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