Apple's "Pro" label does not make all its "Pro" products equal even if they are marketed to share the same internal hardware.
Very much unlike the recent reports of Apple's iPhone SE having better battery life over the iPhone 6s despite its smaller size, the shrinking of the the iPad Pro down to 9.7 inches is actually affecting the smaller tablet's performance.
In Apple's "Let Us Loop You In" event last Monday, the new 9.7- and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models were marketed to be PC replacements. More specifically, the newer 9.7-inch iPad Pro was touted as the "ultimate PC replacement" for PCs.
Many reports online have scoffed at Apple's high-brow claims, and now they have some proof.
While Apple never discusses specific metrics about its devices during their keynotes, Apple users take it upon themselves to dig deeper into the numbers. Reports have surfaced that even though both the 12.9-inch and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro share the same A9X chipset, the one in the smaller model is underclocked.
Whereas the A9X chip powering the 12.9-inch iPad Pro speeds at about 2.24 GHz, the 9.7-inch model runs slightly slower at 2.16 GHz. Apple has quietly concurred this as well on its compare iPad models page. The company reveals that the CPU in the 12.9-inch model is 2.5 times faster than the A7, while the the CPU in the 9.7-inch model is just 2.4 times faster.
But there's an even greater disparity when it comes to the graphics processors in both devices. Apple labels the larger iPad Pro as being five times faster, while the smaller iPad Pro is only 4.3 times faster.
The differences between the two go beyond their processors, however.
Geekbench tests have surfaced online showing that the 9.7-inch iPad Pro is only equipped with just 2 GB of RAM, while the 12.9-inch model has twice as much with 4 GB of RAM.
With all the specs scraped off the 9.7-inch model, the smaller iPad may not really be the "PC killer" Apple makes it out to be. If tasked with a greater number of applications to run, for example, the smaller iPad Pro may be struggling to catch up to the real iPad Pro.
