Image source: http://cdn.iphoneincanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/ipad-pro.jpg
Starting with media consumption, iPads have always been great for watching videos and listening to music. The 10.5" IPad Pro has 4 speakers, and they sound awesome. It's really weird that a tablet like this has better speakers then like 99% of gaming laptops, but it does. It also has a really nice screen.
The 120 Hz panel is excellent, like, straight up 10 out of 10. You can literally see twice the number of animation frames in the UI, so everything looks super smooth. It's tough to showcase this in a video, because you're seeing this at 24 frames per second, but if you see it in real life, you'll notice it right away. The thing is...
Nothing outside of the UI really makes use of that 120 Hertz panel. You're not watching videos at 120 frames per second, you're probably not playing games at 120 frames per second. So, the hardware is awesome, but it just feels untapped for what the device does. Now, if you're an artist the Apple Pencil is really nice on the new iPad Pros, the lower latency is noticeable to me, I will say though, if your master plan is to pick up an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil to learn how to draw, don't do it.
It's not going to happen, start with paper and a pencil. So, there's two big things in iOS 11 that were really exciting to me: drag-and-drop and Files. So, drag and drop is a new UX that allows you to drag and drop multiple objects, and, I have to say, it's really well done. And Files is an app that allows you to store files, like mail attachments or photos, links, downloads.
You can place them into various cloud storage locations, and it will show up on devices that have that Cloud source. So it'll show up on your laptop, your desktop, whatever it might be. So, these two features alone bring a level of usability that I've never seen before in an iPad. I mean there were third-party apps to do this kind of stuff before, but they just weren't nearly as fluid and well integrated as these.
I would say that it is a viable solution, like, if I had to, I could get by with using the iPad Pro as my only device, and I think a lot of reviewers came to that similar conclusion, that the new iPad Pros, running iOS 11, are a significantly better experience than iPads were in the past, for using them as laptop replacements. But after using this for a couple more weeks, I thought: "What am I doing here?", Like, "Why is this still so difficult to use this as my laptop replacement?" It's not as fluid and it's not as nice as it should be. I mean these devices have been around for 6/7 years, and the touchscreen is never going to be as precise as a mouse. If you're accessing websites or doing spreadsheets or database stuff, poking on the screen, like, to click stuff, it's usable, but it'll never be faster than a mouse or a trackpad.
And the same with the drag-and-drop stuff. I send photo attachments from work very frequently, it works, it's a welcome addition, but a keyboard and a trackpad are just so much faster than this. Split-screen works like it should, but it's cramped and all the tapping and swiping you need to do to get this split swing going... I'm fluent at the mechanics at this point.
I've done it so often. I know other keyboard shortcuts, I'm very familiar with them, but it's still never going to be as fast as a laptop or 2-in-1, running a full fledged operating system. And that's my whole issue with this proposition. If you're going to replace a laptop with this thing, the experience has to be as good as the laptop that you're replacing.
Or else, why would you use this, right? The keyboard is not bad, I'm using the Apple one, but if I had a choice, I would never use this thing over a regular laptop keyboard. And it isn't very slim, once you add the keyboard onto the device, it's as thick as a Microsoft Surface Pro, or like a Razor Blade Stealth. The pricing isn't too expensive, but once you add all the accessories and stuff, it's like $800 or $900, which is in the realm of some really good ultrabooks and 2-in-1s. So the hardware on the iPad pro is excellent, the actual tablet itself has so much potential.
It's gorgeous, the screen is beautiful, it's got amazing battery life. We took an easy eight or nine hour battery life on this thing. I mean, it's really really cool, but the software cripples this thing. IOS 11 is definitely a step in the right direction, but I think it's still really far away from what this tablet can do, if it had a completely different operating system, that was more conducive to regular work.
So if media consumption is your jam, like, if you're just buying this to listen to music and watch videos, go for it. It's expensive, but it does a really good job at it. But if you're trying to use this thing to replace a laptop, I mean, it's doable, but it's still a giant pain in the ass..