gigs of RAM installed on them. Part of all this is driven by the new M1 Processor there. The storage on the inside will be twice as fast up to twice as fast.