Content area
Full Text
I had planned to write this column about digital cameras and the use of digital photography in practice, but I received enough inquiries about the iPad Pro that I felt compelled to devote this column to a discussion about this new tablet. For those of you interested in digital photography, I will get back to that topic in a later column.
GOING PRO
Just in time for holiday sales, Apple finally released its iPad Pro in November 2015, changing the iPad lineup considerably and taking it into a new direction. Since the iPad was first released, it has evolved to a more and more useful tool. The device has grown thinner and lighter with each succeeding iteration while increasing the power and maintaining the same basic dimensions in terms of display size. Several years ago Apple's "thinner and lighter" design school came up with the idea of the more diminutive iPad mini and immediately proceeded to make each succeeding generation thinner and lighter than its predecessor (although also increasingly powerful).
Last year, the world changed. For the first year since its inception, Apple did not upgrade the full-sized (9.7" display) iPad. It did upgrade the iPad mini, bringing its power into approximate parity with the full-sized iPad. Instead of introducing a thinner and lighter but more powerful version of the full-sized iPad, Apple chose to super-size the iPad and came up with the larger and heavier iPad Pro, sporting a 12.9" display (roughly 78 percent larger than the iPad Air 2). The Pro is so much larger than the full-sized iPad that if you take two full-sized iPads, you can lay them next to each other on the Pro's display. The Pro also introduces a considerably more powerful chip set and a larger batter)'' to go along with the larger display and increased cost of the Pro. (Pricing starts at $799; for more details, go to apple.com.) The more powerful chip set enables the Pro to do more than its smaller siblings and to do the same things they can do, but do them faster.
Interestingly, Apple introduced a case with a built-in, fold-out keyboard and-of all things-a stylus, which Apple chose to call the "pencil," likely as a result of Steve Jobs' antipathy toward...