Gadgetory

Apple has revealed its biggest ipad yet called the ipad pro it measures 12 point nine inches and there's an optional Apple pencil stylus you can get with it if you like but is this new kind of ipad a waste of time or is a brilliant reinvigoration of the tablet we're going to talk about that now and with me as my colleague returned home hello rich hello now you are cautiously optimistic about the ipad pro yeah i think so i think it's got kind of an interesting idea even if it might be more remark attack sir size than anything else but by marketing exercise well so the thing is i bring your own device is a trend that's been around a little while and that's basically the idea of bringing your smartphone to work or your or your tablet and having your work email on there and it's it's not separated at all and that's been causing a bit of tension with IT departments so i think in terms of marketing what is quite sensible thing to do is to make a device and put the word pro on the end and even though it's basically still the same thing you've convinced IT departments around the world that this is a business device for business people to do business things on so you're suggesting that this is the device it's going to convince big corporations with millions of employees to gadget eyes they're essentially the ipad is potentially because what it is basically the same as as an ipad or a phone but just by making it look slightly different and giving it this new twist it's like the emperor's new clothes but that that is sort of has always been apples raison d'être in fact they probably claim they wrote the emperor's new clothes they be like hans christian who who we wrote it well who yeah exactly we invented that no no no no Johnny I've wrote that yes exactly it's fact um I think that what you were saying about it essentially being the same thing but that has pro on the end could be the biggest problem with it because it's definitely being presented as like here is an iPad that you can do a lot more with it sort of the next step up it's sort of between your iPad and your macbook creating even more subdivisions of categories between smartphones and macbook which incidentally feels very uh Napa creating more categories and more slices of different kinds of Technology feels a little bit like what Apple was doing in the 90s where it split the Mac line up into many many many many options and different lines and stuff and all got a bit confusing and frankly rubbish so I wonder are they smart to create something that is essentially still an iPad because it doesn't give you that much different to a like a normal-size regular iPad I mean you can do split screen apps right stuff like that so a multitasking gets a bit more powerful but i don't know i think if you bought this thing expecting it to do bit to replace your computer I think it'd be as disappointed as all the people who bought ipad 2 expecting it to do that were possible yeah i mean i think the multitasking thing is quite interesting the idea of having two apps side by side is fantastic and I've certainly gone over to having a larger phone I have a six-inch phone now I like I can I know I couldn't live without having a smaller phone now because it's just there's so much extra stuff on the screen but one thing that is missing is having to apt next to each other because we aren't really annoying when you're on your phone and you're constantly having to tab back between two things you know alt tab and the kind of equivalent to that switching between two apps and copying and pasting and that kind of thing so I love the idea of having these two things side by side and I think you have to have that if you could realistically going to use it for work if it's that important to me that I can see two things at once why am I not just doing this on a laptop because the laptop is so good an apple makes such incredible laptops like we both use MacBook Airs in a sort of day-to-day working life and it's brilliant and we're at a point now where it's not going is not going to be that much difference in price between a macbook air and the iPad pro and I just wonder is this is this a is this an evolution of the ipad too far like they're making it so much like the macbook that I just think just buy the macbook Lee it just seems to me so obviously a better device it does come with the option of the attachable keyboard but if you're going to attach a keyboard to a massive unwieldy tab book you might as well like to say just get a macbook air when when Steve Jobs initially revealed the iPad he sort of used it to have a go at netbooks and it was a big on screen graphic which I'd like smartphones and laptops and then in the middle of like I think it was a big question mark and into it dropped the word iPad and it's like da da but I think we can probably safely say a few years later that the tablets haven't really provided a whole new categories we thought they would because smartphones get big and they sort of eat into what tablets can do from that side while laptops have got a lot smaller and lighter and you know consistently more powerful and this feels to me a bit desperate we know that Apple's had trouble in recent years with the iPad in terms of keeping sales growth high and so something about this feels not new and progressive and like that would you buy it if out a keyboard so apparently you like a keyboard do you like keyboards what do you like tell us what you like and we'll make keyboards pens ebooks also the homely whatever you want a tablet that's that's huge the size of a briefcase I think well I think if anything this sort of seems like Apple is is is desperate to try and find new niches right and this seems to be trying to expand into a market that that it hasn't been able to conquer before the idea of a tablet you can draw on is something that Wacom has been doing for artists and graphic designers and that kind of thing for it for a long time and they've pretty much cornered the market yeah and so for Apple to be looking around and to suddenly go well you know maybe we can try and take some money off whack on then that feels like they're they're getting into this sort of this niche this kind of col de sac but having had money off whack on how much money can that be you know they have always gone into areas where there is you know people doing this technology but not doing it in as kind of user-friendly way as Apple good so Apple comes along and they take mp3s or they take any other take digital music they took they took Internet enabled phones and they said right how does a bunch of other people doing it they're not doing particularly well let's do this really really well on the one hand it doesn't feel particularly innovative but then on the other hand that feels like a criticism we make of lots of Apple kit that then turns out to be explosively popular so when you're saying why would they do this when Wacom already does it so well like that's something that you could have been saying about the iphone like why are they doing this when blackberry does it so well and yet I can't shake this nagging feeling that maybe this time things are different and the rules don't apply and maybe this one is just a bit uninspiring let's talk about the I'm not going to say the pencil i'm going to say the stylus speaker because when we talk about samsung things we rarely say s pen and i feel we should in the address of balance we shouldn't give Apple it's silly marketing name either talk about the stylus absolutely what do you what do you think of that what I mean Steve Jobs did famously say Denis that if you see a stylist they've they've messed up yeah like you know you failed on the interface level exactly yeah so I'm on board with pencils generally head pens Apple pencil styluses what everyone they've already got to you on board with pencils generally the day the pencil died exactly and I mean the Apple did say as well that you're perfect pointing implement is is your finger but the thing is the most important thing is about what's inside it's already matter what it looks like can you really draw with it can you use it to create a professional quality design in some way if you're a designer to a comic artist if you're an artist can you actually use this thing to you know create this sort of the nuance and the subtlety that you need in your drawings are you going to have those levels of pressure are you going to be able to have I'm gonna be able to vary the thickness of your lines those kind of real kind of detail and I'm not quintara sure that Apple can do it but having said that you know there's going to be a lot of people who maybe aren't necessarily professional artists or designers but they do have elements of design in their work and they can look professional because they've got this ridiculous big pro tablet yeah they can also look cool because they're kind of drawing and sketching and that kind of thing so you know I think maybe that's where the cool factor will come in okay now that's an interesting idea it could be cool in a different slightly non-traditional sort of work okay all right well folks that's what we think about the ipad pro but what did you think of apple's latest tablet let us know and do stay tuned to cnet com for much much more