I don’t think he’s wrong. Apple and to an extent all tablet makers are treading somewhat uncertain ground here. As far as I can tell, people know what a tablet

I don’t think he’s wrong. Apple and to an extent all tablet makers are treading somewhat uncertain ground here. As far as I can tell, people know what a tablet computer should look like but nobody really knows what a tablet computer should feel like. Microsoft strangely has perhaps the most experience here, they’ve been meddling with the overlap between a traditional computer experience and one finally embracing new interactions for the longest but it's always been hamstrung by their at best questionable decisions in interface and is design. Partly by the nature of its marketing the iPad is currently this weird looking slice between phone and all the phone things we did and now do (actually talking to people, fitting in a pocket) and computers where the legacy of the past has meant you can do all these weird unsanctioned things with relative impunity. Until this point I don’t believe Apple actually cared much about ‘pro’ usage, other than the excuse for higher specs and a bigger price tag. Until then they were for using things up, not making them. As he points out in the article it only became even mildly possible to use iPads seriously to do work with the ability to multi-task, something dating back thirty years on other computers. In my experience one of the most annoying things about ios and it’s to their credit that it’s not the hardware that drove me mad trying to draw on graphics tablets, is the unwillingness to have applications interact. With a desktop you can just plonk a file down and have it be grabbed by something else, pipe it to a new process and carry on. With iOS there’s this maddening chunking of everything, from just trying to get a text document between programs to attempting to have an image library that isn’t split between various messaging applications and editors. I realise file systems are hairy and there’s a desire to protect the common person from it but I also wonder if anyone at Apple actually uses the iPads they create to do something like import and retouch a photograph. I’m sure I don’t know what the real solution is to this, but then again neither do some of the best funded engineering teams on the planet.