iPad Pro How much of a performance downgrade is a 9.7 Pro coming from a Mini 5?

[gdourado]

Hello, how are you?

Looking to know about the situation on the tittle.
I currently have a Mini 5 that I love.
The formfactor is perfect and I use it all the time.

But I have the oportunity to buy a 9.7 pro for a great price.
It is cheap enough that I am considering the buy, not to replace my Mini 5, but to add to it and use the pro when a bigger screen or the quad speakers might be usefull.

But I don't know how much of a performance hit the A9X takes when compared to the A12, and also the 2gb of ram.

Cheers!

 

[Elitegate]

It's pretty much to be honest. A11 to A12 wouldn't be that much of a deal, but A9X to A12, that's a pretty heavy jump. A12 should be roughly 3x as fast (CPU) as the A9 or A9X. If you care about performance and it's not just a device you want to use for light tasks such as reading and streaming, i wouldn't get one anymore.

 

[rui no onna]

More like half the speed of A12 in single threaded and ~40% in multi-threaded.

Geekbench 5

iPad Air 3
ST 1,100
MT 2,900

iPad Pro 9.7
ST 600
MT 1,200

I own the Pro 9.7 and it still performs well. With ProMotion disabled, I actually don't notice much of a performance difference between the A9X Pro 9.7 and A10X Pro 10.5 with general tasks (web browsing, streaming, etc).

Maybe if you use the device for heavier tasks (e.g. gaming, media editing, multi-tasking), you'd be more liable to notice greater performance disparity.

At this point in time though, I wouldn't pay more than $200 for the Pro 9.7.

 

[Digitalguy]

I have both and while you can see the speed difference it's not an issue, it's still fast enough that it is perfectly fine. It's not like the air 2 or the mini 4 that feel noticeably slower, the 9.7 pro is still fast.
The RAM does not affect speed, it affects reloads, so you have pages and app reloading much more often (like use more than 4 apps in a row and the oldest will reload on you go back). Other than that speakers are awesome and it's the lightest pro available... If you can get for less than $250 it's worth it in my opinion.

 

[AutomaticApple]

Hello, how are you?

Looking to know about the situation on the tittle.
I currently have a Mini 5 that I love.
The formfactor is perfect and I use it all the time.

But I have the oportunity to buy a 9.7 pro for a great price.
It is cheap enough that I am considering the buy, not to replace my Mini 5, but to add to it and use the pro when a bigger screen or the quad speakers might be usefull.

But I don't know how much of a performance hit the A9X takes when compared to the A12, and also the 2gb of ram.

Cheers!

The performance between the two is quite vast. You shouldn't jump on that deal unless you're sure about all this.

 

[smbu2000]

The performance of the 9.7 Pro isn't too bad. I'd say the 2GB is a bit limiting though and you will run into more page refreshes. The 9.7 Pro also doesn't support USB3 transfers/USB Fast Charging. You will be limited to the 10W/12W charging of the iPad charger. All of the other iPad Pros models support Fast Charging.

I did notice quite a performance difference between using the 9.7 Pro and my XS Max (also has A12 chip).
I just sold off my 9.7 Pro, but mainly because I wanted to switch back to a 12.9 Pro.

 

[ACG12]

The 9.7 Pro was a great tablet, it’s a shame Apple didn’t give it 4gb of RAM like the 1st gen 12.9

 

[pika2000]

Hello, how are you?

Looking to know about the situation on the tittle.
I currently have a Mini 5 that I love.
The formfactor is perfect and I use it all the time.

But I have the oportunity to buy a 9.7 pro for a great price.
It is cheap enough that I am considering the buy, not to replace my Mini 5, but to add to it and use the pro when a bigger screen or the quad speakers might be usefull.

But I don't know how much of a performance hit the A9X takes when compared to the A12, and also the 2gb of ram.

Cheers!

A12 is better than A9x in benchmarks. However, I doubt that you would notice significantly huge difference in day to day use.
The biggest weakness of the 9.7pro is not the A9x, but it’s the 2GB RAM. Moving forward, RAM will be the bottleneck imo.

 

[BigBoy2018]

A12 is better than A9x in benchmarks. However, I doubt that you would notice significantly huge difference in day to day use.
The biggest weakness of the 9.7pro is not the A9x, but it’s the 2GB RAM. Moving forward, RAM will be the bottleneck imo.

This.

Throw the geekbench scores out. You will only notice a difference if you're doing really intensive high end things on the ipad. So that's the question, are you editing complex videos or something on the iPad? If so, the A12 and extra ram will be noticable. However if you're doing anything relatively average on the ipad, no difference at ALL.

I have a perfectly good iPad mini 4, which is a LOT slower in geekbench scores than the ipad mini 5. I bought a 5 and had it for about a week. Playing games, loading web pages, launching programs ... NONE of it seems noticably faster. Frankly for all the things I tried on the mini 5, nothing seemed different than the mini 4, and the mini 4 is a good bit 'slower' than the 9.7 ipad pro you're looking at.

I returned the Mini 5. Zero difference in real world experience for me at least.

 

[Digitalguy]

This.

Throw the geekbench scores out. You will only notice a difference if you're doing really intensive high end things on the ipad. So that's the question, are you editing complex videos or something on the iPad? If so, the A12 and extra ram will be noticable. However if you're doing anything relatively average on the ipad, no difference at ALL.

I have a perfectly good iPad mini 4, which is a LOT slower in geekbench scores than the ipad mini 5. I bought a 5 and had it for about a week. Playing games, loading web pages, launching programs ... NONE of it seems noticably faster. Frankly for all the things I tried on the mini 5, nothing seemed different than the mini 4, and the mini 4 is a good bit 'slower' than the 9.7 ipad pro you're looking at.

I returned the Mini 5. Zero difference in real world experience for me at least.

Everyone is different. I have the mini 4, 5 and pro 9.7. I can feel the difference between the 3, but honestly the pro 9.7, while in between, is closer to the mini 5 than to the mini 4. The mini 4 is my “bed“ tablet, in bed I don’t care about speed but sometimes it makes me want to reach for the mini 5...
Not the 9.7, I have both the 10.5 and the 9.7 on my desk and honestly I pick the 10.5 only if it’s for something I don’t want to lose, like writing half a message and losing it because I moved to something else in the meantime and the page reloaded... But for browsing the 9.7 does not make me miss the 10.5 or the mini 5 (the mini 4 honestly does sometimes instead..). But browsing relies a lot on single core and the 9.7 is a beast in single core. When I had the air 2, the air 2 was close in multi-core (since it had 3 core instead of 2) but like half in single core... and felt so much slower than the pro 9.7, precisely because of the single core performance.

 

[rui no onna]

Everyone is different. I have the mini 4, 5 and pro 9.7. I can feel the difference between the 3, but honestly the pro 9.7, while in between, is closer to the mini 5 than to the mini 4. The mini 4 is my “bed“ tablet, in bed I don’t care about speed but sometimes it makes me want to reach for the mini 5...
Not the 9.7, I have both the 10.5 and the 9.7 on my desk and honestly I pick the 10.5 only if it’s for something I don’t want to lose, like writing half a message and losing it because I moved to something else in the meantime and the page reloaded... But for browsing the 9.7 does not make me miss the 10.5 or the mini 5 (the mini 4 honestly does sometimes instead..). But browsing relies a lot on single core and the 9.7 is a beast in single core. When I had the air 2, the air 2 was close in multi-core (since it had 3 core instead of 2) but like half in single core... and felt so much slower than the pro 9.7, precisely because of the single core performance.

Don't have the mini 5 but I had a similar experience with mini 4, Air 2, Pro 9.7 and Pro 10.5 (ProMotion disabled). I can easily use the Pro 9.7 and 10.5 interchangeably while performance penalty in Air 2 can be quite noticeable if a website is particularly JavaScript or media heavy.

Also, launching apps can be frustratingly slower on Air 2. It's not just the CPU that improved from Air 2 to Pro 9.7. Iirc, that's also when Apple began the transition from eMMC to PCI Express NAND.

Here's a GB4 comparison I posted in another thread. Seems crazy that the Air 3 (and likely mini 5) are 16x as fast as the iPad 2/3 and original mini in single-core. This also explains why the iPad 3 got obsolete so fast. We got a 500% increase in single core performance from 2011/12 (A5/A5X) to 2014 (A8X). Meanwhile, from 2016 (A9X) to 2018 (A12X) is just 67%.

Based on Geekbench 4 scores. This is just CPU. I believe improvements in GPU are even more exponential.

Performance as a multiple of iPad 3rd gen and iPad Air 2:

	Single Thread vs iPad 3rd gen​	Multi-Thread vs iPad 3rd gen​	Single Thread vs iPad Air 2​	Multi-Thread vs iPad Air 2​
iPad Pro 11, A12X	16.7	32.5	2.8	4.3
iPad Air 3, A12	16.0	20.5	2.7	2.7
iPad Pro 10.5, A10X	13.0	16.9	2.2	2.2
iPad 6th gen, A10	11.3	10.7	1.9	1.4
iPad Pro 9.7, A9X	10.0	9.1	1.7	1.2
iPad 5th gen, A9	8.3	8.0	1.4	1.0
iPad Air 2, A8X	6.0	7.6	1.0	1.0
iPad Air, A7	4.3	4.2	0.7	0.5
iPad 4th gen, A6X	2.7	2.4	0.4	0.3
iPad 3rd gen, A5X	1.0	1.0	0.2	0.1

 

[Digitalguy]

Don't have the mini 5 but I had a similar experience with mini 4, Air 2, Pro 9.7 and Pro 10.5 (ProMotion disabled). I can easily use the Pro 9.7 and 10.5 interchangeably while performance penalty in Air 2 can be quite noticeable if a website is particularly JavaScript or media heavy.

Also, launching apps can be frustratingly slower on Air 2. It's not just the CPU that improved from Air 2 to Pro 9.7. Iirc, that's also when Apple began the transition from eMMC to PCI Express NAND.

Here's a GB4 comparison I posted in another thread. Seems crazy that the Air 3 (and likely mini 5) are 16x as fast as the iPad 2/3 and original mini in single-core. This also explains why the iPad 3 got obsolete so fast. We got a 500% increase in single core performance from 2011/12 (A5/A5X) to 2014 (A8X). Meanwhile, from 2016 (A9X) to 2018 (A12X) is just 67%.

Wow, very nice comparison table! And you are right, I had forgotten the move from eMMC to PCIe SSD with the pro. Nice to know you had a similar experience. Honestly, as ACG12 said above, the 9.7 would have been amazing if it had the same internals as the original pro (4GB, PD charging and USB 3.0). The 10.5 corrects everything but that white spot.... I cannot fall in love with the 10.5 because of that... the OG 12.9 instead is amazing, and probably better than the second gen given all the issues I have read about it.
As for the mini 5, well, it’s so close to the 3rd gen pro in speed you can hardly tell the difference. But honestly once you get to the speed of any pro (so strong single core and high storage speed) speed is not a big deal anymore, yeah you can feel the difference, but the waiting time is so short it doesn’t matter for typical (non professional) tablet use, such as browsing for instance. I think this is also true for the basic ipad 2018 and 2019. But anything older (A8(X), maybe A9, not sure about it), then yes, waiting time becomes quite noticeable coming from an ipad pro.

 

[Shanghaichica]

More like half the speed of A12 in single threaded and ~40% in multi-threaded.

Geekbench 5

iPad Air 3
ST 1,100
MT 2,900

iPad Pro 9.7
ST 600
MT 1,200

I own the Pro 9.7 and it still performs well. With ProMotion disabled, I actually don't notice much of a performance difference between the A9X Pro 9.7 and A10X Pro 10.5 with general tasks (web browsing, streaming, etc).

Maybe if you use the device for heavier tasks (e.g. gaming, media editing, multi-tasking), you'd be more liable to notice greater performance disparity.

At this point in time though, I wouldn't pay more than $200 for the Pro 9.7.

I didn’t think the 9.7 had pro motion? I thought pro motion was introduced from the 2017 pros onwards.

 

[Digitalguy]

I didn’t think the 9.7 had pro motion? I thought pro motion was introduced from the 2017 pros onwards.

He/she (sorry not sure based on the name...) is referring to the 10.5, not the 9.7

 

[MyopicPaideia]

One area that I can personally attest to the big difference having used the A9X on a first gen 12.9” Pro vs an A12X on a current 11” Pro is Google Sheets/Slides/Docs via native web interface in iPadOS Safari. On the A12X this is a buttery smooth full desktop experience. On the A9X it is a close to unusable hacking jittery hot mess.

 

[rui no onna]

One area that I can personally attest to the big difference having used the A9X on a first gen 12.9” Pro vs an A12X on a current 11” Pro is Google Sheets/Slides/Docs via native web interface in iPadOS Safari. On the A12X this is a buttery smooth full desktop experience. On the A9X it is a close to unusable hacking jittery hot mess.

That's interesting. Only tried some simple sheets and it seems okay on the A10 (my A9X is still on iOS 12). It complained about the display being too small, though.

Granted, only tried a simple spreadsheet.

 

[bobsamm]

I bought a mini 5 and sold it after 2 weeks, didn't like it after using a 11" pro fo the last year, once you get used to the pro motion they all seem average that don't have it, wife has a 5th gen 9.7" its the same.

 

[Digitalguy]

I bought a mini 5 and sold it after 2 weeks, didn't like it after using a 11" pro fo the last year, once you get used to the pro motion they all seem average that don't have it, wife has a 5th gen 9.7" its the same.

Once “some” get use to it... Others, like me and others (see other threads) have both pro motion and non pro motion ipad and don’t care about promotion and/or barely notice it. I know this is a sensitive subject (again see other threads), as some people get easily upset or even agressive. Hope it’s not the case here.

 

[Nhwhazup]

I’ve had the iPad 9.7 since it was new and it’s still running like a champ. I use it everyday and a lot. No touch disease issues with it either.

 

[bobsamm]

Once “some” get use to it... Others, like me and others (see other threads) have both pro motion and non pro motion ipad and don’t care about promotion and/or barely notice it. I know this is a sensitive subject (again see other threads), as some people get easily upset or even agressive. Hope it’s not the case here.

No it's just better, people buy what they can afford or need.

 

[RevTEG]

The 9.7 Pro was a great tablet, it’s a shame Apple didn’t give it 4gb of RAM like the 1st gen 12.9

The first gen 12.9 had 4gb or ram? I didn‘t know that. I thought it only had 2gb. Wonder why Apple still puts 4gb in their 3rd gen 12.9? However, I‘ve never noticed any performance issues with any of my iPad pro’s.

 

[Frankras]

Hello, how are you?

Looking to know about the situation on the tittle.
I currently have a Mini 5 that I love.
The formfactor is perfect and I use it all the time.

But I have the oportunity to buy a 9.7 pro for a great price.
It is cheap enough that I am considering the buy, not to replace my Mini 5, but to add to it and use the pro when a bigger screen or the quad speakers might be usefull.

But I don't know how much of a performance hit the A9X takes when compared to the A12, and also the 2gb of ram.

Cheers!

I have botch. 9.7 pro not slow slow as is. But mini 5 is just more smooth in all directions. Starting app’s switch between apps and WiFi connections.

I use primary my 9.7 pro for Netflix (speakers are better) and for writhing (got the apple keyboard). Everything else I use my mini 5. Mini 5 is so much faster than 9.7 pro.

Frank

 

[*~Kim~*]

The first gen 12.9 had 4gb or ram? I didn‘t know that. I thought it only had 2gb. Wonder why Apple still puts 4gb in their 3rd gen 12.9? However, I‘ve never noticed any performance issues with any of my iPad pro’s.

The 12.9” 1st Gen had 4 GB and a slightly higher clockspeed. The 9.7” only had 2GB, despite being released later. I think the 12.9 also had Pro Motion while the 9.7” did not. It wasn’t until the 2nd Gen that the only difference between the models was the screen size.

 

[rui no onna]

The 12.9” 1st Gen had 4 GB and a slightly higher clockspeed. The 9.7” only had 2GB, despite being released later. I think the 12.9 also had Pro Motion while the 9.7” did not. It wasn’t until the 2nd Gen that the only difference between the models was the screen size.

ProMotion was introduced with 2nd gen. I believe max clock speeds are the same but memory bandwidth on the 12.9 is higher thanks to dual channel memory configuration, plus the size allows for better cooling.

1st gen

iPad Pro 12.9
Apple A9X 2.3 GHz
4GB LPDDR4 (dual channel)
32GB & 128GB at launch

iPad Pro 9.7
Apple A9X 2.3 GHz
2GB LPDDR4
TrueTone
32, 128 & 256GB at launch