
Apple Finally Tells Us When the iPad Pro Is Coming
Updated from 8:24 a.m. to include comments from Jim Cramer in the fifth paragraph.
After much fanfare and in hopes of reigniting tablet sales, Apple (AAPL) - Get Report announced the iPad Pro is slated to be available to purchase later this week.
Starting Wednesday, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro will be available to order online, with the tablet arriving at retail stores, its carrier partners and Apple authorized resellers later this week.
"The early response to iPad Pro from app developers and our customers has been incredible, and we're excited to get iPad Pro into the hands of customers around the world this week," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in a statement. "iPad Pro is the most powerful iPad we've ever made, giving users the ability to be even more creative and more productive with the epic 12.9-inch Retina display, powerful 64-bit A9X chip and groundbreaking Apple Pencil and new Smart Keyboard. We can't wait to see what they do with iPad Pro."
Sales of the iPad, first introduced in March 2010 by then-CEO Steve Jobs, have struggled over the past several quarters, as consumers increasingly turn toward larger smartphones to do many of the same tasks done on tablets. In Apple's most recent quarter, it sold just 9.9 million iPads, down from 10.9 million in the previous quarter and 12.3 million in the year-earlier quarter.
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"iPad Pro enables new forms of mobile creativity that will help transform how creatives work," said Scott Belsky, vice president of products at Adobe, in a statement. "With the larger iPad Pro screen and lightning-fast performance, creatives will be able to take full advantage of Adobe's family of Creative Cloud mobile apps. For example, the ability to manipulate a 50-megapixel image right on iPad Pro in Photoshop Fix and then send that image to Photoshop CC on a desktop, for further refinement, is the kind of industry-advancing collaboration that millions of Adobe and Apple customers will benefit from."
Much of the criticism that surrounds the iPad is that it is seen as limited in what it can do (despite there being 850,000 apps just for the iPad), and that the replacement cycle is significantly longer than for a smartphone, lasting as long as four years.
In addition to a larger screen, Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple touted the computing power of the new iPad Pro. It comes with a 64-bit A9x chip, which the company stated rivals that of desktop-class computing power. In addition, the company's $99 Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard add a new dimension of utility to the iPad not seen in previous generations.
The new iPad Pro is seen as a formidable competitor to notebooks, even to Apple's own MacBook lineup, said Pacific Crest Securities analyst Andy Hargreaves in a September research note. Hargreaves tempered his enthusiasm, however, saying the new iPad Pro may "cannibalize sales of current iPads on the low end and MacBooks on the high end." Hargreaved rates Apple "sector weight."
The iPad Pro starts at $799 for the Wi-Fi 32GB model and $1,079 for the LTE 128GB model. In addition to the Pencil, Apple also introduced a Smart Keyboard for $169 for the larger tablet. Apple's MacBook laptops start at $899 for the 11-inch MacBook Air and run up to $1,999 for the 15-inch MacBook Pro.








