Zac Hall on iPad Pro
For me, the Retina MacBook is like a sleek motorcycle that gets me to and from work in style without sacrificing my ability to use the same roads as someone driving a MacBook Pro and iMac. iPad Pro for me isn’t in the same category; it’s more like a portable home theater with a big screen and killer sound system where I can lounge and be entertained. Everyone will use these devices differently, but that’s where I’m at with the Retina MacBook and iPad Pro in their current form.
I wrote about the iPad Pro as the best toy ever the other day, drawn from the lust of a product that I still want and haven’t yet bought. Toy sounds condescending but I really don’t mean it like that, even if it does invoke memories of little kid Fischer-Price figurines and play sets. When I said toy, what I was really saying is that iPad Pro is a great entertainment device for movies, casual drawing with Pencil, laid-back web browsing, iOS gaming with the possibility for light work too. I concur with Zac’s summation.
In terms of wider market, the pricing is the issue. Few people can justify a thousand dollar purchase for a device that doesn’t really do anything other devices, like phones and laptops, can do. Lust alone does not cause sales. I live in this world and I’m barely stretching to it. That’s the stance of the masses here. There is a segment of people who can get real work done on an iPad Pro, but I continue to believe that segment is small and almost identical in size to the number of people who were already doing real work on iPad Air.