I make a (good) living working as an iOS developer on the video editing app (LumaFusion) shown several times in today's event. We have a very solid userbase, including plenty of people using it for professional work. Apple chose to use the app as a featured example in marketing the new iPad. To me, that's all evidence that video/photo editing is indeed a "common" use case for these devices.

Anecdotally, these days my wife (an artist) does digital painting and photo editing exclusively on her iPad Pro because she prefers the software available there combined with the Apple pencil.

Yes, absolutely. In photography circles the iPad Pro is regarded as an amazing device that offers performance and color quality that you won't be able to achieve even with expensive desktop monitors. Also, for the professional photographer, whose average rig is probably worth at least 20 to 50k depending on what they do, a 2000$ tablet with these characteristics is a steal.

Well, now, that's interesting. I legitimately did not know that, even though I own three Blackmagic PCC4k video cameras and take quite an interest in 'playback technology', whether audio or imagery. I do know that my horrifyingly over-expensive iMac Pro has a good screen, but not Pro Display XDR good. I'd assumed the iPads were basically consumer grade.

So the iPad Pro actually does make sense for color timing and proofs and working in DaVinci Resolve etc? If the display is relevant for this, damn straight giving it a good CPU is going to matter.

People are going to be doing serious video color correction work on these things. I certainly won't… but it's going to start looking very compelling for that audience.

The screen is honestly amazing. Puts everything else in its field (and most pc / laptop monitors) to shame.

That was before the M1 laptops. I would say that most desktop users would be better served keeping their workflow than moving to a tablet workflow.

I do all my audio editing on the iPad. And I generate artwork (generally by mangling stock photos) on there. I also do a little bit of video editing but not enough to count it as a common use case.

It has a great screen, it's very fast, it has built in 4G and the single tasking nature also makes it my favourite tool for writing (including coding, if I don't have to do UI work as well).

For me, it's definitely a creation device and one of my favourite computers of all time.

It's also infuriating because it could do so much more - but as soon as it starts multi-tasking properly it will lose some of its strengths. Same goes for the magic keyboard - I use it a lot but the utility of it has to be balanced by the fact that it turns it into a laptop, which is something it's not.

As far as I can tell, those would better describe the use cases for the plain old iPad, whereas the iPad Pro is meant to be used for more content creation in addition to those things.

I've been a little confused about Apple's product lineup the last decade; does anybody else miss the foursquare grid of consumer/pro and desktop/portable?

You are not alone. :)

Do you really think apple would be making pro level devices for that exact purpose if people werent?