“As you may know from my prior opinion piece on the iPad Pro, I was on the fence about keeping Apple’s new 12.9″ tablet,” Jeremy Horwitz writes for 9to5Mac. “One of our editors has loved his Pro since day one, another returned his after a week of testing, and a third effectively consigned his to Netflix duty. Up until the Pro came out, I was a very satisfied iPad Air 2 user, so I didn’t feel like I needed a bigger device.”
“But after three weeks with my iPad Pro, several things have changed my mind, and I’m officially a happy convert to the larger tablet,” Horwitz writes. “Moreover, I have no intention of going back to the smaller iPad Air or iPad mini form factors any time soon. Here are the five things that made a big difference to me.”
1. Apple Pencil
2. The Right Stand/Case
3. Finding A Better Price
4. Getting Updated Apps
5. Discarding Some iPad Air/mini Conceptions
Read about all five points in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re going to give that Urban Armor Gear iPad Pro Case a try (in black).
I can’t wait to get mine, should be here Tuesday! I already got my case in the mail. I went with the non-keyboard Apple cover and the back of course. It’s enormous! Basically the size of my 13″ MacBook Air. Wish it were leather and in one piece like my Air 2 case was. Oh well. Excited!
I have been using my iPad Pro for a couple of weeks and my Pencil since Monday. I can agree on 3 of the points.
1. The Apple Pencil is really a game changer for a whole lot of us.
2. Updated apps that take advantage of the pencil and the screen real estate, wow, just wow!
3. It helps to discard a lot of preconceptions. This thing, the iPad Pro with the Pencil, is a whole other thing, not a laptop, not your old iPad either. I am using the iPad Pro with the pencil in ways I could never use an iPad or traditional computer, it is in a class by itself with distinct capabilities no other computing device has. The combination with the Pencil is a breakthrough tool for some of us.
The Urban Armor Gear case sounded great in the article, and I considered one.
However, at Amazon, it has only has a one star rating from three reviews for it’s flimsy feel/material/construction and lack of protection for the screen.
If Pelican makes a Vault case for the Pro, that would be worth considering. That product has saved my iPad Air from destruction time and time again.
Apple sold me LEGO Duplo!
I bought my iPad Pro (128G Cellular) on launch day and have used my new business tool in anger (conference calls, boardroom presentations, developing content, writing this article etc…) for a fortnight now. I disposed off my old iPad (fourth generation 128G Cellular) and have completely cross over to the Pro.
Well I love it. Except for two things…
In my view, neither the applications nor iOS truely take full advantage of the additional realestate of the new form factor.
The home screens still have a matrix of app icons that are static at five across and four deep with six in the dock. While they are still the same size, they have simply been spaced out wider. Why? Why have Apple not addressed this? After all, Apple has successfully “trained” me to effectively interact with even smaller icons on my iPhone 5S which are arranged in a tighter four by five matrix with four in the dock and icons that are two-thirds the size of their iPad equivalents.
My point is that myfingers are just as dextrous and do not balloon to gorilla size when I switch from using an iPhone to an iPad Pro.
As for applications, the majority display the same amount of information on the screen as for the normal iPad. Rather than use the additional pixels available, the apps simply blow up the existing iPad optimised display to fit the 2732-by-2048 pixels of the iPad Pro.
It’s like I’ve had my LEGO bricks taken away and got given LEGO Duplo!
Of course there are a few progressive developers (like Readdle) that have been smart about this and have taken advantage of the larger screen size to display more information.
But the whole experience is marred by the “Duplo effect” caused by Apple itself and developers who are dragging their feet. I suppose in time, they will catch up.
My point is, if they can make form-specific interface adjustments between the iPad, iPhone and iPhone 6 Plus, why can’t they do the same for the iPad Pro?
I look forward to a major improvement in coming weeks… …or should I say months?
End of rant – toys (including the LEGO Duplo) are back in the pram!