Technology

This is a public service announcement. The latest and greatest iPad, namely the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, will cost you $2,227 to buy in its best configuration and with the basic accessories that make it worth having in the first place. Plus tax, of course. I&m not making a value judgment here, just stating the facts. Tablets are getting pretty damn expensive.

To be clear, herewhat you&d be getting for that price.

• iPad Pro base cost $999
• Upgrade from 64GB to 1TB storage: $750 (!)
• Cellular chip: $150
• New Apple Pencil: $129
• Smart Keyboard Folio: $199

Tax varies. Shippingfree, at least.

To me the cost of the base device is actually not bad, though I wouldn&t buy it. It really does look like a fine device, if you can get over the curved screen edges and minuscule bezels that will probably make you drop it. I can really see how the 12.9-inch iPad Pro could be a great tool for some artists, assuming they&re already successful enough to afford it. Good stylus surfaces are expensive and the iPad has proven itself to be at the very least competitive.

The storage is, as always, the eye-wateringly expensive upgrade that doesn&t really jibe with the cost of the actual components. Good flash storage isn&t super cheap, but it isn&t $750 a terabyte. A good M.2 drive of that capacity and speed is perhaps $150, and thatincluding the interface and so on. Apple charging an arm and a leg for upgraded storage is nothing new, but they somehow manage to make it just as shocking every time.

The cellular is another upsell that probably isn&t worth it, considering it also incurs a monthly cost. If it was a low-speed Amazon-style free service, I&d do it in a heartbeat to keep my notes and saved articles up to date. But itgoing to run you $150 upfront and probably almost that every year as an added device to your plan. (Could be a nice option to have if you travel a lot, though.)

The accessories are expensive, but that new stylus and its snap-on charging (hardly an Apple innovation but nice to have) sure do look nice. You&ll need a keyboard if you&re going to do anything but sketch and read comics on this thing.

Tablet computer or computer tablet

And adding the keyboard is really where you start to blur the line between tablet and &real& computer. Of course, the Microsoft Surface, bless its heart and its tiny sales numbers (unflatteringly called out by Apple on stage), is the one that has made strides here over the last few years and Apple is merely drafting it. Thatfine — itbeen the other way around plenty of times.

But the difference when you start looking at the apps and features is pretty serious. The iPad Pro is certainly the most productive and professional tablet out there, but as soon as you add a keyboard and set it down on your lap, it starts competing with laptops. And the Surface lineup, while it may lack some of the polish of the iPad, is arguably more powerful both in specs (hard to compare Intelchips to Appledirectly in this case) and certainly in software capability.

I suppose that last point is arguable, as well, but lettry to be honest with ourselves. A Windows computer can do more than an iPad.

Microsoftdevice, after all, is a full-blown computer that acts like a tablet when you want it to, not vice versa. Thatimportant. If I was going to spend $2,000 on a daily driver (though honestly, thereno need to), I sure as hell wouldn&t pick the one with all kinds of weird, half-formed multitasking gestures, semi-functional cross-app compatibility and app features and selection highly curated and restricted by the people who own the store. And this is coming from someone who likes Macs and iPads!

For the same price as the iPad Pro discussed above, you could get a Surface Pro 6 with 16 gigs of RAM (Apple doesn&t specify how much the iPad Pro has, and if it doesn&t crow about it, that usually means itnothing to crow about), a better processor (Intel Core i7, same generation) and… well, if you want that terabyte of storage you&re still going to pay through the nose. Maxing it out (including accessories) costs you a couple hundred more than the best iPad you can get, but I think you&d be getting much more value for your dollar.

Plus the Surface has a headphone jack.

That said, thereno reason to go all-out on either of these things. Thatthe real trap that both companies want you to fall into. Save money and buy last yearmodel or the year before, save yourself a thousand bucks and take a vacation instead. You deserve it.

Cockroach Labopen source SQL database, CockroachDB, has been making inroads since it launched last year, but as any open source technology matures, in order to move deeper into markets it has to move beyond technical early adopters to a more generalized audience. To help achieve that, the company announced a new CockroachDB managed service today.

The service has been designed to be cloud-agnostic, and for starters itgoing to be available on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Cockroach, which launched in 2015, has always positioned itself as modern cloud alternative to the likes of Oracle or even AmazonAurora database.

As company co-founder and CEO Spencer Kimball told me in an interview in May, those companies involve too much vendor lock-in for his taste. His company launched as open alternative to all of that. &You can migrate a Cockroach cluster from one cloud to another with no down time,& Kimball told TechCrunch in May.

He believes having that kind of flexibility is a huge advantage over what other vendors are offering, and todayannouncement carries that a step further. Instead of doing all the heavy lifting of setting up and managing a database and the related infrastructure, Cockroach is now offering CockroachDB as a service to handle all of that for you.

Kimball certainly recognizes that by offering his companyproduct in this format, it will help grow his market. &We&ve been seeing significant migration activity away from Oracle, AWS Aurora, and Cassandra, and we&re now able to get our customers to market faster with Managed CockroachDB,& Kimball said in a statement.

The database itself offers the advantage of being ultra-resilient, meaning it stays up and running under most circumstances and thata huge value proposition for any database product. It achieves up time through replication, so if one version of itself goes down, the next can take over.

As an open source tool, it has been making money up until now by offering an enterprise version, which includes backup, support and other premium pieces. With todayannouncement, the company can get a more direct revenue stream from customers subscribing to the database service.

A year ago, the company announced version 1.0 of CockroachDB and $27 million in Series B financing, which was led by Redpoint with participation from Benchmark, GV, Index Ventures and FirstMark. They&ve obviously been putting that money to good use developing this new managed service.

Apple drove the final nails in the home buttoncoffin on Tuesday, removing the once ubiquitous feature from its new line of iPad devices.

The new iPad Pro devices, revealed at TuesdayApple event in New York,no longer have a home button. The design move, which is meant to make room for a bigger, more compelling display, follows the home buttonremoval on the iPhone. Apple alsodropped the Lightning port withthe new iPad Pro and moved to the USB-C.

The new iPad Pro, which comes in two sizes, is now unlocked with Face ID. Itbeen redesigned to work in any direction too, so thereno &wrong way& to unlock it.

Once the device is unlocked, userswill be able to perform actions using on-screen gesture controls to access the feature they need. For instance, users can swipedown from the upper-right corner to get to the control center, or swipe up from the bottom toaccess the dock. In short, itgoing to be the same kind of gesturesused for the newiPhone 10.

Apple started phasing out the home button in 2017, beginning with itspremiumiPhone X handset. It kept the physical home buttons on cheaper iPhones. But we all knew their time would come.

That hammer dropped in 2018 and Apple cleared the home button from its newiPhone XS, iPhone XS MaxoriPhone XR.