hey are you guys ready for another exciting installment in the confusing
saga of what the heck is apple doing with the
ipad great because in this episode apple
edges the ipad a little more towards the macbook end of the spectrum with a new
ipad only flavor of mouse and trackpad
support but just wait until you see the new ultra wide camera and lidar sensor
that apple also put on the back for some reason yeah
if you're confused trust me we are too so let's try to make some sense out of
the beautiful mystery that is the 2020 ipad pro
together with our sponsor
freshbooks accounting software is custom built for how you want to work helping
you stay organized and productive try their 30 day free trial at
freshbooks.com forward slash tech tips
in our last video about the ipad pro we said that apple
wasn't trying to make the ipad pro more like a computer but rather that they
were trying to help the ipad pro be more useful as a computer with ipad os
specific features they called the ipad pro a new way to
take notes make music or create a presentation
a worse way for some people like myself
but for better or for worse a distinctly different way from both a computer and a
traditional tablet and that's not a bad thing in the
initial release of ipad os last year the ipad got better navigation gestures and
some cool features that negated the need for some keyboard shortcuts like
pinching your fingers to copy and spreading them to paste those kinds of
optimizations made us think that the ipad pro might just be a good option for
people who have to get work done but are less inclined to sit at a desk hunched
over a tiny screen so then it's a bit confusing to find ourselves playing with
the 2020 ipad pro running ipad os 13.4
which now has full-blown mouse and
trackpad support instead of leaning further into the ipad pro's identity as
a unique handheld computing device it seems like apple has decided it wants to
make the ipad pro into a bad macbook
after all they're even releasing a keyboard folio in may with a built-in
trackpad i mean they might as well send out an internal memo that goes microsoft
got it right maybe to see where apple's going we have to take a look at where
they've come from ipad os pre 13.4
already had mouse support but the thing is it was buried in the assistive touch
section of the accessibility options and as we said in our last video it was
designed as an accessibility feature to help disabled people who might have
trouble operating a touch screen rather than as a way for every ipad user to
easily connect a mouse and go ham it was a welcome addition but it was not
the type of mouse support that a Windows or a macOS user would be accustomed to
now mouse and trackpad support has been built in as a core part of the os
connect one via bluetooth or even a usbc dongle and a small gray pointer
immediately pops up and morphs
yes my friends this is not your tired old desktop mouse pointer this is an
ipad pro mouse pointer the ipad pointer
actually adapts to the shapes of things that it selects which
is supposed to make clicking them easier i guess i don't know after using it for
a while we really can't see an obvious benefit to this feature but luckily you
can just turn it off in the settings or that is you can turn it off in the
accessibility settings because some of the pointer options are under mouse and
trackpad in the general settings while the rest are under pointer control in
accessibility for reasons that continue
to elude me between the two of them though there are most of the options
you'd expect like adjusting pointer contrast size and color changing the
tracking and scrolling speed and you can even assign functions to other buttons
on the mouse although we were not able to get that last one working properly on
an mx master 2s so your mileage may vary
it's definitely not perfect but overall the user experience with a mouse is a
lot better than in the last version of ipad os where the pointer acted
basically like a floating finger now you can right click to bring up
context menus and there's support for scroll wheels although frequent hitches
and hang ups do make it clear that things have been more optimized for our
track pad or the touch surface of apple's magic mouse there are also a
number of new gestures that involve dragging the mouse pointer outside of
the screen dragging to the right will show or hide slide over apps dragging up
to the top right brings down control center dragging up anywhere else brings
down notification center and there's no
gesture for dragging to the left as far as i can tell but get this in an app
drag down to bring up the dock drag down further to go home drag down again to
enter multitasking at which point you can actually drag down one more time to
go home again by this point we were just jazzed to see how deep this rabbit hole
goes but apparently that is in fact the bottom
now these gestures were a little bit confusing at first but we think in less
than an hour most people are going to find them pretty useful particularly
dragging right to access slide over there are even more gestures that you
can do with multiple fingers on a trackpad to go home and switch apps but
we didn't have a trackpad and if i keep talking about most support i'm going to
get upset again so we had best move on to the hardware
the 2020 ipad pro is not a big upgrade
over the 2018 model in fact it is
basically the same tablet while the whole 2020 ipad pro lineup does now come
with six gigs of RAM and they all get the a12z bionic processor on paper that
is essentially the same chip as the a12x
bionic that is in the 2018 model with a single additional core in the GPU
bringing the total up to eight
that was actually confirmed by our geekbench tests where we saw a very
slight increase in multi-core performance and
a lower score on the compute benchmark
you know what we're just going to chalk that up to some lack of optimization in
ipad os 13.4 for now the base model of the 2020 ipad pro does
come with 128 gigs of storage now instead of 64. that is great to see but
the only other major changes to be found on this device are actually in the
camera module in addition to the standard 12 megapixel
lens we now get a new 10 megapixel ultra wide lens for all of those
people who vlog ipads
and then next to that really interesting one that's a lidar sensor lidar stands
for light detection and ranging and it works by sending out infrared light then
measuring how long it takes for it to hit something and come back
this new sensor is supposed to be a boon for augmented reality content although
in our tests for the time being it didn't seem to make ar content on the
new ipad pro any more compelling object
occlusion in ikea's ar shopping app was about the same as on the 2018 ipad pro
and in the measure app the 2018 ipad pro
actually seemed to do consistently better at measuring length the new one
was about an inch off some app developers have expressed excitement
about the new sensor though with some early tests showing the effect that it
can have on mapping virtual spaces onto
physical ones and there are rumors going around that apple will include a lidar
sensor in the next flagship iphone so this new ipad pro might just be serving
as a test bed so that lidar equipped ar is going to be nice and
polished up by the fall for now it's a fancy new sensor with not much in the
way of software support though all right
ipad pro 2020 then maybe we were wrong when we guessed at
apple's intentions for the ipad it seemed like they were championing the
ipad pro as this groundbreaking new way
for people to do work on the go you know an ipad for pros
and now that we've got the next iteration of it it's
well it's an ipad with a mouse attached to it
and another camera and a light bounce sensor
which is fine it's big it just leaves me questioning who
exactly it's for no really though why
don't you guys let me know like are you jeff are you the unicorn that apple is
searching for who needs more than an ipad but less than a macbook
what do you do with it
you know it's a flipping miracle anyone buys anything from dbrand at this point
i go all the way up the corporate ladder to the top robot i've got one simple
request i want an ipad pro
with unicorns puking rainbows on each
other what do i get i get two unicorns that are puking
rainbows i'll give them that but not on each other and two rainbow colored
unicorns and i'm not even sure if this one is a unicorn i'm pretty sure that
that horn is photoshopped on there it's disgraceful it's what it is
in all seriousness though dbrand is your source for awesome textured vinyl skins
they're available for laptops phones tablets consoles controllers and more
they're made from high quality 3m vinyl with a patented adhesive that is
guaranteed to leave no residue on your device if you want to change the skin
out for a different one although i personally would never change this skin
their uncompromising precision and cutting the vinyl ensures a factory fit
for your selected device and they not only look great but they even protect your device against incidental scuffs
and scratches their customer service robots are easy to work with their
products are affordable and they ship worldwide what could go wrong oh right
you could get insulted by their customer service well you know what i guess
that's just the the risk you gotta take to get a
nice you know quality vinyl skin all right it's not a risk you gotta take
if all that sounds good check out the probably insulting link that dbrand put
in the video description where you can buy their head
if you guys enjoyed this video check out our recent video reviewing the uh latest
you know what it's more some more apple pro stuff how about the
latest macbook pro we really liked that he actually likes the mac pro as well
just expensive but like what were you expecting