Jeff C

I think the choice is clear. Do you need an Apple Pencil or the color gamut for your work as an artist? Do you want handwritten notes? Buy a Pro. Everyone else should buy an iPad and save the scratch. The world of people who can use an IPad as a "laptop replacement" is small and is largely populated by retirees, small children and people who just surf the web and never use a complicated spreadsheet. The lower price iPad opens that world up and also keeps it as a more viable choice to buy for kids. Though giving up on the mini basically cedes that to Amazon where $50 gets you a crap-in-comparison tablet that is actually amazing because you can hand it to a four-year-old and not care. Most of us are not tech writers with access to the bleeding edge. The new iPad is going to be a nice replacement for those with an original iPad, 2,3,4 or maybe Air who are thinking "It is time for a new one do i still need... $329. OK let me just explain this to the wife in a way that makes it sound important. I should use the old iPad more to make it look like I need one." Normal people cannot justify an $800-$1,000 iPad (either base or all in with keyboard and pencil) when you can now grab a MacBook Air for the same price or a MacBook for just a few hundred more. Meanwhile for a growing segment of the population that just browses the Web and uses Facebook the phone works just fine. I just hope Apple wakes up, either adds more true multitasking and power abilities to the Pro's or concedes they are not laptops, they cannot grow the mac business charging more and more for less and they find a way to bring Mac prices down to reality so they can grow the user base and be more than an iPhone company for years to come. They are losing the top part of the market who don't want toy computers and the bottom part that can get a $300 Windows laptop a couple of minutes after ogling the nice MacBooks hidden in the corner of Best Buy.