The New iPad Pro - Good Enough For Business?

Apple has just released its new iPad Pro, which it refers to as "the future of computing". So, is Apple's latest and greatest tablet good enough to replace your business laptop with?

 The new 2018 iPad Pro has a sleek new design and is available in 11-inch and 12.9-inch screen sizes. There is no home button and, like the latest iPhones, you can unlock the device using facial recognition or by typing in a pin code on screen.

 This new iPad Pro features Apple's latest A12X Bionic processor which makes it as powerful as most business laptop computers. With this amount of power you might imagine that battery life is reduced. However the new iPad Pro offers battery life of up to about 12 hours.

 The screen offers Apple's latest "Liquid Retina" technology and has a very high resolution of 2,732 x 2,048 pixels. The display has a high refresh rate which makes on screen motion look very smooth indeed. This is great if you use your device for video conferencing or you work with video editing tools. 

 A major change on the new iPad Pro is the switch to a standard USB-C connector in place of the standard Apple Lightening connector.

 This makes the new iPad Pro directly compatible with a wider range of external accessories and peripherals such as digital cameras, card readers, etc.  New accessories include the Smart Keyboard Folio - a keyboard that doubles as a cover which attaches to the iPad Pro magnetically and wraps around the iPad Pro entirely.  This offers additional protection to the device but it isn’t cheap at £179 for the 11-inch version and £199 for the 12.9-inch.

 There is also a new version of the Apple Pencil available, which attaches to the side of the new iPad Pro magnetically and charges when attached. It costs an additional £119, so you should be sure you are going to use it before investing the extra money. The iPad Pro starts from £769 (including VAT) for the basic 64GB WiFi only version with the smaller 11-inch screen, and goes up to £1,869 (including VAT) for the top of the range 12.9-inch version with WiFi, Cellular and 1TB of storage. It isn’t cheap, but it is one of the best tablets that money can buy.