The day many dreaded is here. Apple last evening unveiled what had been widely speculated for a long time: a really big iPad. At 12.9 inches, the new iPad Pro is really big. So big that using fingers alone may not be enough in certain use case scenarios. Hence the Apple Pencil. Pencil is a $99 accessory that will be available alongside the iPad Pro for those who want to annotate on pages, do artistic work or simply write. I mean, the display is that huge so why not?
The iPad Pro is meant to get a lot of things done not just a light touch of Angry Birds 2 and responding to emails. It’s meant for the designer, for the artist… Adobe Photoshop? Microsoft Office? That’s what the iPad Pro is for. And since there’s nothing wrong with the existing standard iPad lineup, only the iPad Mini got a bump to be at par with the year-old iPad Air 2. Surprisingly, Apple is dropping the iPad Mini 3 in favour of the 4 and still keeping the iPad Mini 2.
The iPad Pro is 6.9 mm thick weighs in at 712 grams and features an 8 megapixel iSight camera, an A9X processor (Apple says it is 1.8 times faster than the A8X in the iPad Air 2), 10 hour battery life, a 4 speaker audio system and run on iOS 9. iOS 9 was crafted with devices like the iPad Pro in mind as users can take advantage of the more screen real estate with iOS 9 features like Split View and Picture in Picture. Apple Pencil is not the only accessory Apple has made for the iPad Pro. There’s also the Smart Keyboard, a physical keyboard case to make using the gigantic iPad Pro for text entry a breeze. I am not sure if $169 for Smart Keyboard is a breeze as well.
The iPad Pro will be available in November in Space Gray, Silver and Gold colour options. The cost of the new iPad Pro varies depending on the storage option and the radio configuration (LTE, Wi-Fi) and range between $799 for the cheapest iPad Pro and $1079 for the dearest.
