So the new iPad Pro has been out since Wednesday and I've spent most of the weekend rebuilding my entire cable drawer around it. If you ordered one of these things when preorders opened after the October 30th event, you already know where this is going. If you're still deciding, let me save you a trip to the Apple Store returns line: budget an extra $40-60 for dongles before you even open the box, because this thing ditched Lightning for USB-C and it did not bring any of your old stuff with it.
I got the 11-inch, 256GB, space gray, the $949 configuration, and no I will not be getting the Apple Pencil 2 this month, my wallet needs a breather. But the port change is the actual story here, not the screen or the Face ID sensor turned sideways or any of that. Every accessory I own is Lightning. Every one. My car charger, the battery pack in my bag, the cable on my nightstand, all of it, obsolete for this device specifically, while remaining perfectly fine for my phone, which still uses Lightning, because Apple apparently decided only one product in the lineup gets to be forward-looking this year.
What you actually need to buy
Here's the list I ended up with after a very annoying Thursday night of Amazon tabs:
- A USB-C to 3.5mm adapter, because yes, they took the headphone jack out of the iPad too now. Apple sells their own for $9, which is fine, it's a dongle, they're all fine.
- A USB-C to Lightning cable ($19 from Apple) if you want to use your old Lightning EarPods or charge your phone off the iPad's charger. I bought two.
- A USB-C hub if you do any real work on this thing. I went with a cheap Anker one, six ports, maybe $35, because the iPad Pro only has the single USB-C port and no headphone jack backup, so if you're charging AND listening to something AND plugging in an SD card you are simply out of luck without a hub.
The good news, and I mean this, is that the included charger is a real 18W USB-C brick with a USB-C to USB-C cable, which is a first for iPad. No more of that weird 12W USB-A wall wart from three iPads ago that took forever to charge anything bigger than the original iPad mini. Charging from empty to about 80% took under two hours in my very unscientific testing, which is genuinely fast for a device this size.
The part nobody warns you about
The thing that actually got me was file transfers. I wanted to move a folder of RAW photos off my camera's SD card straight onto the iPad, which Apple advertises as one of the big USB-C wins, direct peripheral support, no more camera connection kit nonsense. And it does work! But it's slow in a way that made me go check whether the transfer had actually started. A few hundred photos took something like twelve minutes through the hub. I don't have a controlled way to compare that to a direct USB-C connection without the hub in between, so maybe that's the bottleneck, but either way, set expectations accordingly if you're picturing some instant magic wand of file transfer.
I keep seeing people online treat the port switch like it's purely a downgrade and I don't fully agree. USB-C is a better port, full stop, faster, reversible, more capable, and it's clearly where Apple's whole lineup is eventually headed whether we like the transition pain or not. My actual complaint isn't the port. It's that they didn't ship a Lightning-to-USB-C dongle in the box the way they did with the headphone adapter back on the iPhone 7. One cheap plastic dongle in the box would have made this whole first week noticeably less annoying for a lot of people, myself very much included.
Anyway. If you're getting one of these for the holidays, or thinking about it, just go ahead and order the dongles the same day. Don't wait until the box is sitting open on your kitchen table and you realize none of your cables fit, the way I did on Wednesday night, at 9pm, with a dead battery and nothing but a USB-A cable to my name.