**The Tablet Wars: A Comparative Analysis**
As we continue to explore the world of tablets, it's clear that each device has its own strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we'll delve into the details of three top contenders: the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface Pro 4, and their predecessors. From performance to battery life, software experiences, and accessories, we'll examine what sets each device apart.
**The iPad Pro**
The iPad Pro is a powerhouse of a tablet that's designed to replace laptops for many users. With its massive 12.9-inch 2.7K display and all-metal body, it's an attractive option for those looking for a premium device. Performance-wise, the A9X chip is more than capable of handling demanding tasks, making it an ideal candidate for replacing a laptop. Battery life is also impressive, with the iPad Pro boasting one of the longest battery lives among its competitors.
One of the key features that sets the iPad Pro apart from other tablets is its primary interaction method: touch. With a vast array of iPad-specific apps available in the App Store, many games and productivity tools are designed specifically for use on this device. This means that users can expect an optimal experience with their hands on the display. The Apple Pencil is also a notable accessory, offering low latency and performance that's unmatched by other styluses.
However, some users may find the lack of an eraser on the Apple Pencil to be a drawback, as well as its charging mechanism. Fortunately, the keyboard attachment is a game-changer for those who want to use their iPad Pro in a more laptop-like experience. With its command buttons and option buttons, it's easy to navigate common tasks like opening new tabs or searching for content.
**The Surface Pro 4**
Microsoft's Surface Pro 4 takes a different approach to the tablet market. By specing up with full-on laptop internals, including Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, up to 16GB of RAM, and Intel Iris graphics, it's able to compete directly with laptops in terms of performance and software experience. The 12.3-inch 2.7K display is a significant departure from the iPad Pro's larger size, but still offers excellent visuals.
One of the standout features of the Surface Pro 4 is its keyboard attachment, which is arguably the best on the market. With travel and clickiness similar to that of a traditional laptop keyboard, it's easy to type for extended periods without fatigue. The hinge mechanism also allows for adjustable angles, making it comfortable to use in various positions.
However, there's a catch: the Surface Pro 4 is designed primarily as a laptop with touch capabilities. While this makes it an excellent choice for many users, it means that touch is secondary to mouse and keyboard input. In fact, some users may find themselves neglecting the touchscreen altogether due to the device's primary focus on typing and gesturing.
**A Comparative Analysis**
So, which device comes out on top? Ultimately, the answer depends on your specific needs and preferences. If you're looking for a device that excels in terms of performance, battery life, and portability, the iPad Pro is an excellent choice. However, if you prioritize software experience, keyboard quality, and flexibility, the Surface Pro 4 may be the better option.
For those who want it all – laptop-like performance, tablet-like portability, and a full suite of Windows apps – Microsoft Surface Pro 4 is the clear winner. While it may not excel in terms of touchscreen interaction, its strengths in other areas make it an attractive choice for many users.
In conclusion, each device has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. By understanding what sets them apart, you can make informed decisions about which tablet is right for your needs.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what is up guys mkbhd here and tablets tablets kind of had a weird year in 2015. we're all familiar with where tablets sit in between smartphones and computers but lately as they try to differentiate themselves they've blurred that whole line case and point what do these three tablets from this year have in common two of them have the word pro in the name they all kind of have this first party keyboard attachment but really they all really want to be laptops this is google's pixel c the pixel c is beautiful not gonna lie it's actually one of my favorite pieces of recent google hardware but it is the most awkward combo with its keyboard so the tablet itself by itself it's an excellent build completely unibody metal enclosure has the chamfered edges and a really solid feel in the hand has some nice weight to it too it's one of those smaller tablets but it's solid you've got the 10 inch 2560 by 1800 lcd up front and these big stereo speakers on either side that get really loud for media or games or whatever you use it for and even that dope always on color bar on the back that behaves the same way it does on the chromebook pixel and inside it's all high-end for a tablet so it's rocking the nvidia tegra x1 chip and three gigabytes of ram performance while it's okay it actually isn't the greatest thing in the world it's fairly normal throughout but sometimes apps take an extra second to open and there's animation stuttering more often than i expected so it's not to the point where it's a problem or it's unusable or anything but i expected it to be corrected with software updates and i certainly didn't expect it to have this problem out the box anyway this is the keyboard dock it has one of the more interesting magnetic attachment mechanisms it's not really intuitive or like a normal laptop but they're held together with magnets normally and it kind of sort of looks like a normal laptop before we start to mess with it to open it what you have to do is slide them apart then turn the tablet around and click the magnets into place and then pull up on the hinge now these magnets are really strong so once you get it open like this you're solid it's gripping that back panel with some force and you can use it without worrying about it slipping you can adjust the angle and everything it works just fine to put it back you flatten the keyboard and then slide it off flip it over and then place it face down and from there you're good to go and there's actually an additional battery in the keyboard that's now wirelessly charging the tablet so that is legit unfortunately the downside is this is like the most awkward keyboard for any tablet it almost seems pointless after you use the pixel c for a while i found myself looking on the keyboard for like a home button a back button a multitasking button or even like any android shortcut keys there's none of that the only android specific button is just the google search button this is basically just the keyboard the letters themselves for literally if you need to type out a lot of text and i can't think of many people who type that much on their tablet to justify spending 150 bucks on an accessory like this there's this really great article i'll link it right below that like button by ron amadeo on rs technica on how this tablet the pixel c was probably never meant to run android and it was designed as a chrome os tablet and then at the last minute plans left us with this now android isn't bad on tablets but it obviously still has its quirks plenty of apps are still portrait only and plenty just don't measure up to the more functional desktop or even specifically ipad apps so pixel c kind of falls short of its potential it's a bunch of awesome hardware but it just doesn't quite fill the shoes i imagined it to what's fun though is even if you just get it as an android tablet and never use the keyboard you still get the side benefit of being filled with a whole lot of strong magnets enough to stick it to refrigerator boom there's your smart fridge now here we have the ipad pro this is the most well known of the bunch and it's partially due to the huge popularity of the other ipads that came before this one and ipad pro as we already know is huge we've talked about it it has a big beautiful 12.9 inch 2.7 k display and again an all metal jacket just obscenely fast performance throughout we already know the a9x is legit so it's like the ideal candidate to replace a laptop if any right it also happens to have the best tablet only battery life of any of the three but touch is the primary interaction on an ipad for sure there are tons and tons of ipad specific apps in that app store and of course they're pretty much all made for using it with your hands so all your games your productivity everything with the ipad pro is by default kind of done with your hands on the display now i do have your first party accessories you kind of can't forget to mention the apple pencil which in all honesty is objectively actually a pretty good stylus people usually don't need a stylus but for those who do use one this is your best option for the ipad pro in terms of performance and low latency i just kind of wish it had an eraser and i also wish it didn't charge like a giant lollipop but all that being said the keyboard accessory is yet again the one that shows how much ipad pro wants to compete with laptops gets a little closer to a normal laptop experience so the keys themselves don't have a lot of travel or click but they're kind of like the 12-inch macbook but there's some useful stuff so there's a command button on either side an option button a control button and they all work kind of how you'd expect them on a laptop running os 10. so command t in the browser opens a new tab command and space from anywhere opens search like on a mac so i can say that this one's intuitive you're still going to get handsy with an ipad pro though so the keyboard case for 170 bucks offers a tiny bit of extra functionality but again you're definitely not fully replacing a laptop now lastly here we have microsoft surface pro 4. this tablet is the closest to a laptop of any of them it has a 12.3 inch 2.7 k display full metal body again with a little bit more of an industrial look and feel a little more weight it has fans and vents for cooling and you can spec it up to full on laptop internals you can give it a terabyte ssd you can go core i5 or core i7 and you can go up to 16 gigs of ram and give it intel iris graphics has a full size usb port full size sd card slot and full windows 10 so full desktop apps the microsoft office suite the whole deal so almost anything you can do on any other windows 10 laptop you can do on surface pro 4. so on top of that software experience the keyboard attachment for surface pro 4 is also by far the best of the bunch to the point where it's really part of buying a surface pro you really shouldn't get one without the keyboard the travel and clickiness of the keys is most like a normal laptop it feels like regular typing it even has backlighting and the hinge mechanism on the surface itself keeps it at pretty much whatever angle you want which makes it pretty great for again normal work you do on a normal laptop and the real kicker is this keyboard has a touchpad with a mechanical click and gestures and everything so you don't actually need to touch the display on the surface pro 4 for much of anything of what you're doing so this guy is so well geared as a laptop with the keyboard and the trackpad that it actually kind of struggles as a tablet it's sort of the opposite of the ipad pro experience now all the full windows apps are built for being used with a mouse and keyboard touch is secondary touch is awkward on the surface pro 4 and pretty much any convertible windows tablet for that matter so you'll get the most out of a surface pro 4 with that keyboard and trackpad for sure so back to the three tablets to simplify and sum it all up you have photoshop express photoshop fix full adobe photoshop you're rocking android video editor or imovie or adobe premiere in after effects google docs iwork or the full microsoft office suite you kind of get the idea they all really want to be laptops but they're not quite there because they're not quite laptops for now anyway thank you for watching and if you enjoyed you might be interested in the other tech of the year roundups which you can find made by people who you saw appear throughout this video so juddner your average consumer with his favorite headphones john tld with the best smartphones and austin evans with the best gaming tech of the year thanks for watching and i'll talk to you guys in the next one peace youhey what is up guys mkbhd here and tablets tablets kind of had a weird year in 2015. we're all familiar with where tablets sit in between smartphones and computers but lately as they try to differentiate themselves they've blurred that whole line case and point what do these three tablets from this year have in common two of them have the word pro in the name they all kind of have this first party keyboard attachment but really they all really want to be laptops this is google's pixel c the pixel c is beautiful not gonna lie it's actually one of my favorite pieces of recent google hardware but it is the most awkward combo with its keyboard so the tablet itself by itself it's an excellent build completely unibody metal enclosure has the chamfered edges and a really solid feel in the hand has some nice weight to it too it's one of those smaller tablets but it's solid you've got the 10 inch 2560 by 1800 lcd up front and these big stereo speakers on either side that get really loud for media or games or whatever you use it for and even that dope always on color bar on the back that behaves the same way it does on the chromebook pixel and inside it's all high-end for a tablet so it's rocking the nvidia tegra x1 chip and three gigabytes of ram performance while it's okay it actually isn't the greatest thing in the world it's fairly normal throughout but sometimes apps take an extra second to open and there's animation stuttering more often than i expected so it's not to the point where it's a problem or it's unusable or anything but i expected it to be corrected with software updates and i certainly didn't expect it to have this problem out the box anyway this is the keyboard dock it has one of the more interesting magnetic attachment mechanisms it's not really intuitive or like a normal laptop but they're held together with magnets normally and it kind of sort of looks like a normal laptop before we start to mess with it to open it what you have to do is slide them apart then turn the tablet around and click the magnets into place and then pull up on the hinge now these magnets are really strong so once you get it open like this you're solid it's gripping that back panel with some force and you can use it without worrying about it slipping you can adjust the angle and everything it works just fine to put it back you flatten the keyboard and then slide it off flip it over and then place it face down and from there you're good to go and there's actually an additional battery in the keyboard that's now wirelessly charging the tablet so that is legit unfortunately the downside is this is like the most awkward keyboard for any tablet it almost seems pointless after you use the pixel c for a while i found myself looking on the keyboard for like a home button a back button a multitasking button or even like any android shortcut keys there's none of that the only android specific button is just the google search button this is basically just the keyboard the letters themselves for literally if you need to type out a lot of text and i can't think of many people who type that much on their tablet to justify spending 150 bucks on an accessory like this there's this really great article i'll link it right below that like button by ron amadeo on rs technica on how this tablet the pixel c was probably never meant to run android and it was designed as a chrome os tablet and then at the last minute plans left us with this now android isn't bad on tablets but it obviously still has its quirks plenty of apps are still portrait only and plenty just don't measure up to the more functional desktop or even specifically ipad apps so pixel c kind of falls short of its potential it's a bunch of awesome hardware but it just doesn't quite fill the shoes i imagined it to what's fun though is even if you just get it as an android tablet and never use the keyboard you still get the side benefit of being filled with a whole lot of strong magnets enough to stick it to refrigerator boom there's your smart fridge now here we have the ipad pro this is the most well known of the bunch and it's partially due to the huge popularity of the other ipads that came before this one and ipad pro as we already know is huge we've talked about it it has a big beautiful 12.9 inch 2.7 k display and again an all metal jacket just obscenely fast performance throughout we already know the a9x is legit so it's like the ideal candidate to replace a laptop if any right it also happens to have the best tablet only battery life of any of the three but touch is the primary interaction on an ipad for sure there are tons and tons of ipad specific apps in that app store and of course they're pretty much all made for using it with your hands so all your games your productivity everything with the ipad pro is by default kind of done with your hands on the display now i do have your first party accessories you kind of can't forget to mention the apple pencil which in all honesty is objectively actually a pretty good stylus people usually don't need a stylus but for those who do use one this is your best option for the ipad pro in terms of performance and low latency i just kind of wish it had an eraser and i also wish it didn't charge like a giant lollipop but all that being said the keyboard accessory is yet again the one that shows how much ipad pro wants to compete with laptops gets a little closer to a normal laptop experience so the keys themselves don't have a lot of travel or click but they're kind of like the 12-inch macbook but there's some useful stuff so there's a command button on either side an option button a control button and they all work kind of how you'd expect them on a laptop running os 10. so command t in the browser opens a new tab command and space from anywhere opens search like on a mac so i can say that this one's intuitive you're still going to get handsy with an ipad pro though so the keyboard case for 170 bucks offers a tiny bit of extra functionality but again you're definitely not fully replacing a laptop now lastly here we have microsoft surface pro 4. this tablet is the closest to a laptop of any of them it has a 12.3 inch 2.7 k display full metal body again with a little bit more of an industrial look and feel a little more weight it has fans and vents for cooling and you can spec it up to full on laptop internals you can give it a terabyte ssd you can go core i5 or core i7 and you can go up to 16 gigs of ram and give it intel iris graphics has a full size usb port full size sd card slot and full windows 10 so full desktop apps the microsoft office suite the whole deal so almost anything you can do on any other windows 10 laptop you can do on surface pro 4. so on top of that software experience the keyboard attachment for surface pro 4 is also by far the best of the bunch to the point where it's really part of buying a surface pro you really shouldn't get one without the keyboard the travel and clickiness of the keys is most like a normal laptop it feels like regular typing it even has backlighting and the hinge mechanism on the surface itself keeps it at pretty much whatever angle you want which makes it pretty great for again normal work you do on a normal laptop and the real kicker is this keyboard has a touchpad with a mechanical click and gestures and everything so you don't actually need to touch the display on the surface pro 4 for much of anything of what you're doing so this guy is so well geared as a laptop with the keyboard and the trackpad that it actually kind of struggles as a tablet it's sort of the opposite of the ipad pro experience now all the full windows apps are built for being used with a mouse and keyboard touch is secondary touch is awkward on the surface pro 4 and pretty much any convertible windows tablet for that matter so you'll get the most out of a surface pro 4 with that keyboard and trackpad for sure so back to the three tablets to simplify and sum it all up you have photoshop express photoshop fix full adobe photoshop you're rocking android video editor or imovie or adobe premiere in after effects google docs iwork or the full microsoft office suite you kind of get the idea they all really want to be laptops but they're not quite there because they're not quite laptops for now anyway thank you for watching and if you enjoyed you might be interested in the other tech of the year roundups which you can find made by people who you saw appear throughout this video so juddner your average consumer with his favorite headphones john tld with the best smartphones and austin evans with the best gaming tech of the year thanks for watching and i'll talk to you guys in the next one peace you\n"