Apple’s new iPad Pro may be the last great tablet, but you’d be wise to handle it carefully. Apple’s critical darling appears to bend pretty easily under the right amount of pressure, which you might expect but is no less visceral to watch.
This observation comes courtesy Zack Nelson, the YouTuber behind popular product review channel JerryRigEverything. His latest durability test of Apple’s new productivity-focused product — which per his usual process involves trying to destroy it with sharp objects, force, and fire — shows that it takes minimal pressure to render the product essentially useless.
“A tablet the size of a piece of paper folds like a piece of paper,” Nelson says. “The iPad Pro is a thin, ridgeless aluminium sack with no structure holding things together. Like tinfoil wrapped around mashed potatoes.”
Ouch.
As Nelson points out, the product’s ability to bend somewhat easily could be a problem for people carrying their tablet in their backpack with other large or heavy objects, reports of which have already surfaced.
As was the case with the iPhone 6 Plus during 2016’s Bendgate, this could also be an issue if you sit on it (which seems considerably less likely given the sheer size of the iPad Pro).
Nelson tested out the 28cm display, the smaller of Apple’s iPad Pro models. And it’s safe to assume that if the 28cm bends this way, the 33cm version definitely does too. According to Nelson, “the iPad Pro just doesn’t have any of that structural integrity stuff.”
If product destruction porn is your jam, the rest of the video is pretty interesting as well, particularly if you have an itch to see the guts of either the iPad Pro or the Apple Pencil.
The takeaway here is that you should probably be mindful of the way you treat a tablet that can run you nearly a grand or more, depending on storage and display size. At the very least, put a case on it. And definitely don’t try to bend it.