- 2 weeks ago
Today we durability test the Thinnest Apple Product of all time the M4 iPad Pro 13 inch. What could possibly go wrong? Turns out - the results are different than you might expect.
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00:00Apple's brand new 13 inch M4 iPad Pro. The thinnest Apple device ever. Thinner than
00:08even an iPod Nano. It's wild to see how far technology has come. But is it durable? Can
00:14it survive everyday life? That's what we're here to find out. Hit that subscribe button and buckle
00:21in. We're going to see how this iPad is so thin. Inside the box we get a color matched USB-C cable
00:28and a 20 watt charging brick. Thank you very much. But that's it. First thing I noticed on this M4
00:34iPad is that since it's so thin, it's actually difficult to pick up off my desk. And it looks
00:40like mine might have arrived with a slight bow in the housing. As someone who works with metal
00:44regularly, I can zero out my angle finder on my flat tabletop, set it up against the M4 iPad Pro,
00:51and it looks like we are 0.1 degrees off from zero, right out of the box. Splitting hairs of course,
00:58not that I have many to split. But between the milling, heat treating, and warping, I imagine
01:03not many of these ultra thin iPads are going to arrive perfectly flat. 0.1 degrees is better than
01:08I was expecting though. And to be honest, while I don't personally yearn for ultra thin electronics,
01:14I can still appreciate that packing all this hardware into such a tiny device is an incredible
01:18feat. It really is only 5.1 millimeters thick. For my American audience that's about the same thickness
01:24is 3 quarters, 7 razor blades, or 1 third the width of a Ben and Jerry's lid. And just for the record,
01:32I am not the Jerry mentioned in Ben and Jerry's. However, I am available for adoption.
01:38Where was I? Oh yeah. Apple says that in order to increase the overall structure with decreased
01:43thickness, they've added a cowling over the main logic board. That logic board runs through the center
01:48of the iPad. And I can even feel that central rib through the top glass with just my fingers.
01:54And hopefully we'll be able to see it with our eyeballs in just a few minutes.
01:57The most impressive technological addition to the iPads this year in my opinion has got to be
02:02the tandem OLED display. Let's take a peek at it through my microscope. OLED screens are awesome.
02:08The individually lit pixels as you can see here through the microscope deliver super crisp and
02:12vibrant images. What Apple has done here for the first time ever is stack two OLED screens on top
02:18of each other. So not only are there 264 pixels per inch, but there are also apparently 264 identical
02:25pixels below those pixels acting as a backlight. An OLED backlight for an OLED display. This gives us a
02:32ridiculous 1000 nits of HDR brightness with a 1600 nits peak. If you notice the file icon on the M4
02:40iPad Pro has super long blue diodes, while the iPhone 15 on that same folder icon has much smaller
02:46diodes within the exact same footprint. This is actually only because the iPhone 15 OLED has twice
02:52the pixel density and is in no way comparable to the tandem OLED conversation since my microscope only
02:58sees in a 2D plane and tandem OLED exists in three dimensions. But it still looks cool and it was worth
03:04a shot. The tandem OLED isn't the only thing Apple changed up. There's quite a bit more hardware inside of
03:09the Apple Pencil Pro. I'm definitely not the target demographic for a $129 professional pencil,
03:16especially when my razor knife is only 15 bucks. But I guess it just depends on which side of the
03:21tablet you'll be drawing on. As you saw, the tip is removable and inside that plastic housing is a
03:27pressure sensitive ribbon that can sense minute pressure differences from your fingers. We first saw
03:32this technology debuted with the HTC U12 Plus Android phone back in 2018. The ribbon triggers a
03:38taptic engine that we can find past the square mounting magnets. It's all tucked up into the
03:43back end where the eraser should be. The taptic engine makes it realistically feel like an actual
03:48button is getting clicked even though there are no clicky buttons. It's a complex piece of engineering
03:53and an interesting tool built for a very specific job. Some of my favorite tools however are my Mohs
03:58picks, which help us differentiate between different materials. The tandem OLED Apple is using this time
04:04around feels to be protected with glass and since there are no marks left by my Mohs 2, 3, 4, or 5
04:10picks, we can be sure that Apple is using a thin tempered glass screen that scratches at a level 6 with
04:16deeper grooves at a level 7. The Mohs hardness is especially relevant this time around when we open
04:22up Apple's new magic keyboard. We already know that something at a softer level on Mohs scale of
04:29hardness cannot scratch any of the levels above it. A level 3 aluminum won't scratch a level 6 glass,
04:35and a level 6 glass will never scratch a level 10 diamond. However, this time around Apple's magic
04:41keyboard is made from an anodized aluminum. The keys themselves are plastic. Anodization is necessary
04:47for material protection, aesthetics, and as well there's a rather large 1% of the human population
04:53that has a bare aluminum contact allergy. We learned this while building wheelchairs at my factory.
04:59Bare aluminum is not like kryptonite or anything, it's more like a slow motion poison ivy rash after
05:04extended contact, and the aluminum oxide anodizing top layer helps eliminate those reactions. F in chat for
05:11the F. But that same aluminum oxide coating also ranks at a level 9 on Mohs scale of hardness,
05:17which when pressed right up against the level 6 glass display of the M4 iPad Pro makes me worried.
05:24However, even though the metal is coming directly in contact with that glass, the magic keyboard hinge
05:29does not allow for any lateral movement, which reduces the abrasive potential. And to further
05:34decrease worries of accidental scratches, I took my level 9 anodized iPhone 15 and scuffed up the iPad
05:41glass as well as I could, but each of the marks wiped completely away. I imagine the surface lubricity
05:46of the anodizing and smoothness of the glass along with the rigidness of the magic keyboard will all help
05:52to keep the glass undamaged. So far there doesn't appear to be anything to worry about. There's no
05:57glaring build quality issues yet. There's one 12 megapixel selfie camera tucked into the long side
06:03bezel of the iPad Pro, protected with the same scratch resistant glass. And swinging our way up to
06:08the ultra thin frame rails, we see we have a whole lot more anodized aluminum, along with the Apple
06:14pencil dock, and two metal volume buttons that cannot be removed. The top of the iPad Pro has
06:20two stereo speaker openings and a terribly placed center microphone hole. You'll see why in a second.
06:25Moving along to the other long flat side, Apple has removed the microphone hole in the center of this
06:30rail.
06:31I'm glad that's gone. And down here at the bottom of the M4 iPad, we can see that the thickness of
06:37the iPad is literally constrained by the tiny size of the USB-C port, which sits right between two more
06:43stereo speaker openings. If this thing gets any thinner, we'll have a camera bump and a charging
06:48port bump. Speaking of camera bumps, Apple's removed one of the camera lenses this year, and to be honest,
06:53no one's going to notice. There's a lower time of flight 3D LiDAR scanner, and the upper circle is the
06:58only remaining 12 megapixel rear camera, with a single color diffused LED flash, which is also
07:04tucked into the same camera hump. Now one of my favorite parts of owning an iPad is its immense
07:09canvas for which I can display my artwork. Drawing on the tandem OLED seems oh so temporary, so I'll just
07:17use the back. I learned two new things recently. One, apples are made up of 25% air, which was news to
07:24me. And even more interesting, lions, like the anatomically correct beast you see here,
07:31actually eat apples. Yeah, they're carnivores and all that, but if they get hungry enough,
07:36apples are on the menu. You learn something new every day. To keep your own iPad from getting
07:41scratched, might I recommend my teardown skin collab with dbrand? Astute observers might notice that this
07:46skin is the same teardown skin as last year, because of course we haven't seen the inside of the M4 yet,
07:51so how would I have a skin for it? But don't you worry, there's a very large probability that we'll
07:56see the insides in about 60 seconds, and then we can start shipping out the real deal. Link down in
08:01the description. The coolest part of the tandem OLED that I didn't mention before is that because of
08:06the double diodes, each pixel doesn't have to run at maximum load. Just like a person can walk farther
08:12than they can sprint, two pixels working together means that a single pixel doesn't have to work as
08:16hard. So overall the screen uses less power while having a much longer lifespan, which is awesome.
08:22There also appears to be no effect on the 13 inch ultra retina display from my lighter,
08:27even after burning it for more than 60 seconds, so thumbs up for that. Finally, the bend test. No
08:33one's going to be putting their iPad Pro in their back pocket obviously, but it will very much be
08:38bumping around in backpacks, book bags, and as Apple's thinnest product ever, we need to know how this
08:44Netflix machine is going to hold up to everyday life. When bent from the back, the answer is...
08:53...that it holds up surprisingly well. Like suspicious black magic levels of structural
08:58integrity going on. You can see the glass screen literally ripple away from the frame,
09:03eliminating any water resistance, but all that hardware itself is still intact. Yeah, the M4 iPad
09:09Pro might be a bit bendy right out of the box, and will definitely not be straight after a few
09:14months of regular use. But that central spine is definitely providing enough structure for
09:19horizontal bins. I'm very impressed. Vertical bins however...
09:26...still not as wrecked as Drake, but holy macaroni, there's no recovering from this catastrophic failure
09:32right at the charging port. The M4 iPad Pro is now built like a rainbow, or bow and arrow, or a Boeing.
09:39The joke just made my life insurance go through the roof. Kind of like that wheel did. Ba dum tsss.
09:45The back side of the charging port itself is what put pressure on the inner side of that glass,
09:49cracking it up from the bottom edge. Which means, and now we get to go find the M4 chip,
09:54I do happen to have another smaller 11 inch M4 iPad Pro with the nano textured glass. So if this video gets
10:00100,000 likes we can see if that one also falls apart in the same place. If we roll back the glass,
10:06like a very expensive tortilla, we can get our first look at that center spine, or cowling,
10:15that Apple added over the motherboard. This time around we also have some very circular loudspeakers
10:20instead of rectangular. And with 14 Phillips head screws removed, Apple's cowling comes off in two
10:25pieces. It's incredibly thin, like the rest of the iPad, but obviously gets the job done. If Apple could
10:31add another more perpendicular spine running width wise near the charging port, where all that structure
10:36was removed, this thing probably would have survived. And there you have it, the M4 chip in all of its
10:42glory, right alongside the 10,209 milliamp hour pouch style battery. Honestly, it's a pretty cool tablet.
10:50Congrats to Apple on the tandem OLED development. Let me know if I should test a smaller unit and grab
10:55your teardown skin with the link in the description. Thanks a ton for watching. I'll see you around.
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