palegolas

The picture quality, and ease of use, seems great! Good stuff!
The build quality, judging by the video, looks functional, but not elegantly solid, like if Apple would have made it. Good stuff though.

I've tried the new Surface from Microsoft. It's very good. It's not perfect, but it's very good. The concept of ditching a separate tablet OS, for a nearly full fledged tablet PC is enticing. Microsoft is betting everything on this, and when the OS finally gets to the point where it sort of works well enough in both tablet and keyboard form factor, the tablet only iOS ideal seem kinda dated.
The form factor as a tablet is surprisingly big and light as well.
Microsoft did well. That huge Surface Studio is also something EVERY GRAPHIC ARTIST IN THE WORLD has been hoping for Apple to do... for like... ages. But they have not gone there. It seems so obvious. So yeah, Microsoft is doing great there too.

The iPad Pro still has a significantly better pencil. Like, really two different worlds. I find the overall iOS experience much more elegant. More pleasant. But who cares about elegant when you just wanna work and make some storyboards, animation, typing, video editing, connect a hard drive with 300GB of footage, edit and colour grade it, multitask, produce some music, connect to an stage mixer etc. Not wait and hope for your professional production suite eventually, maybe, maybe not will come to iPad. It just needs to work.

I get Microsoft. And to be honest. I find Apple perhaps living a bit too much in their own bubble to really move forward on the computing platform. I love the iPad Pro, but since someone stole it from me I'm not sure I'm gonna get a new one. If they introduce true USB-C speed native extended screen tablet Mac connection maybe. Because it's as an extention to my professional work the iPad works the best.

twa440 said:

You know, your right, it will cost them more....

No glowing logos in the next keynote audience ;-)

USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 is a really clean vision of the future of connectivity. Apple will lead and accelerate the industry, that will follow and transfer.
Dongles during the transfer period. This is great. A year from now most peripherals will be USB-C ready. Perhaps USB to USB-C cables will surface (with built in dongle), and then a dongle won't be necessary anyway.

The SD card slot I will immediately miss. I'm using it all the time for video editing straight from the cards. The card formats are changing rapidly though. SD might be sort of end of cycle. I can see why it had to go.

The prices are really high. It's unfortunate. The specs I'm after are many hundreds of dollars more than the previous model. It stings, and makes me hold off my order for a while. The specs are good though. Surprised by the lack of 32GB. But if the memory and SSD are so much faster, and it helps with battery, then I'm ok with that.

kamilton said:

Ah...  Remove it from all "non-pro" labeled devices.  People that do music/video work "Pro" customers probably want it for another 5 years or until the frequency range is optimized in other options.

jah beautiful 

I'm making music and video, and for the most part I'm using a professional audio interface, connecting to that. It's only at home, or on the road that I'm not always using the interface. So then a little dongle won't take up much space in relative to the size of the headphones I'm using. No big deal for me personally if they choose to remove it from the body itself.