Phil Schiller said this past week when Apple rolled out the 9.7-inch iPad Pro at an event in Cupertino that “You may not know this, but the majority of people who come to an iPad Pro are coming from a Windows PC," he said, adding: “Many of them will find it is the ultimate PC replacement.”
Nope: The "ultimate" part might generally be referred to as hyperbole. I'll call it fiction. I've tried over and over to use the iPad Air, iPad Air 2, and, most recently, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, as a full-bore laptop replacement. I really tried with the iPad Pro -- for more than a month. But no dice. As I've written before, as long as iOS continues to stumble on productivity applications (and even some simple tasks), it's never going to replace the vast majority of Windows laptops (with exceptions, as commenter David Small points out). Or a MacBook for that matter.
The list of hiccups is too long to go into here. But here's what invariably happens to me: I will be (merrily) doing something pretty much as productively as I would on a Windows laptop or MacBook...Then, wham, I run into a wall with iOS. And while I can sometimes work around it, eventually I give up for the simple reason that I don't want to waste time trying to reverse engineer the iPad into a laptop.
And, remember, the preponderance of the gripes in reviews of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro from the major tech sites was that it fell short as a laptop replacement.
Yep: Now, if you drop the "ultimate" part and use the 9.7 iPad Pro (starting at $599) as a part-time laptop, that's another story. Multitasking, iOS style, is viable on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro because of the larger screen. And I can go to
Future: I'm guessing that iOS will eventually -- I would guess sooner rather than later -- catch up. In that case, I will happily switch to an iPad Pro and its Smart Keyboard. I have no problem going mouse-less with an iPad. Just don't waste my time.
