As ultra portable productivity devices you cant over look the utility of a physical firmly attached keyboard. As media consumption devices I am sure these tablets would be great. A laptop can easily be used in moving vehicles or in your lap in a chair without without worry that you will drop the device. If you are looking for a portable device to be productive you most likely wont have a table to utilize the keyboard so you will be limited to the on screen keyboard and will not be as nearly as productive as if you where using a laptop where the screen is firmly attached to the keyboard. “Productivity Tablet” is a bit of an oxymoron IMHO. Intel’s x86 design runs at higher peak clocks but will have a disadvantage in minimizing power draw. The Intel Core i5-7300U is a dual-core, HyperThreaded processor that we are very familiar with in the mobile space. This is similar to the ARM big.LITTLE design and the Qualcomm Kryo, common practice today in the mobile space to improve power efficiency across different compute states (heavy load, light load) at a small cost of die area.
The Apple iPad Pro 2017 revisions both use the same SoC (A10X) with two sets of 3-core blocks, one for high performance and one for high efficiency. (3x high performance Hurrican, 3x high efficiency Zephyr cores)
However, it does give us a good bearing on how the hardware landscape looks when we get into the benchmarking section of this story. Knowing that we are looking two ARM-based devices and an x86 system, we should realize core counts, clocks, and the like are even less comparable and relatable than in the Intel/AMD debates. Let’s start our editorial with a comparison of the hardware being tested in the specification department. At that time, we can reevaluate our stance and conclusions.
I should mention at the outset that with the pending release of iOS 11 due in the fall, the Apple iPad Pro line could undergo enough of a platform upgrade to change some of the points in this story.
This brought the total of the iPad Pro + Pencil + keyboard within $90 of the Surface Pro and matching accessories. That did mean sacrificing some specifications that I would usually not do, including moving down to 4GB of memory and a 128GB SSD. I picked up the new Surface Pro (2017) model that was priced nearly identical to the iPad Pro 12.9-in device. The next step was for me to acquire an equivalent Windows 10-based tablet and try making THAT my everyday computer and see how my experiences changed. I was surprised at how well both handled the majority of tasks I tossed their way but there was still some lingering doubt in my mind about the usefulness of the iOS system as it exists today for my purposes. After receiving the 12.9-in variant, with the same processor upgrade but a larger and much more substantial screen, I started using them both as my daily-driver computing device. In the original premise for today’s story, I had planned to do a standard and straight-forward review of the iPad Pro 10.5-inch model, the latest addition to Apple’s line of tablet devices. Specifications We take the best hardware from Microsoft and Apple to see if the iPad can unseat the Surface Pro. We take the best hardware from Microsoft and Apple to see if the iPad can unseat the Surface Pro.