Mossberg: The iPad Pro can't replace your laptop totally, even for a tablet lover
The Verge, Walt Mossberg, November 11, 2015I am a tablet man, specifically an iPad man. I do love my trusty, iconic, MacBook Air laptop. But, except for heavy writing, I'm likelier to grab my iPad Air or even my diminutive iPad mini to get work done.
That includes everything from email to photo cropping; from reviewing and annotating PDFs to signing legal documents and editing articles and spreadsheets. I surf the web on it, run Slack on it, use it for Facebook and Twitter, business and personal video calls, and even keep my calendar on it.
Of course, I also use my iPads for consuming content -- videos, photos, books, and music. But, contrary to the conventional wisdom, I see the iPad as a productivity device as well. While the iPad hasn't entirely replaced my laptop, it has replaced so many of the scenarios for which I used my laptop in the past that I turn to the laptop much less often.
So I was quite intrigued when Apple announced the iPad Pro, a new, jumbo-sized iPad with an optional snap-on physical keyboard cover and stylus for drawing. This whopping slate can be ordered starting today, and I've been testing it for the past week. In fact, I wrote much of this column on an iPad Pro with Apple's Smart Keyboard. For comparison, I also used a new iPad Pro keyboard from Logitech, and a MacBook Pro to write portions. And of course I've reviewed the Microsoft Surface Pro and its Type Cover in the past, and used a variety of third-party iPad keyboards as well.
The iPad Pro is a huge tablet. Its 12.9-inch screen is almost as large as the 13.3-inch display on the MacBook Air, and has much higher resolution. The display is 78 percent larger than the screen of Apple's standard-sized iPad Air 2. When encased in its keyboard cover, the iPad Pro is longer, wider, thicker, and heavier than Apple's smallest Mac laptop, the 12-inch MacBook.
You'd think an iPad guy like me would be over the moon about the iPad Pro, despite its hefty base price of $799 for a Wi-Fi-only model with 32GB of memory, which stretches to $949 with 128GB of memory, and soars past $1,000 with cellular capability.
But I'm not.
And here is another review by Lauren Goode also on The Verge:
iPad Pro review
The Verge, Lauren Goode, November 11, 2015.When I first picked up the iPad Pro at an Apple event this past September, I couldn’t help but laugh a little bit. For one, its size: it is holy-crap-look-at-this-iPad big. And with a price tag that easily jumps up to around a thousand dollars, it’s the most expensive iPad ever.
There’s also the fact that Apple has once again hung back and watched others launch a new product category before bursting in and laying claim to it. The company had done this with MP3 players, phablet phones, smartwatches. Now, it was unveiling a high-powered tablet computer with a stylus and accessory keyboard.
But after a few days of using the iPad Pro, I started to look at iPad differently. The large tablet pretty much demanded it. I’ve always been a bit of an iPad skeptic, never understanding how people can use them all the time for productivity, even with a Bluetooth accessory keyboard attached. By day three with the iPad Pro, I had started to wonder, Could this replace my MacBook?
It’s the question everyone is asking. And while Apple says it didn’t make iPad Pro with the intent to replace a laptop, even Apple CEO Tim Cook suggested in a recent interview that this could be the case — because what else could this massive iPad be for? It’s the same question Microsoft has been trying to answer with the Surface since 2012, with mixed results.
Either way you look at it, the iPad Pro is meant to change how we think about computers (or at least turn around the iPad’s flagging sales) — which is, actually, no laughing matter.
(There's a lot more at the link above. . . )
And the technology continues to grow and amaze me.
For those of you who have slightly aged Macbook Pro’s, I just got rid of my hard drive for a SSD drive. BIG IMPROVEMENT.
It’s easy to change.
But you'd think Walt Mossberg could at least use the terms correctly:
> ...Wi-Fi-only model with 32GB of memory, which stretches to $949 with 128GB of memory...No, Mr. Mossberg, the new iPad Pro has 4GB of "memory". RAM. Mossberg means 32GB or 128GB of "storage" as in "file system" and yes I know that SSDs are really Flash memory but we don't call our automobile tires "rubbers" do we? Well, at least -I- don't call them that. Grrr.
Anyway, nice long review but worth it if one is interested in the Pro. Thanks for posting.