IPad Pro 2020 11”

The opening below was written in late August, 2021, and I’ve subsequently revisited this post and finished it… Whoops!

I sit in the dark at the dining room table. My fiancée is out for a few days. The window to my right is the city of Toronto, fleetingly backlit by lightning strikes beyond it’s reach. I’m nursing a hazy IPA and a few olives. The iPad Pro provides a soft glow, I’m browsing YouTube and typing out this. Why here? Why not the computer in the office? Or YouTube on the TV in the living room? Well, it’s because the iPad Pro is fun to use, and I can be wherever I want to be using it, and tonight, that’s enjoying this thunderstorm by the dining room window.

A morning with the Pro, featuring the Smart Keyboard folio.

The Preamble

I’ve had the iPad Pro 2020 11” since late 2020. I grabbed the 256GB model in silver as a “let’s see how it works vs the Surface Pro” and ended up quickly selling the Surface Pro afterwards. It’s been a secondary computing device since then, and it’s been pretty flawless.

The Notes

  • It’s fast, like real fast. This thing edits photos as fast as my desktop did, and that thing isn’t a slouch. Even with the M1 version being released I don’t think there are going to be any worries about slowness for a few years.

  • The screen is excellent. Super bright, great contrast, and awesome color accuracy. I like True Tone a lot and it works well. I’m a big fan of the variable refresh rate all the way up to 120hz, which makes games really smooth.

  • iPadOS 14/15 made the iPad considerably less limited than my last experience with an iPad mini. Some nice usability features like being able to directly import into Lightroom from an SD card further blur the lines between iOS and a full desktop OS.

  • Multitasking has improved but could still be better. I’d love to see actual windowed options, but that’d completely cannibalize the Mac lineup.

  • USB-C all the things. If only Apple got the note regarding the iPhone. Fast charging via PD spec is a very nice include, and being able to share dongles/accessories between the MacBook and the iPad is awesome.

  • The speakers are pretty damn good for a little 11” tablet. Makes for a nice impromptu speaker vs carrying a bluetooth one.

  • It’s flexible. Most days it might be an eReader, but if I’m packing light, it can be my full on computer - It’ll handle just about anything I throw at it. Entertainment in the evenings, reading on the plane, photo editing, day planning, blogging, journaling, marking up maps, etc.

  • Whereas the Surface Pro was more of a computer that could be a tablet, this is a tablet that can be a computer. Both aren’t really amazing at their secondary function, but the iPad gets a lot closer.

  • The battery life is an all day affair, provided I’m not pushing it too hard. Screen brightness and task at hand definitely affects things, but with mixed all day usage I’m probably not looking for a charger until bed time.

  • The magic keyboard, although flawed, is probably the best keyboard option for the thing. The typing experience is very similar to the Macbook and it holds the device incredibly well. Although it does increase the weight and size a fair bit, I wouldn’t use any other option on the market if need a keyboard.

  • I wish I used the pencil more. I think this is more of a discipline thing, but it’s one of the best drawing and writing experiences I’ve had on a device ever, and I might use it on the occasion. There’s a lot of good notebook apps that I’ve been playing with like notability and goodnotes, and of course I have apps like procreate and charcoal, but I tend to find myself leaning toward OneNote, Google Keep, or Apple Notes rather than a hand written option. The markup feature for PDFs though has been an absolute godsend for all the paperwork we needed to do for the house.

  • There’s still a few meh points with the app ecosystem. I’m missing features in Photoshop, and the iPadOS versions of the office suite are really not that good compared to the full fat versions on MacOS and Windows. Otherwise software like OneNote works great, for example, and there’s normally an app for what I need to get done.

Overall this device has been a great companion since I picked it up. The fact that I don’t feel like I want more of a device too speaks to the software and hardware inside the device. With sidecar it becomes a great secondary screen while on the go too, the perfect companion to a 14” display. Universal Control will be coming out in the next iPadOS/Monterey release, so I anticipate the iPad is going to get even more use at that point - Getting to just do something on the Macbook then drag and drop it over to the iPad directly to work on it further is going to be really nice.

I’m very happy this was my entry back into the world of iPads. The iPad mini I had a few years ago, although good as a basic device, was really missing the polish that was brought with iPadOS14/15. I can honestly say with the updates made to file management, direct import into Lightroom, growing pro app catalog, and class leading hardware, the iPad fits very easily into my workflows as a jack of all trades, and master of a few.