Apple might be taking a (baby) step in that direction with the recently introduced 128GB iPad, which doubles the storage of the former high end model. In the press release touting the bigger capacity tablet, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, had this to say:
“With more than 120 million iPads sold, it’s clear that customers around the world love their iPads, and everyday they are finding more great reasons to work, learn and play on their iPads rather than their old PCs. With twice the storage capacity and an unparalleled selection of over 300,000 native iPad apps, enterprises, educators and artists have even more reasons to use iPad for all their business and personal needs.”
Schiller added that “virtually all of the Fortune 500 and over 85 percent of the Global 500 [are] currently deploying or testing iPad” for applications such as film editing, music composition, training videos, architectural projects and medical diagnostics.
But, of course, the iPad has a ways to go before it’s truly a “pro” product. In his Feb. 3 “Monday Note” column (http://tinyurl.com/b4tgwtz), Jean Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive, founder of Be Inc. and venture capitalist, points out that a true iPad Pro would lets you open multiple windows, add a hyperlink more easily, handle screenshots better, offer annotation, provide control over the image file format, and offer some means of ‘assembling a trove of parts that can be assembled into a ‘rich’ document, such as a Keynote presentation.”
Does the world want/need an iPad Pro? Possibly. I’ve seriously considered using my 27-inch iMac for the bulk of my work and using a 128GB iPad with a keyboard as a MacBook Air replacement. However, I haven’t done it yet because the tablet just can’t handle the complex tasks the way the Apple laptop can.
Farber concludes his column on this note: “If the Surface Pro becomes more successful as it evolves, Cook and design chief Jony Ive will have to think about designing a no-compromise iPad that can fly and float, or fly and drive, and do both very well.”
You can (and should) read Dan’s complete article at http://tinyurl.com/bgzh8ra .
Apple needs a one pound iPad Pro. No more.