smartphone market is in a league of its own.. one can easily justify the price for themselves by seeing how they'd use it. it's their communication device and camera all in one on top of it being on their body 24/7. i'm comparing the ipad to what it's comparing itself to. laptops.
For $1097, you'd get a faster SoC, bigger screen, higher screen resolution, and better speakers + the keyboard/pencil for a price that's $200 less than the entry level MacBook at $1300. IMO, the pricing is pretty good.
But to the masses it's still just a data consumption device. The average consumer probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the Pro CPU and one from an iPad 4. It could be twice as fast as a MacBook and the MacBook would still be more useful to most people in a production environment. I think it would take a business that develops it's own in house apps to really make use of and tap the full potential of a tablet like this. But maybe that's the who point of it's "Pro" title.
in the end though, apple was freaking genius in this move among some other things they announced. with the ipad pro, they are able to keep the existing ipad line pricepoint where it is. ipad air 2 and ipad air prices don't budge since the ipad pro is a brand new tier. they're gonna make so much money that they can take care of all of the syrian refugees if they choose to. also, they're keeping up with the carriers in the US. all of the carriers are dropping contract (subsidized) pricing of devices and allowing customers to finance their devices. but you only do that through the carrier or agents/authorized dealers. since alot of people like to get their devices directly through apple, apple also introduced a financing option through them which includes applecare+ they can get all of the moneys
Yep…it's the "best" tier in Apple's fairly standard good-better-best approach to their product lines.
I'm kind of interested in what that new Apple TV has to offer. Wasn't there also an iPad mini 4 announced? Most news sites barely mention it.
Newest iPad mini will apparently have the same internal specs as the iPad Air 2 (only difference is that it appears to use the A8 rather than the A8X…smaller screen probably being the reason). Apple TV is going to be an instabuy for me as I've been using the 2nd gen version and there's so many improvements to the hardware and OS.
Screen resolution is the same though, so size is irrelevant when it comes to the performance needed to drive it. A8 will do just fine for most peoples needs, it's a more than capable SoC, but it's a definite league below the A8X in the iPad Air 2. The bigger question is will it have the 2GB of RAM the A8X had? I'd have to hazard a guess that the answer is no. That will effect most users more than a much faster GPU and an extra CPU core.
I came across a guy that said buying a new iPad with 1GB was stupid because it wouldn't support some future IOS feature. Not really sure what he was talking about or it had any merit.
It kind of depends if A9 has 2GB RAM or not. It's still stupid they they are sticking with 1GB on any devices, but if they stick with 1GB on the iPhones for now an iPad mini with 1GB won't be as bad for futureproofing as it would otherwise. The real winners of such a move would be iPhone 5/S/6 buyers.
The new Apple TV has an A8 and 2 GB of RAM, so it's not that unlikely that the iPad mini 4 would also have 2 GB.
Good point, I didn't notice that. Hopefully all the new iDevices have 2GB. I initially assumed the iPhone 6S wouldn't but since it is using LPDDR4 I'm now thinking that lower density chips wouldn't even be available. They'd have to halve the potential bandwidth by using half as many chips to get 1GB. If they go down that route then that's just stupid, especially for the prices they sell at.
It's already been confirmed at 2GB... I liked the implementation of 3D Touch. Once Apple gets a good working concept out, one of the Android OEMs can run with it and provide a more user customized experience. I'm really interested in the details. It's always better to lease a depreciating asset, and what depreciates faster than tech... Hope other OEMs follow suit so I can get that carrier junk off my phone. Will have lots of number crunching to do. LOL @ Apple Pencil. Revolutionary.
haha, looks like no one mentioned what the feature was that he was talking about. i'd have to assume he was talking about the multiwindow feature. the only last generation device that has 2GB of ram is the ipad air 2 so it along with the new generation ios devices will be able to use this feature.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/09/apples-iphone-upgrade-program-vs-the-big-four-carriers-payment-plans/ Long story short: you have a choice of upgrading at 12 months, which would start a new 24 month cycle. Plan includes Apple Care+ coverage for 24 months. Total cost for two years is basically the same as buying the phone up front + two years of Apple Care+. Plan is only available at Apple Stores. Basically, it's an interest free loan...but the inclusion of Apple Care+ is probably what makes them some extra $$ relative to how much people actually make use of it.
some interesting things i just ran across. for some reason, the devs of instagram still don't have an instagram app out for the ipad yet. I would've thought that platform would've been priority for them. no snapchat for ipad either.. but i'm not surprised since that app feels like its developed by amateurs.