Or if you aren't a music person, are you into making movies? Final Cut Pro does have a subscription, but it's only $5 / month and the subscription is easy to start and stop. If your needs are simple, the free iMovie is pretty good.
Or maybe video isn't your thing. Are you a writer or poet? There are a lot of great choices for writing apps and the battery life of the iPad means you can work away from your desk all day.
Or if you like writing software, Swift Playground is fun. I found this to be a great resource:
https://github.com/uraimo/Awesome-Swift-Playgrounds
If you are into photography, Affinity Photo is fun. It doesn't have the AI features that Photoshop has, but for amateurs, it can get you pretty far. Plug in an external drive to your iPad and you can use it with a huge photo library.
Just borrow someone else's underused ipad if you want to give it a try.
Now it's just a YouTube device.
Just buy a sketch book and some colored pens and pencils.
I'm not sure what it is about the iPad -- maybe the physical ergonomics? It's kinda hard to position comfortably for focus.
I have a 2017 iPad Pro and once the battery finally dies will replace it with a non-Pro iPad.
My 4090 and m4 iPad Pro share this fate, with some occasional gaming.
It beats the hell out of either laptops or phones, for me, for these tasks:
- Music. Excellent as a sheet music display; can record and edit midi quite well; play tutorial videos; act as a tuner, tone generator, or metronome (my phone beats it on that front due to portability, but still, if I already have the iPad out on the stand...); plenty good enough at audio recording and editing for my extremely-amateur purposes, plus its ability to play loops and beats and such.
- Reading. It's especially amazing for comic books (in landscape mode a 12.9 incher is almost the same size as an open comic book! You can read two-page side-by-side on it, no problem) and PDFs. I prefer iPad mini sized devices for prose books in ordinary ebook formats, but the 12.9" pro is damn near perfect for those two things. Laptops and desktop computers also work for comic books and PDFs, but are a pretty big downgrade, UX-wise.
- Drawing. Obviously.
- Long-form writing. Laptops work great for this too, of course, but you still need a separate keyboard if you want decent ergonomics. iPad doesn't have an attached keyboard taking up space that I could instead use for a separate keyboard.
It's also just as good as a laptop (to me) as a remote SSH terminal, VNC terminal, video/music player, web browser et c. I can't really think of much I do on my (personal! Not work-supplied) laptop that I can't do just as well on an iPad, maybe supplemented by a headless RPi hanging off my router, or a cheap VM rental (or just the Linux server in an old desktop workstation tower that I already have anyway).
To me this will be the kind of computers I'll tell my parents to use as soon as their crappy laptops die. They do not need literally anything else: sending emails, write a few ones, check Youtube and browse the web. For this use case, it's the most useful machine. Never breaks, infinite battery, no support needed.
And I hate Apple. So this says a lot.
I don’t have a use for the Pro model but I use my Air a lot.
Edit: I realize that ordinary people might not yet care about exporting to AVIF, but they may receive such photos from other people.
Because I have to imagine very few people buy the iPad Pro (and for those who do, what use case are they buying it for).
EDIT: oh, the prices are much lower now than what I paid 3+ hears ago, that’s nice.
Apple M5 Chip
seviu•1h ago
I cannot even give it to my kids since I don’t have multiple accounts with it.
Kind of sad that the most interesting device Apple has will never show its true potential due to their greed.
ErneX•1h ago
mwexler•1h ago
seviu•48m ago
I really dig that Oled screen
ErneX•39m ago