Before I get into the more ‘review’ like bits, first some background on my iPad usage and what led up to buying this particular device.
I jumped on the iPad bandwagon with gen one and was pretty much on each wave after until the iPad Air. At which point kids happened. After not having broken any of my expensive gadgets I went through 2 iPad airs and had to manually replace the screen a third time not to long after we got the new house.
I stayed with he air because when it broke the first time it wasn’t worth the upgrade to the second gen. air. And the second time I just couldn’t afford it. And the third time I really couldn’t justify it because I had gotten a very nice laptop. Though I also didn’t see much reason to upgrade either. Didn’t want the big screen of the PRO and Touch ID was tempting... but not the 4-500 (or more since I did that one myself) more than the repair it was going to cost me interesting.
When my self repaired screen started goofing up (never got it back on properly) and the home button failed I more or less sat it aside and have been mostly iPad free for the past year. I kept thinking I should cut off my grandfathered unlimited plan... and really I had reached the point where I was going to. And then I saw it.
It.... was someone in front of me in a meeting casually jotting down their notes with an Apple Pencil and iPad. Hand resting on the screen and merrily scribbling away just like it was a sheet of paper. I was mesmerized. Why?
Over the years I have spent absurd amounts of money in search of a digital solution to note taking. NOTHING worked on the front of trying to use handwriting. Pressure sensitive stylus on the early generation iPad made it to the point you could do reasonable art work. But they were not fine enough for note taking at anything approaching natural pace. Drawing wasn’t exactly a great solution. It tended to require lots of tool changes and zooming in and out. But art (at least for fun) isn’t typically on a clock. Effective Note taking is a very demanding and time critical task.
Why handwriting? I type (and most people these days) much faster and far more legibly. However... Study after Study has shown a strong link to doing something physically and better cognition and memory. Despite the fact it is a physical act, typing for some reason just does not seem to engage this as strongly as hand writing. Though I do wonder if it would hold if it was your first method of writing (post for another time). Regardless, I know for me it is true. If I write my notes by hand I often do not ever have to refer to them. Which is a good thing (my hand writing is terrible). But when I type I can capture a LOT more... but often I have to read back through them from time to time and search through them. This has often let me in a conundrum as to whether I should take notes by hand or with a keyboard. With the iPad I defaulted to always having a keyboard case and typing everything. While not perfect... it was consistent.
But once it was gone... I moved back to handwriting when I didn’t want to lug my laptop to a meeting. Which was often. And I rediscovered just how much stronger the link was for my memory.
So perhaps this explains to you why I was staring at a colleague just causally scribbling away on a digital screen at full tilt note taking pace. And he wasn’t messing with it. He was just writing. Since I really wasn’t in the market I hadn’t really dug into the reviews of the Apple Pencil other than when it first came out to find out how well it was working. The initial reviews pegged it as a good stylus but nothing super special. I had a couple of hands on sessions at the local Apple store and nothing leapt out at me on that experience either. Though it was better than any previous stylus I had used before it still exhibited a noticeable lag and palm rejection was a bit iffy even if it was again better than most other options I had tried…. Just not amazingly so.
Apparently, I missed something when the 10.5” Pro iPad hit with its 120hz screen sync. They crossed a line on responsiveness of tracking and ability to reliably reject unrelated capacitive touching from your palm/wrist.
The bug bit again hard and I couldn’t put that image of someone casually writing on their iPad from my mind. So on the evening of Cyber Monday I found myself at the Apple store (no Cyber Monday deal unfortunately) picking up a new iPad Pro 10.5”, and Apple Pencil and the Logitech slim keyboard case.
Did it work for me? In a word... YES. Within two days of having it I sat down in one of my standard meetings where I tend to end up with 2-3 pages of notes and I just did it with the iPad instead of a note pad. Comparing with previous notes from the same meeting later they looked identical.
I am still fiddling around with the various apps trying to figure out which one I want to use. The basic Notes app is good enough but I am not sure long term about organizing with it. One Note is better at organizing and doing other content. Nebo is an oddball I like that I found because they had their hand writing calculator installed on the iPad at the store I was messing with while waiting. It’s ability to deal with math formulae and do flow charts along with what seems to be a really good ability to convert hand written text to typed text is intriguing. And as a long time Evernote user I am wanting to use them… but their poor integration with pencil is leaving me cold right now.
Ok so I am very over the moon on the note taking with Pencil. It is a Killer app for me. What about the rest of it?
The Good:
The screen is awesome but that is nothing new. Apple seems to routinely push things in this space and the extra real estate is more than you think. If I were just using it at home for art work I would probably go for the 12”. Beyond getting to OLED for a better night mode/contrast gamut I am not sure what else they can do here.
It still has a headphone jack. WOOT. I suspect it is not long for this world. But considering how long my Air lasted I think this bad boy may be with me for quite a while.
The guts. The iPad has been slowly creeping up into serious hardware spec territory. The amount of computing power shoved in this slab is impressive. That said the “Pro” moniker is still marketing crap more than any real indication of a professional grade of power. You are not going to mistake this for a developer workstation or graphic design command center. But it can be a part of your work flow in a lot more ways now than when it began. 4GB of RAM and 64 bit CPU benchmarks putting it in the same class as traditional processing is nothing to sneeze at. I have long thought Apple should take a stab at using something like the iPad or iPhone as the basis of a full up OS X experience ala Atrix or the MS phone as dock-able desktop experiment. But they are not going to until it works to their satisfaction (if that ever is possible).
Related to the horsepower is the overall OS and App responsiveness now present on the iPad. But really, responsiveness has been good almost from the beginning. The first iPad was…. Tolerable at launch and rapidly became unusable as app developers got more ambitious. However, since the first Retina iPad they have had a clearly better experience on this front than desktop/laptop and smart phones. This is a particularly striking point for me as one of the reasons I couldn’t afford an upgrade was that I had gotten a serious new laptop. Dell XPS 15. Loaded to the gills. 32GB of RAM, NVIDIA 1050 graphics, 1TB solid state drive and an i7 Kaby lake. An absolute monster system. And yet it is achingly slow to boot, launch apps and browse on compared to using my new iPad. It is noticeably slower than using even my old iPad Air. This was something I was not expecting with having absurd amounts of RAM and solid state drives with decent throughput. Win 10 has gotten a lot right… but priority of user experience is still its Achilles heel in comparison to iOS and OS X (or Chrome and Android for that matter).
The Dr. Jeckyl side of the Pencil… we shall deal with Mr. Hyde in a later section. I swear Apple was reading my complaints about previous styluses. But really… the complaints were pretty common. Previous options either had a bit or precision but a horrible feel (Adonit Jot) or decent feel and horrible precision (Pencil by 53). The best compromise I tried was the Bamboo Pogo with replaceable tips…even paint brushes that allowed you to skew towards precision vs reliability/feel. They were all hurt massively by a refusal by Apple to embrace any kind of stylus at the OS level. This made pairing the devices a PITA and required app by app level adoption vs being able to rely on a consistent OS level support. Apple Pencil solves all of the above. It has a fantastic feel (though one does have to adjust to it), exceptional precision, and it benefits from being integrated Apple hardware. What do I mean by feel? A stylus fundamentally feels different from a pencil or pen writing on paper. That feel drives a lot about how you write and or draw. Even those most indifferent to the subtleties have a fairly negative reaction to the slick nature of rubber\plastic\foam on glass vs pencil or pen on paper. While the pencil does not excel here… it brings a level of tactile feedback that makes it useable. The bigger issue is that it seems so far you do not need to adapt your writing posture (or at least in my case I do not) in order for palm rejection to work almost flawlessly.
The So So:
Physical Home button instead of a Taptic solid state button. May just be to sensitive to this after my failed physical button on my last iPad. This is exacerbated by the move to force usage of the home button to get logged in. On my old iPad the button was the only problem but it rendered the iPad almost useless as I could only launch some of my apps through SIRI recommended apps to get to the PIN login and then it would only launch that app. From there I often could not get back to the home screen. ACK. Odds are this or the battery are in a race to be the failure mode for the device.
Screen gunk magnet. So... I thought keeping a screen clean was a PITA before when all I did was touch element app interaction. It is MUCH worse if you are using the pencil for note taking. Much worse.
The Bad:
The powerful guts and display and pencil come at a cost. Literally. I got the 256GB cellular model with the pencil and a keyboard case and it rung up around $1400. That is way to much for a secondary system. It is also why until I saw a clear non-marketing related real world example that my unicorn note taking solution had finally been realized I had no real interest in updating my iPad Air. I always knew Apple would keep their tablets at the pricey end. But even I have been a bit shocked they have not done a better job bringing costs down a bit on the iPad. Especially as their year over year sales continue to dip. They really seem to think they can push this as a sole system.... but it really is, and I think now likely to remain, a companion device unless they solve how to make it the heart of a docked solution desktop with expandable on demand power to run a full OS seamlessly. Without this, No matter how much power they cram into an iPad, I do not see it becoming a main device if for no other reason than the ultimate lack of screen space… even the 12” is small to avg for a thin and light laptop.
No wireless charging… still? Yes it would be slow for the size of battery in the iPad. But it would be so damn awesome if to recharge it at night you only had to sit it on a pad rather than plug it in. Finding a lighting slot when the lights are out sucks… but it sucks less than turning a light on and angering your better half. Perhaps its just me. I just think an inductive charging should be pretty much default on all electronics of this level by now.
The Ugly:
The 64Gb to 256Gb memory jump in models. REALLY? Apple has a long history of absurd memory amount and cost of upgrade choices. This one may top them. No… I’d still give the crown to soldered RAM in MacBook Pro laptops with no upgradeability at extortionate costs for more than the base… or possibly the increasingly vexing 16Gb RAM maximum in the same line. But this one is probably 3rd.
Time for Mr. Hyde. Let us talk now about the design of and device integration (or lack as the case may be) of the pencil. Jobs is spinning in his grave. Not because Apple reversed itself on the usage of a stylus with the iPad. But because of how poorly it was executed as an integrated part of the experience. To be clear… once the pencil in in your hand it works very well per the Dr. Jeckyl section above. But, to first get to tablet and stylus Nirvana you have to… mate the two. As in literally plug the pencil into the lightning slot of the iPad. This inelegant solution does solve a tricky issue of how to link the two devices so I can kind of give this a pass. However, this is also one of he ways in which you recharge the device. This recharge method of sticking the pencil into the lighting slot is a farce. Yes its nice it can be charged by the device... but it is an absurdly problematic setup from a “bad accident waiting to happen” standpoint. GET APPLE CARE. While I am on it... the little modesty cap on the pencil to hide the lighting tip when not in use is another one. Almost lost mine on day 3. Apple doesn’t have them in the store and to get a replacement it seems you have to contact AppleCare. Though of course, many folks on Amazon will sell you replacements. Integration with the device or cases I have seen is comically bad.
Continuing on the absurdity of charging is the optional method of using a female/female adaptor to allow you to plug a lightning cable into the phone. IE one side goes on the pencil end. A particular side. And yet it has no visible indication of which end is which. The adaptor itself is TINY. So the pencil has not one but two tiny bits that are fairly important which are absurdly easy to lose. Both are small enough to be choking hazards for small children. Apple really should have figured out some kind of captive solution.
The device itself has no consideration for what to do with the pencil when not in use. Nor do any Apple case solutions I think. I just can’t count the sleeve as it just means you have a pencil in a sleeve that doesn’t go anywhere. And in conjunction with the case sleeve it is remains ridiculously exposed. Samsung has this beat handily with their note range where the stylus is integrated in the hardware. Apple needs to figure out how to do the same... in their way.
Basically this is a $100 device that if you need it, is pretty much indispensable. Yet there is absolutely ZERO indication of that in the design of the iPad or its first party accessories. Even further… it seems actively designed to be lost, have parts of it lost, damaged or to cause damage to your overpriced tablet.
This should give you some indication of just how important and personally powerful I find this blending of digital and analog note taking capability to be.
Conclusion:
Despite my misgivings It is a hell of a device. But you really need to have a reason for it at this level of cost. Multitasking is in iOS 11 but the screen size and way you multitask is a bit gimmicky. Especially considering the really low rate of app optimization for the capability. This is not a primary computer no matter how much Tim Cook wants to insist it could be for anything beyond casual use. That said, it is closer to being able to fill that role than any iPad before it. These updates on a next gen 12” device with real amounts of RAM and legitimate OS X compatibility might do the trick at least to the extent a thin and light laptop might. But wait… once you add a keyboard/case such a device is larger and more awkward than that laptop. And you don’t have a mouse. Minor quibble when talking about a casual use device. Major critical fault when talking about serious usage in any kind of professional context.
If you want a couch web surfing machine then stick with he mini or lower end iPads. They will not disappoint and the experience on the Pro just won’t be that much better. And really I’d say only go with iPad if you are in or want to be in the Apple eco system. Apple Messenger in particular is pretty potent if your friends are all in Apple land or you already have lots of apps. Otherwise a cheap android tablet with a decent screen will do you fine.
For me personally, the compelling bits are that it has cellular data (and I have an old unlimited plan) and a major boon for my ADD management in how well the pencil works for taking notes. Plus, added bonus of being able to get back to my digital sketching habit which I really missed.
The compelling case for the iPad Pro beyond the regular role of an iPad as far as I can tell is related to uses of the pencil. There is nothing else it does better than the competition (which is primarily a cheaper non pro iPad or Galaxy tablet). Most apps will not be designed such they will only work well on the Pro. Multi-tasking with the more powerful apps will require the added resources the PRO has …. But it is early days. Let’s just say it isn’t super compelling on its own yet but there is potential there.
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