New iPad pro comes with big price tag, big promises
BROOKLYN, N.Y. – Apple’s big reveal at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a departure from its Silicon Valley backyard, might not have featured the rock star of the family – iPhone had its day last month – but it was far from a show of has-beens. Still, the somewhat neglected MacBook Air, Mac Mini and iPad Pro finally got a little love.
Sure, the MacBook Air now sports some of the finer features previously reserved for the pricier MacBook Pro – the crisp Retina display, a third-generation butterfly-style keyboard, spacious Force Touch trackpad and Touch ID fingerprint sensor. It’s thinner and lighter, with Apple touting the laptop’s “greenness,” since it is built with 100 percent recycled aluminum. And the Mac Mini hadn’t been updated in four years.
But the iPad Pro is the headliner here. The new iPad, touted as a computer replacement, is incorporating more features baked into the latest iPhones. Apple ditched the Home button and Touch ID, replacing it with Face ID.
❚ The promise of iPad realized? Apple claims the new iPad Pros are faster than 92 percent of all the portable PCs in the last year. This, veteran Apple watcher Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies believes, brings the tablets “closer to the realized vision (Steve) Jobs had originally of the iPad replacing the PC.”
Now, I still have reservations about that, if only because you are missing a mouse and keyboard. Apple, of course, is all too happy to sell you one of theirs – including a Smart Keyboard Folio accessory ($179 or $199) that also was announced in Brooklyn. You can use pretty much any Bluetooth keyboard as well.
Storage is another consideration. For many of us, even factoring in our increased reliance on cloud storage, 64 gigabytes just won’t cut it. That’s what you get in the lowest-priced iPad Pro with an 11.5-inch “Liquid Retina (aka LCD) screen for $799 and the 12.9-inch version for $999.
So that means things can get awfully expensive if you find yourself spending more to spring not only for the keyboard but for extra storage versions, available in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB capacities.
❚ $2K for an iPad? In fact, if you splurge for the larger capacity iPad Pro with max storage and cellular connectivity, before adding accessories, you’re looking at nearly $2,000 – for an iPad.
Which brings me to another add-on I suspect most of you will want – the latest version of the Apple Pencil stylus, used to draw, write or mark up in the screen, perhaps in the full version of Photoshop that was showcased during the event and coming next year. The new Pencil is $30 more than its predecessor, costing $129. And, no, your $99 Pencil won’t work with the new iPad Pros, nor will the new Pencil work on older iPads.
The new Pencil does come with a few new tricks. You can double tap the sides for certain gesture controls. And it conveniently charges wirelessly when magnetically attached to the top of the new iPad.
❚ Lightning struck: Of course, wireless charging for the new Pencil became a necessity since Apple traded a USB-C connector for the Lightning connector on previous iPad Pros that used to charge the older stylus.
Actually, this is a welcome trade because USB-C is fast becoming a standard across many other computers, including the new MacBook Air. And USB-C connectors are found on external monitors, musical instruments and smartphones – Apple’s own iPhones, which still have Lightning connectors, being a notable exception.
The result? You could, in theory anyway, throw out all of those different cables and use the same charger to add juice to the various devices you own. One key exclusion: You cannot attach a USB-C external storage drive to the iPad Pro because Apple’s tablet lacks the software to recognize any of the files that may reside on that drive.