Seriously, for real this time, the 12in MaxiPad is totally on the way ... Stop us if you've heard this one before: Apple is developing a 12.2-inch iPad that will go on sale within a year. This time, the rumor is spreading from Japanese Apple blog Macotakara, which cites "reliable sources." It's claimed Cook and Co are in the final stages of designing a massive fondleslab to compete with the likes of …
If they are looking to make a "Professional" device then why would anyone believe this to be an iPAD architecture?
The Macbook line is used by many in the professional space for the quality, portability and support of little things like REAL business operating systems (read Windows for business... OSX for graphics/video/audio work). I would love to see an apple-quality device to compete with the Surface... consider it a Macbook Air in a tablet form.
Would definitely be appealing to a large group of users frustrated with the "almost good" solution that an iPAD brings to the professional world.
My $0.02!
>If they are looking to make a "Professional" device then why would anyone believe this to be an iPAD architecture?
Are you conflating the underlying OS with the User Interface? The most professional UI is the one that is most fit for purpose - so an iPad like device with a fancy digitiser (see 'Modbook, or 'Wacom Hybrid') might be the better device for a graphic artist than a Macbook. A musician might find an iPad a better device to use as a control surface, and find it perfectly secure and reliable enough.
Currently we tend to associate ARM architecture with touch interfaces, and x86 architecture with keyboards and mice - but that is largely to do with the power constraints of mobile devices. It is not written in stone.
OSX, like NeXT before it, has run on different hardware architectures in the past. 3rd party applications might have to be rewritten for an ARM OSX, but they would have to be modified anyway in order to work well with a touch/stylus interface.
Microsoft too are dabbling with x86/ARM agnosticism.
They killed off two evolutionary dead ends. The 68040 was the last of its line. IBM showed no commitment to lower power Power PC. Intel has been winning in terms of power consumption and performance for some time, delivering workstation performance that is frugal with the battery.
No one, and I mean it when I say NO ONE is concerned about an ISA's ease of writing assembler. The number of people writing assembler is miniscule, and most of them are wasting their time with such micro-optimization when improving their algorithm in C/C++/C#/ObjC would result in a far greater performance benefit.
If someone was able to create a new CPU that ran three times as fast as today's CPUs on compiled code, but was the most hostile environment for assembly code you could imagine, the market would beat a path to it, trampling on the broken bodies of assembly programmers.
"The report goes on to suggest that the plus-size "iPad Pro" would also use the Touch ID fingerprint reader introduced in the latest iPad models and the Apple Lightning connector interface"
Really? Wow, I'm glad someone figured that out. I don't even like Apple and it was obvious surely that if a new "maxipad" is coming (and it is let's face it, still speculation) the 2 most obvious things you'd expect would the new-standard connector and the new-standard fingerprint sensor.
Rocking the 12.2" Note Pro at the moment, and unexpectedly loving it.
Considering the multiplicity of devices I have lying around at the moment (gotta do those "feasibility studies" and "examine use cases", don'cha know; I love my job), I was very doubtful that it would find a niche. Much to my surprise, it has actually ousted the 9"ish-10"ish form factor beasties from my daily round entirely.
A few days in with the extra screen real-estate of a 12-incher and I now find the lesser slabs too pokey to work on when sitting at a desk with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse... and for those situations where I've got to indulge in one-handed slab-fondling, they're still too unwieldy and I want to drop to a 7"ish-8"ish model. I'm starting to feel like the interim sizes are - for me at least - somewhat superfluous.
It's early days yet though, and I might change my mind in another week or so. :)
All in all, I'm a tentative convert to the MaxiSlab concept, and although I couldn't see myself forking out my own cash for an iThing ever again now I've hopped over the wall of that particular garden, I think it would be a good move on Apple's part if they ship one soon.
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