I got my father an iPad Pro over the holidays - he loves it.
He uses it for listening to music, writing emails, and surfing - the same things you'd do with any laptop, but he likes the iPad form factor quite a bit.
Most importantly, the iPad Pro (and I guess, now the smaller iPad Pro) is the only platform in the entire world that offers competent Chinese stylus input.
Typing Chinese is a pain in the ass - there are several ways to do it and all of them largely suck and require a steep learning curve (and even then, still a pain in the ass). There has been a lot of demand for writing-based input methods, but most of the solutions so far have sucked a lot. The hardware surrounding it has been bad, and so has the software, which often required you to enter a single character at a time tediously, with poor recognition rates to boot.
The iPad Pro is the first device that let him write entire sentences at a time, which made input much faster and more natural (you used to have to write a character, pause, select from a list of guesses, repeat). Not to mention the low lag between pen movement and on screen display makes the whole process way more pleasant. Being able to write entire sentences also improves the recognition accuracy of the software, which tilts it from being useful-but-crappy to godsend.
That use case is only for dictionaries/looking up words, where you never need to type anything of any length at a time, thus high speed typing is not needed, which is exactly what is being discussed.
He uses it for listening to music, writing emails, and surfing - the same things you'd do with any laptop, but he likes the iPad form factor quite a bit.
Most importantly, the iPad Pro (and I guess, now the smaller iPad Pro) is the only platform in the entire world that offers competent Chinese stylus input.
Typing Chinese is a pain in the ass - there are several ways to do it and all of them largely suck and require a steep learning curve (and even then, still a pain in the ass). There has been a lot of demand for writing-based input methods, but most of the solutions so far have sucked a lot. The hardware surrounding it has been bad, and so has the software, which often required you to enter a single character at a time tediously, with poor recognition rates to boot.
The iPad Pro is the first device that let him write entire sentences at a time, which made input much faster and more natural (you used to have to write a character, pause, select from a list of guesses, repeat). Not to mention the low lag between pen movement and on screen display makes the whole process way more pleasant. Being able to write entire sentences also improves the recognition accuracy of the software, which tilts it from being useful-but-crappy to godsend.