I want the new iPad Pro, which is in a league of its own but for one thing: iOS still can’t be used for work unless your job has no workflow. Nilay Patel’s review sums up why it remains a poor tool for professionals who have to deal with files.
…either you have to understand the limitations of iOS so well you can make use of these little hacks all over the place to get things done, or you just deal with it and accept that you have to go back to a real computer from time to time because it’s just easier. And in that case, you might as well just use a real computer.
I had the last-gen iPad Pro and spent a lot of time trying to make it work for me, and eventually gave up.
All the workflow problems seem to result from iOS’s security model, where apps live in their own sandboxes and can’t access the file system or other apps’ boxes. The “Files” app acts as a bridge between apps but doesn’t provide access to a shared set of genuinely-accessible local files and therefore leads inexorably to headaches. For me, this situation only got worse when I started adding third-party file system apps, because they were really just complicated clones of the “Files” app or cloud/network synching services masquerading as file systems. The more I squirmed, the more annoying and frustrating it got.
If you want an iPad Pro, the sad fact is you probably need a Microsoft Surface, with its own mirror-world of compromises: complexity, slowness, pen latency, bloated OS features and general lack of fun.