Same same, for me, I have 1tb 2020 12.9, and I am upgrading for 4 (maybe 5) reasons:
- Screen, sure it’s not oled flawless, but given the massive glowing grey of a black screen on my current model it will still be better. Especially for things like letter boxing for movies and such.
- 5g cause yolo why not, ultimately not important, but nice add. Already covered in my fees so might as well take advantage.
- Thundebolt port, for a few reasons. First backing up my current 1tb iPad (especially full local encrypted backups) sucks. Anything to go faster will appease me. Second the new thunderbolt hubs. Third I have 10gb network and tb hubs all over my apartment.
- 2tb + 16gb ram. I am currently at ~100gb free, mostly cause I have lots of books and comics and some games and videos, so 2tb is ideal, especially if the final point bares fruit, it nothing else it will basically double as a thunderbolt drive lol. The ram is nice just cause I am a browser tab whore and it will reduce the tab memory purges more often. Plus for any video and creative uses the ram will be a huge boon.
- The potential for final cut and other ported osx apps makes me drool. And there is no reason the m1 iPad couldn’t for example run compressor to add more render nodes. Fingers crossed WWDC.
I also am hoping apple figures out a good way to take advantage of thundebolt to thundebolt tethering for like super sidecar. Cause with 40gbps and the 4k display port bandwidth, it should be totally possible for the iPad pro to work as an external monitor and touch surface for a companion Mac. Combined, its additional GPU cores for rendering there is a lot of potential as a mac and especially MacBook companion device. If they pull that off and make a pro pencil/pen/stylus, they could very seriously compete with Wacom. Especially given how good apple silicon is at running media and creation apps.
Now all that said, I can afford to upgrade, and I wanted my current one to become an intune registered work device and the new one will be for personal use (cause I really love my iPads over any computers), but I’m far too paranoid about Intune since it can force vpn policies to hijack all your traffic. Thus separate work and personal devices.
For MOST people, the iPad AIR (or a 2020 pro) is still a much more sane and logical purchase, at least until WWDC comes and we see how much apple is gonna take class of the full laptop class chip in a tablet. Cause under the current OS, it’s totally overkill, but since an M1 is an M1 it should have instruction set parity which means there is absolutely nothing preventing iPadOS from doing anything osx can, they just gotta implement the apis/instructions and then work out the mappings from 1 os to the other. But with hardware this close multi targetting should be easy.
