Apple Will Have Its Work Cut Out Pitching iPad Pro To Enterprise – The ‘Book Mystique

If the rumor mills are on target, we could finally see what Apple, has wrought in the form factor of a larger-“screened iPad Pro at the Apple special,event on Wednesday along with the iPad 6s smartphones announcement.

Referencing 9To5Mac intelligence reports, Forbes contributor Amit Chowdhry suggests that Apple will forego its customary late October iPad update event, and will roll out a new, larger panel iPad Pro on September 9, piggy-backing the iPhone 6s unveiling event.

Chowdhry notes that if 9To5Mac’s insider moles are reporting accurately, the iPad Pro, which, will compete against Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3, will feature a 2732 x 2048 at 263-pixels-per-inch resolution 12.9-inch display, and be powered by Apple’s latest in-house designed A9 ARM processor, 2GB RAM, have two USB 3.0 ports (hooray at last!), a stylus that supports Apple’s marquee Force Touch feature, and stereo speakers flanking the device enclosure. Storage is rumoured to range from 64GB to 512GB, with shipping to commence shipping in November.

Chowdhry also thinks there may be an iPad mini 4, basically upgraded to mirror most of the iPad Air 2’s internal specs., while the Air itself will get passed over in this year’s upgrade cycle.

If so, as a happy iPad Air 2 user, that suits me fine, once the Air 2 will support iOS 9’s new slate of multi-windowing features, which amounts to a major productivity upgrade anyway, and my ‘Pad will remain the contemporary latest model in its category for another year possibly, which is a value enhancement for my purchase expenditure. I also think it’s eminent good sense to bring the iPad mini and Air back to near performance parity.

Meanwhile, in a blog, Gartner Inc. Technical Professionals group Research Director Andrew Garver has posted a list of features and capabilities he thinks Apple needs to incorporate in the iPad Pro in order for it to compete effectively with Microsoft’s briskly-selling, Windows 10 supporting, Surface Pro 3 and Surface 3 tablet computers as a business oriented productivity tool.

Garver says that with speculation rampant about whether a new iPad Pro may or may not be released this Wednesday (or for that matter exist at all), He focused his thoughts on the several real challenges that an enterprise-focused computer device needs to solve.

First, Garver observes that touchscreens and styli still need work, particularly on basics like precision and overcoming latency between input and what appears on the screen as well as pressure sensitivity. Personally, I’m not a big fan of stylus input in general, but recognize its utility for certain functions such as spreadsheet entry and image editing. However, my production orientation is mainly to do with text, and an ongoing frustration working with the iPad has been its many shortcomings pertaining to text selection, and particularly the iOS’s disability in selecting text in PDF documents.

Garver also,maintains that Apple must address the fact that businesses don’t want to buy multiple primary computing devices for their employees, which puts iOS devices at a major disadvantage right out of the chute compared with the Surface machines’ full Windows 10 support. Apple has doggedly cling to the two operating systems model for PCs and mobile devices respectively. While there are lots of apps and a variety of procedural workarounds to address the resulting efficiency slowdowns associated with working across two OS platforms, it’s cumbersome. Personally, there’s no way I could standardize on an iOS machine, which the new iPad Pro is almost universally expected to be, as my primary computing device. Advantage Surface.

Which segues into another item on Garver’s list — the wide range of legacy business applications that are supported by Windows 10 (or formulate matter by OScX for Mac users) but essentially don’t exist for iOS devices. As he puts it, enterprise users need tablets that support legacy investments in software that will not be modernized. How could an enterprise-focused Apple tablet address that challenge? Garver suggests a couple of options: 1) Creating some sort of Docker-like container for running legacy apps under the iOS, or 2)Making the iPad Pro capable of dual-booting both the iOS and Mac OS., although he acknowledged that it’s difficult to imagine this latter actually happening, and in any event, within most end user machines in the enterprise running Windows, even iOS/OS X dual-booting would not really address the root of the issue. Garver offers a somewhat fanciful suggestion 3) Dual boot iOS and Windows 10 on the iPad Pro. However, he observes that realistically its difficult to imagine any of these scenarios actually happening, at least built in from Apple, leaving the iPad Pro handicapped as an enterprise-focused tablet capable of supporting new apps in modern architectures while gracefully accommodating the long tail of older productivity apps that simply wont be modernized. Indeed, that’s the reason why I keep a Mac booting into OS X 10.6 to support Carbon based apps ported from Power PC that haven’t been replaced by satisfactory Intel native OS X substitutes. Advantage Surface.

However Garver speculates that Apple may not be targeting large enterprises with legacy apps with an iPad Pro product, but rather a next generation of professionals relatively unencumbered with years or decades of accreted Windows legacy baggage,mand noting that Apple has historically not shied away from abandoning legacy support in order to push the industry forward, but the shortcoming in that is in essentially conceding certain lucrative pieces of the market to competitors like Microsoft and Microsofts hardware partners.

Another item on Garver’s wishlist for the iPad Peo is wireless projection of PowerPoint presentations sans the hassle of plugging stuff in ,and capable of supporting all WiDi displays. I can’t really speak to that since I don’t use presentation software, but for those who do, I expect it’s a valid point.

Garver’s final item is NFC APIs, currently restricted to Apple Pay on iOS devices but which offer an array of cool possibilities for enterprises to have tap to happen events, provided theres a standard way of doing so.

Garver summarizes that in comparing rumored iPad Pro feature content to the Microsoft Surface, the latter solves a number of problems for businesses, including precision input support, and does so in a package that addresses both forward-facing apps and legacy apps. Consequently he contends that the iPad Pro will be obliged to differentiate itself from the Surface in a meaningful way if Apple wants to attract large enterprises that now have a compelling alternative in Windows tablets.

I agree that Apple has set itself a job of work in convincing largely conservative enterprise captains and IT department bureaucracies that an iPad Pro is a more desirable solution than a Microsoft Surface or other tablet running Windows 10, but then Apple has surprised us plenty of times before.

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