No Portrait Mode

One interesting omission in the iPad Pro product pages is any mention at all of Portrait Mode or Portrait Lighting features. Granted, the iPad Pro doesn’t have the telephoto lens that was originally required to support this, however, even the iPhone XR offered a limited version of Portrait Mode back in 2018, and last year’s iPhone 11 delivered the feature pretty much on-par with the triple-lens iPhone 11 Pro.

It’s unclear if the lack of any reference to Portrait Mode is simply an oversight, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see it omitted completely from the new iPad Pro, despite the inclusion of the LiDAR sensor. In fact, Apple’s marketing materials for the new iPad Pro talks about the LiDAR sensor a lot in terms of Augmented Reality, but mentions almost nothing about using it to enhance photography.

Likewise, even though the single-lens iPhone XR was released a month before the 2018 iPad Pro, the Portrait Mode feature didn’t appear on that model either. It seems that Portrait Mode and Portrait Lighting are features Apple wants to confine to the iPhone, while the multi-camera system and LiDAR sensor of the iPad Pro is targeted toward Augmented Reality and other creative applications.