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The iPad Pro is an amazing computer that is also pretty frustrating because the software is not yet there. In combination with the Pencil, it becomes an incredible tool for sketching out ideas. I love Paper by 53 for this, and it has replaced paper and pencil for me. It is simply so much more convenient to always have multiple colors, intelligent sketching tools (especially the pencil simulation is brilliant), and a perfect eraser with you that it easily trumps the added space of A3 paper.

It continues to be an iPad, and this means it remains very useful for reading data sheets, as well as marking up any texts. In fact, the large screen combined with a still reasonable weight are the best compromise for a working tablet so far: it has almost completely replaced usage of my iPad Air, since you can’t beat the extra screen space, while remaining light enough to be used while walking.

Writing longer texts is more frustrating, though. It starts with the keyboard support: external ones are adding quite a bit of extra weight, and interacting with the screen is easier when you can quickly move on a trackpad instead of having to move your arm to actually touch the screen. If you put a Bluetooth one to the side, you still lose the onscreen keyboard, which would be very handy for adding a few letters for editing. Typing on glass is not a great experience on the iPad Pro, either. The main problem is that it lacks a haptic reference for your fingers to create a muscle memory for typing. Creating a small indentation in the middle of each side would offer a reference for our thumbs to rest, so that our other digits could learn where the letters are. I believe this is also the reason why I am typing faster on an iPhone than the iPad, the fixed reference from holding the iPhone more than making up for the smaller keys.

The frustration results from the high expectations, and the many small ways in which the software is still incomplete: no builtin way to access additional characters in fonts, no control about font features, neither Word nor Pages allow you to define your own styles, you cannot insert a diagram from OmniGraffle into a text document, organizing documents by project is finally possible, but complicated with document providers¹. There is already software to cover 90% of your needs². But those remaining 10% mean that many still have to wait awhile until the software has caught up. While the iPad Pro has already become my most used computer, there are still enough crucial tasks that require me to switch to my Mac from time to time.

The iPad Pro is a computational power house. It is roughly a match for the MacBook, and even the fastest desktop processors are less than twice as fast in single core performance. With the A9X chip, Apple has made the interesting decision to optimize the general processor for single core performance, and spent a lot of resources to include a powerful GPU that can do parallel workloads via compute shaders. I believe this is the correct decision, especially with a shared memory model that allows us to quickly move tasks between CPU and GPU. It also means that it will take some time for software developers to adapt to this paradigm, as well as to finish supporting more functionality in their iOS software. In the end, the hardware is there, powerful enough to support everything you are now doing on a laptop, and I am optimistic that the software will follow within a few years as well.