For me personally, I would never use a closed platform for my primary device. So Apple would need to allow sideloading also, like Android. And they’ll never, ever, do that.
But sure, your list would definitely expand above the casual user threshold quite a bit.
The Apple keyboard is really expensive but I gotta say, it is so pleasant to use. The textured keys, the throw, the setup are just premium as hell. Apple branded accessories are hit and miss in the ripoff department, but I think the keyboard is a giant hit.
Also, a bit more on “laptop replacements.” I don’t really want my iPad to be a laptop replacement. Laptops and that form factor are tried and true. If people want a laptop, get a laptop.
On the other hand – especially when the thing now cost $1700 to stick a keyboard on to – it needs to do more, shall we say, basic computing tasks. I don’t really care if I can run Xcode on it, but the file system stuff really causes a lot of problems for workflows.
Yeah, it’s weird, I like the smart keyboard more than I like the keyboard on my MacBook Pro.
I saw all the messages here and was hoping for some hands-on impressions of the new iPads or something. Nope, a bunch of cyclical arguing about laptop replacement that’s pointless because it’s 100% subjective. The iPad is a great laptop replacement if you’re Andy. It’s a crappy laptop replacement if you’re Denny. Those are both true. I hope to God we can move on now.
The iOS set up is getting even better. My iCloud back up on my old iPad was from this morning, so my new iPad asked me if I wanted to do a new back up on the old one before doing setup in the new one. Hit yes and it did it’s thing. Took a couple of minutes with almost no input from me.
No real impressions yet. Looks great, and is very zippy compared to my 4 year old iPad. Very difficult to pick up from a table. Have to slide it to an edge or use 2 hands. No case yet. Got the keyboard folio, but haven’t used it yet.
I bought the top of the line 12.9 today. What can I say, I am planning ahead for a future of Photoshop and Xcode (one can dream).
It is fantastic to hold and to use, especially with no case on it. I only purchased the Smart Folio to go with it for now, partly because it is pretty light but also because it is so easy to remove. I am mostly using it bare.
I expect them to support USB drives in the future. They cannot not do it and still compete in the pro space. And technically it is such low hanging fruit now. They are getting reamed about it in reviews. I don’t think they will have a choice.
Robust multi-monitor support is non-trivial to do really well in the short term. iOS just was not designed as a multiscreen OS, and iOS apps make certain presumptions about how they are displayed, along with how and when the displays change (rotation, etc). There will need to be more OS and API changes in future releases, and apps will need to conform in order to behave well. I hope that Apple pursues those changes and that app makers take full advantage.
What might make sense is a dock of some sort, like back in the MacBook duo days. A fancier version of the dongles they make for the recent MacBooks. You could leave your monitor and peripherals connected to it and just set the iPad on the dock to access everything.
Got my 11” iPad Pro. It’s nice. Somehow it seems smaller than my 10.7 even though it’s pretty much exactly the same size. All screen is fancy and face recognition is fast in all orientations.
Anyone have any specific questions? I got space grey, but the back is a nice matte black.
Well, to be fair, I doubt many pros are using a Dell XPS 13" laptop or even a Surface Pro 6 to crunch 4k videos, but still, it seems impressive to me. I mean that time is basically encoding 4k video faster than real-time on an iPad.
Back when I was an amateur photographer and used to do a lot of reading, pretty much all pros used Macs (OS X had better color calibration tools than Windows). Also had great software, but that has changed a lot in the past decade where it’s probably pretty even now.
iPhones have good camera’s so there’s that.
As been mentioned a few times in this thread, iPads are really good for cases like the author described, so there’s that.