Last year, when Apple launched the iPad Pro – the 12.9-inch juggernaut that packed enough punch to replace laptops – I knew I’d found the iPad of my dreams. Those specs, all that power, the beauty, and that pencil … oh, that pencil … how could I not lust after the iPad Pro!
There was just one problem – it was huge, a mammoth-sized device that was almost as big as my MacBook Pro and just as uncomfortable to use casually. Alas! My dreams of buying the iPad Pro were buried with deep regrets.
But now … we have the 9.7-inch iPad Pro and it’s everything I could have dreamed of in an iPad. It has all the lovable compactness of the iPad Air 2, but under the hood, it hides the power and reckoning of the iPad Pro. The screen is the same as the Retina iMacs launched in 2015, giving this 9.7-inch monster the widest color gamut ever; even better than the 12.9-inch iPad Pro!
Side note: I am having to exercise all my willpower to sit still and write this article, but inside, it feels like a thousand soda bottles have gone pop. Wheeeee!
The 9.7 (let’s just stick with that moniker for now, because typing ‘9.7-inch iPad Pro’ over and over again is getting tedious!) is also the first product in the Apple family to feature “True Tone display” – a technology that adjusts the brightness of the screen, depending on the lighting condition and the color temperature of your environment.
So, all those times you flipped open your iPad for some pre-sleep night browsing and it almost blinded you with the glare of its screen … yeah, 9.7 protects you from that. Whether it’s morning or noon or night, 9.7 will sense the ambient light around you and adjust the display accordingly. No more rude shocks or color bursts that jar your sensitive eyes!
The 9.7 also features an impressive camera – 12 MP on the back (with 4k video support) and 5 MP on the front. I know the sight of people holding up their iPads and taking pictures looks ridiculous as hell, but when I have a 12 MP camera to fool around with, who cares? Besides, for a writer who has to travel as much as I do, the 9.7 frees me up from having to carry a separate camera. Now, all I have to do is point (my iPad) and shoot amazing pics and then upload them onto my blogs and social media. Piece of cake!
What about the “camera bump” that raised such a hue and cry when the iPhone 6 was launched? Yep, it’s there on the 9.7 as well, and while it is unlikely to cause the entire iPad to rock when you rest it on a flat surface and use the Apple Pencil to doodle on it, there might be some slight inconvenience caused to users.
What can I say? Not everything in life is perfectly perfect!
Most other specifications of the 9.7 are similar to that of the iPad Pro, because, after all, it is the iPad Pro with a little more than 3 inches knocked off the top! So, I’m not going to go into the details of that. You can find the complete specifications here. However, it is interesting to note that Apple, for the first time, has broken the norm and introduced a 256 GB variant for whatever reason they thought was important.
Now, the price … the nastiest part of this article. It’s the bit where you’re snatched from the comfort of that poufy little cloud you were dreaming on and dashed with brutality against the hard ground of reality.
The iPad Pro is expensive. Really, really expensive. Just to give you an idea, the 32GB iPad Pro 9.7-inch (Wifi only) with accessories (the Smart Keyboard & Apple Pencil) will cost me about 72,000 rupees!!
Looks like my dream will need extremely careful and systematic planning to be fulfilled. With that, I should be able to buy the 9.7 in … oh, about a decade or so! Time to go and curl up into a ball and sob myself to sleep, then.
And why the hell couldn’t Apple give the new iPad a better name that the 9.7-inch iPad Pro?
nice phon