Better sound, which is important to a lot of people.
The camera is another advantage. The extra port and keyboard.
I understand that you don't find value in the 9.7" IPP, and personally, I'd opt for the 12.9" over its little brother myself, but I don't think you can that as a matter of fact that the Air is better then the pro. It may be better for you and your needs (which is fine) but others are finding value in it.
I was just going to say much the same thing. There's no doubt the Pro 9.7" is an upgrade over the Air 2, you just can't argue with that, it's better and faster hardware. That's a simple fact.
If it were called the iPad Air 3, people would likely be proclaiming how much better and faster it is over the Air 2.
I'm not saying the Air 2 isn't still a great buy. It's definitely a great and perfect choice for people who's budget it fits. It'll give you many happy years of use. The Pro, will give you probably 2 or 3 years more.
And before anyone starts shouting about the RAM, I'll just say this and I'm not going to argue on it. No it's not, the bottleneck I see when I'm developing apps is not the amount of memory, it's the chipset.
For instance, I've had apps running great during development on an iPad Air with 1GB of RAM. When you drop to the previous generations iPad 3 & 4, both of which have the same RAM, neither of which get anything like the frame rate of the Air 1.
The same is true of iPhones. iPhone 5s and 6, 1GB RAM, lovely performance. iPhone 5, also 1GB of RAM, nowhere like the same performance.
You'd be surprised just how well iOS can cope with 1GB of RAM or more obviously. I still am sometimes when I'm monitoring the load on the system during development. Is there a difference? Well, of course. But is 2GB something to be concerned about? Not for quite some time that's for sure.
I could ramble on for several pages, thank you morphine
but I won't for a change I'm just going to stop before I end u........
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I've said it before and I'll say it again. Every time a new iPad comes out it is better than the last gen, the 9.7 pro is better in every way, but no way should they have jacked up the price a 100. I'm not saying it's not worth it, but considering how the iPad Air 2 was a lot better than the iPad Air 1 and didn't raise 100 dollars, I see no reason this one should have either. It's honestly just because of the pro name.
I realize it has so new accessories it can use that the others can't, but Apple always adds things to make the new ones better.
Still I see why some would need or want the new 9.7 pro, but they should have kept it at the same price.
You may well be right that they are doing it because they think with the Pro name they can just bump up the price.
Another option though, is that we've been lucky these past few years that they have kept the price the same and now is just the time it's increasing. I'm not saying that's what it is, just that there's always more than one possibility.
