Six things I learned from using the iPad Pro for Real Work™

Shh, don't rock the boat

They're so desperate to try and make those slablets important, don't ruin their illusions.

Those things have their uses, but when surfing, email and chat are in the top 5 apps to use, you take the rear of the line when actual work is concerned.

Re: blast away

Too late to edit to update my original post, but here are the numbers:

the A10X achieves:

a single-core score of 3929 and a multi-core score of 9372.

the entry-level 15-inch MacBook Pro achieves:

a single-core score of 4255 and a multi-core score of 13,727

Do they use iPads too?

Slight context change there, since this is a tech website and neither of those are technology jobs, though of course it does illustrate that office work is pretty physically undemanding. I would submit however, that if a carer in a geriatric ward is going to be using computing technology, in the future it will be increasingly likely to look more like an iPad than a desktop or laptop computer.

Real work my arse, try being a fisherman in the North Atlantic or a carer in a geriatric ward.

I design water systems to avoid contamination of drinking water. A job that could easily be done on a tablet, while sitting on a sofa, sipping an iced latte. Is that not real work?

The only exercise afforded by that is a bit of muscle-toning when picking up huge folders full of regulations and datasheets - and arm strengthening by hurling disgusting iced lattes as far away as possible...

As stated above, people who work on geriatric wards also spend quite a lot of time sitting on their arses filling out forms. In my experience of those wards, a good deal too much time on their arses, and not enough time dealing with the actual patients...

"Real work my arse, try being a fisherman in the North Atlantic or a carer in a geriatric ward."

Having spent my teenage years living on North Uist and having summer jobs working on fishing boats in the (admittedly close to the coast) Atlantic and now working as a Software Developer I may be uniquely placed to answer this one!

I can categorically say that while at sea we had no call for (or time to make use of) an iPad, your comment makes no sense and you have completely failed at your trolling attempt. Get back under your bridge.

Is being a Biological Scientist work? See when I have to go into the Maus Haus (phonetically works in both languages) with restrictions on what can be brought in for infection control reasons and taking the animal management database (FileMaker) in as printouts is clumsy and so last century (did plenty of that) but put it and FM on a slab and take that in and sync with the desktop db when you get back?

Sure a stylus helps for when one is wearing nitrile gloves, but they can be taken off (note to safety Johnnies: I have a biology PhD and am perfectly capable of assessing when it is safe to take my fecking gloves off).

The work is physical and frequently dirty (they launder lab coats/scrubs for one) and my family can tell when I've done a session by the smell on my cuffs despite the above.

I once spent most of two week in there taking out mouse intestines, from duodenum to anus, slitting them lengthways, cleaning them out, cutting into length sections and pinning flat in dishes (Sylgard on the bottom) under fixative. I did most of it under saline and breathed through my mouth and mouse intestinal contents are very fibrous and look a bit like sawdust for most of the time but the smell is the smell. Does that count as 'real work'?

"real work" but inside the RDF

Please do not compare those apples to these oranges.

Remember, these are products that are entry paraphernalia into the <i>Reality DIstortion Field.</i> He won't really be handling nitroglycerine or powerful explosives, talking about Real Work

Re: "Office just isn't good enough"

Yes, you can use, for example, TexPad.

Worse than that - flat keyboard and non-adjustable screen angle, No thanks.

If you want to do "proper" work, you need Windows (I hate to say it), proper Windows, not half-baked Metro-eqsue Windows CE equivalents

Well I'd say you need a proper desktop OS, be it your choice of Windows, *nix or MacOS in whatever is your preferred flavour.

On the rest we agree.

A good few years ago now, my father was looking at getting a tablet for when he was away from home. I pointed him at the Asus Transformer line, with the Atom processors, so they could run full x86 Windows. It's been working great for him.

"things that are attached but flimsy will break the first time you grab it"

I've been using a Surface for over 4 years, and the keyboard is thin but quite sturdy - and not bad to type upon even for a long time. No issue to use a mouse when you need it.

Many users don't need virtual machines on their systems - that's mostly a thing for IT people.

Funny that...

... Here multiple executives are very good at using the Surface Pro. I have yet to see someone here using an iPad Pro...

What is all this crap about "proper work". We've got the reverse-snobbishness above, who says it ain't workin' if you're not a'fishin' the salty seas for cod! Aaaarrrrrhhhh! Then we've got people here saying it's not working if you're not furiously typing and tabbing between windows.

Surely it's horses for courses.

Some of our road warriors get vast amounts of work done on a phone, sitting on a train. If you've read Orlowski's reviews before (particularly his almost obsessive love for the old Blackberry), you'll know that he has to go through vast numbers of emails - and most of what he's doing is ignoring/sorting/filing/planning. Many emails only require a short reply, which can be pecked out on a horrible onscreen keyboard - leaving long composition for a time in the day when you've got access to something better.

In fact I'm office-based, and it's rare I'll send an email longer than a couple of paragraphs. Mostly if it's complex, I'll phone someone up - something else you can do well on the move. In fact it's essential - any long email will require information I can only get talking to someone - and asking them the questions they didn't know they needed the answers to, before I can then sit down for a couple of hours to do calcs and compose an email with the answers.

Copy and Paste is often a vital feature though, and the original iPad is still shit at that. I get the impression the Pro isn't much of an improvement, except in a few cases. Apple also seem to have lost total discipline with their UI, by just allowing loads of new gestures, seemingly with not that much logic to it. Now you need a long tutorial video to work it all out, whereas you used to be able to pick an iPad up and work it out with no help whatsoever.

And the pencil is tragic. To add it with almost no handwriting support is pathetic. You still can't do hand-writing recognition in Apple's own email app, but have to copy and paste (still shit) from a dedicated hand-writing app. My £550, HP 2005 Vista convertible tablet/laptop thingy could do that!

"If you want to do "proper" work, you need Windows (I hate to say it), proper Windows"

Funny - that's one thing I avoid whenever I need to do actual work. Some people might want it, but I suggest that's familiarity rather than need.

Unix works just fine... At the moment I'm sat with a BSD derived box at my fingertips. Makes a rather good tool, and is my 'work' machine.

I also have some experience of using the iPad as a productivity tool - for a while we went 'computerless' at home, and my wife wrote a book on her iPad2, with an apple bluetooth keyboard. The iPad has now basically stopped being useful (used occasionally for things), but I still use that keyboard when I work whilst travelling, since a keyboard and iPad mini actually make a great little work device - fits far better on a train/plane table than a laptop ever does.

One of very few things I struggle to do on the iPad is to remotely control a PC UI... And frankly I'm not surprised... I do wish they'd allow a pointing device (heck even if it's an app on a companion iDevice).

(Amusingly computerless is autoscrewuped to computerises)

"Details like... you can't drag-drop nicely, manage files, save a JPEG... god."

Details that don't exist you mean?

I can manage files just fine on an iPad/iPhone using FileExplorer. It's easy to keep them appropriately filed and tidy on my NAS, DropBox, GoogleDrive, OneDrive, WebDAV, Box, etc.

As to JPEG, I can export as JPEG, PNG or whatever the heck I like, depending on the App.

Here, for example, is the list of import/export formats supported by ArtStudio.

Import: Images - PNG, JPEG, PSD, HEIC, TIFF, Brushes - ABR, TPL, Color swatches - ASE, ACO, Patterns - PAT, Gradients - GRD, Fonts - TTF, OTF

Export: Images - PNG, JPEG, PSD, TIFF

Knocking Apple/iOS is fine by me, but try to do it from a basis of knowledge rather than ignorance.

Re: It isn't there

Sorry, but IOS is NOT a replacement for a proper working environment. I did try to do it, but failed very quickly.

I'm confident it was never intended to do real "productivity" working with multiple applications and multiple windows open concurrently. What this should do is run a task specific function for non-power users, but still be able to do a fair bit more than a basic tablet, thus avoiding the need for a full fat PC, or run more complicated stuff but in "consumption" rather than "creation and input" mode.

Think how senior managers are usually clueless around a PC. This gives them the pricey comfort blanket (and office prestige) of Apple, the ability to open the exec briefing papers, the finance spreadsheets, dabble a little bit, and that's all that is required. They won't even have it iin use for a full day, so the battery life is no problem. Apple don't want to be fighting in the cost conscious IT-for-the-hoi-polloi market, so wider limitations compared to commodity PCs don't matter, and real power users are the tiniest of tiny minorities - Apple can't compete there simply because of the processor grunt and OS limitations across their range.

Re: A mobile OS will need, eventually, to become a desktop OS for real work...

and that will require a lot of redesign of both the OS and applications.

It's mainly the UI that needs work and both Android and IOS have been making strides in that direction for years. Some apps will just look stupid without any changes but they can be configured to run in phone size windows.

Both OSes already provide most of the service for pre-emptive multitasking, printing, etc. Not sure what's really missing.

Apple's numbers for sales of the I-Pad Pro show that there is a market for this and developers that focus on it could do well.