The difference between the 9.7" iPad and the 9.7" iPad pro is not intuitive, at least to me. If it is not obvious how different products serve different needs, then you aren't actually expanding the market your product appeals to, you are just confusing customers.

Do you need a better screen with the stylus? If yes, iPad Pro, else iPad.

I mean, this is kind of ridiculous. All beers, wines, sodas come from bottles that are exactly the same size, how do you know if you like Budweiser or Heineken.

A good restaurant or non beer-focused bar might have a curated selection of one or two examples of each style. Their customers just want something good to pair with their food.

But go to a good bottle shop or beer bar and you'll find sub-styles within sub-styles. Want an IPA? Will that be West Coast or New England? Double or single? Fruit adjuncts? OK, Which fruits? Beer geeks will seek out places with these choices.

Choice is good, sometimes. :-)

Pro offers:

- Better processing power

- Better sound (more speakers)

- Better resolution cameras (about +4MP on both)

- Thinner (1.4 mm)

- Lighter (.04 lbs)

- Higher storage capacity

- Pencil & Keyboard (the ipad smart KB, bluetooth should work on both) support

And possibly the non-pro does not have P3 wide color gamut support?

If I was buying one for a family member I would buy the iPad, not the pro unless I specifically knew they needed one of these features—of which, the keyboard and pencil support seem most probable, cameras probably second.

Personally, I have the pro with the keyboard and pencil, and I love it for most day to day use. I have not yet tried to code on it, but I am dubious that I will ever be able to rely on it as my primary/only computing device. However, for meetings, classes or speaking engagements I find it highly versatile and fits a niche my laptop never would.

Usually it's not that easy, and tech releases are shockingly hard to understand, and in my opinion most of the ambiguities are pure laziness. Since the topic at hand is Apple, let's pick out some examples from their small'ish product line:

* There's no way to know, without doing extra research, that the iPhone 'S' suffix means "better." 'S' could easily mean "small." The 'C' suffix is even more ambiguous.

* The iPhone SE is probably the most ambiguously named product they've released in years. Now it's even worse, because once you know that the SE stands for "Special Edition," releases like the iPhone 7 (RED) Special Edition make it even harder to understand where the SE fits in.

* Apple still sells MacBook Airs, except they made the MacBook do what the Air used to do and they've all but discontinued Airs.

* They're advertising the iPad 9.7", which is just the newest version of the iPad, except they already have an iPad Pro 9.7", so if you search for 9.7" on Google or look around Apple's store you mostly see mostly results for the Pro 9.7". In fact on the buy iPad 9.7" page doesn't even say 9.7" anywhere except when referencing the Pro.

Of course Apple isn't the only tech company that does this; they just used to be one of the better ones, and now they're slowly giving up that advantage. The more technical a company thinks its userbase is, the lazier it gets with naming. Computer components, for example, have names that are so useless you basically have to infer their positioning by their MSRP. (Spec sheets are only marginally helpful; your only real option is to search for benchmarks.) This is not a good thing; everyone benefits from clearer naming conventions. Many companies just don't think it's important, for some reason.

Dunno if there are other fogeys like me who remember the days going back to the Imagewriters, Stylewriters and Laserwriters -- those were fantastic printers in the pre-USB era where third party printer pickings were quite slim for Apple users.

In the late 80s, you could even get a third party scanner in the shape ink cartridge called a Thunderscan for the Imagewriter.

That was indeed very cool. The much lower complexity of the technology involved is what made these kind of feats possible tho- there's no way you could pull off something like that in this age of hyper miniaturized, specialized hardware components- that's why something like Project Ara was doomed from the start.