Apple iPad Pro 2021 Review – Introduction, Design and Mini LED Screen

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Actually, it’s a ridiculous thing, an iPad Pro like that, and we mean that in a positive way. For years, Apple has packed its best socs into the slim device, leaving it grossly overqualified for most tasks and able to handle even the most demanding user with the iPad Pro. So, what has Apple done in 2021? You guessed it: the manufacturer made it even more ridiculous. This time no A chipset, but the M1. That is the very powerful soc that Apple also puts in recent MacBooks.

There is little new about the appearance of the device, but the screen has had a special upgrade. The new screen has mini LEDs, which means that the brightness is much higher locally and HDR content should look better. Then there are all kinds of new functions, such as Center Stage, where the camera ‘follows’ you. For example, support for the USB-C port has also been expanded with USB 4 and Thunderbolt. You can also get the iPad Pro 2021 with 5G support and with no less than 2TB of storage. Most of the features of the iPad Pro 12.9″ are the same as those of the 11″ version. The latter, however, lacks the mini LED technology of the screen. We tested the technologically more interesting 12.9″ variant.

The annually recurring question whether the iPad Pro is a good laptop replacement, naturally also comes up again. And if so, for whom? You can read that and more in this review.

Design: little news

As usual, let’s start with the outside. Has anything changed there? Yes, but not alot. The iPad Pro 2021 has become slightly thicker. This is reportedly due to the new mini LED screen, which takes up a little more space. The screen also appears to be slightly deeper into the iPad Pro than it was last year, even though it’s laminated, of course.

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The half a millimeter of extra thickness is less noticeable than the 41 grams of extra weight. If you really want to be productive, the Magic Keyboard will probably come in handy. That is an expensive joke, because it costs 400 euros. The good news is that the iPad Pro 12.9″ 2021 simply fits on the Magic Keyboard of 2020. Due to the half a millimeter extra thickness, the whole is a bit tighter when closed, but certainly not so that anything is damaged and it looks It doesn’t look strange either. The iPad Pro 2020 in the new Magic Keyboard is actually less pleasant because there is a small gap. Something could come in between. We see no reason to buy a new Magic Keyboard for your iPad Pro 2020, even because that is more expensive.In fact, we would also consider a Magic Keyboard 2020 for the new iPad Pro 2021, given the current price difference of about 70 euros.

Let’s talk about that weight, because how does a 2021 iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard compare to a MacBook Air M1?

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An iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is therefore still heavier than this year’s MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Somehow that feels contradictory. If you don’t always need the keyboard, you are of course more flexible with the iPad Pro, because you can only take the tablet with you if you wish.

In terms of housing, the iPad Pro 2021 is otherwise equal to its predecessor. In landscape mode, the power button is on the left and the volume buttons are around the corner on top. The USB-C connection is on the right and then of course we have the four speaker openings. At the top right is the SIM card slot on our 5G version.

Bending and twisting remain a bit scary with such a large tablet. It is more difficult to make such a large slab of metal and glass sturdy than a smartphone that is about the same thickness. We recommend that you don’t sit on it or put too much force on it, although it doesn’t feel fragile either. The Magic Keyboard accessory gives the tablet a lot more sturdiness. The iPad Pro is available in silver and gray. The color options are therefore limited, which may be a shame for some in an age of colorful iPhones and iMacs. The new iPad Pro again has no IP certification, so it’s probably wise to keep it away from liquids.

Mini LED screen: nice for HDR

The screen of the iPad Pro 2021 is next to the M1 soc the biggest change this year, but we have to say that this only applies to the 12.9” version of the tablet we tested. With the 2021 iPad Pro in the smaller 11″ version, the specifications of the screen are unchanged compared to last year, without all the innovations that we discuss below. If you want to use the iPad for viewing or editing HDR video material, it pays off so it is absolutely necessary to go for the larger model.

Apple itself calls the screen of the iPad Pro 2021 12.9” a Liquid Retina XDR display and that is the marketing name. Of course, that includes True Tone to adjust the color temperature to the ambient light and it has an adaptive screen refresh rate of up to 120Hz. It also has a DCI-P3 color gamut and a resolution of 2048×2732 pixels.

The innovation lies in something else: mini LEDs as a backlight. There are more than 10,000 of them and together they form 2596 separate dimming zones. While it’s still an LCD, it allows the screen to adjust brightness at a fairly local level. That is still not possible as locally as with OLED in potential, because the individual pixels can be switched on or off. However, the individual zones of this mini LED screen have a higher maximum brightness than many OLED screens. According to Apple, this highly localized peak brightness would be 1600 candelas per square meter and 1000cd/m² when lit the whole screen.

That is only the case with HDR content; for sdr content, the maximum brightness is limited to the same 600cd/m² as with the previous iPad Pro and the iPad Pro 2021 11”. We have placed the iPad Pro 2021 next to an LG OLED55B8PLA television and always set up the same HDR content in a darkened room. With some videos, such as this one, there was almost no difference. With some other videos, such as this one, we saw the effect of the iPad Pro’s high peak brightness local dimming in full effect. We tended to squint when we looked at the bright parts. For our eyes, the black was indistinguishable from the deep black of the OLED screen. This was supported by our measurements, because in our test to measure the contrast ratio we saw results that indicate an ‘infinite’ contrast value.

This mini LED screen, including the monitors and televisions we test at Tweakers HQ, is one of the most advanced mini LED screens we have envisioned. For example, monitors sometimes have the same number of dimming zones, but usually in a larger screen. The Pro Display XDR Apple also only has 576 dimming zones.

Blooming

However, there are also disadvantages to a mini LED screen like this. Because each zone has to be chosen how bright the mini LEDs of the backlight are, the parts with high contrast are in theory problematic. For example, if half of a dimming zone has to display white and half black, the dimming zone can never do it right. The result of this is that you can see the backlight shining through in the black part. This effect is called blooming, or the halo effect.

We have also observed this in practice. If you watch an HDR video in a dark room, with bright elements on a black background, you can see it clearly. This is especially true if you look at the screen at an angle. You can also see it, for example, in the text with a black background on YouTube that is in the top left of the screen. The best example is perhaps a starry sky like this one. In practice, however, you will hardly be bothered by this phenomenon when watching HDR videos on Netflix or other streaming platforms. It requires quite specific circumstances. It is a disadvantage and Apple would reportedly address this for the next version of the iPad Pro.

You also see with a completely white screen, such as in Safari, that the screen becomes slightly less bright towards the edges. This is also due to the dimming zones, probably because the backlight is slightly further from the display. All this has taken away little viewing pleasure for us in practice. The HDR content looks sublime. We did not think to have this experience so quickly on an LCD.

You can use the iPad Pro as an extra screen for a MacBook, for example, via Apple Sidecar. That can be useful for video editing. The strange thing is that you can’t see the content in HDR, despite using a Thunderbolt cable. If you want to connect a second monitor to the iPad Pro, you run into the fact that you can’t use it as a second monitor, but usually only as a mirror. An app developer can use a second screen as a preview, but it doesn’t work like it does on macOS.

Screen Tests

We have the screen as usual measured with our SpectraCal C6 colorimeter and Calman 5 software, but did it a little differently this time. To measure the very local peak brightness of the mini LED screen, which according to Apple has 1600cd/m², we have a number of hdr-testvideo’s played and the maximum brightness measured. In our regular tests, we only measure SDR content. The maximum brightness did not differ much between the rectangles of different sizes. That is more the case with OLED screens. We did not get further than 1080cd/m². However, in one of the test videos we achieved 1400cd/m². That’s not 1600, as Apple claims, but we don’t rule out that the screen can reach 1600cd/m² in specific circumstances.