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Unsurprisingly, a 2020 iPad Pro will bend if you try to break it

On the good side, it's very impressive how long the iPad Pro keeps working during all of this

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Stop us if you've heard this before — a YouTuber has taken a brand-new 2020 iPad Pro and destroyed it with his bare hands. He wasn't stir-crazy from a coronavirus lockdown or performing some kind of commercial protest, he is just a vandal with a big bank account — and a mission.

YouTuber "EverythingApplePro" has a mission to get attention and we're rather helping here, but somewhat less from wanting to spread the word about something good, something useful, or just something interesting. We can point you at this YouTube video and together still thwart the mission, though, because what this person wants is to turn that attention into sales.

"EverythingApplePro" sells cases for the 2020 iPad Pro, and, you see entirely where the motivation to bending a new one is coming from.

It's like the way life insurance sales people were allegedly trained to use the word "maim" as much as possible. Seemingly most of us fail to believe we will ever die, but all of us are brought up short by the idea that we could be seriously maimed in an accident.

In this case, the entire 10-minute YouTube video exists to say one thing. The new iPad Pro can bend, so you must, must, must buy this YouTuber's case to prevent it happening.

As it is, we watch a video with this guy pretending to be shocked that Apple hasn't changed the laws of physics. We watch this video where he gasps that aluminium is somehow no studier than it was in 2018 when other people chose to bend their iPad Pro too.

The EverythingApplePro guy puts his back into this job, really buckling the iPad Pro with all the force he can muster, and then says this is what could happen in day to day use. He is completely correct, so long as your day to day use requires you to deliberately torque the device, and smash a thousand dollars worth of iPad Pro in the process.

AppleInsider readers will of course know if you apply pressure to a thin piece of metal, it is going to bend. Only, someone who makes iPad Pro cases must know this too. You can't be in product design and manufacturing without knowing something about materials, you simply cannot.

So he must know, and yet he pretends not to in the verbal equivalent of a goofy face that YouTube viewers seem to demand to click on a video. He pretends to gasp at how easily thin metal bends and thin glass breaks if you bend it, he pretends that this is a poor choice by Apple rather than simply physics.

It's patronizing to treat us as being so stupid that we will believe these incredulous gasps, or that we could ever be shocked at how a device can be broken if only you try to break it.

And it is reprehensible to break an iPad Pro just to be patronizing. You can argue that Apple makes the iPad Pro by the millions, and you can argue that Apple designers or engineers were well paid for their work. But this is still someone's work, and destroying an iPad Pro is vandalism.

EverythingApplePro's decision to patronize his viewers is not exactly endearing. His decision to destroy a thousand bucks of precision engineering in order to sell a cheap case isn't going to turn us into customers either.

It is true that you can bend your iPad Pro. But if you just remember to treat your thin sheet of glass and metal as if it cost you $300 and up for the low end iPad, and well more than $1000 at the high end, you'll be fine.



44 Comments

neilm 16 Years · 1001 comments

Anybody got a Rolex I can, ah, borrow to test with this hammer?

Mike Wuerthele 8 Years · 6906 comments

neilm said:
Anybody got a Rolex I can, ah, borrow to test with this hammer?

Make sure you've got an array of cameras to point at it to post on YouTube, or a Rolex case to sell.

AllProductsNoShip 4 Years · 1 comment

Anybody got a brand new Rolex I can, ah, borrow to put in my backpack without bending?

elijahg 18 Years · 2842 comments

Unfortunately publicising this idiot just gets him more clicks and more ad revenue.

petri 11 Years · 122 comments

I’m not sure if this site was always AppleApologist and I just didn’t notice so much to start with, or what.  I don’t even need to see the video (and I haven’t) to know that iPad Pros are weaker than they used to be, and weaker than they should be, to function as the go-anywhere, Chuck-in-a-backpack tablet they were originally intended as.  It’s not just a question of materials either, the current design is just fundamentally less strong and far more prone to flex.  

Apple should be called out on that.  They should be called out on a bad design which functions less well than it’s predecessors and will be an expensive disappointment for some of its customers.  And when they launch another new iPad generation with the same design flaw and the same weakness, they deserve to be called out on it again, and for more YouTubers to make these same videos pointing it out.  
Apple should do better.  So should AppleInsider.