The Online Photographer

B&H Photo is accepting Pre-Orders for the iPad Pro. The thing appears to be made for showing photos.

I read a claim somewhere recently that many iPad users consider their iPads a) their least essential device, but b) their favorite among all their devices. Kind of a surprising juxtaposition. But it resonated for me because it's true for me too. It took me quite a while just to start using the iPad, and of my four computing devices (27" iMac desktop, MacBook Air 13", and iPhone 6+ are the other three), it's the one I need the least. But I love it.

(This post was originally going to say that B&H had some in stock, but the ones they had sold out in a nanosecond. Or maybe it just seemed that way.)

For one thing, I do 80% of my book reading on the iPad now. It provides its own light source and all books now have variable print size, which is great for aging eyes. The screen takes some getting used to at first, but be warned, once you do get used to it...well, I guess I already said I love it.

Don't forget that if you don't need "pro power" and you're not going to use it much while traveling, you can get most of the iPad goodness for a much lower price with a garden-variety Wi-Fi-only version (I have an earlier 16GB iPad Air v.1).

Mike

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Fazal Majid: "It's not an either-or situation, and computers including tablets have fallen down sufficiently in price where most people can afford to have a set, and use the most appropriate one as needed. Tablets are the best platform for many things because of the immediacy of the touch interface, the fact the screen can instantly be pivoted to portrait mode to maximize the content that can be read, and because the user interface disappears compared to legacy desktop OSes where the user interface 'Chrome' can outweigh content in terms of screen real estate.

"The iPad Pro bests the MacBook and MacBook Air in performance, and on some benchmarks even the MacBook Pro. As a canvas for photos, it is unmatched. The only reason for a photographer not to use one is that is still lacks system-wide color calibration."

John Lehet: "The problem I have using an iPad for photography is syncing photos in a way so that reveals the file name, so I can go work on it on the real computer later.

"The up side is that I find that the context switch—'I'm relaxed and not seriously working' opens my mind, and I see new possibilities and sometimes surprising goodness in photos while browsing on the iPad. That context switch is worth a lot.

"Lightroom Mobile seems not quite working and not worth the trouble, for browsing. It does seem like it's got potential if you want to work on images on the iPad, but not me. I want to look at them, but I don't want to work on them without a full set of input devices.

"Some of the Lightroom-like apps like Photosmith have been more trouble than they're worth.

"Apple's Photo app loses the filenames, and I've found if I thrash those files, changing them in great number and frequently, the whole iPad gets corrupted and needs to be nuked and paved. Maybe it's superstition, but I seem to have much better luck not overloading the photos app.

"Currently I'm trying syncing a few folders on the mac through Amazon Cloud Drive and Google Drive, and using apps that can read those clouds. I use Jeffrey Friedl's excellent Lightroom Collection Publisher plug-in to lightroom to sync a few different kinds of collections to folders, which are then automatically synced with the cloud services.

"But—really? Mostly it's far better to just have the laptop on my lap, so I can keyword and rate things while I'm at it.

"The iPad is great for Twitter. For photography it seems to hold such promise but deliver such heartbreak."

Paul De Zan: "I've had an oddly circular relationship with the iPad. I wasn't interested in the concept at all, then I inherited an iPad 2 from my wife; this was before I had an iPhone or any smartphone. It quickly became my constant companion, despite the fact that content creation (I do a lot of that) on an iPad is a dodgy proposition at best. But when I finally gave in and got an iPhone 5 two years ago (a car I'd purchased basically demanded I get one if I wanted to use all the infotainment stuff it came with), the iPad slowly faded away for me. Outside of piloting (the iPad is the gold standard of the Electronic Flight Bag universe) I don't use it anymore. Despite the relatively small screen of the iPhone 5, I found I could do everything I really needed to do with it and the heavy lifting could wait until I got back with my MacBook Pro. I suspect this may be the arc of the tablet in the market as well; they don't make great general purpose devices, but the form factor works really well for a lot of narrowly-defined applications."

Eolake: "I had it the same way. But the beloved pancake device became more essential after I stopped doing processor- and screen-size-demanding work every day. Now I use it far more than my Mac Pro. And talking about Pro, I've had iPad Pro since yesterday, and it really put the frosting on the cake and the coronet on the princess. With a floor stand (floteyourtablet.com), and sometimes an external keyboard, the normal iPad was not far from perfection, but for some applications I wished for a bigger one. Like using complex web sites with small text and long lines (Amazon and Wikipedia), Watching movies with beautiful visuals, and reading books with a lot of graphics or art. When I got it, it was less 'wow, that's huge,' but more 'yes, this is exactly what it should be.' (Also in that size and without any fingerprints yet, you could really appreciate what a beautiful piece of minimalist design this is.) And I still have the (too expensive) Pencil to come for making my own art."

Mike replies: Wow, thanks for the pointer to the Flote. I can't afford it right now, but that's exactly what I need.

MHMG: "The iPad Pro would have indeed been a game changer, in my humble opinion, if it could also run the full-fledged Mac OS system. Apple elected to keep it iOS only for entirely product-segmented reasons. iOS does not support file and folder capability, as far as I know, and without this deeply fundamental feature, iOS is a hugely crippled operating environment compared to MAC OS. Enough said."

Mike replies: I'm of the opinion that that's one sign that Apple is on the way down. Strong, truly contemporary companies are not afraid to let their own products impinge on their other products. As an example, think of what might have been if Kodak hadn't tried so hard to protect its film business. Apple should give the iPad Pro all the functionality it can, and let the chips fall where they may. It hasn't been afraid to do so in the past.

psu responds to Mike and MHMG: "There is more to the iOS/MacOS split on the iPad than just simple market segmentation. Anyone who has developed user interfaces for both systems will tell you mouse+buttons+clicks+keyboard is a very different model than the multitouch scheme in iOS. All of the higher level user interface frameworks (not to mention the applications) on both systems are structured to deal with the dominant interaction model on that system (mouse for Macs, touch for iOS) and in practice you can't easily migrate code from one framework to another and keep things working "right". Windows has famously tried to mix these two modes in one system, with distinctly mixed success. Other aspects of the iOS system (aggressively sandboxed apps, the lack of an explicit file system model) are partly a result of the mobile-oriented security subsystems and partly a conscious design decision from the early days. Anyway, the upshot is that making something like MacOS work on the iPad is a lot more involved than just porting the core OS. There are deeper structural and philosophical differences between MacOS and iOS than might be obviously visible on the surface."