5 ms·

I have a 2018 model and love the 12.9" screen size for media, note taking, reading, sketching, etc. That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" scree

I have a 2018 model and love the 12.9" screen size for media, note taking, reading, sketching, etc. That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead. I don't do anything that needs a desktop class processor. Artists do love the performance though, people use them for video editing or large image editing with lots of layers. Edit to add - 12.9" is also helpful for using two apps in splitscreen. Might become less important with Stage Manager, we'll see how I like that.

smoldesu 4y ago
That's what I don't really understand, though. Even the artists and video editors who use these devices aren't actually leveraging all of the power in the machine. Photo editors and artists are mostly still constrained by single-core performance, and video editors are mostly just leveraging the GPU's video accelerators. The "full power" of the M1 or M2 doesn't even make sense for these pro customers. That's why I still think an "iPad Max" makes much more sense. Even to professionals, the iPad is ultimately a content consumption device. So, Apple ought to lean into that. Make an iPad you can love with a big screen and punchy OLED panel, while cutting back on the CPU cores to optimize for battery life and thermals. Even if they never put Stage Manager on it and ditched the LIDAR camera, I think these things would sell like hotcakes at the right price.
- garyfirestorm 4y ago
  I think you are underestimating the power of pencil combined with Letter sized screen for people who read research papers, take notes and need entertainment when traveling - potentially entire higher ed students. I just bought an M1 iPad Pro last week and I am impressed with how easy it is to navigate and annotate pdf documents
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I don't think I do. I used to own a Surface Pro with their Surface Pen, basically the same experience and I used it for everything from reading manuals to flipping comic book pages. It was great, but none of it's greatness was predicated by "the power" of it's chip. The iPad Pro would be equally as attractive if it used the base-model chip and ditched the LIDAR nonsense, and it would be cheaper.
  - CPLX 4y ago
    This just has to be a big use case. There’s a very large community of wealthy people who are extensive business travelers and their core job description is reading and marking up documents on the road. Think lawyers, finance, basically anyone doing “deals” is in this category. As someone with about 3 million frequent flier miles lying around I’ve seen a whole lot of them in airports. I have one too. Big screen, thin profile can be used in an airplane seat or wherever, has a cell connection so you don’t need to fuss with wifi to send back comments on something quickly. It’s really a great application for these things. Agreed that the processor might be overkill but also who cares, when you live on the road and shit depends on you, you just max out all the choices and press the order button.
    - cj 4y ago
      > Agreed that the processor might be overkill but also who cares Lower income consumers who would appreciate lower prices. Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company at this point. The only way for them to grow another 50% from where they are today is through mass market adoption by regular people. Or maybe these high end devices aren’t meant to drive revenue as much as they are meant to keep power users happy while focusing on other revenue streams for meaningful revenue growth.
  - gomox 4y ago
    What app do you use for this? I'm constantly appalled at how hard this seemingly basic use case is.
    - garyfirestorm 4y ago
      Try Foxit pdf - it even lets you crop and apply it to all pages in a pdf.
yamtaddle 4y ago
> That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead. I don't do anything that needs a desktop class processor. This right here. I literally only buy them for the screen size, and because Android tablets are... really bad and largely have much worse (for my purposes) software available, even if I could find one in that size. I never really push the processor or graphics capabilities. The screen size is incredible for: PDF reading, drawing and art generally, a little video editing maybe, sheet music display and other music purposes, comic book reading, as a portable second screen for a Macbook (it's a very similar size to a 13" Macbook screen), portable SSH terminal, remote desktop, and yeah, watching Netflix or whatever. But I could easily get by with the brains of a much lower-end model. However, I expect the larger, higher-quality (for faster refresh for drawing and such) screen is a big chunk of their cost to manufacture it, so I'm not sure how much cheaper such a thing would really be. I truly don't even know what I might do with one that'd really use all that horsepower. Gaming I guess? But I don't like my games vanishing or breaking when I update an OS, so I don't game on iOS very much. Pinball and (now that it's been re-released, finally) Angry Birds. That's about it.
- wlesieutre 4y ago
  At the most general level, it does run a 2732-by-2048-pixel display at perfectly smooth 120 hz, and that looks great with the Pencil. But I'd give that up to save a couple hundred bucks. The main bummer with the base iPad display is that it's still using sRGB, while Apple has been using P3 gamut pretty much everywhere else since the iPhone 7. Not sure if I'd downgrade to that one, but I'd be fine with a 12.9" iPad Air.
tshaddox 4y ago
> That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead. I bet you can find used ones for much cheaper. I still love my aging 2nd generation 12.9" iPad Pro from 2017. Of course we would all love products even more if they were cheaper, law of demand and all that.

smoldesu 4y ago

That's what I don't really understand, though. Even the artists and video editors who use these devices aren't actually leveraging all of the power in the machine. Photo editors and artists are mostly still constrained by single-core performance, and video editors are mostly just leveraging the GPU's video accelerators. The "full power" of the M1 or M2 doesn't even make sense for these pro customers. That's why I still think an "iPad Max" makes much more sense. Even to professionals, the iPad is ultimately a content consumption device. So, Apple ought to lean into that. Make an iPad you can love with a big screen and punchy OLED panel, while cutting back on the CPU cores to optimize for battery life and thermals. Even if they never put Stage Manager on it and ditched the LIDAR camera, I think these things would sell like hotcakes at the right price.

garyfirestorm 4y ago
I think you are underestimating the power of pencil combined with Letter sized screen for people who read research papers, take notes and need entertainment when traveling - potentially entire higher ed students. I just bought an M1 iPad Pro last week and I am impressed with how easy it is to navigate and annotate pdf documents
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I don't think I do. I used to own a Surface Pro with their Surface Pen, basically the same experience and I used it for everything from reading manuals to flipping comic book pages. It was great, but none of it's greatness was predicated by "the power" of it's chip. The iPad Pro would be equally as attractive if it used the base-model chip and ditched the LIDAR nonsense, and it would be cheaper.
- CPLX 4y ago
  This just has to be a big use case. There’s a very large community of wealthy people who are extensive business travelers and their core job description is reading and marking up documents on the road. Think lawyers, finance, basically anyone doing “deals” is in this category. As someone with about 3 million frequent flier miles lying around I’ve seen a whole lot of them in airports. I have one too. Big screen, thin profile can be used in an airplane seat or wherever, has a cell connection so you don’t need to fuss with wifi to send back comments on something quickly. It’s really a great application for these things. Agreed that the processor might be overkill but also who cares, when you live on the road and shit depends on you, you just max out all the choices and press the order button.
  - cj 4y ago
    > Agreed that the processor might be overkill but also who cares Lower income consumers who would appreciate lower prices. Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company at this point. The only way for them to grow another 50% from where they are today is through mass market adoption by regular people. Or maybe these high end devices aren’t meant to drive revenue as much as they are meant to keep power users happy while focusing on other revenue streams for meaningful revenue growth.
- gomox 4y ago
  What app do you use for this? I'm constantly appalled at how hard this seemingly basic use case is.
  - garyfirestorm 4y ago
    Try Foxit pdf - it even lets you crop and apply it to all pages in a pdf.

yamtaddle 4y ago

> That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead. I don't do anything that needs a desktop class processor. This right here. I literally only buy them for the screen size, and because Android tablets are... really bad and largely have much worse (for my purposes) software available, even if I could find one in that size. I never really push the processor or graphics capabilities. The screen size is incredible for: PDF reading, drawing and art generally, a little video editing maybe, sheet music display and other music purposes, comic book reading, as a portable second screen for a Macbook (it's a very similar size to a 13" Macbook screen), portable SSH terminal, remote desktop, and yeah, watching Netflix or whatever. But I could easily get by with the brains of a much lower-end model. However, I expect the larger, higher-quality (for faster refresh for drawing and such) screen is a big chunk of their cost to manufacture it, so I'm not sure how much cheaper such a thing would really be. I truly don't even know what I might do with one that'd really use all that horsepower. Gaming I guess? But I don't like my games vanishing or breaking when I update an OS, so I don't game on iOS very much. Pinball and (now that it's been re-released, finally) Angry Birds. That's about it.

wlesieutre 4y ago
At the most general level, it does run a 2732-by-2048-pixel display at perfectly smooth 120 hz, and that looks great with the Pencil. But I'd give that up to save a couple hundred bucks. The main bummer with the base iPad display is that it's still using sRGB, while Apple has been using P3 gamut pretty much everywhere else since the iPhone 7. Not sure if I'd downgrade to that one, but I'd be fine with a 12.9" iPad Air.

tshaddox 4y ago

> That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead. I bet you can find used ones for much cheaper. I still love my aging 2nd generation 12.9" iPad Pro from 2017. Of course we would all love products even more if they were cheaper, law of demand and all that.