Daniel Eran Dilger, writing for Apple Insider, put together this terrific post, detailing the hands on experience with the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. There are a number of videos embedded in the article, but the video below is the one I found most compelling.

The video shows Apple Pencil being put through some of its paces in Adobe Sketch. Watch the video, then come back and read on.

If you’ve ever used a tablet and pen/stylus, you’ve seen much of this before. From everything I’ve read and seen, Pencil captures the angle and force as well as any tablet, which may or may not include a pen for tablet, on the market, but it does so with no lag, becoming an almost perfect mirror of the tool being emulated. That’s what a high end tablet should do.

The “Aha” moment for me, involves content creation. I’ve always seen the iPad as a second class citizen when it comes to creating content. Unless I use an external keyboard, typing on an iPad is never as fast as on my laptop. Without outside assistance, the angle of the iPad is not easy to get just right, no match for my laptop’s hinged screen. Document creation and a management is more sophisticated, more capable in OS X. Drag and drop between applications, for example, has not been mirrored in iOS. Yet.

This is by no means a complaint. The advantage the iPad brings is obvious. Incredible portability, as well as compatibility between my iPhone and iPad and, more and more, between iOS and OS X. A perfect example of this is Safari. When I wake up in the morning, I grab my iPad and use Safari to dig in to the news of the day. When I move over to my Mac, I can access all the tabs I opened on my iPad in the OS X version of Safari. Easy peasy.

I love the portability of my iPad, but do the majority of my content creation on my Mac. I truly appreciate having both of them, truly appreciate the bridge Apple built between them.

Back to the “Aha” moment. Watching the video embedded below, I could see myself creating content on an iPad Pro that I could not create on my Mac, at least not without adding a pretty expensive tablet setup. It’s still pretty early in the game, app-wise, but I can see myself creating annotations, first cuts at graphics/logos/icons, page layouts, all with a direct touch and portability that I don’t have on my Mac.

With the iPad Pro, the stylus is a first class citizen, as opposed to a 3rd party add-on with limited app support. I’ll be interested to see how Pencil compares, head to head, with the stylus that ships with Surface and Samsung’s offerings. I suspect the Apple Pencil is head and shoulders a better experience.

Regardless, with the iPad Pro, I now see the iPad in a different light, not just as a content consumer, but as a first class content creation tool.