The Verge reviews the new iPad Pro: Apple’s approach to iOS is holding back powerful hardware in serious ways

“Apple gave me a completely maxed-out 12.9-inch iPad Pro with 1TB of storage, LTE, and the optional $199 Smart Keyboard Folio and $129 Apple Pencil to review. That makes for $2,227 of iPad Pro — more than all but one standard MacBook Pro configuration,” Nilay Patel writes for The Verge. “It is impossible to look at a device this powerful and expensive and not expect it to replace a laptop for day-to-day work.”
“With one huge exception, most normal stuff you’d plug into a USB-C port works without fuss, and a bunch of other things work if you have an app that supports it. I tried a handful of USB-C hubs with an assortment of USB-A, HDMI, card readers, and Ethernet ports, and everything worked as intended. An extremely corporate Dell USB-C hub even let me plug an external display into the iPad over VGA, which was truly a vision of the future,” Patel writes. “External displays work just like the old Lightning-to-HDMI adapter: the system will simply mirror the iPad Pro by default, but apps that support an extended screen can do different things. Keynote will use the external display as the presentation monitor and show you the next slide on the iPad, for example… Keyboards worked. A USB microphone showed up in GarageBand… But one extremely important category of devices will definitely not work: iOS does not support external storage. You can plug as many flash drives or hard drives as you want into the iPad Pro’s USB-C port, and nothing will happen. Apple says third parties can write apps to talk to external storage, but out of the box, this $1,899 tablet simply won’t talk to a flash drive.”

“The one thing iOS can do with external storage devices is import photos: if you plug in a camera or a memory card from a camera, iOS 12 will automatically pop open the camera import screen and let you import photos into your camera roll. That’s it. That is the sole way iOS 12 can address external storage,” Patel writes. “Apple’s approach to iOS is holding that hardware back in serious and meaningful ways, and while USB-C makes life with this new iPad Pro slightly easier, it still has the same basic capabilities and limitations of last year’s iPad Pro.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We await these third-party apps that will allow iPad Pro talk to external storage via USB -C with bated breath.
Quite some time ago, we dreamed of something we wish Apple had brought to fruition by now: iOS Pro.
Imagine an “iOS Pro” mode.
Turn on iOS Pro on your iPad Pro
1. Tap Settings > General, and make sure iOS Pro is turned on.
2. There is no step two.
Hey, we can dream, can’t we?
Shouldn’t such a thing already exist? Where would iPad sales be if it did? — MacDailyNews, December 29, 2015
And how would reviews like Patel’s today be different?