This is the start of a research article about the iPad Pro. My goal is to try and use the iPad Pro as a serious working device.

Apple touts the iPad Pro as the future of computing. They say that it’s an uncompromising vision of personal computing for the modern world. That it makes complex work as natural as touching, swiping or writing with a pencil.

As someone using a computer to make a living, it’s natural to want things bigger and better. For years we (and then I mean pro users) have been asking for more processing power, more ports and bigger screens.

If there’s a new development in computing I want to test it. If there’s something that could improve my productivity – even in a minor way – I have to try it. At some point in the not too distant past I had three 27 inch screens on my desk at the same time. Maybe that was a bit too much, but it was worth the try. I wanted all my screens to be retina, I wanted a faster Macbook, I wanted all of it.

Around that time I moved to Japan, and because of the fact that was in a coworking space moving from desk to desk I had to rely on a single screen to do my work. It was just my Macbook and nothing else. In the beginning I thought I really needed all that screen space to be productive but what ended up happening is that I had some of the most productive work months of my life there – all on a single 15″ screen.

For years for every Apple Keynote I’ve been hoping for a better Macbook. But I think what Apple is showing us with the iPad Pro is that the future maybe isn’t a continuation of the past. Maybe iOS as a whole is a new break in computing that in the end will make us much happier than the old school world of moving files around.

I think that with every release they are trying to make it more powerful without turning it into something bad. And maybe they’re succeeding. This is the first one in a series of posts where I examine the iPad pro as a serious computing device. I wrote this blog post on the iPad and I must say that went quite smoothly.