When the iPad Pro review embargo lifts, here’s what I want to know

Will the embargo on iPad Pro reviews lift today?

(Typically it’s a day or two before Apple begins taking orders for a new product)

Here are three questions I want answered. 

How the Center Stage camera performs 

Many have lamented the location of the iPad’s camera. When using the iPad in landscape (which most of us do, most of the time) the camera resides on the left bezel, which can make video calls and conferencing look a little awkward. The new Center Stage camera is ultra wide and follows you as you move, potentially alleviating some of these issues. It looked great in Apple’s product video (of course) and Apple’s John Ternus promises big things:

“What’s been really cool is that we’ve all been sitting around in these meetings all day long on video conferencing and it’s just nice to get up. This experience of just being able to stand up and kind of stretch and move around the room without walking away from the camera has been just absolutely game changing, it’s really cool.”

How will the new feature perform out in the wild?

The impact of increased RAM

iPads now have “RAM-parity” with Macs, coming in 8GB and 16GB configurations. Presumably, this will allow the iPad Pro to handle pro-level apps that may be coming, like Apple’s Final Cut Pro. 

But I’m more interested in how the RAM affects the iPad’s performance in other ways. Will we see less--maybe far less--app reloading as we move through our open apps? And will Safari hold more tabs open without reloading pages?

The difference in the new Liquid Retina XDR display 

The 12.9” iPad Pro gets the new mini-LED display. And the tech is pretty remarkable, as described by Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch:

Apple has essentially ported its enormously good $5,000 Pro Display XDR down to a 12.9” touch version, with some slight improvements. But the specs are flat out incredible. 1,000 nit brightness peaking at 1,600 nits in HDR with 2,500 full array local dimming zones — compared to the Pro Display XDR’s 576 in a much larger scale.

But what will this mean in everyday usage? Is the screen markedly “better?” It was pretty great already. Will it perform better in sunlight? Is it truly better for creative professionals?

And of course, do sports and action movies actually look sharper and brighter? 

Lots to learn 

Those are my burning questions. What are you looking forward to learning about the new iPad Pro?