Watch: 2017 12.9" iPad Pro vs. 12" MacBook
Apple packed a ton of processing horsepower and cutting edge display technology into its latest iPad Pro series, but is it enough to replace a full-size laptop? AppleInsider takes a closer look in this comparison video.
For reviews, news, tips, features and more, subscribe to AppleInsider on YouTube.
For reviews, news, tips, features and more, subscribe to AppleInsider on YouTube.
Comments
iPad needs to support the mac OS file system inorder to become an equal to the laptop.
My 2 cents...
can the ipad run Audio Hijack? no
can i plug in my korg microkey into the ipad (even with the efn' dongle that lets you supposedly charge and connect something usb)? no
can i plug in my Zoom H6 and dump my field recordings into the ipad without a special this or that? no
likewise, can i take out the sd card on my Zoom device and just plug it in, rubberband the filesd dump them into a folder i create? no
i/o options onboard? no
file management? no
file management as elegant, as deep, and as flexible as i may need it to be, or may not need it to be...MY choice? no
dongle nickle and dime? yes
cloud dependant? yes
cloud dependant. so, for instance, when i am doing research in central America or southeast/central Asia, where the infastructure is dicey and i can't backup anything to solidstate devices (thumbdrives/sd)? fck yes
is the ipad a desktop replacement? maybe for apple desktop/laptops as they boldly keep on blurring the line between ios and macos...with desktop hardware becoming more so like the ios devices with increasingly less is more philosophy driven by some knighted guy and the yes board.
is the ipad a desktop replacement? not for a windows machine where you get bigger bang for the buck...except running the shtty operating system as its namesake.
so no.
apple, keep on burning people who actually ARE productive and have made great use of your quality products and operating system for countless years and instead keep on with the curated music, the shttyr and shttyr itunes ecosystem, the increasingly inaccessible physical i/o path and the social consciousness...hey, the multitude of consumers and the share holders will throw rose petals down that path
With that being said, the generational performance gains of the A series architecture is insane. They are catching up to Intel at a rapid pace.
That's what I want.
A10X is quite the chip, but a clamshell is a much more productive form factor than a tablet.
For me it still can not replace a PC/Mac. Lack of track pad/mouse. Mounting external storage. Access to applications that I normally use. Its very close though. Also I wish the keyboard accessory was more like the surface pro 4/5 keyboard (one of the best mobile keyboards I've used)
Especially since A10X is actually conservative for iPad die size. A11 could further embiggen the cores.
TSMC has also announced there will be 7nm High Performance as well as Low Power variation at the SAME TIME. We know the Low Power, SoC node are Apple specific, or at least Apple is always the largest customer when it ship. I wonder if it is also Apple for the high performance node. Due to cost issues it is definitely not Nvidia. It is not Qualcomm because i am not aware of any high performance part that will be shipping in small volume. AMD seems to be more tied up with GF, their lower cost APU and console SoC are also price sensitive for adopting.
But I thought that it strange that it never mentioned the largest single functional difference between the two:
- lack of a touchscreen on the MacBook
- lack of a trackpad on the iPad Pro
While the lack of a touchscreen on the MacBook is no big loss (I agree with Apple that touchscreen sucks on a laptop), the lack of a trackpad on the iPad Pro turns it into a touch screen laptop -- which still sucks unless you're using it as an old fashioned typewriter.
But the video did well illustrate how the performance of the iPad Pro has now matched or exceeded that of a high end, base level laptop. And, (as many of the preceding comments have pointed out) the main differences being simply specific areas of personal preference mostly related to app availability and OS functionality.
I have a student coming up who could soon benefit from having his own laptop. I would love to get him an iPad Pro for that -- but that will have to wait until it has a cursor. The worst scenario is: I will have to buy him both: a tablet for tablet stuff and a laptop for laptop stuff. That's so old fashioned!
However, one cannot, at this point, selectively retrieve a single file or group of files from that backup.