It’s the biggest iPad ever, and it’s destined for drafting tables, artists’ desks and graphic design offices this holiday season.
The 12.9-inch iPad Pro is an entirely new product category that seems tailor-made for creators who love Apple. It is, in short, a digital canvas.
For the first time, we have an iPad that seems like it belongs on a desk. Its screen is larger than my own MacBook Air, and more gorgeous, too. It’s one of the best displays ever made. With a thin feel and weighing in at 1.5 pounds, Apple managed to keep the size akin to the first-generation iPad from five years ago. The battery may not last a full work day without charging, but it’ll come close.
The so-called Smart Keyboard, which doubles as a stand and cover, is a showcase of Apple’s meticulous design. Typing is as effortless as one can get with a tablet. It comes with new keyboard commands (for instance, press x-shift-K to comment) and an onscreen shortcut bar that allows for a quick way to bold, italicize or underline text.
The price for the 32 GB model is $799, but most people are going to opt for the 128GB model, which is $949 and $1,079 with cellular service. Add $169 for the Smart Keyboard and $99 for the Apple Pencil, and you have a pricey proposition.
In some ways, the Pro feels like a first-generation device because it’s a tablet that wants to be more. I found myself reflexively hunting around the keyboard for a trackpad that wasn’t there. And you can’t hand it to another user and have them log into their own account like you would on an Apple laptop or the Microsoft Surface Pro 4.
A tablet that seems made for artistic types should have easy integration with Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of applications such as InDesign and Illustrator, and I expect Apple will create future versions that do just that. Adobe did update two of its apps — Photoshop Sketch and Photoshop Mix — for the iPad Pro to take advantage of the larger screen. Apps made for sketching, like Procreate, have never looked better.
Gamers will appreciate the impressive sound of the Pro’s four speakers as well as the speed of the new A9X chip, which Apple claims has twice the graphics and processing power of its predecessor.
New multitasking features of iOS 9 are particularly effective due to the size of the iPad Pro. It’s nice to be able to run common apps like Twitter and Facebook side-by-side in split-screen mode. But the limitations of iOS 9 are also amplified by a screen size that seems to be begging you to do more.
Because we haven’t yet reached the post-mouse era, the iPad Pro isn’t the laptop replacement some Apple fans will want it to be. But by the second or third generation it may very well be.
