12.9" M1 iPad Pro Ultimate Review after 1 Month - No More Excuses..

The 12.9 inch iPad Pro is by far the best tablet ever made. Every time I pick it up and use it, as cheesy as it sounds, it gives me a bit of joy because of how amazing the hardware is. But after a month of use and the new iPadOS 15, if I'm completely honest with myself, I wish that I didn't buy it, and if I could return it, I would. With that, even though I love it, I'm probably going to sell it and I'll explain exactly why in just a bit. Now I can already imagine the haters commenting on this review, but before you guys come at me, I ask you to take a step back, watch the whole video, and pay attention to the 5 key points that I have, and I think that most of you guys will completely agree with me that this new iPad has some inexcusable issues that you absolutely have to know about before you upgrade or buy one. I've always purchased the smaller 11 inch Pro, but this is the first year that I've bought the 12.9 inch iPad Pro for personal use, mostly because of the new mini LED display, and man is this an amazing piece of tech. It feels even thinner at this larger size, but packs an insane hardware punch, and that's without even considering the M1 chip, or the new HDR display, or even the 5G data connectivity which no Mac has. Actually, this is not only the best tablet ever made, but possibly the best mobile computing device ever made. Let me cover what I absolutely love about it before getting into the issues. After using it for a day or two for basic tasks, I had the intention to ditch my 13 inch M1 MacBook and make this my daily driver. Combined with the expensive but really high quality magic keyboard, the laptop experience was almost perfect. The more roomy keyboard layout is noticeable with the 12.9 inch model, and I had no problem spending hours typing and using the trackpad instead of using my MacBook. In fact, the experience was overall better because of three things. First off, the display. It genuinely feels expansive when you use it, almost like going from a 13 inch to a 15 inch laptop. Now that might sound crazy, but the iPad's 12.9 inch screen is actually slightly larger than a MacBook's 13.3 inch screen because of the 4 by 3 aspect ratio, and then you factor in how much closer you generally have it even with the keyboard. Then add that the display has top line reflectivity coatings, and it's rated at 1600 nits in SDR mode compared to 400 nits on MacBook Air, and this thing is much easier to use in bright rooms or outdoors. Along with that, because it's a touchscreen, I naturally use both the trackpad and the display, whichever is faster and more convenient for the task, and of course, if you want to use what is arguably the best stylus on the market for a wide variety of tasks, it's right there, and the experience is great with almost no delay thanks to the 120hz display. Now I've always wanted Face ID in a MacBook because of how quick and easy it is to log in and authenticate passwords and purchases, well it doesn't look like Apple is going to add it to the MacBook, but it's right there built into the iPad Pro and makes it so nice to use. With that, this new ultrawide camera and center stage software makes it really flexible for web conferencing either by yourself or with a few people, and in terms of microphones, this thing packs 5 of them, and the sound quality is shockingly good, even in a room with constant HVAC noise. And then let's get to the speakers. How in the world did Apple pack 4 speakers in this ultra-thin chassis that sound better and louder than a 13-inch MacBook Pro and absolutely smoke all windows laptops I've heard? Go ahead and take a listen for yourself. Because of these speakers and the new display, as you can imagine, watching movies is fantastic on the iPad. Now yes, the aspect ratio isn't the best, but I would definitely take this to watch a movie compared to my MacBook. The new mini-LED display looks fantastic with HDR content. Yes, there is some blooming, but if I had to choose between an LCD on the 11-inch or Samsung's OLED and their best tablet, I would absolutely choose this display. In normally lit rooms, contrast levels look perfectly black just like OLED. Actually, quite a bit better than Samsung's OLED display because the S7 Plus has really reflective glass which makes blacks look great and erases the main benefit of OLED, and then you have the downsides of OLED such as flicker and that it can't get super bright, maxing out at 400 nits full screen brightness compared to 625 nits for the iPad and SDR or up to 1000 for full screen HDR brightness. And of course, that crazy peak rating of 1600 nits, which although almost no HDR movies go that high, it's just clear how much more pop you get from the mini-LED screen compared to Samsung's best OLED tablet. Comparing it to the 11-inch which uses the same display tech as the previous 12.9-inch, in daylight viewing, content has more detailed and deeper shadows as well as much brighter highlights. Will you notice a difference without putting them side by side like I did? Yes, you definitely will if you upgrade, but as I mentioned, most content doesn't take full advantage of this display. Now in darker environments is where the difference is much more noticeable. HDR content looks just as good as my high-end LG OLED TV, but highlights pop even more, and in most scenes blacks look pure black compared to grey on the LCD. In general, the display is the best of the best, pretty much matching up with my $6000 Pro Display XDR, at least in short term hardware capabilities, and this is in a tablet that starts at $1099. Now sure, there are downsides, the same ones my 6K display has, if you're in a really dark room and have the brightness up and viewing bright white content on a pure black background, you can see blooming. Apple gets around this by using grey in their dark mode and grey borders around their white UI in the Apple TV app, but it's very noticeable in other apps like YouTube. You can also notice it when watching things like fireworks or other content with really small bright spots, but most of the time this isn't an issue, and in daylight viewing this has never been an issue. It's a shame that Apple did something I didn't expect, and that's on purpose limiting how you can use this hardware, which really starts to tick me off every time I start thinking about it. When I first saw the display and what it's capable of, like many others, my thoughts were to use it as an additional display for my Mac for HDR editing. You have an iPad on the go, and then you can pair it with your Mac as the cheapest way to get a 1000nit HDR image for video editing, but Apple is limiting sidecar to SDR only, even if you connect it through a thunderbolt cable that is clearly capable of passing through enough data, since it is used for full 6K 10bit HDR on their Pro Display XDR. As soon as you connect it, it is limited to good old SDR just like the old iPad, and the only reason I could think of that they wouldn't want you to do this is likely just so people can do exactly what I want to do, which is not have my 6K display and just be able to use this display for those times where I really need to grade HDR footage. But don't worry, if you want to use this display to it's full potential, like for example HDR editing, yes you can do that, as long as you're using iMovie. I have to say that I completely agree with Linus, since Apple spends nearly $20 billion a year on R&D which is insane, if their flagship tablet clearly lacks features, especially softer ones, it's because they don't want them to have them. And now it's time to get into the rest of the negatives that literally make this product almost useless for me personally, and even though it might still work great for you, we need to push Apple to allow it to do more because the hardware is insanely good and the only problem it has is because Apple wants it to be that way. When Apple showed Tim Cook sneaking into their own building to transplant the M1 chip into the iPad, everybody was absolutely shocked. Apple went from showing a chip for just a few seconds a few years ago to spending so much time on it with awesome animations and action scenes. The way they marketed the M1 chip and it's capabilities on stage made most of us take this as a sign that Apple finally wants the iPad Pro to be a Pro device. Now I know that some of you will say that it already is depending on what you do, and yes you're right, while others will say that it was never meant to be a laptop replacement, some even going as far as saying it is perfectly fine and actually expected to spend $2000 on an iPad and then also buying a MacBook, and clearly Apple wants you to do just that along with also an iMac for your home as they showed off at WWDC with software that is straight up mind-blowing magic while at the same time not even giving us a way to format a hard drive in the Files app, but hey, at least we finally get a status bar on our tablet that costs over $2000. On one end we have some of the best software in the world, and on the other hand we have a thunderbolt port that Apple marketed like crazy that can't even connect to many of my thunderbolt hard drives, they just don't show up because it's not the exact format the iPadOS needs, whereas Android was doing this back in 2014 and even with iPadOS 15 10Gbps drives still connect over 5Gbps for some reason. There's also no eject button to properly eject a hard drive, and even though I make sure all the apps that access external drives are closed, I still occasionally get errors on my 4TB SSD and they won't mount unless I run error correction, which of course you also can't do on an iPad, so you need to have a Mac even though iPads have supported USB type C drives since 2018. Apple is showing off the iPad being able to connect to external displays, even their $6000 one, but not really telling you that they limited the usability so much so that it is almost useless. On the iPad itself they created software that can instantly resize any app to work side by side and adjust, and it can even float around where you want it, but if you connect it to an external screen not only can it not expand the usable space, but it limits it to mirroring the exact content on the display and it somehow can't even use the full 16x9 screen. Oh yeah I guess I know, Apple doesn't want you to do that. Almost every reviewer that got an M1 iPad early said the same exact thing, the hardware is incredible, and now we just have to wait a few weeks for iPadOS 15 to finally take full advantage of it, but as many of you know iPadOS 15 was one of the most disappointing software updates we've ever had for the iPad, and unfortunately for those of you and me that ordered an iPad at launch, your return date ended on Friday, two days before the release of iPadOS 15. Sure it's great that the iPad can finally rotate to iPhone apps, and yay we can finally put widgets wherever we want to, how wonderful, but what about allowing apps like Procreate or Lightroom to use more than 5GB of RAM to increase their performance since the M1 starts with 8GB of RAM and it can go all the way up to 16GB just like the M1 Macs. Nope, we still have that 5GB limit with iPadOS 15. What's even more crazy is that in an M1 Mac that can actually take advantage of 16GB of RAM, you have the choice to not pay $200 for it if you don't need it, but you still want the extra storage. But guess what, with an M1 iPad Pro Apple forces you to get 16GB of RAM in this year's model if you want 1TB of storage. And no, it's not free, the 1TB configuration costs $300 more this year compared to last year. Now $100 of that is for the mini LED display which is fair, but the other $200 is for that 16GB of RAM which will literally make no difference unless you open 25 apps, 20 browser tabs with background videos, 2 high end games, multiple photo and video editing apps, export professional 4K video and 42MP edited RAW photos at the same exact time. And if you do all of that, you will then see a difference, and you will save a whole 12 seconds on exporting both at the same time, and then after you do that at the same time, if you go back through your apps, one of those games will have to reload on the 8GB model. Now sure, the M1 chip is an absolute beast that nothing else can touch, and it destroys every other tablet on the market, even ones that will come out in the future, but why is CM's $300 tablet much more flexible and capable in its software than the iPad Pro? Now I'm not asking Apple to make an iPad with macOS, even though I know a lot of people would love that. I'm asking them to stop showing off the massive performance of this iPad while blatantly limiting the software so there's no way they can use it as your main mobile pro device even though it can cost up to $2750 paired with their keyboard. In the past we thought that Apple was limiting the software because they didn't want people to buy iPads that were cheaper than MacBooks, but then they started to raise the price and they gave the iPad Pro USB type C along with dedicated iPad software which started to get our hopes up. They then released the most expensive keyboard accessory for a tablet, which made the iPad even more expensive than a MacBook, making it even more likely that Apple would finally unleash the iPad Pro, but they didn't, and we chalked it up to maybe the older mobile chip. But about a month ago that changed. They raised prices again, at least for the 12.9 inch model, and put the same M1 chip that is in 5 different Macs and the same RAM and the same SSD, so there were no more hardware excuses. This thing could easily run full macOS if Apple wanted it to, but now we know Apple's true colors. If Apple wanted the iPad Pro to be a pro device it would be, but they don't, and now I don't think they ever will because if there was ever a time to finally fix these artificial software limitations and release pro apps for it, now would be the best time to market that alongside with the M1. Heck, even if they just wanted to limit that software to the M1 powered iPad Pros going forward that would get a ton of people to buy them or upgrade, and most people wouldn't complain since the iPad could outrun even gaming laptops even in software like beta premiere pro which is not yet fully optimized. But now, there are no more excuses, and any small software fixes that they do decide to make will take another year when we get iPadOS 16 at the next WWDC. Now for me, the M1 iPad Pro is unfortunately still just a high end tablet like it was years ago when it was noticeably cheaper. Now sure it does have more performance than before, but for the capabilities that it has I have never complained that it was too slow with the older A12Z or even A12X in 2018, and even though now it does have Thunderbolt, transfer speeds are still much slower than with the Mac, and compatibility is extremely limited. The iPad Pro is still just a fancy tablet, but just more expensive this time, and Apple is doing everything they can to keep you using both an iPad and a MacBook, and after weeks of hauling both of them in my bag where this iPad actually weighs more than my MacBook, I'm using it less and less, and I'm mainly just using it for tablet tasks. And if I have to use both as I do, the 11 inch makes much more sense, and at that point the 2018 model is almost as capable as the new M1 iPad Pro. Apple could have made this the ultimate computing device, a full on computer replacement like in their what's a computer ad a few years ago, but instead they made that video private and instead decided that if they can get you to buy an iPad, a MacBook, and an iMac, that is the best thing to do. Now sure, the M1 iPad is the best tablet ever, as I explained at the start of my video, it has insane potential, but at this time it is still a tablet, albeit a very very expensive one. Thank you guys for watching this video, if you enjoyed it you can click that circle above to subscribe, that would help us reach our goal of a million subscribers before the end of the year, we are really trying hard and hopefully you guys like the honest content. Click that video over there if you want to check out another one, this has been Max, and I'll see you in the next video.