IPad Pro Review – Too Big To Fail

When I first picked up the iPad Pro at an Apple (AAPL) event this past September, I couldn’t help but laugh a little bit. For one, its size: it is holy-crap-look-at-this-iPad big. And with a price tag that easily jumps up to around a thousand dollars, it’s the most expensive iPad ever.

There’s also the fact that Apple has once again hung back and watched others launch a new product category before bursting in and laying claim to it. The company had done this with MP3 players, phablet phones, smartwatches. Now, it was unveiling a high-powered tablet computer with a stylus and accessory keyboard.

But after a few days of using the iPad Pro, I started to look at iPad differently. The large tablet pretty much demanded it. I’ve always been a bit of an iPad skeptic, never understanding how people can use them all the time for productivity, even with a Bluetooth accessory keyboard attached. By day three with the iPad Pro, I had started to wonder,Could this replace my MacBook?

It’s the question everyone is asking. And while Apple says it didn’t make iPad Pro with the intent to replace a laptop, even Apple CEO Tim Cook suggested in a recent interview that this could be the case — because what else could this massive iPad be for? It’s the same question Microsoft has been trying to answer with the Surface since 2012, with mixed results.

Either way you look at it, the iPad Pro is meant to change how we think about computers (or at least turn around the iPad’s flagging sales) — which is, actually, no laughing matter.

Let’s just get this out of the way: Apple wants to sell more iPads. This is the visible seam in the story Apple has stitched together about the iPad over the past five years. The iPad Pro is being marketed as a tablet for users of heavy apps and creative types, and it is a very obvious product differentiation strategy. But some people are just going to want to buy the biggest iPad they can get, and this is a very big, very nice iPad.