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Comment by hazelnut-tree | Hacker News Reader

The iPad and Apple Pencil are hugely popular for artists and designers. The leading iPad app for digital painting is Procreate. (Adobe are late to the game with their own painting app called Fresco. However, Adobe has failed to dent the popularity of Procreate.)

There is also a wide variety of design apps for the iPad (e.g. Clip Paint Studio, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

The Apple Pencil offers superb pressure sensitivity - why the iPad is so popular for artists, illustrators and designers.

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The iPad Air fully supports the second-gen pencil and Procreate. Only difference is the screen isn't as big

The difference in refresh rate is VERY noticeable for Apple Pencil users. There is noticeable lag on the Air.

I haven't used a Pro so I guess I can't properly compare them, but I've used the pencil quite a bit on my Air and I don't feel any latency at all

The latency on the Air is quite low, but it's half that again on an iPad Pro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Pl_vIkMgtI

The Air is better than any other tablet out there so it feels like it ought to be the best. Then you try the Pro and realize there’s a whole ‘nother level you didn’t know existed.

Lag on the Air is noticeable. I don’t mean inconveniently so. The Air is extremely good. But I mean you can literally notice a delay between movement and registration of that motion on the app.

The Pro on the other hand is so fast you can’t even tell there’s a delay. It’s like the difference between 60fps and 144fps in VR. It crosses the uncanny valley from being a human computer interface and knowing that it is, to just feeling like it is a pen writing on a glassy surface.

It's even better on the Pro! Display is 120Hz, and it scans for pencil input at 240Hz.

I sold my 11" iPad pro for the 12.x version specifically because drawing in the smaller screen wasn't as good. But it's a 2018 model so less relevant.

Overall I use it for painting and a kitchen computer for recipes/YouTube while I'm cooking.

Probably not a pro use case.

I have a bunch of audio production apps on it but tbh the iPad audio workflow sucked so hard compared to desktop I just stopped using it for that. There are some cool apps (koala sampler, fugue machine, etc etc) but the lack of audio out and routing audio between apps kind of sucks.

The screen size difference is more than enough to justify the price difference for art.

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