Welcome to iPad a MacBook? 9to5Mac contributor Peter Cao endeavored to find out by replacing his 2016 MacBook Pro with this year’s 12.9-inch iPad Pro, accessorized with the Smart Keyboard Folio and Apple Pencil. He said that using the Pro as his main wor
Still, it’s possible that we are continuing to ask the wrong questions about the iPad Pro. In an article for The Week, Navneet Alang suggested that many of the use cases assessed by reviewers do not reflect how the Pro will be used by many people who buy it. For example, while some reviewers were disappointed in their attempts to use the slate by connecting it to external storage through the new USB-C port, Alang said that cloud services had made such storage less necessary.
He continued that this was particularly the case for many students, writers and academics, adding: “What users want is a device that’s portable, has great battery life, and lets you interact with it in different ways: via typing, touch, even a pen.” All of this indeed describes an iPad – and it could be argued that the new Pro does fare well when assessed on its own merits.
At the launch event, Apple very much marketed the new Pro as being primed for creativity. The company even reportedly tasked 400 different artists with producing the quirky new takes on the Apple logo that were later seen on the press invites and during the opening of the keynote.
It’s interesting, then, to see how an artist reacts when putting the Pro and the secondgeneration Apple Pencil through their paces – as indeed, you can see in this video review by artist Ian Barnard. He reported positively about the Pro as an artist’s tool, which particularly passed his practicality test for lettering.
On the subject of letters, what is the Pro like as a writer’s device – especially compared to
AMAZING FUNCTIONALITY FOR FANS OF THE CREATIVE ARTS
Over the years, Apple has introduced more and more pro-friendly functionality to iOS, with multitasking features particularly coming to the fore. Cao benefitted from these advances during his test – reporting how, for example, he would have Slack chat running on his screen’s left side and Safari with the 9to5Mac web portal open
on the right side. He also said he kept track of breaking news by leaving Tweetbot open in a window over Safari.
He cited the hardest part of the Mac-to-iPad transition as “going from mouse/trackpad and keyboard to touch and keyboard”, but noted that several apps supported keyboard shortcuts akin to those available on a Mac. He also called Shortcuts or Siri Shortcuts “a potential gamechanger for getting work done on an iPad”. In all, he acknowledged that “the iPad is starting to grow on me and I’d highly recommend others who primarily write for a living to give it a shot.”
If that seems like slightly cautious praise for the new iPad Pro, it remains reminiscent of much of the reaction to the device so far. So, is it really a laptop replacement at long last? Is it the future of computing? Perhaps the more fitting question to ask would be whether it is right for your own needs – and there’s little doubt that for various purposes, the new Pro indeed triumphs.