A cherished trope of idiot pundits for years has been “You can’t do real work on an iPad.”

This, of course, has been a tureen full of hot nonsense for years. The problem has always been to define the words “real” and “work”. Also, for some of these experts, “soup”. One of them actually tried to drink a steak. He had to be rushed to hospital.

If you’re a developer, of course, you’re not going to do much work on an iPad. Likewise, if you are a system administrator. But if you work in a factory, in retail, or if you’re a (cough) writer or manager whose days are largely spent in enterprise messaging and collaboration apps, you can work all day. on an iPad. (And still probably do a fraction of what the CEO of your company does in the 30 seconds he spent wondering what a “tureen” was. But that’s a different issue.)

Arguments against the iPad as a work device would have been harder to swallow if they had something to do with work instead of complaining about things like flash drive slots, the ability to run LARGE APPLICATION X and very specific corporate sourcing rules defined by organizations that purchase everything from a single company in Renton, Washington.

The productivity potential of an iPad has always been there for those who could take advantage of it. La Macalope, for example, regularly wrote her columns on a first-generation iPad. It was “real work” for which he was paid. We may wonder if it’s a money-maker or not, but it has sustained the horny for many years (obviously in conjunction with his lucrative business of blowing poodles out of glass).

Regardless of this furry pontiff’s personal experience, people have always worked on the iPad, and the group of people who can do so has only grown over the years.

IDG

To say this year is no exception would earn you a gold medal in the Olympic 100 meters. First and foremost, you can finally get the weather on an iPad. Think about how much more productive you will be.

Kidding aside, the Macalope is happy that it finally happened, he just fears that now that it has happened we’ll never get the real story. why did it take so long.

The biggest knock on iPadOS in years has been its clunky multitasking interface. Stage Manager is the company’s latest attempt to bring sanity to multitasking on the iPad, and while it remains to be seen if the company has pulled it off, it seems like a much clearer way to view and navigate. in several applications at the same time, as well as to create several workspaces. And when connected to a keyboard with a trackpad and plugged into an external monitor, the gap between iPad and Mac seems so small that even angels can hardly dance in it.

The Macalope has long argued that unlike Microsoft’s approach of slapping a touch interface on top of Windows, Apple should rethink interactions and it’s done. Even when it added a cursor to iPadOS, it did so in a logical and different way than the Mac. While Stage Manager was first shown on the Mac during yesterday’s keynote, it wasn’t until it was shown on the iPad that it made sense.

There are arguably still some types of work that are much harder or even impossible to do on an iPad. But those are steadily disappearing, and in the meantime, many of us are doing just fine getting paid to work on our iPads.

Of course, you still can’t make glass poodles with just one.