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M4 iPad Pro

gez said:
I agree with him when he says that not keeping it the same thickness and putting in a larger battery was a missed opportunity. Mobile devices can never have "too much" batter longevity in my view, and I think it's too far down the priority list of most manufacturers.
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Yes, I can’t agree more. I’ve always thought ‘thinness’ was the most ridiculous performance metric. No one ever complained an iPad was too big and heavy. I do complain about having to charge it twice a day though. I’d have been delighted to buy one that was thicker, heavier and only needed charging every other day.

PS I’m certain Apple’s obsession here is about shipping weight. The company is pure corporate greed under Tim Cook. Fantastic technology, but so dubious in other ways.
 
Anyone who has held the 1st or 2nd gen full size Pro with or without a protective shell will have almost certainly complained about the weight and had some wrist issues. BBC reports going back a decade about exactly this and symptoms which look like carpal tunnel eto. Plenty of other more recent reports.

Offspring acquired new Pro, Pencil and keyboard for music college despite my advice to wait 2 weeks ago. New products then launched and he’s been able to swap for the new ones of the Pro and keyboard without issue and actually get a refund as there’s a small drop in price.

Sat down this afternoon and spent two hours using his and comparing to my 8 year old Pro whilst using Logic and a few other things . Several observations.

  • It is noticeably lighter but not massively so.
  • The new screen is astonishingly good.
  • His screen is marginally bigger than mine but overall his Pro is smaller.
  • Yes it is thin. It is also very rugged and I see zero issues.
  • The sound is remarkably good.
 
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Mike Hughes said:
Anyone who has held the 1st or 2nd gen full size Pro with or without a protective shell will have almost certainly complained about the weight and had some wrist issues. BBC reports going back a decade about exactly this and symptoms which look like carpal tunnel eto. Plenty of other more recent reports.

Offspring acquired new Pro, Pencil and keyboard for music college despite my advice to wait 2weeks ago. New products then launched and he’s been able to swap for the new ones of the Pro and keyboard without issue and actually get a refund as there’s a small drop in price.

Sat down this afternoon and spent two hours using his and comparing to my 8 year old Pro whilst using Logic and a few other things . Several observations.

  • It is noticeably lighter but not massively so.
  • The new screen is astonishingly good.
  • His screen is marginally bigger than mine but overall his Pro is smaller.
  • Yes it is thin. It is also very rugged and I see zero issues.
  • The sound is remarkably good.
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Thanks, that’s the sort of issues that land with me, particularly how it is in the hands as I use iPads everywhere and not on a table top much. Think I’ll get the 13” in due course.

Also if anyone’s in the market for goods from John Lewis, they’re giving discounts and gift vouchers away with purchases. A telly gets 20% off plus a £100 voucher to use on a new iPad.
 
TheDecameron said:
Thanks, that’s the sort of issues that land with me, particularly how it is in the hands as I use iPads everywhere and not on a table top much. Think I’ll get the 13” in due course.

Also if anyone’s in the market for goods from John Lewis, they’re giving discounts and gift vouchers away with purchases. A telly gets 20% off plus a £100 voucher to use on a new iPad.
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The thing about people agonising over thinness makes me laugh. There are not multiple reports of iPads breaking because they’re too thin. Weight and grip are serious considerations. Something being somehow vulnerable because it’s too thin is verging on comedy.
 
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I have a Gen 2 12.9 and can't imagine ever using it hand held. Far too big and heavy.

If I was buying one to sit and read, a much smaller one would be ideal. As it is I only use mine for music scores for which it is a perfect tool. pretty much everything else (including music and video production) are much better suited to a laptop. (All imho, of course).
 
Nic Robinson said:
I have a Gen 2 12.9 and can't imagine ever using it hand held. Far too big and heavy.

If I was buying one to sit and read, a much smaller one would be ideal. As it is I only use mine for music scores for which it is a perfect tool. pretty much everything else (including music and video production) are much better suited to a laptop. (All imho, of course).
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I’ve the same one and have used it one handed for 8 years. May not necessarily have done me any good.
 
Never tried a 13” as the 11” fits my usage so perfectly. I just hold it in portrait mode where I’d hold a book, which is actually very close (about 10-11” away) as I’ve never been able to get on with varifocal glasses despite paying an absurd £500-700 several times over the years. I always end up taking them off to read! The iPad never gets too heavy.
 
Mike Hughes said:
I’ve the same one and have used it one handed for 8 years. May not necessarily have done me any good.
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Mike do you have a hand and forearm exercise regime for this? In 10 years I’ve never dropped an iPad in the bath but increased iPad size and declining grip strength could spell disaster…
 
TheDecameron said:
Mike do you have a hand and forearm exercise regime for this? In 10 years I’ve never dropped an iPad in the bath but increased iPad size and declining grip strength could spell disaster…
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I think “holding the iPad” is my “regime” really. I naturally hold it with my left hand, which is interesting and possibly helpful as my left side has always been weaker than the right. In recent weeks I’ve had to pick up some very light free weights (2.5kg) for around 20 minutes every day as part of a regime to contribute towards countering recently diagnosed lumbar spine osteoporosis and they seem to have made it easier again.

I do appreciate that our experience on this are all remarkably different on this as Mrs. H. regularly nods off with a mere iPad Air in her hand and wakes with a start as it either drops on her foot or the living room floor. This can happen up to 5 or 6 times before she finally gives in and goes to bed. I have often come to bed only to find a similar scene playing out except this time the iPad simply drops onto the bed.
 
That is a really good review, I can’t find anything to disagree with even though I use the iPad in a much simpler more ‘tablet’ manner. My primary infuriation is the Files app, and it is good he picks that first. With a proper file manager, better file handling etc I could be very happy with it. I’m not expecting it to be a full desktop or laptop computer, which is why I have no interest in the add-on keyboard, extra monitors etc, but I would certainly like real file-handling etc. I bet iPadOS 18 with all its AI bells and whistles doesn’t bring it. I’d like a command-line terminal too, but I guarantee Apple will never give me that!

PS For clarity: I edited the above post to get the video to display inline.
 
Tony L said:
I bought an M3 Macbook Pro recently and the level of upselling and nobbled specs between the plethora of options is hugely triggering. I ended up with the 13” with the ‘binned’ M3 Pro chip, 18GB and 1TB SSD. Anything below that just seemed deliberately nobbled, anything above grotesquely overpriced. That said for £2.3k I’d have expected to be closer to the top of the spec range. A truly absurd amount of money for a laptop, but I got over 12 years out of its predecessor and it still works perfectly. I only hope this one lasts as well. It’s a nice enough piece of kit, but there is nothing to get excited about. It is just a Macbook, remarkably similar to every other Macbook. They stopped being interesting decades ago! It’s main advantage over its mid-2012 predecessor is it hasn’t been orphaned OS-wise so is fully secure and can run the latest versions of everything.

I’m far happier going base spec on the iPad Pro as I view it as having a shorter service life. I only expect 3-4 years there, whereas these days I want an absolute minimum of a decade out of a proper computer. I’m annoyed the 256GB iPad Pro has half the RAM of the 1TB model and one less CPU core, but this is just the level of grift and slight of hand I expect from the company post-Jobs. The annoyance is I really like the products from a user and system perspective. I’m not a fan of the company these days at all.
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I just switched back to Apple after a 10 year stint with Android and MS.
Still run Linux too - there is something satisfying seeing Linux boot on a MS surface laptop (where it works very well).
Very nice products but the pricing is pretty horrendous, and I also have reservations about the company.

Not all new buys. I really don't like large phones so picked up a NOS iPhone 13 Mini which is amazing.
The for PC, a MacBook Air 13 M3 but bought into the online hype that base spec is pants so went up the 16g ram, 500gb SSD and the extra core on the M3.
I cannot overload or slow that thing down no matter what I do, even running stupid levels of multiple apps. So when it came to a desktop I just grabbed a base spec M2 Mac mini - the one everyone hates - and it too is blazing fast even when loaded down with multiple apps and is more than capable of photo editing, audio processing etc.
The unified memory thing whereby the ram and SSD are on the main CPU die seems to work very well. No you wouldn't choose it for lots of 4K+ complex video editing but it's fine for the vast majority of uses. So I think the haters of the base spec stuff clearly have an agenda.

For the iPad it was a question of just how much power is needed. In the end I chose a refurbished Air from I think 2021 so the version before M1 but with the later thin bezel style.
Again I cannot detect any lags or stutters so it should be good for a few years, and at c£300 who's gonna complain?

I think the compelling feature of the new pro has to be that screen not the M4 which is crazy OTT.
Oled on an iPad is long overdue. I have an old Samsung S6 here which I think dates back to 2018 and that has Oled, so about time!

.....really hard adjusting back to all the buttons and gestures being in the wrong place though ;)
 
I hate tablets (and large phones) but my wife loves her's, not sure what gen but the first with Touch ID - so at least 10 years old. She told me she doesn't want the Pro (and that's before she knows what they cost) so I'll wait and hope the Air gets OLED next time round.
 
Alex S said:
I hate tablets (and large phones) but my wife loves her's, not sure what gen but the first with Touch ID - so at least 10 years old. She told me she doesn't want the Pro (and that's before she knows what they cost) so I'll wait and hope the Air gets OLED next time round.
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A couple of tests show the new Pro lasting around 3 hours lees on continuous video playback before needing a charge compared to the Air with M2.
So while OLED is nice It clearly chews through battery.
 
Just sat through the WWDC brainwashing session, which was even more cringe than usual. For some inexplicable reason the plastic palace people thought they should cast themselves in an action movie. I gues it will irk the far-right as LGBTQ+ flags were everywhere, so that’s good, but still cringe.

The iOS, MacOS and iPadOS updates seemed a bit flat to me. I’d have swapped everything for a genuinely good iPadOS file manger, but the big thing was the expected ‘Apple Intelligence’ that came later. I find something dystopian and unsettling about AI, even, maybe especially, when a company such as Apple appears to be channelling the collective power of the Borg and Krell combined to create vacuous Teletubby-grade emoticons and sanitise your emails etc. I didn’t see anything I especially wanted to use, though some of it is scarily impressive.

From an IT perspective it is all science fiction to me. As unreal as the Apple people look to me in their unreal Apple building. All Tim Cook-era stuff it comes across as a sci-fi movie about sanitised future cult that believes its own hype. Branch Davidians from space. It makes me very uneasy, especially as I’m typing this on a M4 iPad Pro, so it will all be coming to a place a mm or less beneath my fingers. My iPhone, a 13, is too old, it appears the AI integration starts with the iPhone 15 Pro and any M-series Mac or iPad. There is ChatGPT integration across platforms too. Again, not too comfortable with that at this point, in fact even less comfortable. Maybe it will grow on me, but I suspect I’ll just turn it all off (I don’t use Siri at all, again I find it unsettling for some reason).

That said I’m really looking forward to tormenting the AI living in Logic Pro. I updated to version 11 on my MBP a couple of days ago (free upgrade from X, but needs a newish Mac) so I’ll be having a good fiddle with that. Curious how obnoxiously atonal and abstract it can be pushed. I’m betting not much. I suspect elevator music will be its comfort zone. Anyway, skim through this and tell me if my assessment is wrong…

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PS I bet as time goes on we’ll see more and more AI generated crap posted on this site. eBay listings are full of it now, and whilst artificial it is hugely lacking in intelligence. At this point it can be very easily spotted, as can the thousands of AI meta-data-driven “review sites” YouTube video reviews etc. Search for pretty much any new product now and you’ll eventually end up on a site full of words but obviously without real depth, knowledge or information. Just click-bait.
 
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