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iPad Pro iPad Pro will be a failure...

Jim Campbell said:
The iPad Pro is a niche product, to be certain, but I don't think Apple expects anything more from it than that. I know a lot of artists and graphic designers and they are all (myself included) absolutely champing at the bit to get their hands on one. Wacom may currently be the best-in-class for pressure-sensitive stylus input, but they don't set the bar particularly high. If Apple gets this right, they're going to put a nasty dent in Wacom's business. If Astropad works as advertised, and the pencil is as good as everyone says, then I think there's a real possibility I may sell my Cintiq.

(FWIW, I already have a Surface Pro 3, which I think is pretty poor. It's not laptoppy enough to replace my laptop, but not tabletty enough to sit in a workflow gap between my laptop and phone. The non-Wacom pen that ships with the Pro 3 really isn't up to scratch for artwork, either.)
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This is the one thing I hope the Apple pencil does, is knock Wacom around a bit and make them more innovative. MS is trying to do that with N trig, but they aren't quite there yet. The Vaio I own uses the same Ntrig digitizer as the SP4, and it still has that annoying diagonal jitter issue. More competition in the stylus/ digitizer market is a good thing.

That Astropad app looks very interesting, and could convert a iPad Pro into a Cintiq if it works well.
 
d4rkc4sm said:
Long time Apple user here...

The iPad Pro will be a big failure for Tim Cook. Really, he just doesn't have a long term vision for the tablet line. Bigger iPad with stylus, but same OS is honestly the dumbest thing Apple has come up with since the Apple Watch.

The iPad Pro needs to be able to run OSX or have some sort of file system as a lite replacement for a MacBook, otherwise it's just a glorified and expensive version of an iPad Air (which I sold to get a MBP)

Now I read Apple is investing resources to building a car. (Slaps forehead) Laughable Tim.
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That is how Microsoft Surface Pro works better when they ditched Surface RT....
 
iPad Pro will be a failure if the Air 3 is released next year with a non-downclocked A9X SOC.
 
Jim Campbell said:
The iPad Pro is a niche product, to be certain, but I don't think Apple expects anything more from it than that. I know a lot of artists and graphic designers and they are all (myself included) absolutely champing at the bit to get their hands on one. Wacom may currently be the best-in-class for pressure-sensitive stylus input, but they don't set the bar particularly high. If Apple gets this right, they're going to put a nasty dent in Wacom's business. If Astropad works as advertised, and the pencil is as good as everyone says, then I think there's a real possibility I may sell my Cintiq.

(FWIW, I already have a Surface Pro 3, which I think is pretty poor. It's not laptoppy enough to replace my laptop, but not tabletty enough to sit in a workflow gap between my laptop and phone. The non-Wacom pen that ships with the Pro 3 really isn't up to scratch for artwork, either.)
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Wacom hasn't needed to push the tech forward because they have had near-zero competition so far. Their current generation digitizer is still from the Intuos 4, introduced in 2009 (came to Cintiq in 2010 with the 21UX refresh). This was when they finally solved the linearity issue on the Cintiqs (similar to the N-trig wobble, still seen on Penabled-class Wacom digitizers). It didn't significantly help with the hardware-level tracking latency or parallax. I will say that the current generation has nearly-perfect linearity, which is really important for artists.

Apple definitely has the resources to beat the Cintiq on raw pen performance if they think it's worth the investment. The mainstream audience probably didn't catch it, but pretty much every line in the video was a poke at Wacom's mediocre performance points (made especially funny by Ive's delivery). Latency, accuracy, and parallax were the big points and those are where Wacom's most expensive hardware stumbles.

The big question is: have they solved the active capacitive linearity (wobble) issue? I can think of a number of ways to improve it off the top of my head: increase polling rate, increase digitizer density, analyze and filter out whatever variations in signal cause the stair-step effect. Apple's claiming pixel-level accuracy which is... quite a bold statement to make. Apple loves to be hyperbolic, so we don't know what this means.

fieldsphotos said:
This is the one thing I hope the Apple pencil does, is knock Wacom around a bit and make them more innovative. MS is trying to do that with N trig, but they aren't quite there yet. The Vaio I own uses the same Ntrig digitizer as the SP4, and it still has that annoying diagonal jitter issue. More competition in the stylus/ digitizer market is a good thing.

That Astropad app looks very interesting, and could convert a iPad Pro into a Cintiq if it works well.
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MS will be forced to do better next year too. They paid $30 million for N-trig's tech and already made some improvement in the SP4.

Astropad is laggy on the hardware I've been able to try it on (2010 MBP and iPad Air so the host is probably the issue.. no Windows version, couldn't try my desktop). It's a video streaming system so with enough hardware on both ends you probably could get it to Steam Home Streaming levels (25-30ms.. makes a good 3D-capable remote desktop). It has to be written to take advantage of GPU hardware video streaming capabilities, and I have no idea if that's true of Astropad.

What we really need is a video input on the device which could do the equivalent of iMac "target mode." It's basically a piece of software that can process HDMI/DP input and render it on the screen, kind of like the modern equivalent of TV tuner software. The Cintiq Companion 2 has this, but it's a larger device and has room for an actual display input. We clearly need a new port, because there's no such thing as an HDMI or DP to USB2.0 "adapter." I suppose you could put video converter hardware in the path between your system and the iPad, and then run an app that does something with THIS data?
 
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The Apple user base has become enormous.

So big that if only one half of one percent buy the new model, Apple will declare in a roaring success.

That's Apples power and influence.
 
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masotime said:
Yes, because people will buy the iPad Pro only because it is faster, and not because of the bigger screen or the stylus.
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A tablet which is much more expensive, is physically much larger (more room for battery and thermal dissipation) and aimed at professionals should have a bit more performance oomph than the standard consumer orientated tablet. Apple said they designed the A9X specifically for the Pro. If they can then fit that same processor inside a much smaller, cheaper tablet a couple months later it would prove that claim to be an outright lie.

Casuana said:
How come on iPad Pro it's downclocked?
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It's not? There's only one version of the A9X currently and that's what the Pro uses. It can't be considered down-clocked, because there's nothing else that uses the A9X to compare it to.
 
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IPad Pro is bigger and more expensive. People expect more from it. My friends are considering it as a laptop replacement. It makes total sense why they would want to do this. It has all the power they need and is a safe reliable environment.
 
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AdonisSMU said:
IPad Pro is bigger and more expensive. People expect more from it. My friends are considering it as a laptop replacement. It makes total sense why they would want to do this. It has all the power they need and is a safe reliable environment.
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This is a bad laptop replacement. You should urge them to get a 12" Macbook. I'm definitely getting an iPad pro, but I hold no illusions that it will not be replacing my Macbooks at any time.
 
To add on.... the iPad Pro is really aimed at visual engineering / creatives who can make full use of the Apple Pencil. You need to read it in the context of the demo - this is what the spec hounds don't get. It's not the specs - large screen and powerful processor - that are key, although they are certainly necessary for the use cases this drives.

Despite the Microsoft Office demo (why not get a Surface Pro / Surface Book?), I see the real use from the demos from Adobe as well as 3D4Medical show how convenient it is to use the iPad Pro to work on mostly visual elements, aided by the precision given by the Apple Pencil. Recall also how Pixar was invited to try out the tablets. In none of these cases is the A9X processor the highlight. It's how the iPad Pro work to make these specific professional use cases work.

It doesn't matter if the iPad Air 3 is launched next year with a more powerful processor. Everyone knows that processors get faster year after year. The point is that with a larger screen, the right accessories and a sufficiently powerful processor, the iPad Pro is positioned to change the way engineers, artists and the medical industry works. That's the key proposition of the iPad Pro. Not the specifications.
 
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What I really like about the iPad Pro compared to the Macbook is the aspect ratio. 4:3 gives a lot more vertical height and total screen size than 16:10 given then same diagonal length. Combine than with 0,9" longer diagonal and you're looking at significantly more screen real estate.

In addition, I consider the Macbook to represent the least value per dollar for any Apple product ever. You're going to notice the significantly weaker Core M when compared to i5 and i7, and you're going to need bulky adapters for the foreseeable future. It doesn't even offer better battery life than Airs and Pros.
 
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I won't go so far as to say a "failure". It will definitely be a niche product for a while. It all comes down to how well a device like this can compete with pricier drawing tablets (and cheaper ones with no built-in display). Apple have always catered to creative professionals, and this could be their first baby steps into democratizing what have been up to now, ridiculously overpriced single-use digitizer tablet technologies. I knew, even when I was plunking down $2,500 on a 50Lb Wacom Cintiq that it had one foot in the grave. There is literally zero excuse for pen input devices to be that heavy, cumbersome, and reliant on multiple cables in a world where multi-touch gestures and all-in-one are now the bare minimum expectation.

For convenience and portability as an e-reader or gaming device, yes, it does seem quite dubious. I'm not a huge fan of the smaller iPads, but if you're a voracious Kindler/iBooker, there is definitely something to be said for small and light. So no, it will not be anywhere near as successful as the 10" lineup, but everyone is carving out a strata in their portfolio for "professional" applications, and this is no different. It will be around for a few years, subject to the same incremental improvements as other Apple products -but the key to its staying power will hinge on how deeply it cuts into Wacom's near monopoly on pen input, in my opinion.
 
Iamshazamm said:
I have the equivalent to $25,000 dollars worth of studio gear in my iPad that's in the palm of my hands. I'm a music producer and from working on commercials to video games to movies scores my iPad Air 2 has made it so my workflow is amazing I have my entire studio in a bag and I make money from my iPad. I don't use it for media consumption. The iPad Pro would leapfrog my capabilities portably. So your comment makes no sense to someone who feeds his family off his iPad. This picture shows what I have in my studio
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That is actually really impressive. Way to go man. We need more examples like you showing iPad can be used as a tool rather than just a tool for goofing around
 
Iamshazamm said:
I have the equivalent to $25,000 dollars worth of studio gear in my iPad that's in the palm of my hands. I'm a music producer and from working on commercials to video games to movies scores my iPad Air 2 has made it so my workflow is amazing I have my entire studio in a bag and I make money from my iPad. I don't use it for media consumption. The iPad Pro would leapfrog my capabilities portably. So your comment makes no sense to someone who feeds his family off his iPad. This picture shows what I have in my studio
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Just for my education, when you said "studio gears in my iPad", are you referring to the apps or the actual hardware gears that connect to your iPad?
 
I don't think it will be a 'failure'. I think it will replace a laptop for most people. I know my mother-in-law has moved on to just an iPad setup. iOS is easy to use and I think Apple is slowly creating and making it possible to be productive in mostly iOS setup. I do still see a need for a regular OS like OS X/ Windows for software.

I recently got the Surface Pro 4 (i5/8GB/256GB) as I was convinced it's a total laptop/tablet hybrid opposed to the iPad Pro. It was a nice device when it worked. The display was nice and crisp and I had liked the form factor. After loading MS Office 2016 etc and using it for about a week, I began to realize that the Surface Pro 4 is just a mediocre laptop and an even worse tablet. It doesn't beat out a Macbook Air in battery life. It is a terrible 'tablet'. Microsoft's App Store is just terrible. There was also constant googling for quirky errors like the 'display driver' not responding and recovering or the touch screen suddenly not working. I also had constant wifi dropouts...web pages would often just not load. Anyway, I'll be returning the Surface Pro 4 and getting an iPad Pro. It was also hard to try and do normal activities outside of the Apple ecosystem once you are fully entrenched in it (iCloud, FaceTime, HandOff, Air Play to Apple TV, etc).
 
Cakefish said:
A tablet which is much more expensive, is physically much larger (more room for battery and thermal dissipation) and aimed at professionals should have a bit more performance oomph than the standard consumer orientated tablet. Apple said they designed the A9X specifically for the Pro. If they can then fit that same processor inside a much smaller, cheaper tablet a couple months later it would prove that claim to be an outright lie.
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Outright lie? How about if a different manufacturing process is used? A die shrink 6 months from how could allow the same architecture in a smaller device.
 
xraydoc said:
Outright lie? How about if a different manufacturing process is used? A die shrink 6 months from how could allow the same architecture in a smaller device.
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10nm will not be ready in time for a H1 2016 launch. For a SOC to launch at 10nm in 6 months would require mass production to be ramping up right now, which it is not.
 
iPadFan2010 said:
People said that about the original iPad as well. Funny, history shows differently, No one knows really, perhaps let time tell.
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True. Times are different though. At the time the iPad came out. There was no other comparable device.

In in the market. At the price point I'd get a surface 10 out of 10 times.

A pro device of this nature that does not run desktop apps is not s pro device IMO.
 
masotime said:
This is a bad laptop replacement. You should urge them to get a 12" Macbook. I'm definitely getting an iPad pro, but I hold no illusions that it will not be replacing my Macbooks at any time.
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They dont want a macbook when all they need is an ipad with a keyboard.

OneMike said:
True. Times are different though. At the time the iPad came out. There was no other comparable device.

In in the market. At the price point I'd get a surface 10 out of 10 times.

A pro device of this nature that does not run desktop apps is not s pro device IMO.
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The surface does run desktop apps and its terrible at it. The UI wasnt designed for touch screens. It was designed for mouse and keyboard input. The keyboard and trackpads on the surface are not good. If you think those people complaining about the macbook keyboard wait until they try one on the surface...its really not good and i mostly liked it more than other msft products.the dual os thing i hated.
 
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I can only speak for my particular niche of the "Pro" world, but, the iPad hardware and OS are not problems. The problem is App Store restrictions on what kinds of software can actually be produced. As it stands, iPP can only serve peripheral purposes for my work, which is a bummer.
 
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zacheryjensen said:
I can only speak for my particular niche of the "Pro" world, but, the iPad hardware and OS are not problems. The problem is App Store restrictions on what kinds of software can actually be produced. As it stands, iPP can only serve peripheral purposes for my work, which is a bummer.
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The same criticisms Macs used to get. All we heard throughout the 90s and early 00's is I use my computer to do real work.
 
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