It’s the end of October and Apple has announced a new MacBook Air, Mac Mini, and most notably, a new iPad Pro. The iPad Pro (shipping Nov 7th) features an all glass edge to edge display, FaceID, and most importantly for business professionals, an updated CPU that is faster than 92% of all laptops shipping over the last year.
Live at the Event
Bigtincan was honored to be invited by Apple to attend the launch event at the beautiful Howard Gilman Opera House in Brooklyn (Apple, please come back to New York more for these events!).
It’s easy to watch the keynote and see the demos of games, AR technology, and design apps (pretty cool to see a true native version of Photoshop on iPad) and think that this is all about our day to day entertainment and education use. However, for millions of workers, the iPad is already a day to day productivity tool that has made their life easier and more effective than ever before.
What Apple did yesterday was critical for those workers and others who inspire to transition to a more mobile life. In the keynote Apple said that the iPad is a real "computing device" at the same level as existing laptops with the power, security, and flexibility to go toe to toe with laptops for mobile workers. The A12X chip now makes it possible to allow even the most complex applications to run on the iPad, and with the new Apple Pencil and keyboard folio, working with these apps will become even easier.
Hands On in the Experience Zone
Check out the images and videos below to see how the new iPad looks and feels - live from the experience zone at the event. One thing you will notice when you pick up the new iPad Pros is how small they feel. Even the larger 12.9” device feels easy to handle – it’s the size of a standard sheet of paper and fees like it. And the folio is much lighter than previous versions making the iPad easy to throw into a bag or bring up in front of a customer.
For customer facing workers in sales and service roles, this means that they can use the iPad Pro as their primary computing device. When presenting to customers or getting data from a person to person engagement, the new iPad Pros will give all of us the power we need to be more productive every day. We expect enterprise customers to adopt the iPad Pro faster than ever before as it will finally be that ideal device for customer facing people who need the balance between power and ease of use.
[playlist type="video" ids="16889,16890"]
Key Takeaways
I noticed two key things that were part of the announcement yesterday that seem to have been missed by a number of the Apple pundits. One is the ARkit - while yesterday was not about new software, the advances in ARkit that came with iOS12 are tailored for the new iPad Pros. For business use, developers like Bigtincan can now design and deliver the ultimate AR experience. Expect to see AR as a key part of how we think about empowering customer facing employees.
And second, the new Apple Pencil when combined with the folio, keyboard, and of course snappy powerful apps means that we can tie up the ecosystem into one bundle. We can replace the standard PC approach to spreadsheets and word processing. When combined with Machine Leaning on the device, there is no better computing device for enterprise customer facing workers.
Apple’s announcements have inspired Bigtincan to continue to create the ideal business solution for the newly released devices and to continue make your world simpler and more productive. We can’t wait for you to see what Bigtincan has in store for the future!
