Since about six seconds after Apple debuted the new and remarkably thin iPad Pro, the internet has collectively been asking one question: you can totally snap this thing in half, right?
By god, that’s music! And our favorite destroyer of gadgets delivered on Thursday, posting an 11-minute dive into the new Pro. As ever, it’s a really interesting (and brutal) test of a 13-inch tablet: you’ll get to see the new OLED screen at microscopic levels, open up the new Pencil Pro, watch this incredibly expensive device get scratched up good (though it holds up pretty well!), and pry apart the pieces of the Magic Keyboard. JRE host Zack Nelson’s videos are always both incredibly fun and kind of painful to watch, as you see a beautiful piece of engineering just get totally wrecked. It’s great.
But at about eight and a half minutes into the video, we get to the main event. And spoiler alert: the iPad Pro holds up really well. Even with some aggressive bending, “that central spine is definitely providing enough structure for horizontal bends.” Vertical bends don’t do as well, though — the Pro cracks right at the charging port, which appears to be the main structural weakness of the device. Still, for what it is, and how you’re likely to use it, the Pro should hold up fine.
Other creators are also getting their hands on the new Pro and finding similarly solid results. In nearly every case, the charging port appears to be the weakest part of the device, but in general, it holds up better than ever.
This is particularly good news because the iPad’s history in JRE tests is, let’s say, not great. The first Pro did terribly:
Even the last model bent pretty easily, though it was somewhat hilariously still functional, even after Nelson turned it into “a crinkled piece of paper”:
The latest Pro is definitely a big step up. No word on the new Air yet, but to borrow a JRE-ism, if you get the 10th-generation iPad, don’t put it in your back pocket:
Overall, most of these testers seem impressed by the Pro, and they do a good job of showing off what Apple does to make the device so sturdy despite its size. Like any gadget, you can break it if you really try — and you can probably carve a lion into most things as well, if your knife is sharp enough. But for all the new iPad Pro owners worried about how their new tablet will fare in their backpack, it seems you’re probably going to be okay.