[kozukumi]

I fail to see why a normal person would want the extra things in an iPad Pro. Sure for some professionals it has some good features but a normal content consumer/light content creator (edit pictures, write some documents) it is just overkill with TrueTone display, etc.

Yes the CPU power is on the same level as an Atom/i3 from what I have read which is interesting but what does it really offer that the Air doesn't offer to an average user? I guess it is similar to how some of those average consumers also buy a MacBook Pro when they don't need any of the extra power over an Air (although lack of retina display on the Air is a valid reason thinking about it).

The biggest complaint I have with the iPad Pro is that it runs iOS. If it ran a touch-friendly ARM-version of OS X that would be awesome.

[potatolicious]

I got my father an iPad Pro over the holidays - he loves it.

He uses it for listening to music, writing emails, and surfing - the same things you'd do with any laptop, but he likes the iPad form factor quite a bit.

Most importantly, the iPad Pro (and I guess, now the smaller iPad Pro) is the only platform in the entire world that offers competent Chinese stylus input.

Typing Chinese is a pain in the ass - there are several ways to do it and all of them largely suck and require a steep learning curve (and even then, still a pain in the ass). There has been a lot of demand for writing-based input methods, but most of the solutions so far have sucked a lot. The hardware surrounding it has been bad, and so has the software, which often required you to enter a single character at a time tediously, with poor recognition rates to boot.

The iPad Pro is the first device that let him write entire sentences at a time, which made input much faster and more natural (you used to have to write a character, pause, select from a list of guesses, repeat). Not to mention the low lag between pen movement and on screen display makes the whole process way more pleasant. Being able to write entire sentences also improves the recognition accuracy of the software, which tilts it from being useful-but-crappy to godsend.

[wodenokoto]

Learning pinyin is a lot easier than to learn how to write all the characters.

Typing pinyin is also a lot faster.

If you don't know pinyin or mofopo, then yes, suddenly handwriting is the fastes, but then it is pretty much by default.

[Grue3]

These methods won't work if you don't know how to pronounce the character in the first place.

[wodenokoto]

That use case is only for dictionaries/looking up words, where you never need to type anything of any length at a time, thus high speed typing is not needed, which is exactly what is being discussed.

[IkmoIkmo]

Same here. But it seems I'm the weird one, or we. The Pro actually sold quite nicely, generating a billion in sales pretty quickly. Meanwhile the Surface line lags behind it in sales, despite the fact I think they're more capable devices and have superior value. I just don't get the appeal of the iPad Pro, and that's coming from an owner of a rMBP and iPad, both of which I use, not anti-apple or anti-iOS or even anti-iPad.

It feels like it gives me the hardware of an awesome machine, with the software of a phone, at a steep price. If you want to use it as a video screen or something, you don't need LTE, storage or a keyboard, but then you don't need a pro either. If you need a pro for on the road, you need LTE, keyboard and storage, and then the price approaches machines that have far nicer software for professional usecases, e.g. os x or windows.

Yet it's selling quite nicely, in a market that wasn't showing any signs of growth any more. Remarkable.

[ssmoot]

If you're an all-Mac home, what's the appeal of buying outside that ecosystem? I'd have to get used to Windows again. I would have a very non "native" experience to the content the rest of my devices share naturally.

The one plus is: I could run IntelliJ (I assume). But on a platform I don't normally use, having to jump through hoops (I assume) to get some of my toolchain (ffmpeg, exiftool, graphics-magic) working, with a different keyboard. And then hope it actually works on my main development and deployment environments.

I bought the Pro for games mostly. Love my Kindle Voyage for reading, so I didn't need that. The screen and speakers are awesome for games. I never touch my PS4 because I don't have 2 hours to "get a feel" or "settle into" a game. I've got 20 minutes maybe. So bite sized semi-casual gaming is really the only gaming that's convenient for me these days. I actively do not want a PC for gaming.

It can pull off the duties of all my non-work stuff easily. Photos, videos, web-surfing for a new cooktop. Budgeting and paying bills. Recipes hunting. Grocery app. Sitting on the counter while I'm cooking. It's actually better than a full laptop for most of those things.

I never update drivers. I don't have to configure anything. iOS could definitely do with some sort of multi-user sign-on experience, but it's not a hindrance for me personally.

For a home machine, if you don't want to play full PC games, it's about the best thing going (for a Mac user) IMO.

I picked the Pro (a few weeks ago), for three reasons:

1. Microcenter had it for $100 off MSRP. 2. For every great iPad keyboard, there's 3 or 4 mediocre ones. A first party keyboard is a big deal. 3. I like comics/graphic novels. Reading a full panel the way it was intended is really nice.

I would very much recommend this device to my older in-laws. It's everything they're used to, and more, and not missing anything they need. Price aside, there's really not much to complain about.

[IkmoIkmo]

May I ask what games you play? There's a couple I really like, like XCOM, but... man, I've scoured the app store for hours every 5 months, pick 5 games, install m, and get frustrated with all the shit. Just inapp this and that left and right, no gameplay, lots of multiplayer games with 0 strategic component and they're either massive time sinks in grinding or pay to win...

Other than an occasional racing game, they's just nothing there I'd play. And even racing games get old fairly quickly, tilting a screen as a way of controlling a car isn't exactly the type of coordination challenge that keeps me enticed for long.

I totally hear you on little time to settle into a PS4 game, life with family, work etc... it's tricky to get a good session in like the old teenager days!

Anyway I get the appeal of a tablet to some extent for non-work stuff, for sure. I have a tablet. But the pro-element I don't get, especially when paring it with e.g. a keyboard etc, then I'd prefer a laptop. But I just can't imagine doing actual work on that thing, over e.g. a Macbook!

Anyway let me know if you have game recommendations on iOS!

[ssmoot]

This is what I've got installed at the moment:

Games I play:

  * Carcassonne
  * Angry Birds
  * Monument Valley
  * Kingdom Rush (plus Frontiers, plus Origins sequels)
  * Creeps
  * Rebuild 2 & 3
  * Strategery
  * Mahjong
  * Solitaire
  * Sudoku
  * Civilization Revolution
  * XCOM
  * Battle Hearts
  * Battle Hearts: Legacy
  * rymdkapsel

Games I’ve downloaded:

  * Riven
  * Ocean horn (I have a Nimbus controllers for my AppleTV I figured I’d use for this one)
  * DOOM
  * SpaceMarshals: Turn based team shooter games can be fun
  * Space Age: The graphics remind me of the original XCOM games
  * Legend of Grimrock: Looks like old "Lands of Lore" games?

Occasionally I'll see something on the App Store that strikes my fancy. But usually I just check out TouchArcade every month or so and see what the top rated stuff is and go from there. I end up with a lot of older games that way, but it's all NewToMe™ So that works.

The one routinely annoying thing on the iPad Pro: When it wants to capitalize something, it's gonna do it, like it or not. Back-spacing, holding SHIFT and typing the letter again has no effect. See the "So" up there. The only way to get around it I've found is to type the letter twice, then cursor back and remove the capitalized one.

I'm not sure if it's an option in auto-correct settings I can disable but it's not enough of a nuisance to bother to check yet so there's that.

[gh02t]

The pen is a big attraction to a lot of people. I've used one of those passive capacitive pens (the ones with foam on the end) with my Android tablet and my old iPad before that. It it was OK enough to whet my appetite for taking hand-written notes and stuff on a tablet, but the input lag really torpedoes the experience. If the active Apple pen is as nice as I've heard then that's a pretty attractive feature for me.

Not enough to justify the iPad Pro markup alone IMO, but it's definitely something major that makes me want one.

[ssmoot]

The Apple Keyboard is worth it alone IMO.

I've had most versions of previous iPads, and I've spent hundreds and hundreds on keyboards that are generally: Too Heavy, MicroUSB, non-Mac layout or otherwise flawed.

The down-stroke on the 12.9" iPad Pro Apple Keyboard takes a little getting used to, but it's otherwise very similar to my MacBook keyboard. Which puts it way ahead of any Logitech, Belkin, etc keyboard I've ever used on my old iPads.

It's great to just go to a trusted source, buy the thing, and it does what you expect.

So that's a major upgrade for the 9.7" version (IMO). There's nothing I can't do on my iPad Pro that I do on my Macbook aside from running IntelliJ and writing web apps. (There's "solutions" for that I guess, but not ones that I want to actually use yet.)

Also because of the screen size I guess, responsive websites think it's a desktop. Which is great. Because responsive usually just means "let me remove a lot of core features entirely and not actually make it any more usable" for 9 out of 10 sites IME.