“You probably expected a thinner, lighter, and faster iPad Air 3, but Apple had other ideas. Instead of iterating on October 2014’s iPad Air 2, they went back to the drawing board,” iFixit reports. “Actually they probably don’t use a drawing board, they use an iPad Pro — which might be where they got the idea for this. It seems to pack all the features of the first iPad Pro, in a smaller package.”
“Apple may have let all the Air out of the iPad line, but they didn’t skimp on the 9.7″ Pro’s specs,” iFixit reports. “Once we pop the speakers out for a closer look, we’re rewarded for our hard work: they connect to the logic board with spring contacts!”
“Out pops the perpetrator of that unsightly camera bump. And yup, that dimple goes all the way down, through the case down to the sapphire crystal lens cover,” iFixit reports. “On our way to the logic board, we encounter some strange new antenna interconnect boards…”
Check out all of the gory details in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There’s a lot of goodness packed into such a thin, small space!
iFixit said the camera it pulled out was the same one used in the iPhone 6S Plus, which has optical image stabilization. It even showed the part and linked to its iPhone 6S Plus camera image, showing it’s the more bulky part. I wonder why Apple didn’t claim optical image stabilization as a feature of this new iPad Pro 9.7″ model? Maybe Apple has disabled it, or perhaps their claimed Auto Image Stabilization (same as for iPad Pro 12.9″ model) is their new way of addressing this feature. Still, a bit odd. It’s unlikely they overlooked this capability.
Not the first time department
Apple tends to under report features it does not expect are selling points. However it sure is nice having them.
Unfortunately they realy did skimp in two important areas. The USB2 instead of USB 3 and the lack of RAW support for photographers are deal breakers for me. Before you say I know that I can work aroud the lack of RAW support, but why should I spend all that money just to work around an issue.
Everything else about the 9.7 inch iPad in perfect. I even prefer the size to the 12.9 inch iPad pro, but I shoot RAW files and I need to import them quickly.
The Microsoft Surface has usb 3 and can handle RAW file, but I really do not want to go back to Microsoft. So as far as I am concerned with USB 2 this is really a case of Defeat snached from the Jaws of Victory!
If you just change you camera setting to raw+jpeg the iPad will work with it. It saves the raw image and displays a full resolution jpeg to work with. When you’re done, you can offload the raw image to your Mac for additional processing.
And slightly slower A9x and half the RAM (2 GB vs. 4).
Oh, btw, I have both.
Except the memory. Wait for iOS 10 or 11 to prove that.