After years of rumors and lofty expectations, Apple has finally unveiled a tablet that could rival its own line of laptops. The iPad Pro comes equipped with an enormous 12.9-inch Retina display and a 64-bit A9X chip that Apple says is 1.8 times as powerful as the A8X, but we want to know whether or not it can kill the MacBook.
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Short answer: no. (Disclaimer: This is an opinion! One you may disagree with!)
Despite its beastly internals and eye-popping display, the iPad Pro still runs iOS 9. There’s nothing wrong with iOS 9, of course, but for power users who are used to having dozens of tabs open in their browsers, four or five apps running in the background and a desktop full of folders and files, I just can’t imagine that iOS is going to cut it.
On the other hand, the portability of the iPad Pro is going to be a major factor for many consumers. The iPad Pro is even lighter than the MacBook Air (which makes it significantly lighter than the 2015 MacBook Pro), so if weight is a determining factor in your purchase, the iPad Pro might become a viable option.
Let’s take a look at the technical specifications of both devices stacked next to one another:
At the end of the day, this is still an iOS device. If you prefer a mouse or trackpad to a touch screen, the iPad Pro probably isn’t going to make your MacBook obsolete. But with its impressive specs, it’ll be able to handle pretty much anything you can throw at it, even while you’re multitasking with multiple apps open at once.
