“I met with Steve Jobs two days after he came back to Apple in 1997,” Tim Bajarin writes for Tech.pinions. “At the time, Apple was in serious trouble and I asked him how he planned to bring Apple back to health. He told me the first thing he planned to do was to go back and take care of the needs of their core customers. He defined these customers as graphics professionals, publishers and engineers. He felt the CEOs before him had let those customers down by not advancing the Mac platform.”
“What the Mac is particularly good at is things like desktop publishing, graphics design and engineering tasks and it was viewed by this audience as an important tool to help them get their jobs done better and faster,” Bajarin writes. “When I saw the new iPad Pro, my mind went back to this conversation with Steve and I could see his influence in this new product. With the addition of their Pencil stylus and the iPad Pro’s ability to use it at the pixel level, the iPad Pro is the kind of tool artists, graphics designers and engineers will love. It gives them a level of control over their projects in precise ways that should make their jobs easier.”
Bajarin writes, “With the iPad Pro and Pencil, Apple gives these same customers Jobs wanted to serve when he came back to Apple in 1997 another set of tools that will dramatically impact their workflow.”
Much more in the full article – recommended, as usual – here.
MacDailyNews Take: As Bajarin explains, the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil is not meant to serve just a niche market. With a massive army of developers behind it, including the likes of IBM and Cisco, iPad Pro will quickly move far beyond desktop publishing, graphics design and engineering tasks.
I agree that iPad Pro will go beyond niche markets, but still not far much as it is significantly higher priced device that iPad Air 2, which fits to mass corporate purchase culture much better.
Where iPad 2 can go beyond painting/music niche is home, actually. People are not restrained by corporate budgets and “economy”, so they can and will afford the best mobile experience, which is iPad Pro.
Though I personally would rather wait for iPad Pro 2 because it will include 3D Touch (though it will increase weight of the device, so not everything is going to be better about it) — especially because use time of this device is few years.
The iPad Pro, no matter if Steve would have liked it or not, channeled his sprit. Steve has his ways and sometimes he looked away from the obvious.
Apple is two companies, one for consumers and one for professionals. It is really difficult to balance the two.
The iPad Pro does this in spades.
Jony Ives should be commended for this achievement. This probably is all his, we will never know, but it’s ours now and we love him and Apple for it.
We, you dont speak for everyone about good ol Joney
Agreed, I don’t speak for you… I happen to like him. I use “we” too loosely. (is that correct?)
The peanut gallery has taught me to limit my generalisations to the small group of outcasts from mainstream thinking to which I apparently belong. I must be careful to state, “some of us” instead of the presumptuously inclusive “we.” It sounds like Gollum might be in my meagre group of renegade admirers of Apple design, or in another similarly isolated band of contemptible freethinkers that care enough to spell Jony Ive correctly. Paradoxically, judging from overall Apple sales and satisfaction ratings, there exist legions of people who go ahead (presumably begrudgingly) and buy their products anyway undeterred by the shortcomings of Jony Ive or Tim Cook.
Sure enough, it could be just as the trolls have been insisting all along — that there are more people with money than brains. — Still, if I had more brains than money, I wouldn’t waste them posting inflammatory remarks on an Apple-centred web site.
Don’t worry he is simply being anal ‘we’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘all’ in fact it rarely if ever does. It quite clearly represents a group (real or speculated) and we really don’t have to spell that out each time we use it. Using ‘I’ in place of those two uses of ‘we’ wouldn’t have worked would it, while replacing it with for example ‘some of us’ would have been obscure and confusing.
Since Steven was never against stylus as secondary input device — he ever ordered those devices (third-party made) to sell in Apple Stores along with iPads.
And what about the mac? Mac pro needs some rethinking.
Yes, I think Apple got cute by half with new Mac Pro. The Mac Pro achieved it’s biggest success when it didn’t try to buck the trends. OS X still sets it apart even if the hardware is a duplicate of standard PC workstation gear. I just bring myself to buy one.
Note: “it’s” = “it is”
Now re-read your sentence with that in mind.
It will be interesting to see if Adobe’s drawing app will allow collaborative design with two people on iPad Pros connected across a network.
I can see that speeding up early design work in exploring possibilities.
Design professionals are extremely excited about the iPad Pro. Now the Software companies that supply the professional design software have to step up and integrate the iPad Pro into their products.
Imagine a CAD package which the GUI on the iPad Pro, tied back to the heavy processing power on the desktop, but utilizing distributed processing to also add the power of the iPads CPU and GPU. And, imagine being able to take this power with you anywhere with a good internet connection!
But the real question on everyone’s mind is: where does the pencil go when I’m done using it? In my ideal world it would snap to the side of the proPad with massive magnetic strength, but clearly that’s not the case. So how? In my pocket? Do you know how many pencils I’ve lost that way? So how?
NB, and those “Pencils” cost $100 each. Case that holds the keyboard must have a slot for it.
Should fit in your pocket protector.
I’ve lost untold numbers of cheap pencils and ballpoint pens, but I’ve never lost any of my expensive fountain pens.
When something is expensive and exquisitely crafted, you look after it in a way that is entirely different to a throw away item.
I’m envious of today’s students. All their notes can now be saved and archived. There are many times I wish to see my past scribblings, but alas, all is lost to time.
The iPad Pro is going to be a hot seller this holiday season.
I had the same problem. Now I try to put phone and other notes into a WP document with a date so I have all the data, and it’s searchable. However, I still make handwritten notes on a legal pad at times, so when a page fills up I scan it to PDF and add that page to my huge PDF of scanned notes. Not searchable, but very valuable.
Unfortunately, I’ve lost many incredibly valuable handwritten notes because of relocation.
I had a Windows convertible tablet from around 2001. It was an excellent device for the time, but the stylus was not 100% accurate. Fast forward to three or four years ago and I bought a Windows Samsung tablet. Again, the stylus was inaccurate, so it was never used for writing, drawing, etc. Because of the accuracy and low latency of the Apple Pencil and the ability to save notes, documents, sketches, drawings, slide annotations, etc. to the cloud (one master repository), the iPad Pro could be the first reasonably priced product to finally replace paper and pen(cil). I think it’s a big deal.
In Jony’s book there’s a story about him designing a line of pens for Zebra when he was younger.
The flagship design was white and had a nib on the top that was purely for the user to fiddle with… Zebra loved it and it went into production (the TX2).
After his peers saw the pen there was a new phrase coined: if something was cool it had a ‘Jonyness’ about it.
I would like to see the stylus work on an iPad Air 3
Steve was not afraid to change his mind if the future warranted a change. I hate when people label change as a negative trait. Same with politicians (mistaking flexibility for flip-flopping), I want a flexible leader who weighs current facts and trends, not one that sticks with his original ideas even if they become obsolete thinking.
I don’t think Steve Jobs came up with this. I do think that Jony and his team still go by most of Steve’s ideals to make the greatest products, not just good ones. They did it again by following how Steve would think it out and how to make the design look so simple and yet be able to do so much. So everyone who thinks Apple doesn’t innovate think again. They still have it.