iPad Pro 10.5-inch review: great tablet camera, lower latency with Apple Pencil, and excellent battery life, but iOS 11 still three months away
More RAM, great screen, and better keyboard will all shine... once iOS 11 is out. — Nothing Apple has done in the last three years has reversed …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third time Ars Technica has reviewed an iPad Pro against the same backdrop: hardware that outruns the software it ships with. The original 12.9-inch iPad Pro was dinged for iOS 9's limitations, and the 9.7-inch follow-up shipped with just 2GB RAM that reviewers flagged as potentially limiting.
The 10.5-inch model breaks the RAM constraint and improves Pencil latency, but the payoff is deferred — iOS 11 is three months out. The Verge's same-day review adds the other half of the story: the Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil needed to unlock the 'Pro' pitch make an already expensive tablet more so.
First-order effects
- Buyers paying the premium today are financing capability they can't use until iOS 11 lands — the review's core caveat is that the extra RAM, screen, and keyboard improvements sit idle on iOS 10.
- Apple is selling the 10.5-inch as a Pro device whose total cost of ownership balloons once the Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil are attached, as The Verge's review emphasizes.
Second-order effects
- Every positive note in this review — lower Pencil latency, more RAM, better keyboard — raises the bar for what iOS 11 must deliver at launch, since Apple has publicly staked the Pro line's justification on that software update.
- The recurring 'expensive with accessories' critique across both 2017 reviews pressures Apple to either bundle or discount the Pencil and keyboard, or risk the Pro line reading as a luxury tier rather than a work machine.
Third-order effects
- If the hardware-leads-software pattern holds, each iPad Pro generation becomes a bet on the next iOS release — a structure the 2018 iPad Pro redesign ultimately paid off, with a second-generation Pencil and a lap-stable Smart Keyboard arriving alongside the software maturity earlier Pros were promised.
The trend: Apple is iterating the iPad Pro toward laptop replacement in hardware-first cycles, where each generation's silicon and accessories ship ahead of the iOS release meant to justify them.