firelock

I’m not sure why the comparison between iPads and laptops is always one-way in favor of the laptop. There are a lot of things my iPad does better than my laptop. For example, my iPad Pro is my favorite way to take notes. Goodnotes and the Apple Pencil are an amazing combination. I love making graphs and flowcharts in Grafio using the Apple Pencil. And I do a lot of PowerPoint presentations directly from my iPad. (Though I wish MS would bring feature parity to the animation controls for the iOS version.) And, again, I can markup changes to the deck with my Apple Pencil. The iPad also makes for a great portable photo editing platform. Using Canon’s Connect app I tether my DSLR wirelessly to my iPad to control my photo shoots and preview on the fly.

The iPad can do all of these things while being lightweight, easy to carry around and use, and with all-day battery life. I am really stunned at how great the battery life is in the new iPad Pro 11”. I can use from 8 AM in the morning to late in the evening without having to charge it.

I’m writing this on my new 11” iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard on my lap while sitting in my recliner. It is far more stable than my old 10.5 Pro and Smart Keyboard in this configuration and has much more of a laptop feel. I do agree that the back protection adds unwanted thickness; the 11” iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard definitely feels heavier than my old 10.5 with Smart Keyboard, but it also has a more premium look and feel, and the higher-quality keyboard with additional stability is worth it.

I found the author’s complaint about the magnets a little misleading. The new Smart Keyboard has a far stronger connection to the iPad than the old one did. I’ve had the old keyboard cover slip off several times, once causing me to drop the iPad to the floor (causing small dent); I’m pretty certain that is not going to happen with this new keyboard cover and 11” Pro.

entropys said:

Yes I can see that. Desktop and iPad Pro. In fact I would love that.  Problem is a decent laptop would do both jobs well and cost half as much as the iMac and the iPad Pro. The gap needs to be a lot closer to make it easier for More people to do exactly what you suggest.
Overall what I am saying is the iPad Pro isn’t quite there enough to justify laptop prices. Yet.
where are updated iMacs btw?

I think the part of the equation that you might not have yet considered is that a certain segment of consumers, myself included, prefer using an iPad Pro for many tasks. Your arguments are based on a fundamental assumption that there is nothing preferable about working on an iPad vs a laptop except for its portability, and therefore it is just a less effective tool. I believe that was true not too long ago, but that paradigm has started to shift due to the introduction of iOS 11 and the Apple Pencil. IOS 11 was a giant leap for iPad productivity. I now prefer to take notes in GoodNotes with Pencil. I prefer to make flowcharts with Grafio and Pencil. It actually makes both of these tasks somewhat fun and I do these two things a lot.

Using the Canon Connect app I can walk around a trade show with our photographer and see what he is shooting on the iPad as he shoots. I can easily tell if we got the shots we need, or if they are too blurry or grainy for whatever reason and have to be reshot. I can control our cameras in the studio with the iPad much easier than with a laptop. I am really looking forward to using Photoshop and the Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro next year. That may be a killer combination for the pro imaging market. And as someone who was given a Surface 3 with Photoshop a few years back, I can tell you right now that Microsoft has no idea how to implement this combination properly. Trying to access Photoshop’s tiny menus on the Surface screen was nearly impossible, and their stylus is in no way as good as the Pencil/iPad Pro combination.

I recently had some friends over for dinner. One had brought her elderly father along and he was complaining how he couldn’t make phone calls. He had a nice Samsung phone so I offered to take a look at it. It was completely overrun with spyware/adware and to describe it as barely useable would be too generous. After about half an hour of deleting apps, fighting the spy/adware every step of the way, I was able to get the phone more or less baselined and back to useable condition. Now you might argue that a more tech savvy user wouldn’t have been baited into installing all of that malware, but the fact is this would never have happened on an iPhone no matter the experience of the user. I told my friend to ditch the Samsung and buy her father an inexpensive iPhone and they wouldn’t have to worry.

My wife and daughter love their iPad minis. I work in creative, and ALL of the women ADs that I work with who have iPads own iPad minis. While anecdotal, I think Minis are very popular with women. I suspect if no other reason because women tend to have smaller hands than men. Something that men are prone to forget. The minis is also perfect as an e-reader, and it is a statistical fact that women read more books than men. And I also don’t buy the argument that larger iPhones somehow fill this niche. My daughter, for example, loves her iPhone SE. She doesn’t want a big phone, she wants a mini iPad.