Federico, as he always does, delivered a very in-depth and thorough review of the new iPad Pro that just landed in stores today. His review was with a review device that he had in his possession for a week.
The iPad Pro intrigues me for a few reasons — portability, form factor and power.
Portability in the sense that it is a giant iPad. So it should be lighter than a notebook and could be taken around with ease. Viticci mentions that he was able to squeeze out about 10 hours of work from the iPad Pro. I think that is impressive. To think that you could simply run out there door with the iPad on a full charge and not carry any cords with you and be productive.
I think the extra screen real estate with iOS 9’s split-view feature could be really handy. If memory serves me right, when the iPad Pro is in landscape orientation, y-axis is as tall as an iPad Air 2 in portrait orientation and the x-axis is the same width as 2 iPad Airs side by side. That is a lot of real estate and I think would allow for a lot of folks to be really productive on the new iPad.
That A9X chip is a lot of power and impressive. I’m not sure if the CPU speed is a good metric to compare devices but the A9X, if I’m reading the specs correctly is more powerful than the CPUs that the Macbook Air ships with — whoa. The Macbook that trumps the iPad Pro in terms of CPU power is the baseline Macbook Pro.
Which leads me to a conundrum. I’ve been experimenting with programming on my iPad Air. With an SSH app and a machine that I could connect to. I can easily do some programming on an iPad with tmux and Vim set up on the machine I’m SSHing to. But for the price to purchase the base model iPad Pro and a keyboard, we’re only a few hundred dollars shy of a base model Macbook Pro.
With the Macbook Pro, I wouldn’t need to SSH to an external machine. I could do everything from the machine itself. The only reason why I toy with using an iPad as a replacement for a notebook is the sheer size and portability of it. But with Macbooks getting thinner and lighter, I’m not sure if it really is a cost effective option to get just an iPad Pro for programming.
Nonetheless, the machine looks pretty awesome and I’m curious to try the new devices Apple created for it — the keyboard and pencil. If the pencil is as impressive as everyone has touted it to be, I think we’re going to see a lot of graphic artists jumping on board and pumping out some impressive artwork in the near future.
