10.5-inch iPad Pro vs 9.7-inch iPad Pro | Should you upgrade?

Hey guys, Stephen Coulter of Mac here

Now there's been an awful lot of talk across the interwebs about the new 10.5 inch iPad Pro

But what have you owned last year's 9.7 inch Pro? Should you upgrade

Well, in this video I'm going to compare all the good stuff and try to answer that question

So let's get started. Just a quick disclaimer, I'm running both of these iPads on iOS 10.3.2 to make it fair

I did have my 9.7 inch iPad Pro running on iOS 11, but as it's not available to this fall

I didn't think it would be right to do comparison tests and so on using beta software. With that said, let's start with the design

Not a lot has changed since the 9.7 was released back in March 2016

The only real giveaways are the larger dimensions and those smaller bezels. Starting with the dimensions, the new 10.5 inch pro is 10.6mm taller

5mm wider, has the same thickness coming in at 6.1 millimeters, but it now weighs

32 grams more. So there's not a huge footprint difference between the two. The biggest change

is obviously that larger display and those smaller bezels. The combination of which means the screen

to body ratio is now 78.3% compared to the 9.7 inches 71.6%. But what about the quality of the screen

Well, the 10.5 inch iPad Pro screen is now HDR capable, 600 nits brighter than before, but it has

the same 264 pixels per inch count. And that's not a bad thing. The displays on both iPads are

crystal clear with great accurate colors thanks to that P3 color gamut Both have the true tone technology and both of the best tablet displays on the market So what else is new with the 2017 iPad display

Well, it now features ProMotion technology, which offers a 120 hertz refresh rate

ProMotion will alter the screen's refresh rate depending on what you're doing. So if you're reading a book, it will refresh less times per second, therefore increase in the battery life

And then, when you're gaming or watching videos, it will increase for smooth animations and frame rates

Even scrolling up and down across the home screen, all websites is greatly improved

Where this also comes into play as if you're an Apple Pencil user

The latency is now down to 20 milliseconds, which means it's closer than ever to feeling like drawing on real paper with a real pencil

The new screen is also apparently less reflective, although I can't see too much of a difference in person

I'll let you guys be the judge of that one. Although it's only marginally bigger, the new larger iPad Pro does mean watching movies and YouTube videos are that little bit larger

It's not a huge difference, but it's still noticeable. but it's still noticeable

The 10.5 inch iPad Pro now features Apple's hexacore A10X fusion chip

which is 30% faster than the 9.7 inch's dual core A9X processor

4 gigs of RAM versus 2 gigs of RAM, and it now starts with 64 gig of storage

double that of the entry model 9.7 inch Pro. How does that stack up in benchmark tests though

Well, with Geekbench 4, the 10.5 inch pro comes in at 3,920 on the single core

versus the 9 inches 2 and 9 on the multi test versus 5 on the 9 inch But what does that really mean Well if you editing videos and photos on your iPad you see a significant increase in export times and the amount of time it takes for filters to render and photo editing apps

For example, here I'm exporting the same 4K video on both iPads, where you can see the 10.5

inches faster than the 1 year old 9.7 inch pro. If you're a heavy gamer, you're not going to see much of a difference at the moment

purely because there's not really any games out there just yet that take full advantage of all of that power and performance

Upgraded on the new 10.5 inch iPad Pro are both the front facing and rear facing cameras

While the rear facing camera has the same 12 megapixel count as the 9.7 inch iPad Pro, it's

now got an F-stop of 1.8 to let in more light, as well as the quad LED flash over the

dual LED flash. Meaning low light photography will be improved. Here's some quick sample

photos I took both with and without the flash, so you can draw your own conclusions

Both shoot 4K video, which again you can see here. The front facing camera has been upgraded to a 7 megapixel shooter over the 5 megapixel camera

in the 9.7 inch pro. At the end of the day, that comes down to who is actually using that iPad as a camera

The only time I truly use a camera on the iPad is for FaceTime, so having that upgraded

front facing camera is really nice. Whereas I personally very rarely use the rear camera, if well, ever

The 10.5 inch has a slightly larger 30.4 watt hour battery versus the 27.9 watt hour battery

in the 9.7 inch. But I found that battery life is about the same for both. both iPads getting around the 8 to 9 hour mark dependent on what tasks I throw at it The new iPad also has the second generation fingerprint scanner but let be honest the first gen works absolutely fine for me so this isn a deciding factor in the slightest

If you're in the market for a new iPad, coming from a model that's just a few years old

the speed and display increase will be night and day, meaning it's a worthwhile investment

If you're looking to upgrade from last year's 9.7-inch iPad Pro, though, it completely depends

on what you're using it for. If it's working fine for what you need right now, chances are it's going to be fine for a good

few years to come. The benchmarks show a huge increase on the multi-core, but if you're not a heavy gamer

or you're not editing video, stick with the 9.7 inch pro. On the other hand, if your primary use of the iPad Pro is to illustrate a design or creating

graphic design masterpieces, it may be worth looking at. The improved latency on the 10.5 inch iPad Pro, the more powerful processor, and a slightly

larger screen may just be enough to encourage you to make the switch

If you're still not sure, maybe head out to an Apple store and try it out, doing the tasks

that you personally do to see if you can see a real difference. As I only occasionally doodle with my iPad Pro, I don't really edit videos or photos on there

it's not something I would truly see a benefit from, so I'm going to be sticking with the 9.7 inch iPad Pro

Well, as it for this video, but let me know in the comments section down below if you

plan to upgrade to the new 10.5 inch iPad Pro or if you're sticking to last year's 9.7 inch

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