Will the iPad Pro Replace Your Laptop?
SAINT JOHN–Apple’s iPad has been a game-changing device, but it has never really cracked the corporate market. Now, with its new iPad Pro, Apple hopes to make its monster iPad a replacement for your laptop.
It’s big – the iPad Pro’s 12.9-inch screen is just slightly smaller than the 13.3-inch display on the MacBook Air. With 5.6 million pixels, it also has a much higher resolution, the highest of any Retina display on any iOS device. The big display is 78 per cent larger than an iPad Air 2. You can add a keyboard and a new stylus, the Apple pencil.
Canadian pricing starts at $1,049 for a 32 GB wifi model.
We checked out some of the early reviews.
Personal tech guru Walt Mossberg, writing in The Verge, says “for me — a person already using his laptop a lot less in favor of the iPad — the Pro is just not likely to eliminate my laptop use entirely.” Mossberg is a big fan of the new stylus, writing, “I am blown away by the Apple Pencil.” He concludes that thee the iPad Pro will appeal to big businesses, “where a huge screen that can show a big spreadsheet or presentation could have real value.”
But for Mossberg personally, he won’t be adding adding the iPod Pro to his gadget pile. “The iPad Pro will no doubt make a lot of Apple users happy, especially if they use it for graphics. But I won’t be buying one, and I don’t recommend that average users do so either.”
Wired recalls that Steve Jobs once said tablets are cars and laptops are trucks. “The iPad’s always had one key problem: It’s ill-suited to the work people do at work. The apps don’t do enough. The tablet isn’t powerful enough. The screen isn’t big enough.”
But, “all that’s changed with the iPad Pro…the iPad Pro is plenty powerful, and it’s plenty big… This tablet does things your phone and your laptop can’t do. Are they solutions in search of a problem? Perhaps. But the iPad Pro is the best tablet, and the best case for tablets, anyone’s ever made.
Like Mossberg, Wired is a big fan of the Apple Pencil. “In apps that support it, the Pencil is an unbelievably accurate, fine instrument for creation or control. When you write or draw, it feels like ink is coming straight from its tip. You can shade with the side of the Pencil, write in beautiful calligraphy, or sketch with amazing accuracy.”
Forbes went full Apple fanboy, writing that “the iPad Pro is not a toy, it is the highest-performance machine in the iOS world by a long shot.”
“The point of the iPad Pro is to extend the capabilities of the iPad by adding a much larger and higher resolution display surface, multitasking, a much higher performance engine, and two new ways of inputting content with the Smart Keyboard and Pencil. It’s a new and more expanded experience, yet feels familiar. If you feel really comfortable using an iPhone or iPad, odds are you will be able to easily use the iPad Pro.”
