The new iPad Pro

When the day of replacing my good old MacBook Air will sadly come, I want to consider the iPad Pro as a candidate. As Apple unveiled the new version last week and the reviews got published today, I thought I would check if my main use cases would be improved, possible, and enjoyable.

My main three use cases would be web browsing, writing, and photo editing. Obviously the web browsing experience would be different but somehow much improved — the simple thought of reading my Instapaper list on a screen like the iPad’s is dreamy, especially coming from a non-retina 11” Air. For the other — secondary — use cases, I can still use the computer from work. The perfect portability and the screen quality of the iPad Pro alone, in my opinion, justify considering it as my next main computing device.

So I focused my reviews reviewing process on two things: the keyboard accessory¹, and Lightroom.

Chris Velazco, on Engadget:

writing this story on the iPad’s Smart Keyboard has been relatively painless: It’s still covered in the same liquid-resistant fabric, which feels odd, but it’s perfectly usable even for long stretches of drafting. And Lightroom CC has been terrific at editing the photos I imported onto the iPad

Matthew Panzarino, at TechCrunch:

The general effect here is that the Smart Keyboard is much much more stable than previous generations and, I’m happy to report, is approved for lap use. It’s still not going to be quite as stable as a laptop, but you can absolutely slap this on your knees on a train or plane and get work done. That was pretty much impossible with its floppier predecessor.

John Gruber, on Daring Fireball:

At the hands-on area after last week’s event, Apple was showing Adobe Lightroom editing 50 megapixel RAW images from a Hasselblad camera. The photos were by Austin Mann, who was there, and helpfully demoed the software, showing what a real pro photographer would do in real life with real images. The experience was completely fluid and instantaneous.

Jeffrey Van Camp, on WIRED:

Photographers and video editors might like the new storage options. The Pro comes with 64GB of memory by default, but you can bump that number as high as 1TB. And since this tablet has a USB-C charging port, you can more easily connect it to a camera, external monitor, and other accessories.

Geoffrey A. Fowler², on the Washington Post:

Inside the new iPad, there’s also a new A12X chip Apple says is more powerful than 92 percent of laptops available on the market. It was robust enough to handle any processing task I sent its way, including editing and sorting through thousands of photos in Adobe’s Lightroom. (Next year, Adobe says it will bring to the iPad Pro a full-fledged version of its Photoshop app, too.)

A new kind of port on the iPad Pro can also drive a second screen. I plugged it into my office monitor just like I do my laptop.

Well, consider me convinced.³