A cherished trap of foolish pundits over the years is “You can’t really work on an iPad.”
It has, of course, been a soup turin full of piping hot nonsense for years. The problem has always been defining the words “real” and “work.” Also, for some of these pundits, “soup.” One of them actually tried to drink a steak. He had to be rushed to hospital.
If you are a developer, sure, you are not going to do too much work on an iPad. Similarly, if you are a system administrator. But if you work on a factory floor, retail, or you are a writer (cough) or a manager who spends most of his days in email and corporate collaboration applications, you can work live-long on an iPad all day long. (And yet perhaps your company’s CEO will make a fraction of what he does in 30 seconds that he’s spent thinking about what “Turin” is. But that’s a different matter.)
Arguments against the iPad as a work device would have been more difficult to swallow if it had something to do with the work, rather than complaining about things like flash drive slots, the ability to run large application Xs and defined by very specific corporate provisioning rules. Bought everything.
The productivity potential of an iPad is always there for those who can take advantage of it. McCallup, for example, regularly wrote his columns on a first-generation iPad. It was the “real work” for which he actually got paid. We can argue that this is a living thing, but it has supported Horner for many years (apparently in conjunction with his lucrative glass poodle blowing business).
Regardless of the personal experience of this hairy pointer, people have always worked on the iPad, and the group of people who can do it has grown larger as the years go by.
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This year is no exception to say you will win a gold medal in the Olympic 100m short. First and foremost, you can finally get the weather on an iPad. Think about how productive you will be.
Joking aside, McAuliffe is happy that it finally happened, he’s just worried that now that it’s over we’re never going to get the real story. Why did it take so long.
The biggest knock against iPadOS over the years is its awkward multitasking interface. Stage Manager is the company’s latest attempt to bring the iPad multitasking to the forefront and, although it remains to be seen whether the company nailed it, it seems to be a clearer way to create as well as view and navigate multiple apps at the same time. Multiple workplaces. And when connected to a keyboard with a trackpad and plugged into an external monitor, the gap between the iPad and the Mac seems so small that even angels find it hard to dance.
McAuley has long argued that, unlike Microsoft’s approach to slapping a touch interface on Windows, Apple should reconsider the interaction, and it has done so. Even when it added a cursor to the iPadOS, it did so in a way that made sense and different than the Mac. Although the stage manager was first introduced to the Mac in yesterday’s keynote address, it was not understood until it was shown on the iPad.
Of course there are still certain types of work that are much harder or even impossible to do on an iPad. But they are constantly disappearing, and in the meantime, many of us are doing the right thing by paying to work on our iPads.
Of course, you still can’t make a glass poodle with one.