Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

I have seen the new iPad Pros, and they are about what you'd expect, not that that's a bad thing. Since the "hands on" process is basically the same as handling any other iPad, let's focus on answering questions.

The new 12.9-inch iPad Pro is the easiest to describe, since its physical design is the same as the original model. It's still a 0.27-inch (6.9mm) thick, 1.49 pound (677g) tablet that looks like a stretched-out version of the iPad design Apple has been selling since 2013 or so. The difference is that some of the features introduced in last year's 9.7-inch iPad Pro weren't ready for the first 12.9-inch version. That list of features includes:

Apple's top-tier mobile camera. The old iPad Pro used Apple's "good enough" 8MP camera, the same one from the $329 iPad and a few other products. The new one uses the exact same camera and ISP as the iPhone 7, which means it can take "wide color" photos and shoot 4K video.

The wide color display. This has also shown up in other Apple products, including recent iMacs, the iPhone 7, and the iPhone 7 Plus.

The "True Tone" display. Formerly exclusive to the 9.7-inch iPad, this is a system of sensors that detects the tone of your ambient light and adjusts the color temperature of the screen to match. This is on by default but easy to disable.

The 10.5-inch iPad Pro has all of these features, too—the new models are more in sync with each other than the first two, since their releases weren't staggered. And design-wise, though the ratio of bezel to screen obviously differs, both include Touch ID, a four-speaker sound system, a camera bump, a Smart Connector, and (yes) a headphone jack.

The two tablets also share other new features. Most prominent is the A10X Fusion chip, an SoC with a six-core CPU and a 12-core GPU. Of those six CPU cores, three are high-performance cores and three are low-power cores, mirroring the big.LITTLE configuration we've seen in lots of other ARM SoCs in Android phones for the last few years. The A10 Fusion includes two high-performance cores and two low-power cores, but the operating system only sees two logical CPU cores—sending specific tasks to specific cores is handled in the background, and it's not something the software is aware of. Likewise, I assume that the A10X is effectively a tri-core CPU, like the Apple A8X before it.

We don't know this chip's clock speed, and we don't know how much RAM either tablet has (I would guess 4GB for both models, but that's based on a hunch and not actual data). But Apple says the A10X is around 30 percent faster than the dual-core A9X in the old iPad Pros. Some of that increase may come from architectural improvements, but most of it will come from the presence of that third processor core. The GPU is apparently 40 percent faster, which will help keep those new 120Hz displays fed with frames.

Speaking of those "ProMotion" screens, I can report that 120Hz scrolling and animations look just as lovely and smooth as Apple says they do, though it's completely impossible to convey unless you see it in person. Your device's screen is probably running at a paltry 60Hz, incapable of showing off the new iPad screen in its full glory.

Changes for the 10.5-inch iPad

Finally, let's talk about the 10.5-inch iPad specifically. It's just a tiny bit taller and wider than the 9.7-inch iPad Pro (9.4 and 6.6 inches for the old Pro compared to 9.8 and 6.8 for the new one), but it retains the same thickness and weight, which contributes to an overall impression that it's about the same size as the older iPad Pro. Apple has used that extra width to create a full-sized Smart Keyboard to replace the reduced-size one that paired with the 9.7-inch Pro. The keys are still canvas covered, and they retain the shallow-but-clicky feel of Apple's other butterfly-switch keyboards. The typing experience is not so much radically changed as it is slightly more comfortable.

With the new iPad Pros, Apple hasn't reinvented the category, but it has put some much-needed space between the $329 iPad at the entry level (still a good deal) and the $649 iPad Pro lineup. The 9.7-inch Pro was better than the $329 iPad, but it wasn't so much better that most people could justify paying nearly twice as much; the 10.5-inch iPad adds enough that, for particularly heavy users, you could justify the extra cost. The only missing piece of the puzzle right now is iOS 11, which includes new multitasking capabilities that will help the Pro hardware better realize its multitasking potential.

We'll be spending more time with the iPad Pros in our full review, where we'll be able to perform our standard benchmarking and battery testing and give you some impressions based on more than a few minutes of use. But the short story is you don't really need more than a few minutes—these are iPad Pros, and they're unlikely to move anyone who already thinks that the words "iPad" and "Pro" don't belong next to each other.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham