What we can connect to the new iPad Pro with USB-C

The eagerly awaited iPad Pro 2018 is already with us and comes with a novelty we’ve all been waiting for: features a USB-C port instead of the Lightning port we’re used to seeing on iOS devices. What will this bring to users? Much more than you might think because you can easily connect to external monitors, cameras and a host of accessories just like a Mac, with the software limitation that we hate so much . In this article we will try to present all the benefits of this new USB-C port and what advantages it will give us the users.

Apple is slowly moving towards using what will soon be the standard in physical connections. A few years ago the company decided to do away with all HDMI, Ethernet or USB-A connections on Macs, to concentrate everything on several USB-C which offers users an incredible data transfer speed as well as the possibility of connecting various accessories with a single connection.

You can connect an external monitor to the new iPad Pro but with several limitations

What we can connect to the new iPad Pro with USB-C
What we can connect to the new iPad Pro with USB-C

After the obligatory adaptation of the new MacBook Pro, it’s now time to take this step on the iPad and possibly soon on the iPhone. With the new USB-C connector of the iPad Pro 2018 we will have a data transfer rate of 10 GB/s and we will be able to connect a monitor to play content at 5K 60 fps, although with several limitations.

We must bear in mind that the monitor to which we connect the iPad must support the DisplayPort standard and in order to enjoy a satisfactory experience the monitor we use must be compatible with HDR10 technology. This is because the output signal supports this type of technology so if we want to see multimedia content at the highest quality that gives us our new iPad we recommend having a compatible monitor. The one recommended by Apple itself if you remember is the LG27MD5KA that you can find at Amazon.

Besides this limitation in the video output, we could see in the Keynote of last October 30th that when we connect the iPad to the external monitor it will show exactly the same, that is to say it will be like a mirror. If it is true that in some very specific applications such as Adobe Photoshop we can select what we want to show on the external monitor, such as the photo we are editing, without showing the tool selection. Obviously we expect that third party applications will work to make use of this goodness as well as the Adobe suite.

What does this mean? In short, we can connect our iPad to watch a movie on Netflix or HBO but we won’t have as much flexibility as when we connect a Mac where we can select what to show on the external monitor or switch windows between screens. Here the limitation is clear: iOS 12.

Another limitation that we will find is that the USB-C cable that we found in the box of the iPad will not serve to connect to a 5K monitor , forcing us to buy a cable with a high bandwidth that we can find in the Apple Store or we also have an option at Amazon with the Belkin cable. For us this is something wrong, because if you present this new possibility with the iPad the right thing is to include the compatible cable but we are used to this kind of decisions in the iPhone and the quick charge adapter.

Currently the USB-C connection is not a standard in all monitors or accessories, so we will not be able to use this cable to connect the iPad to a monitor with HDMI for example. But don’t panic as this is where adapters come into play. In the Apple Store or Amazon we can find output adapters to HDMI 2.0 that will offer us a maximum resolution of 4K at 60Hz. This is obviously the same thing we have in the Mac world, and that some of us criticize quite a lot.

And as with the MacBook Pro, MacBook or MacBook Air 2018, if you don’t want to carry around a lot of accessories with your iPad you can choose to buy a hub that will give you a multitude of unified connections , without having to change your adapter.

Use your iPad Pro 2018 as a PowerBank

The iPad Pro shines for having a very good autonomy, and this is why will allow us to use it as PowerBank since if we have a USB-C cable to Lightning we will be able to connect it to our iPhone and it will start to recharge at a power of 7.5W. With this output power we can say that the recharge will be faster than with the charging adapter that comes with the iPhone which is 5W.

In addition to being able to recharge an iPhone we can connect it to any compatible accessory and it will also start to recharge its battery, something that has undoubtedly attracted our attention and will save us at certain times as if it were a Mac.

Easily import photos from your camera or external hard drive

Without a doubt, the iPad Pro is a device focused on the professional sector, and that is why Apple has provided tools to facilitate its work. Now with the arrival of the USB-C port we can connect external storage devices or even a camera and export its content quickly and easily.

Once we connect these devices the iPad opens the Photos application and will let us import all the multimedia content we want to our iPad so we can start editing it quickly, saving us from having to go through a computer to download the photos and transfer them through the cloud or AirDrop to our iPad.

Obviously if our camera can not be connected via cable because it does not have a compatible connection, we can always purchase an SD card adapter to USB-C to be able to take the card from our camera and connect it to our iPad to import the photos and videos we want.

But here we have a limitation for video editing professionals, since i OS 12 does not allow us to export audio files, by opening only the Photo application and not Files. It would be appropriate to have in iOS 12 a Finder as in macOS to be able to export any type of multimedia file as audio. Here again we have as a limitation the operating system that we hope will be solved in iOS 13 with a more productive file system.

Connect any kind of accessory to your iPad

Just like the Mac, the USB-C connection gives us great versatility when connecting external accessories such as keyboards, pen drives, hard drives, and we can even connect an Ethernet adapter to give our iPad Pro a wired connection rather than a WiFi one, improving your Internet experience.

To take advantage of all this we will have to go through the box and buy the corresponding adapters or use a suitable hub. The good thing is that if we have adapters for our MacBook we can use them in this new iPad Pro without any problem.

For us this is a very positive development, that we hope will be extended to all devices of the company of the bitten apple as it will be a stimulation for all brands to get to work by concentrating all connections on this USB-C standard.

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