The iPad Pro

After several months of hype and speculation, the long awaited Apple tablet, the iPad, was revealed last week. Unfortunately, the iPad announcement was met with community disappointment. The week following the iPad’s announcement was full of tech journalist, bloggers and everyone else with an opinion expressing how unimpressed they were with the device, or at least how unimpressed they will be when they actually can hold one.

So since everyone, myself included, seemed to enjoy the hyped version of the Apple tablet better, I’d like to take a moment and assemble a new Apple tablet that I’m dubbing the iPad Pro. Now mind you when I say ‘pro’, I don’t mean what Apple has come to mean by ‘pro’. Apple decided to add the ‘pro’ moniker to almost all of its notebook line so as not to make the lower quality ones have low self esteem issues. When I say ‘pro’, I mean professional, like it’s loaded to the gills with stuff that most non-pro people would not need.

The iPad Pro fulfills the goals that a tablet computing device should. A perfect middle man; solving problems for situations that need a larger screen and more computing power than a smartphone, yet also require more mobility than a notebook.

Here’s what my fictitious, yet truly magical, iPad Pro contains:

Incremental Upgrades

The iPad Pro will have all of the hardware specifications as its lesser sibling, but some areas will be improved to be bigger, better, faster. Firstly, there will only be one version of the iPad Pro. None of that six options garbage. The iPad Pro comes with 128 GB flash drive and 3G built in. The screen resolution will be 1280×720p to give it a 16:9 aspect ratio for watching high-def video. Although reports say that the 1.0 GHz processor on the iPad is very fast, the iPad Pro will be 1.2GHz just cause it can. Also the battery life will be extended from 10 hour to 12 hours.

Oh and it will be able to do this radical, mind-blowing computing thing called multi-tasking.

Cameras, with a ‘s’

One of the major groaning points with the iPad is it lack of a built-in camera. The iPad Pro will have both a back and front-facing camera. The back camera will be 5 megapixels and capable of video. The majority of all quality images/video will be done with the back camera. The front camera is mainly for video conferencing or skyping and it will be a 3 megapixel camera.

Credit Card Reader

Apple should either build this themselves or acquire Square and have them add their tech to the iPad Pro. The card reader will be built into the device, not an external dongle like the current Square device is.

Doing this alone will wipe some egg off of Apple’s face by having all Apple Store employees use an iPad Pro to process customers purchases instead of the Windows Mobile devices they carry now.

While average consumers might not have much use for it, apart from the serious yard seller or the Avon lady, businesses could do some impressive stuff with one coupled with a custom app.

Graphic Pen Stylus

Steve Jobs is noted as to saying he hates styluses. What he really hates though is a simple plastic stick that you have to keep up with. The iPad Pro’s stylus will be valuable in and of itself.

What I’m envisioning for this is a mashup of the pressure sensitivity of the Intuos4 with the microphone of Livescribe’s Smart Pen.

This pen’s capability opens up some nice tablet functionality right out the gate. Apple can either commission Adobe to create a Photoshop app that lets the tablet be used like most graphic artists use a Cintiq. Or they can stick it to Adobe (a trending topic at Apple lately) and develop their own Photoshop killer for the tablet.

Next, they can use the microphone capability and do exactly what Livescribe/Pear Note do. Record audio along with pen writing to sync what is being said with what is being written.

I’m sure Apple and it’s legion of App Store developers can come up with numerous more uses for an uber pen.

Finger Print Scanner

I throw this one on here basically as a ‘Why Not’ feature. Some laptops have print scanners used to log in, so a majority of this feature will be used for that. But the most brilliant thing to come of the iPhone revolution is the app store and its ability to solve problems for things most people didn’t know existed.

Adding a finger print scanner to the iPad Pro will produce 1000 different apps that use it for things I wouldn’t have imagined. I can see police officers or DMV workers being able to find a use for it off hand. Maybe you start to couple credit cards with finger prints for an added level of security.

Outputs/Inputs

This section can be summed up with you can plug anything into the iPad Pro and anything can be pulled out of it. The iPad Pro will have your standard array of MacBook inputs, USB, firewire and SD. Those, plus the obligatory proprietary Apple, you will only ever need this input/output port until we tell you the same thing with our next computer release that uses our newer, non-backwards compatible, port that you will only ever need, port.

For output, the main deal will be an HDMI port so that play your videos/slides on large HDTVs. A VGA/DVI output would be nice to use for hooking up to a projector, but they are just so fugly that I don’t blame Steve if he pukes at the thought of it.

Meeting Manager Mode – M³

That’s right, the iPad will come with its own new mode that has a cool branded name with a superscript number. I can see the swimming pool of money already.

Basically, here’s the idea behind this concoction of my mind. When thinking about the iPad Pro, I tried to visualize who the true target users are. It will be the people who either have enough money to afford such an outlandish object, or people don’t actually have to pay for it because it gets written off as a business expense. The target user is also very fond of having new computer technology before most others get it even though they understand very little about the device or have very little use for it. And they enjoy flashing their new tech toy in front of everyone especially their peers.

What that user analysis boils down to is that the people most likely to own an iPad Pro are managers. So why not give them something that could actually validate their need to own it. Hence, Meeting Manager Mode or M³ if you’re feeling hip.

The general idea of M³ is seamless information sharing among iPad Pro users within proximity or SISAiPUwP for short (I kid). The scenario is a meeting room with 5-10 managers all with iPad Pros. As discussions are going on, the managers can share information being discussed among each other quickly and intuitively. Sally is going over the company’s financials, but Billy can’t find the e-mail with the spreadsheet. Sally (or anyone with the spreadsheet open) can quickly click a button to share the spreadsheet, click Billy’s name from the list of iPad users within proximity and immediately send the file to Billy.

The idea can also be scaled up to something like screen sharing capabilities. So if a projector isn’t available in a conference room, a presenter can share his or her screen with the Keynote slide and everyone in proximity can view right along on their own iPad Pro.

I’m sure there are many more uses for the idea of easy proximity sharing, but I’ll end it with those.

Although if managers still aren’t sold of the idea of M³, the iPad Pro will win them over with its ability to generate pie charts from random data sets to show off to other company employees. Gantt charts and Venn diagrams are also available.

Conclusion

Thanks for letting me air my ideas and thanks for making it to the end. To Steve and the Apple Execs who read this and found the advice invaluable, you’re welcome. Just put a $1200-$1500 price tag on this baby and you’ll start making billions faster than Steve Ballmer can break out into a sweat. You can just paypal me my share.

I’d love to hear any ideas you might have to improve the already practically flawless iPad Pro. What are some other things that would be useful from a device that is bigger and more powerful than a smartphone but more mobile than a laptop?