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Apple just released two new iPads. One of them, the basic 10th-generation iPad, was rebuilt from the ground up. The new iPad Pro, on the other hand, is a much simpler update. The company took last year’s model, swapped the M1 chip for the M2, made a few other small tweaks, and called it a day. The iPad Pro is still ludicrously fast, and it’s still extremely expensive, starting at $799 for the 11-inch model and $1,099 for the 12.9-inch.

I can’t really fault Apple for this approach, though. Even though the basic design of the iPad Pro was first introduced in 2018, it’s still a marvelously engineered piece of hardware. It features one of the best screens Apple has ever made, and it continues to surprise me that the company can pack so much power into such a compact frame.

While this year’s model closely resembles what Apple was already selling, it does arrive at a significant time for the iPad’s evolution. That is thanks to iPadOS 16, which launched last week. For most iPads, it’s the expected collection of useful improvements — but for the iPad Pro, it offers an entirely new multitasking system called Stage Manager. It’s a clear response to the question we tech reviewers (and many iPad Pro owners) have been asking for years: When will we get software that lets us take advantage of the iPad’s power?

Hardware

First, a quick refresher. The iPad Pro is still available in two sizes: 11 and 12.9 inches. Storage options range from a modest 128GB up to a truly outrageous 2TB, and you can configure it with an optional 5G radio for when there’s no WiFi. And for when you’re at home, it supports the WiFi 6E, whereas last year’s model was limited to WiFi 6. As usual, we reviewers get to play with a near top-of-the-line iPad: the 12.9-inch model with 1TB of storage and 5G service from Verizon. This iPad Pro costs a jaw-dropping $1,999, and that’s before you add on the $129 Apple Pencil and $349 Magic Keyboard. We’re well into MacBook Pro or Mac Studio territory at this point.

At least the iPad Pro still feels like a device worth that kind of money. (Whether it is is a different question.) The fit and finish remains exceptional, and while the 1.5-pound weight makes it a bit more of a burden to hold compared to smaller and lighter iPad models, I’m still impressed at Apple’s ability to cram such performance into a device that’s so compact. There are other well-designed tablets on the market, but I still don’t think anyone has caught up to the iPad Pro.

The 11-inch model still has to make do with the same Liquid Retina LCD display it’s had for a few years now, but the 12.9-inch version has the Liquid Retina XDR panel that was first introduced on the M1 iPad Pro in May of 2021. This screen uses mini-LED backlighting to offer 2,596 local dimming zones to offer a wide dynamic range and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. It also has up to 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness and 1,600 nits peak brightness when playing back HDR content, which can really make movies pop.

Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

There’s nothing new about the screen this year, but it’s worth highlighting just how good it is. Both iPad Pro models also have the 120Hz ProMotion refresh rate; support for the P3 wide color gamut; a screen that’s fully laminated to the front glass; and an anti-reflective coating.

Just like last year, the iPad Pro has an ultrawide 12-megapixel front-facing camera that supports Face ID authentication. This wide-angle camera supports Center Stage, which crops and zooms around your face to keep you in the middle of the frame on a video call. That’s all well and good, but unfortunately the iPad Pro still has its front-facing camera on the portrait edge of the screen, which means you’re always going to be somewhat off-center and not looking directly at the screen if your iPad is in a keyboard dock. This has been true of all iPads for years already, but now that the basic model has gotten a landscape-oriented camera, we’re going to be waiting impatiently for Apple to implement that across its entire lineup.

The back cameras are also the same: There are 12-megapixel wide and 10-megapixel ultra wide options, along with a flash and LIDAR scanner. However, the M2 processor unlocks a new video trick, as the iPad Pro can now record video in Apple’s ProRes codec in 4K resolution at 30 frames per second, a feature first introduced in the iPhone 13 Pro. This is admittedly something of a niche feature, but it shows off the M2’s improvements over its predecessor.

Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

Accessories

From an accessories standpoint, the iPad Pro uses the same 2nd-generation Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard that have been available since 2018 and 2020, respectively. The Magic Keyboard still provides the best typing experience you can find on an iPad, though the whole package is pretty heavy. It’s also crazy expensive, as I already mentioned. And now that the basic iPad’s new Magic Keyboard Folio offers a row of function keys and a slightly bigger trackpad, I’m really missing those features here. But if you make your living with words, as I do, it’s still an essential tool.

The Apple Pencil remains a tool that I’m not particularly great at evaluating, because I am sorely lacking in visual arts skills. I sure wish I could sit down and sketch and doodle and make the wonderful creations I’ve seen others do, but that’s not happening. If you’re a visual artist, chances are you already know how well the Pencil works, though.

The M2 on the new iPad Pro also enabled a new trick called Hover. If the Pencil is within 12mm of the screen, icons and interface elements can react to it. The most simple example is how app icons increase in size when you hover the Pencil over, showing you what you're about to tap on. This works system-wide, at least in Apple apps. Third-party developers will have to build Hover features into their apps, but it should be a nice new tool in the Pencil’s arsenal. One place I was able to demo it was in the Notes app; when using the new watercolor brush, you can hover the pencil over the screen to see how the color will react with other elements you’ve already drawn.

I found another cool Hover implementation in the excellent image-editing app Pixelmator Photo. Hovering and moving the Pencil across a strip of different filters at the bottom of the app automatically applies them as a preview. It’s wickedly fast and a fun way to see what your picture will look like. That said, it’s something you could already do with the trackpad and pointer; so far, a lot of Hover actions I’ve seen are straight up clones of what you can do when hovering over an interface element with the trackpad. I’m looking forward to seeing what developers come up with going forward, though.

M2

But let’s get into that M2 processor, shall we? Thanks to our review of the M2 MacBook Air earlier this summer, we had a good idea of what to expect here. And running Geekbench 5 tests confirmed it. The M2 iPad Pro scored 1,888 and 8,419 on single-core and multicore CPU tests, respectively. Those are 12 percent and 42 percent better than the same tests on the M1 iPad Pro, and similar to the 18 percent and 38 percent gains we saw when comparing the M2 MacBook Air to its M1-powered sibling.

I saw similar improvements in the Geekbench 5 Compute test, which measures GPU performance. The M2 iPad Pro scored 32,834 – 52 percent better than the M1 model and a bit higher than the 27,083 we saw in the M2 MacBook Air’s test. Obviously, synthetic benchmarks like this aren’t the be-all and end-all way to judge performance, but it gives you an idea of what to expect. If you regularly push an M1 iPad Pro to its limits and use it in a setting where your time equals money, these improvements might justify upgrading, but unless your workflow is extremely demanding you can probably skip this generation. When you consider the fact that the iPad Pro’s basic design hasn’t changed since 2018, that’s another reason to hold off; it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple released an all-new Pro in the next year or so.

Stage manager

Finally, there’s the not-so-small addition of iPadOS 16, and more specifically Stage Manager. As a reminder, Stage Manager lets you have up to four apps open in one group at once, with overlapping, resizable windows. Four other groups (with up to four apps in each) show up on the left side of the screen, based on how recently you’ve used them. Only a select few iPads can run Stage Manager: The iPad Pro with either an M1 or M2, the M1-powered iPad Air that was released earlier this year, or the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pro models running on the A12X or A12Z chip. (Those older iPad Pro models won’t be able to use Stage Manager on an external display; that’s limited to M1 or M2 devices.)

Ever since Stage Manager arrived in beta versions of iPadOS 16 earlier this year, there’s been a lot of chatter among the iPad faithful about Apple’s execution. On one end of the spectrum you have someone like Federico Viticci over at Macstores.net — he’s well known for being a devout iPad Pro user and writes massive, detailed breakdowns of each iOS and iPadOS release. Viticci, to put it mildly, is not a fan of Stage Manager; he wrote around 10,000 words detailing its inconsistencies and bugs.

On the other hand, I have not run into nearly the same scale of difficulties as Viticci, but I recognize his overall point. There are probably too many different ways to do things in Stage Manager (like adding a new app to a group); window management is more restrictive compared to a Mac (or Windows, or ChromeOS); and the behavior of the Control Strip on the left side of the screen remains confusing. Stage Manager feels like a work in progress — but when it works, I have created app groupings that make me a lot more efficient and productive than I was using the standard two-app Split View multitasking mode with a third app in a small “Slide Over” window.

And while Stage Manager was (and still may be) buggy, I at least have run into a lot fewer problems here on the M2 iPad Pro with the final iPadOS 16.1 release. I’ve been working on this iPad for the entirety of my work day and think I’ve only had one app crash on me (Gmail, which isn’t exactly the best iPad app on its best days). There are some conceptual things about Stage Manager I’m still grappling with, like the best way to add or remove apps from a group, but I think the experience is worth spending a day or two with to see if you can find your flow.

Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

Wrap-up

There’s no question that the new iPad Pro is better than its predecessor. It’s the same price and comes with a more powerful chip as well as a few additional features. That said, I think it’s not as sure a bet as the last iPad Pro was when it came out in early 2021. That’s primarily because of the iPad Pro’s design, which has remained essentially unchanged for the last four years. That’s good news in some ways, because you could have bought an Apple Pencil in 2018 and a Magic Keyboard in 2020 and still use them with the M2 iPad Pro.

But at a certain point, probably not too long from now, Apple will advance the form factor yet again. Not that it necessarily needs to; the iPad Pro remains well designed and continues to be a standout performer, as it should be for the price. But that landscape-edge front camera on the 10th-generation iPad tells me that we’ll see an iPad Pro before long with a more substantial redesign and not just one with a faster chip inside.

Now's a great time to stock up microSD cards for your phone or console, or new portable drives for all of your most important files. A new sale at Amazon has knocked up to 67 percent off Samsung storage gadgets, including some of our favorites. The latest model in the company's T7 drive series, the T7 Shield, has dropped to a new record low of $90 for the 1TB model, plus you can get Samsung 980 Pro SSD in 1TB for only $120 or a 256GB EVO Select memory-card-plus-adapter set for only $24.

Samsung's T7 family of portable SSDs has been one of our favorites for some time thanks to its generally fast read/write speeds and its pocket-friendly design. All of the T7 drives can easily fit into your back pocket or a stuffed travel bag, making them one of the better options for professionals who travel often and need extra space to store important documents and files. The T7 Shield is the newest addition to the series and, along with being IP65 water- and dust-resistant, it has a more rugged exterior that helps it survive nearly 10-foot drops. When it comes to performance, it supports 1,050/1,000 MB/s read/write speeds and its Dynamic Thermal Guard controls heat to help maintain performance even when you're pushing the drive to its limits.

If you're finally getting around to expanding the storage available on your PS5, Samsung's 980 Pro internal drive is a good option, particularly at this sale price. It supports read speeds up to 7,000 MB/s and it uses a nickel coating to control heat levels for improved efficiency. You will need a heatsink in order to use this drive with the PS5, though, and if you want to keep things simple, you could spring for the $150 bundle that includes one with Samsung's drive.

Any of the microSD cards included in this sale will work well with the Nintendo Switch, smartphones and tablets, cameras and more. We like the 256GB EVO Select model on sale because the discount is pretty solid (it's only $4 more than it was during the Prime Early Access Sale last month) and it comes with a full-sized adapter.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Amazon Prime members can now listen to much more music without any ads — as long as they do so in shuffle mode. They'll have access to Amazon Music's full catalog of more than 100 million songs (50 times more than before) without ads. Prime users can also check out on-demand All-Access playlists that are personalized for their tastes. It's possible to download these for offline listening.

It's not quite as positive a step forward as full ad-free listening, but it's still a change for the better. Amazon still needs to keep some features locked behind an Amazon Music Unlimited subscription, after all. Those include on-demand access to the full catalog, more than 100 million songs in HD quality and an expanding selection of music in the Ultra HD fidelity and spatial audio lineups.

Elsewhere, the Amazon Music app is getting a redesign and a new feature called "podcast previews." You'll be able to listen to curated clips from podcast episodes. These could help you figure out if a show might be for you before listening to a full episode. Amazon offers some podcasts ad-free, including its exclusives, shows that premiere on its servicesbefore they're available elsewhere and other third-party shows, such as ones from The New York Times, ESPN and NPR.

You're getting another shot at grabbing Amazon's larger Echo Show smart displays for prices much lower than retail if you missed their Prime Day deals. Prices for both Echo Show 10 and Echo Show 15 have fallen back to the lowest we've seen for them on the website. The third-gen Echo Show 10 in Glacier White and Charcoal is currently listed for $170, or 32 percent off its retail price of $250. Same for the Echo Show 15, which you can also get right now for $170 or $80 off its usual price. 

The Echo Show 15 is Amazon's first smart display that you can mount on your wall, and the company expects it to be used as a picture frame or a bulletin board. And since having a 15.6-inch screen means you can also use it to play movies or shows, say, while you're cooking in the kitchen, the e-commerce giant announced in September that it's also rolling out the Fire TV experience to the device as a free update.

We praised the Echo Show 15 in our review for having a beautiful picture frame design, with its 0.7-inch white bezel and its black metal enclosure. We also found its screen to be the best out of all the Echo Shows'. It was so bright and sharp that Engadget Editor Nicole Lee was able to clearly see what's displayed from about nine feet away. You can also clearly see the information on your widgets at a glance, thanks to its large screen. 

If you'd rather get a smart display with a smaller display, though, then the Echo Show 10 is the better option for you. It has a 10.1-inch HD screen and a 13-megapixel video camera that has auto-framing, so it can keep you at the center during video calls. You can use it as a photo frame, but you can also use it as a cooking companion — it can serve you daily personalized recipes and step-by-step instructions for them. 

In addition to those two models, Amazon is also selling the Echo Shows 8 and 5, as well as the fourth-gen Echo speaker at discounted prices. You can get the second-gen Echo Show 8 for $70, which is 46 percent off retail, and the second-gen Echo Show 5 for $35 to $40 (for the Kids' version) or almost 60 percent off their usual prices.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Meta has spent the GDP of a small country trying to make the metaverse a thing, and now we get to see the latest device designed to take us there. The Meta Quest Pro is a $1,500 flagship VR headset that should offer the best experience Mark Zuckerberg’s money can buy. And our Sam Rutherford has spent plenty of time with one and is full of praise for it.

Rutherford lauded the comfort, the design, the power and pretty much everything else about it, at least on a hardware level. The sting, of course, is that fancy hardware doesn’t mean much if there isn’t compelling software to back it up. And while there are some cool new apps able to take advantage of the Pro’s more muscular performance, it’s still a pretty thin selection.

As someone who would love to spend more time in VR but can’t find a headset that offers the right combination of eye (and neck) comfort, I’m excited to try the Pro. But, like many people, I’ll wait a year or two before investing in one, lest I wind up with a very pretty, very expensive piece of furniture gathering dust on my side table.

– Dan Cooper

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A luxury Chromebook has always been a bit of a paradox because Chrome is designed to work on the dirtiest of dirt-cheap hardware. HP’s Elite Dragonfly Chromebook fits the category, however, with a base model costing more than a grand, and our review model topping $1,500. Naturally, our Chromebook expert, Nathan Ingraham, put it through its paces and had plenty of nice things to say about it. Sadly, no matter how nice it is, it’s still 1,000-plus dollars for a Chromebook.

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The UK has been playing around with live facial recognition technology (LFR) for several years, but not in a way that’s ethical or legal. That’s the conclusion made by University of Cambridge researchers after analyzing its use by police forces in London and South Wales. The findings, published in a new study, said key information about how data is used has been “kept from view,” leaving unanswered questions around if the technology is used as a cover to justify racial profiling. Not to mention its overall efficacy, which third-party experts say is far lower than the forces themselves like to boast about.

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Bizarre Instagram outage left some thinking they were banned

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An Instagram bug caused users to receive notices their accounts were suspended without cause. The issue also saw individual follower counts fall, as well as disruptions to the platform’s main image feed. Around eight hours later, Instagram said it had fixed the bug but declined to elaborate on what caused it. It’s the second high-profile service disruption to the image-sharing network in a month, and another sign not all is well inside Meta’s gilded walls.

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Starship's first orbital test flight could finally take place next month. Mark Kirasich, a senior NASA official overseeing the development of the Artemis moon program, has revealed the information during a livestreamed NASA Advisory Council meeting. According to Reuters, Kirasich said that NASA tracks four major Starship flights and that the first one is coming up in early December. 

Based on the plans SpaceX previously released, the Starship spacecraft with its Super Heavy booster will launch from the company's Boca Chica facility in Texas. The booster will break off three minutes into the flight and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Starship vehicle itself will go into orbit before reentering and making an ocean landing near Hawaii. The company expects the entire test flight to last for 90 minutes. 

SpaceX has been planning Starship's first orbital flight since mid-2021, but it kept getting pushed back due to various technical and regulatory reasons. The space corporation's launch facility in Boca Chica, for instance, only recently cleared the FAA's environmental assessment. And even then, the FAA required the company to make more than 75 changes to mitigate the environmental impact of its flights before it grants the company a launch license for the site. 

An FAA spokesperson told Reuters that the agency will grant the company a launch license "only after SpaceX provides all outstanding information and the agency can fully analyze it." As SpaceNews notes, SpaceX must also conduct and clear more tests before the flight, including a static fire test of all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster. 

A static fire test of the Starship in July ended up in flames when propellants ignited under the booster. SpaceX's next attempt in August went smoothly, but the company only fired a single Raptor engine on the Super Heavy that time. In addition, Starship must go through a full wet dress rehearsal, wherein a rocket that's loaded with propellants go through the launch countdown without actually taking off. 

In its latest earnings drop, Sony said it sold 3.3 million PlayStation 5s this quarter, matching exactly what it did last year and bringing total units sold since launch to 25 million. Its numbers this quarter are far short of what it needs to hit the 18 million PS5 sales target for fiscal year 2022, though. Sales halfway through the fiscal year (ending March 31st) are now at 5.7 million, which is also nearly the same as 2021 at this point (5.6 million). 

Despite the equal number of PS5s sold, revenue was up significantly over last year (12 percent) to 727 billion yen ($4.92 billion), thanks in part to a PS5 price increase earlier this year. However, profit was down by 49 percent due to the company's recent acquisition of Bungie, along with game developer cost increases. 

Sony sold 11.5 million consoles last year, so it's a good bet that 2022 sales will be about the same . However, a lot depends on holiday sales and whether it can keep production up with demand. That's a problem that has plagued the PS5 since it arrived, due to the pandemic and other issues. In May, Sony said that it will finally be able to ramp up production to meet PS5 demand as supply chain issues ease. While it hasn't given any numbers in that regard, anecdotally it appears that the console has been easier to find in recent months. 

Meanwhile, software sales fell to 62.5 million units from 76.4 million this time last year. Digital downloads accounted for 63 percent of that, up slightly from last year. PlayStation Plus subscriber numbers declined for the second consecutive quarter. 

Sony has revised its revenue projection for next quarter downward to due an expected drop in first-party game sales. However, it's bullish on the next fiscal year, aiming to ship 23 million PS5 units in that time. Interestingly, it also still expects to 18 million units by the end of the fiscal year (March 2023), so it may still have something up its sleeve. 

Twitter became the target of a coordinated trolling campaign shortly after Elon Musk took over the company last week. Yoel Roth, the company's head of safety and security, said that the organized effort was to make people think that Twitter has weakened its policies. Roth also said that the company was working on putting a stop to the campaign that had led to a surge in hate speech and hateful conduct on the website. Now, the executive has tweeted an update to the Twitter's cleanup efforts and said that it has made "measurable progress" since Saturday and has removed over 1,500 accounts involved in the trolling.

Roth explained that those 1,500 accounts didn't correspond to 1,500 people. "Many were repeat bad actors," he tweeted. The executive also said that Twitter's primary success measure for content moderation is impressions — that translates to the times a piece of content is seen by users — and the company was able to reduce impressions on the hateful content that flooded its website to nearly zero. 

In addition to providing an update about dealing with the recent trolling campaign on Twitter, Roth also talked about how the website is changing how it enforces its policies regarding harmful tweets. He explained that the company treats first person and bystander reports differently: "Because bystanders don’t always have full context, we have a higher bar for bystander reports in order to find a violation." That's why reports by uninvolved third parties about hateful conduct on the platform often get marked as non-violation evens if they do violate its policies. 

Roth ended his series of tweets with a promise to reveal more about how the website is changing how it enforces its rules. However, a new Bloomberg report puts into question how Twitter's staff can enforce its policies in the coming days. According to the news organization, Twitter has frozen most employees' access to internal tools used for content moderation. 

Apparently, most members of Twitter's Trust and Safety organization have lost the ability to penalize accounts that break rules regarding hateful conduct and misinformation. This event has understandably raised concerns among employees on how Twitter will be able to keep the spread of misinformation in check, when the November 8th US midterm election is just a few days away. 

Bloomberg said the restriction placed upon the employes' access to moderation tools is part of a broader plan to freeze Twitter's software code, which will prevent staff members from pushing changes to the website as its changes ownership. The organization also said that Musk asked the Twitter team to review some of its policies, including its rule regarding misinformation that penalizes posts containing falsehoods about politics and COVID-19. Another rule Musk reportedly asked the team to review is a section in Twitter's hateful conduct policy that penalizes posts containing "targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals."

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