Nonetheless, the Touch Bar stays visible and legible even if you are sitting at an off-angle to your Mac.

It’s also optimized for viewing at a 45-degree angle, looking down from above, which is odd for any screen. You can’t adjust its brightness yourself, for example, because if it was too bright it would start looking more like a display than a set of keys. How much that’s worth if you already have the old iPad is highly subjective.The Touch Bar is an OLED strip that’s tempting to call a display, but Apple wants developers and users to think of it as an input device, not a display. I half expect the new iPad’s screen to feel wet because the drawing experience feels so liquid-light.

Also, I can subjectively say it feels more fluid when sketching with the newer iPad Pro. I don’t know how much this will affect the average artist, but one artist told me they hand shade their art, and that it’s a realistic activity. The video below shows when you’re really moving the pencil at high velocity, the older iPad stutters a little bit more, and leaves a bit more of a gap as it fills the line in after the pencil compared to the new iPad. Lastly, there was an improvement in Apple Pencil tracking, though at somewhat of an extreme case. This has not been terribly relevant thus far, but with 512GB of storage and the ability to sync all your desktop data onto the iPad to do more ‘real’ work with iOS 11, disk throughput will become more relevant. That pales a fair bit to the 2017 iPad Pro’s 980MB/sec read and 380MB/sec write speeds. The 2015 iPad Pro has respectable 701MB/sec read and ‘meh’ 89.7MB/sec write speed, as shown in the screenshots below. The new iPad has 40% faster reads and a whopping 324% faster writes. There was a good bit of improvement in SSD speed with the new iPad. These speed bumps will become much more relevant with iOS 11’s expanded multitasking and windowing. Also, while it’s a nice increase in single core performance (27% speed bump according to Geekbench 4, as shown below), it’s almost double the throughput with multicore performance (79% bump) and Metal/video performance (82% bump). Overall the new iPad feels snappier when you use it, and those differences become more noticeable the more you stress it. iPad Pro 12.9-inch Benchmarks 2017 iPad Pro 12.9-inch Is Snappier This includes benchmarks from Geekbench 4 and PerformanceTest Mobile, as well as my experiments with Apple Pencil. In benchmarking iPad Pro 12.9-inch, I put together some interesting highlights and differences between the old 2015 model and the 2017 model.

2015 macbook pro 13 2.7 geekbench