'iPad Pro' Said to Feature 12.2-Inch Display, 7-mm Thickness, Stereo Speakers at Top and Bottom

[Max(IT)]

You seriously reported me for that? I'm not attacking you personally, I'm criticizing your arguments.

"Yup. You gotta take everything he says with a grain of salt. I vaguely remember arguing with him over larger phones, and he pulled out the old tried and true "average consumer doesn't care about phones over 4 inches" argument."

That's not a civil discussion about different opinions. That's trying to ridicule someone else depicting he like a blind fanboy....

 

[the8thark]

Before attacking me (reported) just take a look at my signature. I have a phablet and it's not an iPhone....

He is right. The 5S is not phablet sized, the 6/6+ is.

 

[newdeal]

I used to live my iPad but I never use it anymore now. The reasons are page reloading in safari and the macbook air getting the same battery life a couple years back. The site has totally replaced my iPad and then some

 

[Max(IT)]

He is right. The 5S is not phablet sized, the 6/6+ is.

Did you ever hear about the Lumia 1520?
It's there, in my signature....


And you are off topic

 

[newdeal]

I just replace my iPad 3 with iPad Air 2. You don't understand what you're missing even with iPad Air 2. Even my family member who doesn't care about technology stuff noticed the apparent differences immediately.

I have an iPad 3 and an iPad air and notice no difference outside of weight and thickness

 

[ahhh]

agreed. At least on osx you can use torrents and aren't limited as much as you are with ipads.

Great argument. 'Apple please give us a product that better allows us to steal from you'.

 

[MacAddict1978]

If Apple just puts out a super large iPad I'm not interested.
Such a device should be more like a surface with a dockable keyboard.

I also think Apple really needs to create an iPad specific version of IOS. The scrolling app carosel has long needed reworked, and it's never made much sense on the iPad, that has so much more screen Realestate.

I would love to see the iPad take on the more traditional mac dock, and instead of a true finder, have that be the app drawer integrate with spot light, and even if they still refuse a true file system, a few folder options for docs, vids etc that are accessible to all apps. With iCloud this would be logical as well... and give the home screen some options for widget like things.

Beats audio will eventually come to Apple products, but Apple really needs to stop have suck ass speakers in ALL of their products. Hopefully the speakers on this will live up to the rumor.

When the iPad first came out, I thought that having a larger size would be perfect as a replacement for carrying a laptop around. But now after living with iPads for the past couple of years, I feel different about it.

Going bigger simply forces the use of a device into what effectively is a laptop, much like Microsoft's Surface. Sure, you can hold a larger screened device, but to do any work on it, or even interact in a basic way, you really would need to set it down. Holding a device one-handed while interacting on-screen, is not an efficient way to do anything, other than maybe browsing online or reading emails.

Using a keyboard in the same plane as your arms/hands in front of you (while supported by a desk or some other flat surface) is still the best (read as easiest physically on your body) way to interact with a device. If Apple can create a MacBook Air with a thinner form factor that is essentially an iPad screen with a keyboard and trackpad (maybe supporting an additional battery for longer use), I would consider that an ideal work travel computer. I don't need a bigger touch screen, which will show that much more fingerprints.

 

[rGiskard]

Actually, consumer culture being what it is, I absolutely could get behind that.
"Computers-As-Commodity" would allow me to get my nieces & nephews Christmas gifts every year
that I wouldn't have to care about obselecence.
Just chuck it/hand-it-down, then it's onto this year's model! Suh-weet!

I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if Apple reduced prices commensurately. Terrible for the environment, though. Pollution in China where these toys are built is hideous.

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The iPad mini sharing its resolution with the 9.7" iPad, it already has a higher pixel density.

We'd be here at 264 ppi with both the Air and the "Plus", that's still a higher pixel density than the different retina Mac models, where you also have access to scaled resolutions (but sub-pixel rendering not present on iOS compared to on OS X probably makes a difference).
The point of scaling is only compatibility with software incapable to adapt to the larger resolution (of for accessibility reasons, when the user wants a blown-up interface).

The 2560x1920 larger resolution would be used at 2x and with AutoLayout for the adaptive UI. And this larger resolution could also allow split screens options to display and interact with more than one app at a time, as now the screen is large enough to justify such functionalities.

Might work. I'm still not conviced that downscaling would work well at the lower dpi we're talking here. Yes, the Air already has a lower dpi than the mini, but it's not compounded by downscaling. Go with both a low dpi AND downscaling, and the sharpness hit could end up looking pretty bad. At the least, the maxiPad would have less sharpness than the Air.

 

[rudychidiac]

The homescreen on that will be ridiculous. I hope it's time for Apple to rethink the "Homescreen" and make it a lot more useful than an app list.

 

[Casiotone]

Might work. I'm still not conviced that downscaling would work well at the lower dpi we're talking here. Yes, the Air already has a lower dpi than the mini, but it's not compounded by downscaling. Go with both a low dpi AND downscaling, and the sharpness hit could end up looking pretty bad. At the least, the maxiPad would have less sharpness than the Air.

I don't think he's talking about any downscaling here. He's simply saying that the resolution would be increased while keeping the same PPI as the 9.7" iPad just like they did for the iPhone 6. It would the most logical and easy thing to do for Apple.

 

[petsounds]

This. Apple has been very disdainful about styluses (they don't even sell them at Apple Stores!) and Steve Jobs will probably be turning in his grave but if they want to make serious inroads in education proper stylus support is a must. It would make this giant ipad an instant hit with college students which is a reasonably large target audience.

Yeah, I've never really understood Apple's bias against the stylus as an input device. I get that it was a point of contrast to the Treo when the first iPhone came out, and yes for gestural support fingers are easier. But for things like drawing and writing, you need the precision of a stylus. If Apple could use Continuity to allow the iPad Pro to function as an input device for desktop graphics apps, I would seriously consider one.

 

[chuloo]

The homescreen on that will be ridiculous. I hope it's time for Apple to rethink the "Homescreen" and make it a lot more useful than an app list.

I totally agree. Too much screen real estate to waste on a grid of icons. Apple needs to reinvent the home screen.

 

[Gix1k]

I have a good feeling the iPad mini is going to get phased out, the Air will be the mini and the Pro will be the full size.

 

[powertoold]

I totally agree. Too much screen real estate to waste on a grid of icons. Apple needs to reinvent the home screen.

Dunno, the desktop on Mac doesn't have much more utility.

I think Apple is going the route of widgets in notification center.

 

[brendu]

I just replace my iPad 3 with iPad Air 2. You don't understand what you're missing even with iPad Air 2. Even my family member who doesn't care about technology stuff noticed the apparent differences immediately.

But since it would end up being used for the same things I already do I can't justify spending $500+ on it. I almost did and held back.

 

[inscrewtable]

If it has NFC, it's going to be awesome whipping one of those out of your trench coat pocket to pay for a coffee.

 

[cube]

It has to be a ratio of the standard iPad to make developers lives easier.

Just make the tablets 1:√2 once for all and be done with it.

----------

Who wants a stylus? You have to get ‘em and put ‘em away and you lose ‘em -- yech! Nobody wants a stylus.

I want an integrated stylus. That is practical and hard to lose.

I only got a Tab instead of a Note because I found a massive deal, and there's not Note PRO S anyway.

 

[ProfessorHenry]

Give me a SD slot and HDMI and I'll buy.

 

[pearvsapple]

They are waiting for intel broadwell beast. Time to phaseout the Macbook air lineup.

 

[neutrino23]

Who wants a stylus? You have to get ‘em and put ‘em away and you lose ‘em -- yech! Nobody wants a stylus.

Clearly you don't. And that is OK. Apple shouldn't force you to use a stylus, but there are people who need the precision of using a stylus and a high quality digitizer.

 

[Mac32]

I don't get it. Wouldn't a retina 12'' MacBook Air be much more practical and popular, than an extra large iPad..?

 

[princered]

Roundup

So does this mean the iPad Pro deserves a rumor roundup now? Just in time for me to hold off from getting the new iPad Air 2.

 

[iChrist]

A bigger iPhone added new features based on the size, pretty safe to say a bigger iPad would do the same. I can tell you this, even the current sized iPad is not really big enough for a music stand to read music, I'd be all over this one.

I wouldn't say that split views are new "features". It's one feature, and probably the only significant difference in UI between the small phone and the larger iPad.

The fact that the iPad is just a stretched out iPhone UI shows some serious imagination shortage at Apple.

 

[TouchMint.com]

Give me a SD slot and HDMI and I'll buy.

That would stop them from making huge profits on hd upgrades and lightning cables so that's not going to happen anytime soon.

 

[Innuendo]

I have both an MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro, and I'm much happier with the Air. There's zero difference between the two machines when it comes to functionality. Zero. They both can do exactly the same thing, and I find the Air is slightly faster, even with a slower CPU, because of the SSD instead of a spinning HDD.

I have an MBA, as well, and a late-2013 rMBP. I can assure you that for my use case these machines do not provide equivalent functionality. I run Win7 Enterprise in a virtual machine under Fusion; this works incredibly well on the rMBP. I need 16GB of DRAM (MBA is 8GB max), 1TB of flash storage (MBA is 512GB max), four cores (MBA is dual core max - even the upgraded Core i7 machine) to adequately support the host and guest OSs concurrently, and so on and so forth.

Shifting gears, I would find a "convertible" Surface-like iPad Pro less useful. I would find a retina 12" - 13" iPad running iOS with Wacom-like digitizer and appropriate stylus very useful. Include user-exchangeable battery, choice of 2, 4 or more (!) GB DRAM, 500GB or more (!) of on-board storage, an I/O slot that accepts an additional flash card of user-selected capacity, and, possibly, a single port allowing network or direct-attached connectivity. Thinness is *not* the primary consideration; this device would be used on a desk, table or stand.

The version of iOS for this device would need to do a better job of multitasking (including, potentially, more than two windows) and provide the user with the ability to manipulate files much more easily. (I find foldering messages in Mail on the iPad and iPhone, for example, incredibly frustrating; Apple should at least give the user the ability to collapse/expand folders.)

With the above-described iPad, I would ditch most/all of my physical mag subscriptions, finally make the switch to digital note-taking (my experience with current iOS-based note-taking solutions is not positive), and continue to enjoy all of the apps I currently use on my existing iPad - but with a larger screen.