Kickstand

I haven't bought an Apple product for years. The last one was the iPad 1, so you have it... it was a long time ago. The 64GB iPad 1, 6 years back. I've been always thinking about larger display sizes... So here comes the iPad Pro A.D. 2015. It is a very mixed bag of feelings.

Overall it is a great piece of hardware. The display is top-notch (although it would be even better if it was AMOLED not LCD, but hey...). It has a lot of horsepower too. Very snappy. It weighs the same as my 1st gen iPad. Which is reasonable. Many ask "what would I use the Pro for?". So here are my hints. It works very well as a secondary USB display when connected to my Windows-10 Lenovo Yoga. I love big screens and lots of screen real estate. The iPad pro helps here while traveling. It is my second monitor (thanks to the TwoMon App). It is also the greatest reader for PDF and Microsoft Word documents, I've ever had. Successfully replacing my old Kindle DX that I will be retiring now.

I believe it could also serve as my backup demo system, when on the road. In case my laptop dies (it did earlier this year, just before a demo for an important customer).

The iPad also has one thing other tablets (and phones!) are missing: the kickstand. Apple calls it the magic cover. Well if you consider magnets magic, let it be. It is just a cleverly designed scree protector that magnetically attaches to the tablet and folds as a kickstand. Surprisingly no other tablet offers such feature in a minimalist form factor.

But other than that, software-wise, the iPad pro is a joke. It is just the iPad 1, but bigger. Over 6 years iOS has been able to significantly increase the spacing between application icons. Despite the screen size, it still maintains 4x5 icons spacing. Which in an almost 5k screen looks weird (to be polite). Everything is just bigger, outrageously bigger. Especially the fonts.

The iPad Pro also demonstrates how far ahead the Android tablets have gone, with the Material Design concept. It is just _unbelievable_ how Apple has been displaced as the software / UX leader. Don't get me wrong. The iPad is really a great piece of hardware but the iOS sucks. Comparing to my Blackberry Priv for example... it is a different league. I wonder if one day Apple will introduce the "Back" button - the lack of it makes navigating the flow of multitasked applications so difficult.

But it has a magnetic kickstand "magic cover". Which is a great plus, but done wrong this time. It is kicking it in horizontal orientation. While it should be doing it in a vertical one! A 5k device is perfectly capable of rendering any content in vertical orientation. and this is how I love to use it. So I'm detaching the kickstand from the side and using it as a standalone stand for vertical orientation. It is not bad overall but not a cutting edge anymore.

It would also be great if the Pro could run Android. It'd allow to skip on this iOS nonsense while having the best hardware available. For some reason the Android community is still not capable of delivering hardware that matches Apple.