Apple Pencil is nearly impossible to repair; earns repairability score of 1 on 10: iFixit.
Remember when Apple launched the iPad Pro and its stylus popularly known as Pencil? Much of the marketing around Apple’s new iPad Pro has been centered on its ability to run professional grade software and the variety of creativity apps it supports. Back then, iFixit had done a thorough analysis by ripping it apart and had arrived at a repairability score of 3 on 10, where 10 means the device is most repairable. Apple, the same company that once swore off styluses, and dismissed hybrid PCs as experiments gone wrong, is now selling a laptop/tablet mashup of its own.
Despite the new tablet’s processing power and capabilities, it’s still running on mobile software — and developers aren’t totally convinced the economic incentives exist in the App Store for iOS. The new 12.9-inch iPad Pro went on sale last week, and though it is, in a sense, just an oversized iPad, it’s also the closest thing we’ve seen yet to a hybrid device from Apple. Through the series of images released by iFixit as part of the teardown, the Apple Pencil comes across as an utterly stubborn piece of technology to repair.
With the screen real estate of a laptop, and the speed of a laptop, and various keyboard accessories allowing you to type on it like a laptop, the Pro seems like it might indeed be able to replace your notebook. Once the plastic body of the Pencil is removed, the body reveals a metal casing that contains all the electronic components such as the sensors and logic boards. The build quality and design are the same as any other recent iPad, with a unibody aluminum enclosure available in the usual colors: Silver, Gold and Space Gray.
But two months ago, Sa left a comment on the website Designer News saying that he and Omvlee had “no plans for an iPad Pro.” “Yes, it has a beautiful screen, but there’s more to consider…,” Sa said. “Apps on iOS sell for unsustainably low prices due to the lack of trials. Assuming you were holding the device in landscape mode, you’ll find the headphone jack and power button on the left, the volume rocker and LTE SIM slot (if there is one) on the top.
But Sinclair, an iOS engineer at a Seattle-based digital agency called Black Pixel, believes the difficulties in turning pro software into iPad Pro software have nothing to do with engineering. There you’ll find Apple’s three-pronged Smart Connector, which you’ll use to connect the iPad to whatever keyboard you end up choosing. (Apple has licensed the design to third-party accessory makers, starting with Logitech.) Unlike some other 2-in-1s I’ve seen, the connector here is virtually flush with the tablet’s edge, so it’s unlikely to snag on anything else you have in your bag. It makes a satisfying click when you drop it into your keyboard and because the magnetic connection is so strong, you won’t have to work hard to line up the male and female connectors. Finishing up our tour, the tablet has a Touch ID fingerprint reader on the lower bezel — the same sensor used on last year’s iPad Air 2 and the new mini 4. Now we have 25 people working on it, testing on eight or nine different platforms, in 13 different languages.” FiftyThree makes money by selling hardware, a popular $60 stylus called pencil, and has raised $45 million in venture capital funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and New Enterprise Associates.
Neither of those companies have to worry about the number of mobile downloads they’ll get for their creativity and productivity apps, which they offer as free, lightweight versions of their core apps. That rear camera is equipped with some decent specs, including an f/2.4 lens and the ability to shoot both 1080p and slow-motion video (the latter at up to 120 frames per second).
Though I doubt anyone wants to be that guy using a nearly 13-inch tablet to take photos at a football game, I’m willing to believe that the mobile professionals Apple is targeting — real estate agents, medical types — might get some use out of the built-in shooter here. The economic environment for smaller mobile developers, who need to give Apple a 30 percent cut of any paid download or app subscription fee, is more tenuous. Apple has said that it paid out $10 billion dollars in revenue to its developers in 2014, and developers have made $33 billion to date from the sale of apps and games. At 1.57 pounds (1.59 on the LTE model), it’s on par with Microsoft’s 13.5-inch Surface Book in tablet-only mode, though to be fair, the Surface manages to stuff inside a heavier-duty notebook-grade processor. But as Ben Thompson has pointed out before in his well-respected blog, Stratechery, 95 of the top 100 apps are free to play (free to download with purchasing options once you’re in the app).
According to Gartner research, in-app purchases are expected to drive 41 percent of app store revenue in 2016, and apps that cost between 99 cents and $2.99 will account for the overwhelming majority of paid-for downloads by 2016. That said, 1.5 pounds is just heavy enough that I wouldn’t want to hold the Pro aloft for long, even if it’s 6.9mm-thick (0.27-inch) casing otherwise makes it easy to handle. All of this leaves fewer options for makers of expensive, professional-grade software, who neither a) do free-to-play or b) want to charge as little as a buck for their software.
In addition to being the biggest tablet iPad to date, the Pro also has the distinction of having the second-sharpest screen of any computer Apple has ever made. Speaking of the iMac, Apple borrowed the same Oxide TFT (thin-film transistor) technology it introduced on its flagship all-in-one last year, which keeps the brightness even throughout the panel. Bohemian Coding’s Omvlee says for apps like Sketch, that might not work. “Some tools like Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Cloud have enough force behind them that they can demand this and people, grudgingly, pay it. According to the company, the speaker housings have been CNC-machined directly into the enclosure, with 61 percent more chamber space compared to previous iPads. Lastly, aside from being spill-resistant, the benefit to this design is that it’s designed to be durable: Apple put a conductive material under the fabric that’s meant to be folded thousands of times over.
As Apple tells it, the shortcuts bar at the bottom of the screen in iOS 9 will help save people time, but in my experience, it wasn’t a substitute for a touchpad. And though I wish I had a choice of different screen angles, the Smart Keyboard is at least comfortable to balance in my lap; the underside of the cover feels soft against my bare legs, and the case is sturdy enough that the setup isn’t too top-heavy. It took Microsoft several tries to build a Surface keyboard that could replace a notebook’s; perhaps in a few years Apple will have accomplished the same.
There was no learning curve here: As soon as I snapped the iPad into the hard case, I was immediately able to begin typing at a fast clip, with few typos. Just as important, the Create has a Function row up top with buttons for all the most important controls — brightness, volume, play/pause, rewind, fast forward, keyboard backlighting and screen lock. While many people won’t need this $99 accessory, it’s worth it for someone in a creative field, or even folks who still prefer hand-written note-taking.
Ink appears on the page as you pull the pencil across, and the feedback is not just instant, but precise: I can’t remember ever attempting to make a marking and coming up empty. Lastly, like the A9 chip inside the new iPhones, the A9X makes use of the M9 coprocessor, which continuously pulls in data from various sensors including the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass. I downloaded AutoCAD 360 — a program I don’t actually know how to use — mostly so that I could spin models around with my finger and quickly zoom in and out. All this graphics power is borne out as well in synthetic tests, with significant gains in 3DMark and GFXBench. (You’ll see similar leaps in web benchmarks too.) In basic use, it was mostly smooth sailing. There was a point during my testing where I was writing this review in Pages and flipping back to Twitter in Slide Over and Google Drive in a separate window.
And let me tell you something: I actually see more performance hiccups on Apple’s new iMac, which comes standard with a Core i5 processor and piddly 5,400RPM hard drive. I routinely wait for apps to load, I wait to regain control of the desktop after startup, and I wait even when I want to switch from tab or window to another.
As with other Apple products, that turned out to be a conservative estimate: The Pro actually lasted through 10 hours and 47 minutes of video playback in our tests, with WiFi on and the brightness fixed at 50 percent. Additionally, the company sells a keyboard-less Smart Cover for $59, as well as a $79 silicone case that covers the tablet’s back side only (it’s the same design as the silicone case for the new iPad mini 4).
Since Apple seems to be suggesting the iPad can replace a laptop, it’s tempting to call the company’s bluff and compare the product to traditional notebooks. Because Microsoft has been at this for several years now, its keyboard is more comfortable than Apple’s, and it’s cheaper too, at $130 (though by now Microsoft should really be building it into the base price). Then there’s the endless stream of Surface knockoffs, including the HP Spectre X2 ($800 with the keyboard), the Dell XPS 12 ($999, keyboard included) and the the Lenovo Miix 700 ($699, not shipping yet). Specifically, professionals and in particular, those who might otherwise have some difficulty getting work done when they’re on the go and away from their primary computers. I’m thinking medical professionals, designers, engineers — jobs where having a precise writing implement matters more than having a comfortable keyboard, or even a trackpad.
And, of course, there will be some early adopters — the sort of people who read Engadget — who simply want a big, powerful iPad, and are willing to pay a premium for it.