 Hey, are you guys ready for another exciting installment in the confusing saga of what the heck is Apple doing with the iPad? Great, because in this episode, Apple edges the iPad a little more towards the MacBook end of the spectrum with a new iPad only flavor of mouse and track pad support. But just wait until you see the new ultra wide camera and LiDAR sensor that Apple also put on the back for some reason. Yeah, if you're confused, trust me, we are too. So let's try to make some sense out of the beautiful mystery that is the 2020 iPad Pro together with our sponsor. FreshBooks accounting software is custom built for how you wanna work, helping you stay organized and productive. Try their 30 day free trial at freshbooks.com forward slash tech tips. In our last video about the iPad Pro, we said that Apple wasn't trying to make the iPad Pro more like a computer, but rather that they were trying to help the iPad Pro be more useful as a computer with iPadOS specific features. They called the iPad Pro a new way to take notes, make music or create a presentation. A worse way for some people like myself, but for better or for worse, a distinctly different way from both a computer and a traditional tablet. And that's not a bad thing. In the initial release of iPadOS last year, the iPad got better navigation gestures and some cool features that negated the need for some keyboard shortcuts, like pinching your fingers to copy and spreading them to paste. Those kinds of optimizations made us think that the iPad Pro might just be a good option for people who have to get work done, but are less inclined to sit in a desk hunched over a tiny screen. So then it's a bit confusing to find ourselves playing with the 2020 iPad Pro running iPadOS 13.4, which now has full blown mouse and trackpad support. Instead of leaning further into the iPad Pro's identity as a unique handheld computing device, it seems like Apple has decided it wants to make the iPad Pro into a bad MacBook after all. They're even releasing a keyboard folio in May with a built-in trackpad. I mean, they might as well send out an internal memo that goes, Microsoft got it right. Maybe to see where Apple's going, we have to take a look at where they've come from. iPadOS pre 13.4 already had mouse support, but the thing is it was buried in the assistive touch section of the accessibility options. And as we said in our last video, it was designed as an accessibility feature to help disabled people who might have trouble operating a touchscreen rather than as a way for every iPad user to easily connect a mouse and go ham. It was a welcome addition, but it was not the type of mouse support that a Windows or a Mac OS user would be accustomed to. Now, mouse and trackpad support has been built in as a core part of the OS. Connect one via Bluetooth or even a USB-C dongle and a small gray pointer immediately pops up and morphs. Yes, my friends, this is not your tired old desktop mouse pointer. This is an iPad Pro mouse pointer. The iPad pointer actually adapts to the shapes of things that it selects, which is supposed to make clicking them easier, I guess. I don't know. After using it for a while, we really can't see an obvious benefit to this feature, but luckily you can just turn it off in the settings. Or that is, you can turn it off in the accessibility settings because some of the pointer options are under mouse and trackpad in the general settings, while the rest are under pointer control in accessibility for reasons that continue to elude me. Between the two of them though, there are most of the options you'd expect, like adjusting pointer contrast, size and color, changing the tracking and scrolling speed, and you can even assign functions to other buttons on the mouse. Although we were not able to get that last one working properly on an MX Master 2S, so your mileage may vary. It's definitely not perfect, but overall the user experience with a mouse is a lot better than in the last version of iPad OS, where the pointer acted basically like a floating finger. Now you can right click to bring up context menus and their support for scroll wheels. Although frequent hitches and hangups do make it clear that things have been more optimized for a trackpad or the touch surface of Apple's Magic Mouse. There are also a number of new gestures that involve dragging the mouse pointer outside of the screen. Dragging to the right will show or hide slide over apps, dragging up to the top right brings down control center, dragging up anywhere else brings down notification center, and there's no gesture for dragging to the left as far as I can tell, but get this. In an app, drag down to bring up the dock, drag down further to go home, drag down again to enter multitasking, at which point, you can actually drag down one more time to go home again. By this point, we were just jazzed to see how deep this rabbit hole goes, but apparently that is in fact the bottom. Now these gestures were a little bit confusing at first, but we think in less than an hour, most people are gonna find them pretty useful, particularly dragging right to access slide over. There are even more gestures that you can do with multiple fingers on a trackpad to go home and switch apps, but we didn't have a trackpad, and if I keep talking about mouse support, I'm going to get upset again, so we had best move on to the hardware. The 2020 iPad Pro is not a big upgrade over the 2018 model. In fact, it is basically the same tablet. While the whole 2020 iPad Pro lineup does now come with six gigs of RAM, and they all get the A12Z Bionic processor, on paper that is essentially the same chip as the A12X Bionic that is in the 2018 model, with a single additional core in the GPU bringing the total up to eight. That was actually confirmed by our Geekbench tests where we saw a very slight increase in multi-core performance, and a lower score on the compute benchmark. You know what, we're just gonna chalk that up to some lack of optimization in iPad OS 13.4 for now. The base model of the 2020 iPad Pro does come with 128 gigs of storage now, instead of 64, that is great to see, but the only other major changes to be found on this device are actually in the camera module. In addition to the standard 12 megapixel lens, we now get a new 10 megapixel ultra wide lens for all of those people who vlog, iPads, and then next to that, really interesting one, that's a LiDAR sensor. LiDAR stands for light detection and ranging, and it works by sending out infrared light, then measuring how long it takes for it to hit something and come back. This new sensor is supposed to be a boon for augmented reality content, although in our tests for the time being, it didn't seem to make AR content on the new iPad Pro any more compelling. Object occlusion in IKEA's AR shopping app was about the same as on the 2018 iPad Pro, and in the measure app, the 2018 iPad Pro actually seemed to do consistently better at measuring length, the new one was about an inch off. Some app developers have expressed excitement about the new sensor though, with some early tests showing the effect that it can have on mapping virtual spaces onto physical ones, and there are rumors going around that Apple will include a LiDAR sensor in the next flagship iPhone, so this new iPad Pro might just be serving as a test bed so that LiDAR equipped AR is gonna be nice and polished up by the fall. For now, it's a fancy new sensor with not much in the way of software support though. All right, iPad Pro 2020 then. Maybe we were wrong when we guessed at Apple's intentions for the iPad, it seemed like they were championing the iPad Pro as this groundbreaking new way for people to do work on the go, you know, an iPad for pros. And now that we've got the next iteration of it, it's, well, it's an iPad with a mouse attached to it, and another camera, and a light bounce sensor, which is fine, it's big, it just leaves me questioning who exactly it's for. No, really though, why don't you guys let me know? Like, are you, Jeff, are you the unicorn that Apple is searching for who needs more than an iPad, but less than a MacBook? What do you do with it? You know, it's a flipping miracle anyone buys anything from dbrand at this point. I go all the way up the corporate ladder to the top robot, I've got one simple request. I want an iPad Pro with unicorns, puking rainbows on each other. What do I get? I get two unicorns that are puking rainbows, I'll give them that, but not on each other, and two rainbow-colored unicorns, and I'm not even sure if this one is a unicorn, I'm pretty sure that that horn is Photoshopped on there. It's disgraceful, is what it is. In all seriousness though, dbrand is your source for awesome textured vinyl skins. They're available for laptops, phones, tablets, consoles, controllers, and more. They're made from high-quality 3M vinyl with a patented adhesive that is guaranteed to leave no residue on your device if you wanna change the skin out for a different one, although I personally would never change this skin. Their uncompromising precision in cutting the vinyl ensures a factory fit for your selected device, and they not only look great, but they even protect your device against incidental scuffs and scratches. Their customer service robots are easy to work with, their products are affordable, and they ship worldwide. What could go wrong? Oh right, you could get insulted by their customer service. Well, you know what? I guess that's just the risk you gotta take to get a nice quality vinyl skin, all right? It's the risk you gotta take. If all that sounds good, check out the probably insulting link that dbrand put in the video description where you can buy their shit. If you guys enjoyed this video, check out our recent video reviewing the latest, you know what, some more Apple Pro stuff. How about the latest MacBook Pro? We really liked that. We actually liked the Mac Pro as well. Just expensive, but like, not really expensive.