❯❯ Barometric sensor: Now on all three iPad models, this sensor makes it possible for your iPad to sense air pressure around you. This feature is especially cool when you’re hiking a mountain, where the weather may change as you climb. Perhaps more to the point, the changes in barometric pressure can be sensed on a smaller scale so that elevation can be sensed and measured as you move normally.
❯❯ Apple Pencil: With iPad Pro, some exciting new hardware features include the ability to use the optional Apple Pencil stylus to interact with the screen.
❯❯ 3D Touch: This feature allows for three levels of pressure on the screen. They can be used for different input meanings. For example, the lightest tap on an object selects it; medium pressure displays a preview (called Peek by Apple); the heaviest pressure opens the item (called Pop).
❯❯ More keyboard options: The iPad Pro has a full-size onscreen keyboard. Because there’s more space on the screen, the top of the keyboard can contain extra commands for use in filling in passwords and more advanced input techniques. There’s more on this in Chapter 2.
❯❯ Smart Connector for Smart Keyboard: Additionally, you can use a Smart Connector to hook up a Smart keyboard, which makes it much easier to get complex work done.
❯❯ Live photos: Using the 3D Touch feature, you can press a photo on the screen to make it play like a short video. The Camera app captures 1.5 seconds on either side of the moment when you capture the photo, so anything moving in the image you photographed, such as water flowing in a stream, seems to move when you press the still photo. See Chapter 14 for more on photos.
❯❯ News app: This app is an intelligent news aggregator, which means that it gathers news stories from various sources. It’s intelligent because it “learns” to present content similar to other content you’ve viewed. See Chapter 22 for more about how News works.
❯❯ Notes: The Notes app gets a facelift with iOS 10, allowing you to use Apple Pencil (and even your finger) for sketching notes as well as using the text, photos, maps, and URLs that have already been present in Notes. Additionally, you can create instant checklists and even sketch in your notes. You can also share items to Notes using the Share feature in apps such as Photos. See Chapter 21 for more about Notes.
❯❯ Improved Maps app: With iOS 10, Maps gets a new look and major new features. You can now use it to find where you’ve parked your car, and there are significant new features added to show you what businesses and saved locations of your own are near your current location. These features add on to improvements in iOS 9, including a Transit view for finding information about public transit in select cities around the world. If you go to Settings and look at Maps in the left column, you’ll see that you can enable extensions for Lyft, OpenTable, and Uber. This means that Maps may contain buttons to let you reserve a table or a ride (if you have the appropriate account). The extension architecture is widely promoted by Apple to developers so you’ll probably start to see more services enabled directly from Maps. However, as is the case with Maps, the extensions that make this possible can be turned on and off from Settings for the app in question (Maps in this case).
❯❯ Siri extensions for more functionality: Siri, the iPhone’s personal-assistant feature, can now interact with more apps such as Pinterest, WeChat, and Skype. This uses the extensions architecture that Maps also uses, and the Apple is promoting to developers. Expect to see Siri’s ability to control apps broadened in the future as developers add their functionality.
The most obvious differences among iPad models are their thickness and weight, with the Pro being biggest, then iPad Air 2, and finally the smallest, iPad mini 4 (see Figure 1-1). All three models come in three colors: space gray, silver, or gold.
All three models come in Wi-Fi only for accessing a Wi-Fi network, or 3G/4G for connecting to the Internet through a cellular network as your cell phone does. The iPad models also differ slightly in available memory and price based on that memory:
❯❯ iPad Pro: $799 for 32 GB and $949 for 128 GB.
❯❯ iPad Air 2: $499 for 16 GB; $599 for 64 GB; $699 for 128 GB.
❯❯ iPad mini 4: $399 for 16 GB; $499 for 64 GB; $599 for 128 GB. Comparable Wi-Fi plus Cellular models cost about $130 more for each model.
Finally, there are variations in screen quality and resolution, camera quality, and so on. Logically, the bigger the iPad, the bigger the price and higher the quality.
Read on as I explain some of these variations in more detail.
Storage capacity is a measure of how much information – such as movies, photos, and software applications (apps) – you can store on a computing device. Capacity can also affect your iPad’s performance in handling tasks such as streaming favorite TV shows from the World Wide Web or downloading music.
Your storage capacity options are 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB, depending on the model. You must choose the right amount for your needs, because you can’t open the unit and add storage. Additionally, you can’t insert a flash drive (also known as a USB stick) to add backup capacity because the iPad has no USB port – or CD/DVD drive, for that matter. But Apple has thoughtfully provided iCloud, a service you can use to save space by backing up content to the Internet. (You can read more about iCloud in Chapter 3.)
Do you know how big a gigabyte (GB) is? Technically, it’s a billion bytes where a byte is the standard unit for digital information. A byte is typically 8 bits long where each bit is an on/off, yes/no, or 0/1 value (those terms are interchangeable in this context). So now do you know what a gigabyte is? Let’s try another route.
A gigabyte can contain 60 minutes of standard TV video running a 2.2 megabits per second (2.2 Mbit/s). A gigabyte can also contain 7 minutes of high definition TV (HDTV) running at 19.39 Mbit/s. The difference between HDTV and SDTV has to do with the size of the image, but the storage also depends on the speed with which it runs: A faster speed makes for a smoother playback, and a larger image size makes for clearer images. Both the speed and the image size together determine how good the video looks.
When downloading or playing video on any computer, if you have a choice of HDTV or SDTV, pick the version that gives you the best results. In the best case, choose HDTV, but because the files are going to be larger than SDTV, if you’re running out of storage space you might want to opt for SDTV.
If you are downloading video to view later (as opposed to viewing it now) you might want to do the download at an off-peak time and watch it in the best quality once it’s downloaded.
Don’t forget that downloading large files also costs you more if you’re not using a Wi-Fi connection. So the choice is yours based on how much storage space you have, how long you have to download the file, and how much – if anything