My first reaction to the new iPads announced today is: my god these things are expensive. Not that the new iPad Air and iPad Pro has increased in price, mind you - one of the few things that hasn’t price inflated in recent years. It just never occurred to me how damn pricey those models are compared to the base poverty-spec iPad (9th generation) that I have ($309 with the education discount). I was and still am not the target audience to spend $999 (starting) for an iPad Pro.
And honestly, who is? A thousand dollars is main-computing-device kind of money. It is far too steep to pay for a secondary tablet. An iPad Pro (the old one and the new one) certainly has the computing horsepower to be a primary device, but I wonder deeply who is using it as such. Every single person I know, their tablet is a secondary (or tertiary, if we count the smartphone) thing for media-consumption.
I guess I can use an iPad as my primary machine, but it’s definitely far from ideal. I would be working around its limitations (such as poor windows/app management, not great multi-tasking, and cumbersome file management), rather than a MacBook Pro performing exactly what I need out of a computer. Apple sure wants people to use the iPad Pro as the main computer (being the control center for a four-iPhone multi-cam recording is freaking cool), though I remain skeptical there exist such users. I will continue to recommend to others that the best iPad is the very base model.
I plan to use my 9th-generation unit for many more years to come. This is not the year to be dumping money into nice-to-have gadgets. Not in this economy, not at these interest rates. Well actually, the interest rate would be zero because the Apple Card offers zero-percent financing. Hmmm…
So meaty.