The new iPad Pro is going to make me fall in love with iPads all over again

Have you ever loved and lost? I have. For years, my favourite device was my 2017 iPad Pro. I loved the way it looked. I loved the way it sounded. I loved doodling on it with my Apple Pencil, and I loved the way it could do absolutely anything without breaking sweat. And then this year we broke up.

Normally when one of my Apple devices goes to the Apple Store in the sky I get the latest version of the same thing. Not this time. What used to be the iPad everybody lusted after had been eclipsed by a younger, smarter, more exciting model, the 2020 iPad Air. So when my Pro packed up, I decided to settle down with the iPad Air instead.

I still have love for the Pro, though. So I’m pleased to see that next week’s Apple Event will make the iPad Pro the iPad you’ll lust after again.

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Apple's Pros should make you go "woah!"

When I bought my iPad Pro, it was the best iPad money could buy. It wasn’t just ahead on specs, but in how it felt to use: whenever I moved from my Pro to another iPad it felt like stepping out of a speedboat and into a dinghy. But in recent years the Pro has languished as other iPads have got better, and the difference between the current Pro and the iPad Air is negligible. £200 more for 0.1” more inches, a few more nits of brightness and speakers and a camera I rarely use? No thanks.

That’s why the new iPad Pro is interesting. We’re just hours away from Apple’s Spring Forward event, and the new iPad Pro specs have been leaking all over the place for months. We’re confident that it’ll have a mini-LED display, a better processor equal to or better than the M1 system in M1 Macs and a third-generation Apple Pencil. 

Those three things don’t sound like much, but they put clear blue water between the iPad Pro and the iPad Air again: the Pro will be faster, will have a significantly and clearly better display and will once again be what any Apple Pro device should be: the one that makes you go “woah!”.