Why I'm NOT buying the M4 iPad Pro.
So yeah, the first reason I'm not buying the new iPad is cause I'm broke. Well, I'm kidding and not kidding at the same time. (hes lyiing) I mean, I don't really think Apple is going to let me trade in my M2 iPad anymore with what I've done to it, but you've probably been wondering, why isn't Josh talking about the new M4 iPad? Where's the artist review of the new iPad, right? It's the first time since I think the 2018 iPad that I have not done a review of the latest and greatest iPad pro. Instead, I just wanted to talk about why I'm not buying it, some of the complaints I have. I mean, it's an amazing device. They released the M4 chip first in the iPad, which I think is awesome.
But they also kind of did a little bit of gatekeeping with the pencil. Then I also wanted to play a little bit of the devil's advocate and talk about all the stuff I really like about Apple and some of the things that I think they're doing really well, especially for the art community, whether intentionally or not. And some of the things that I think.
I don't think, I know a lot of people have been complaining about a lot of Apple products, not just the iPad for years now that I think it's pretty silly. And I think this launch really shows how their design and business strategies, not all of them. But some of them are just perfect, and I think they should lean into that a little bit more to support people and what they create. Let's go back to that first topic I mentioned with the Apple Pencil Pro, right? This is the, uh, second generation I have here. It's got my name engraved on it.
Ergo Josh. They released the Pro version, which has a really cool squeeze feature where, in addition to the double tap feature, you can squeeze it to Use different shortcuts and commands, which I think is awesome. And people have been reporting that it's actually really responsive.
If it doesn't have more pressure sensitivity levels, like we see with display and graphics tablets, it's the same technology. It's the same functionality. But in addition to that, it's also got find my enabled. So if you lose it, you can actually use your iPhone or your iPad itself to find it, which I would really need because. Let me just tell you, that is not my first Apple Pencil.
I was super disappointed to hear that it wasn't going to work on any of the older iPads at all. Only the new M4 and the new iPad Air that's M2. And I was like, well, my iPad Pro is M2.
It should work with that, but it doesn't because they moved the camera over to the side with the new iPads. So instead of having your iPad in landscape when you're doing art, but then you want to do a call and it looks weird because the camera's over here. It's right here in the center like that, which is perfect. That also meant that they had to redesign the magnets for how it connects and charges the Apple pencil. So that makes sense. Maybe it was a lucky coincidence for them to make a little bit of extra cash.
Who knows? Not saying that they did do that, but. It's a possibility. And it does make sense that trying to sacrifice that decision, which people have wanted for a long time, just to make the Apple Pencil compatible, probably wasn't the best way to go. But here's what I think.
Why not redesign the Apple Pencil second generation and just make a third gen and call it the third gen and I don't know, make it at least have fine I think that should be in all of them. I mean right like they're they're not cheap things they're this one is still selling for 129 bucks So why not do that, you know, obviously they're gonna want to save money But I think they should follow what they've been doing with their iPhones make a device that is accessible to almost everyone But they can also Create things that are really good for professionals, right? And when you have this wide breadth of devices, you can become a monopoly based off of just sheer excellence in performance. And so I say they should take the R& D hit, redesign all of the pencils and just make them better. And release them so that people can actually have the best of the best available to them when they buy into the Apple ecosystem because that's what they want, right? Apple wants people to get into the ecosystem and have everything work together and then start to pay for the software and the products and all of that.
But this just feels like a really cold business marketing decision. I mean, you could also say I'm just jealous that I can't use it with my current M2 iPad, but I don't think a lot of people are going to Just dump another grand and switch out their iPads unless they are due for an upgrade. Because the iPad Pro has been an extremely successful device since the very beginning. There are people who still use the 2018 model today and have no problems with it.
Even if you look at most of the tech reviewers on YouTube, the number one complaint is that the software isn't there yet. It has the power. That was never the problem, but it doesn't have the accessibility with the tools that we are used to using on the more powerful platforms like your MacBook.
I mean, not only does that work with Apple, you can just look at the game industry, right? The biggest console gaming platforms, like PlayStation with Sony and the Xbox with Microsoft, they take a loss on the sales of the consoles because they are extremely powerful devices that they just sell for about three to five hundred bucks. What the goal is, is for you to invest into that. to buy into the vast library of games that each of these brands have to offer. What I love about the game console industry is that even now, with the PS5, they don't release stuff every single year. They wait several years, up to 7 years so that even the lowest income family can afford a PlayStation 3. PlayStation of maybe last gen while it's still somewhat relevant I was one of those kids and I got a PlayStation 2 way after everyone else got it And I still had a blast with that thing and I have extremely fond memories of it So why not do that with the iPads? why not do that with all of the devices that they sell and Create a really in depth platform where people can really Spend time and get to know the product and evolve with it.
Now, the most appealing upgrade with the M4 iPad was the mention of the new tandem OLED display. OLED technology is basically using a light behind every single pixel. to light up or turn off instead of large LEDs that illuminate the display overall.
With the M2 model that I have, they used this micro LED technology and that had a lot of different LEDs behind it, but you still had dimming zones where if you were watching really high contrast media, you would notice there would be some haziness, some blooming. That's what it was called. Where the light in one area would bleed over into the areas that were supposed to be dark. But with an OLED display, all of the pixels can operate independently and show different colors and turn off completely. And since they double stacked it, that means that all of the issues with using OLED technology were resolved.
were resolved and they could actually implement it on such a large display because I have an iPhone 15 right here and it has an OLED display but is a really small display and a lot of the issues that come up when you use OLED screens don't really apply when the screen is small and what I've noticed with this is that even if I turn the brightness up some of the areas on the screen stay really really dark and it almost feels like I need to turn the brightness up more but I don't and sometimes actually more often I end up turning the brightness all the way down because even at low brightness it's still too bright for me in dark environments and that would be perfect for my iPad because when I'm painting here and filming the glare gets to be a problem and then I have to raise the brightness up to the max and then you The screen is fully illuminated and it just uses a lot more power and gets a lot hotter. I actually did an experiment using one of my Anker little power station things and I noticed that if I raise the brightness back and forth from 0 to 100, the power draw from my iPad Pro would go up and down by over 10 watts. And nothing else I did on my iPad could make it jump in so much power consumption at once. More power means more heat.
And that brings me to my next point about the new iPads is that, even though nobody asked, they made them a lot thinner. Now, a lot of people were like, okay, well, this just makes it more likely to bend, but after some incredibly detailed and profound research that some YouTubers have made, they found that it actually is a little bit more rigid. You can check out JerryRigEverything's channel if you haven't seen his amazingly profound video already where he tested the absolute limits of the new iPad. However, there is another thing that I think people aren't really talking about. When you have a thinner device that doesn't have any fans, it's much more likely to actually dissipate heat more efficiently because the thermal envelope was next to nothing.
It's actually about getting that heat outside of the device as fast as you can. And so that's why I glued a piece of copper to the back of my iPad, and I have noticed significant improvements in its performance. Now, mind you, I push it to the max almost every single day, but Still, I noticed a big difference, and so if it's thinner, there's a better chance that it's not going to overheat as much, and if it's using an OLED display that doesn't have to push the pixels as hard, or just turn off a lot of the pixels, that saves on the power usage too, which saves on the heat generated, which makes the overall device a lot cooler. Hopefully there's a channel out there that can actually put this to the test and see maybe with like a thermal gun or something if the back of the iPad on the new M4 model stays cooler for longer doing the same tasks. And my little modifications on my iPad there weren't completely based off of speculation. If you actually look at the formula for thermal conductivity and rewrite it to solve for the actual temperature.
Amount of heat transferred. The variable d represents the distance between the two surfaces that are exchanging heat and If you notice it, since it's on the bottom, the smaller it is, the higher the amount of heat output will be. The bigger the distance is, the less output there's going to be. Touching on the M2 iPad Air, I am really happy with their decision to bring that up to the Pro level, because I think that a lot of people wanted to be able to use the iPad as a professional illustration device, but they couldn't justify the price of jumping to the Pro. Now that you can have a full size 13 inch iPad Air, I think that's awesome.
And the M2 has already been an extremely powerful chip for my usage, creating an entire Procreate course and all of my YouTube videos here where I show you the time lapses of how I create my illustrations. And I can spend well over 100 hours on these. Now, one of the biggest updates that they made with the iPad Pros is the nanotextured glass. Now that's something that they offered on their extremely expensive 6K, what was it, the 32 inch Retina display that they released a while back. And you had to use a really special cloth to clean it.
So a lot of people were speculating that it wasn't going to be a good decision. But from the reviews I've seen, especially from artists here on YouTube, on the nanotexture display, it seems like it's actually providing advantages over using something like a paper like matte screen protector, which is what I use on my iPad. Now, personally for me, I draw all the time on my iPad, and I put this matte screen protector on last year.
I don't switch them out nearly as often as some other people do and I find it's still awesome but this whole idea of using a matte screen protector to change the feel of how it feels to draw and paint on your iPad is a very personal decision so I highly recommend that if you are ever considering purchasing it that you go check it out. At the mall or, you know, at an Apple store because the nanotexture display is really only worth getting if you're getting the highest end models, which are extremely expensive. I don't even know if they're actually available on those sub one terabyte models of the iPad Pro. However, I will say that the number one consideration is endurance and durability.
Just like I said, I still enjoy using my paper like screen protector, and it's been several months since I last put it on. With the nanotexture display, you can't take that off. Even though it looks better than a matte screen protector, and it feels better to a lot of people, I don't know how it's going to hold up over time. And, you've also got to factor in that different people use their device in different ways, with different pressures, with how they hold the pencil, and different nibs. So I'm really interested to see what a lot of artists will have to say about the nanotexture version three, six months down the line, a year down the line, right? Because I think for me at least, if I wasn't a YouTuber, I would still keep it for two years solid because it's just they're extremely powerful and resilient. Now although Apple has a lot of really questionable attitudes towards sustainability with how they ship their accessories, like the power brick, but then they ship.
really outdated and weird ones with these devices. There is something that they do pretty well, which is the fact that they design products that are extremely effective and efficient at what they do, and they don't make unnecessary design changes. And I find it kind of Silly, honestly, that a lot of people are like, wow, it looks the same as last year. Oh wow, no innovation, no creativity here. Well, that's the point. Why would you constantly make unnecessary changes to a device when it doesn't really need it? I would rather use a device that's been perfected for over a decade than just something new for the hell of it.
If I wanted to do that, I would get a way cheaper device that I could save money with. And the even bigger reason is that when you have a device that's consistent, it allows for third parties to be able to invest a lot of time and effort and take a lot of care in designing accessories that are extremely beneficial to us, especially as artists. So, app developers like Procreate can employ a whole team in Australia and ship them around the world for all these events just because of the app that they made that only runs on iPads. They can do that and support several families with it, clearly. They even supported me and invited me to the event where they released the new Procreate Dreams app.
If you look at Paperlike They're based in Germany, or at least last I heard, and they have perfected the artist focused matte screen protector, and they're doing well, they're paying people payroll, right? Sketchboard Pro, and others like the, what is it, the Darkboard and the Sketch Slate, They've developed really awesome easels for us to be able to use as artists so that we can get a lot more out of the iPad's relatively small display. If they change the shape every single year, then it wouldn't be worth it for them to create these high end accessories for us to invest in and improve our artwork with. Big corporations and companies aside, individuals benefit from this too. Artists like myself can make skins for iPhones and iPads and reliably get sales because they're going to work for multiple devices and There's a lot of people with the same device, right? If you make a skin for the newest flashy OnePlus phone, you're not going to have that big of a pool for people to buy your skin from.
I myself make videos here on YouTube with tutorials that are based in Procreate, and I have my own Procreate course and a living through these things. I wouldn't be able to do that if Procreate didn't exist. So you can see how this kind of trickles down as much as I don't like that term.
Another art YouTuber here, BeeJayDeL, he has designed and released an incredibly unique Apple Pencil grip with all kinds of cool features that now with the new Apple Pencil Pro, he's confirmed that all of those features still work with the new version, and if they just made the Apple Pencil this fancy new thing just for the hell of it, Then he would have to redesign that thing. And his audience wouldn't have as much reason to invest in that product. But now he can invest in that. And.
He's mentioned working on even more products to help artists who use the same tools that he does, which is awesome. So the next time you feel that urge to complain about something not changing, think about all the different people that benefit from one company's product. Think about all the different people that benefit from Great, intentional, thoughtful design, and all the different creations that we can make that just make the world a much more exciting and interesting place to live. And now we are at the last reason that I am not buying the new M4 iPad Pro. That is because I am saving for something quite special in the future.
I can't say too much about it now. It does cost somewhere in the ballpark of how much a new fully decked out M4 iPad Pro and Pencil would be. However, saving your cash is something that I actually have a lot more to say and talk about, especially for artists and other creatives, but I'll save that for the next video.
So you should subscribe if you want to hear more about that while I show you my super Hyper geeked out, futuristic, crazy DIY iPad setup that I've been working on for quite a while now. I'm finally ready to show you guys and talk more about what exactly I did here and how it's helped me with my work. Uh, it's super overkill, but it's fun.
And it's related to the topic. And I think I know it's something that I want everyone to be aware of. If you do anything creative. Well, we'll get a little bit into the politics stuff like I mentioned in the other video, right? You should check it out here. Capitalism. I think it's an important one.
But with all that being said, thank you all so much. I've been Ergo Josh. I hope you enjoyed this video. Keep drawing and stay balanced, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace. Did you guys see I was actually in the Apple keynote for the new M4 iPads? That's actually a scan they did of my hand.
I'm just kidding. No, they didn't. It's probably like a 3D render or something they filmed. But come on, it looks like my hand, right? (should I sue them? XD) Look at this.
Let's put it, let's put it side to side. That's, that's, that's like, come on. Oh man, as if I'm the only black iPad artist out there. But honestly man, that was kind of nice to see. That was kind of nice.
As much as I'm annoyed about the Apple Pencil stuff, that felt pretty cool to see.
2024-06-01 12:41
