Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
An ipad pro makes sense now due to the air's naming, but I don't know what it would be good for...artists maybe, but who else? But a retina screen for macbook air seems likely too, though with the lower grade retina in the mini, I am guessing the macbook air will suffer the same fate. But I hope apple doesn't start spreading themselves too thin.
 
We got people celebrating the ipad Air shedding a .4 lb. It's now usable they say. Oh wait, let's do a much bigger ipad at 13" that weighs even more. It's what people want..
 
"Make just a few things, but make them Insanely Great". - SJ


iPhone 5C (yeah, that was a success... :roll eyes: ), iPad Mini, iPad Pro, etc....

Cook needs to stop expanding the lineup. Seriously.

The 5C replaced what would have been the 5 and now provides a product portfolio under the iPhone. I don't see why that's a bad thing. Apple's product line expanded under Jobs too...iPod, iPod mini, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, etc.
 
I'm curious as to what you would use one of these for.

iPad: "I don't get it. It's just a big iPod Touch. What would you use it for?"

iPad Pro: "I don't get it. It's just a big iPad. What would you use it for?"


The answer is, we don't know until we have it. Assuming it will even exist, of course. :D
 
They technically have some room in the pricing structure for an iPad Pro. The 13" rmbp starts at $1200 and the top of the line wifi ipad air is $800 (128gb). My guess is they would have the ipad pro starting point be 32gb at $800, 64gb at $900, 128gb at $1000.

The price difference is $200 over the ipad air due to the what could be a UHD display. As opposed to the $100 difference between the mini and air with same screen res.

I would also expect to see apple's version of the surface keyboard they've supposedly been working on released with the pro. I find it hard to believe they don't have a prototype in their lab of an ipad pro with keyboard/trackpad attachment. While a touch screen OS X would be worthless, iOS could easily be used with a trackpad/mouse cursor.
 
Last edited:
hmmm......
This will run iOS or OSX?

iOS. Otherwise why would they have transitioned iOS to a 64-bit desktop class architecture?

A "pro" tablet with more RAM and faster CPU/GPU would be capable of running more capable software than current iOS devices.


And the iPad Air makes much more sense now, lining right up with the notebook line.
 
Exactly. If it's going to be positioned as 'pro', the screen needs to have a digitizer built in. I would imagine at that screen size and resolution, it would be positioned more as a creation tool and less of a consumption one.

Art work, but would need to have a pen enabled screen.
 
Sounds interesting. It looks increasingly like Apple is taking the opposite approach from Microsoft. Instead of trying to scale down a desktop operating system to run on mobile devices, they want to scale up their existing mobile OS to become more powerful. I wonder if the "iPad Pro" will have a souped up A7 or A7X?

Think about it. Mac OS, including OS X has been a niche OS for decades. iOS is the #2 mobile OS overall, close to #1 in the US, and accounts for more than half of mobile profits and mobile app downloads. There's a reason Apple was first to introduce a 64-bit ARM processor and 64-bit mobile OS. They see it as the future of computing and want to secure their place in it. It's also why they ported the iOS versions of iWork over to Mac rather than the other way around. They want to promote iOS as the future, and Macs will be "dragged along" to further interoperability.

Microsoft prefers the opposite approach, which makes sense since Windows is by far the dominant desktop OS. Hence the whole drive to push a single Windows 8.1 for desktops, notebooks, and mobile devices.

The wild card here is Google. Android is the dominant mobile OS, but Google's control over it is tenuous. Chrome is fully within Google's control, but it doesn't have the same market penetration. Logically, I see Chrome and Android converging over time, but don't know whether Google will build up Chrome so that it replaces Android, or keep the two separate, but converged, much like iOS and OS X. I think Google would prefer the former but am not sure they can get there.
 
You know why Apple changed the name to iPad Air? Everything is set to fall in line when the 9.7" iPad Air becomes the middle-tier with the 7.9" iPad Mini on the bottom-end.

Mac Pro > Mac Mini
MacBook Pro > MacBook Air
iPad Pro > iPad Air > iPad Mini
 
Mac mini, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro

iPad mini, iPad Air, iPad pro


Filed under: common sense

I believe a 13" will be possible. Considering how a lot of retail stores and other companies use the current iPad, having that extra screen size will make their job even easier. I see way too much scrolling within apps to fill out customer forms, etc..
 
It's beautiful isn't when something feels familiar but is entirely new. That's exactly what the iPad Pro is. Its a distillation of, not an enlargement of, the original iPad.

I'm not hating, but really? First, you don't even know what this hypothesized product looks or feels like yet--but it looks a lot like a bigger iPad to me based on the mockups. Second, with the direction iOS 7 took the iPad, I'm not sure how you can arrive at that conclusion--some things just feel like a blown-up iPhone (icon folders on the home screen, for example), and I can't imagine making the screen bigger will help.

One thing that might be good here is that unlike the iPad mini vs. iPad (Air), there is actually extra screen real estate according to the mockups. On the flip side, I hope it's easier to develop now for multiple screen resolutions than it was historically, otherwise this could just add to the existing 3.5-vs.-4-in.-vs.-iPad size problem already in existence. (Or...maybe you could finally run two iOS apps side-by-side?)
 
It's beautiful isn't when something feels familiar but is entirely new. That's exactly what the iPad Pro is. Its a distillation of, not an enlargement of, the original iPad.

Nice Jony Ive reference, but he'd probably use "evolution" rather than "distillation" for the iPad Pro.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.