I’ve been looking forward to replacing my 10.5” iPad pro for about a year now, and I’ve wanted to love my new 11” M4 iPad Pro, but I fear it may not be doing it for me. Like, the new iPad is so nice. But I just have this nagging feeling that a lot of the niceness comes at the expense of usability.
- This is the thinnest and lightest 11” iPad ever! Well, unless you use it with the keyboard, which most people (including me) seem to be doing. This iPad is far heavier than the 10.5” iPad Pro it’s replacing—by 43%. It’s kind of nuts how many compromises were made to create this luxurious Magic Keyboard with its theatrical cantilevered-iPad effect, let’s enumerate them:
- It’s cool that there’s a trackpad on the keyboard. The trackpad is very nice. Using a cursor on an ipad doesn’t work as well as touching the screen, though—but, compared to the Smart Keyboard Cover, the screen has been pushed back too far to touch it comfortably while you’re typing, so you’re incentivized to use the trackpad. I think it’s an inferior experience to a Macintosh and to an iPad with a screen you can reach.
- The rubber stuff on the outside… it seems fragile. I can’t imagine that it would still look decent 6 months from now, can you?
- This thing is so, so heavy. I’m a little surprised that reviewers never made a bigger deal out of this. The weight of the Magic Keyboard is a disaster. It’s conceptually at odds with the purpose of the iPad as a portable device. It’s as though the design team thought, “cool, we can cantilever the iPad an inch” and made every other design choice subsidiary to that.
- The palm rests appear to be quarter-inch slabs of solid aluminum. If this thing has to counterbalance the iPad on the other end, couldn’t they have stuffed some extra batteries in there?
- I’m a little concerned about the long-term effect of smushing the top of the screen against the bare aluminum of the palm rest when the Magic Keyboard is closed. Wouldn’t a little rubber lip in the corner be nice?
- The key action is good, as expected. But, again, it’s smaller and heavier than my 2017 12” Macbook (which, despite its pokiness and declining battery, may simply be the World’s Greatest Writing Computer, never to be replaced).
- I know iPadOS is a wildcard in the days before WWDC, but it’s not easy to use control center, and not easy to use with an external screen because the OS doesn’t let you configure the precise position of your iPad relative to your screen (ie, there’s no way to choose “to the left and slightly below”).
- The squeeze-click with the pencil is nice. That’s not a downgrade.
- You do sound insane when you say: “When you are using the iPad in a darkened room and set the screen brightness to 25% and look at solid blocks of medium-to-dark-grays, there is a static film-grain pattern on the screen as you move the content around,” but it can also be true that a $1600 tablet shouldn’t put you in a position where you can say that sentence.
