The Kensington StudioDock turns your iPad into a tiny iMac

There are many iPad keyboard covers out there that aim to turn the Apple tablet into a laptop, but the Kensington StudioDock is something entirely different: it turns your iPad Pro into the smallest iMac in the world.

This is an important accessory for people who take iPad productivity seriously. (Yes, they do.) It is a dock that allows you to use your iPad Pro or Air equipped with USB-C in portrait or landscape orientation, while offering much more connectivity. Basically, if you ever sit down and work at your desk with an iPad Pro, StudioDock might be for you.

Well, if you’re happy to spend $ 399, anyway.

The StudioDock is made mostly of aluminum and is robust enough that you can adjust the position of the iPad without it moving on your desk, making it easier to switch between portrait and landscape modes or tilt the vertical viewing angle. (An iPad Pro in a StudioDock in portrait mode is a great Zoom device, for example.) The build quality of the stand itself is solid, although the plastic back panel looks a little torn.

On one side of the dock you will find a USB-C port and an on / off button, while the other has an SD card slot and a headset. On the back there is a cylindrical connector for power, three USB-A ports, an HDMI port and a Gigabit Ethernet port. There are also two 7.5 W Qi wireless chargers integrated into the base of the stand and (of course) two Kensington security locks. The iPad Pro connects via USB-C and connects to a magnetic plastic panel that helps support the connector; the dock is available for 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPads, although the size of the magnetic panel is the only difference between the two versions.

Once your iPad is connected to a keyboard and trackpad or mouse, it’s like having a small desktop computer with a touchscreen – and many more ports than most Mac laptops today. It’s really adorable, if you find adorable things like the idea of ​​wired Internet connectivity on a tablet.

Even if you’re not using a lot of accessories, StudioDock is more comfortable to use on a desk than on a laptop, simply because it lifts the screen to a better angle. I remember a recent New Yorker cover showing a woman at home with her laptop precariously perched on a pile of books. Laptop stands exist, of course, but not everyone wants to use them, and I like that the StudioDock means you’re not stuck with a redundant keyboard and trackpad.

A crucial element of this product is that it is easy to move the iPad to and from the dock. It’s still a bit complicated and in a perfect world, I would like StudioDock to use the Smart Connector, but since no one but Apple and Logitech has ever released products that actually use it, I assume Kensington has its reasons – bandwidth, no doubt between them. One benefit of this design is that it charges the iPad very quickly at 37.5 W, so I didn’t have to think about charging it any other way at home.

Kensington also sent an Apple Watch charger that plugs into the USB-C port. It will be sold separately after the launch of StudioDock. I found it a little plastic, like the rear panel of the dock, but it worked well. I already use an Apple Watch desktop charger every day, so I haven’t seen much of a need for it, but if you don’t already have one, then this would be a convenient addition.

Wireless chargers, in turn, are also a good addition. You won’t get the fastest speeds from them, but the ability to carry a phone and AirPods throughout the day is useful and saves space on your desk compared to separate blocks. I noticed a slight coil noise when the devices were fully charged – this is not so uncommon with wireless chargers, but not all do, so it is important to note that this one does.

The HDMI port on the StudioDock supports 4K monitors at 60 Hz and should be ideal for dual monitor configurations on the iPad, but the software is not yet there by Apple. Only a few apps allow you to show different content on each monitor – the rest of the time, you’re dealing with a crate-shaped mirror on your iPad’s 4: 3 screen. (A smart way around this is an app called Shiftscreen, which is basically a browser that lets you run up to four web apps on two monitors – useful for things like multitasking on Slack and Asana.) I personally need iPadOS to get support from much better external monitor before going all-in in an iPad desktop setup, but if you’re used to using a laptop alone, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro should be big enough for most tasks.

That’s how I used StudioDock most of the time and, in general, it was a great experience. I really like the trackpad support that was added to iPadOS last year, and it’s great to be able to combine it with a wired mechanical keyboard and still have a ton of connectivity options. I will just say that I generally prefer to use the StudioDock rather than a laptop balanced on a pile of books.

StudioDock is clearly a niche product and has its peculiarities. But for the most part, Kensington’s attempt to turn the iPad into a desktop computer really works. You would really have to be in the iPad lifestyle as a working machine for this to make sense to you, but the StudioDock and iPad Pro combination is a fast and fun computer that does most of what I want.

My biggest obstacle is the price. It costs $ 399.99 for the 12.9-inch version of the iPad Pro or $ 379.99 for a model that fits the 11-inch iPad Pro and the 10.9-inch iPad Air. This is clearly a lot of money to invest in a third-party peripheral – it is more than the cost of some iPads alone. And I would worry if it would work with any future designs of the iPad Pro, considering that the current Pros have not had a significant update since its launch in 2018.

These are some very big caveats, but if you can overcome them, StudioDock is a great way to work on an iPad. This makes the tablet a more comfortable, capable and flexible computer, and I just hope that Apple software will evolve to make this type of use case even better.

Photograph by Sam Byford / The Verge