The key feature that drove me to buy the 12.9" iPad Pro last year was the ability to read and mark up PDFs without having to constantly zoom/move it around. Old eyes.

I also use it to create routes for road trips for my Jeep club: it's really nice to have my GPS app and a satellite view side by side as I look for interesting back roads.

In short: I bought a Ferrari and use it like a Civic.

Would you mind elaborating a little on your workflow / apps used here please?

There's really not much to it.

I keep computer science/math-related PDFs in Dropbox, copy them to GoodReader (I've started experimenting a bit with other PDF apps, but GoodReader has been my go to for years now), and occasionally use Apple Pencil to mark them up as I read them. I don't save them back to Dropbox for future review; GoodReader is effectively its own island in that regard.

For GPS, I use Gaia GPS to create routes, often with Apple Maps and/or Google Maps running in split screen.

If you have specific questions, I can address them, but none of it is particularly formal.

Full-time PhD student, I use it for pretty much everything besides running actual simulations. It’s the only thing I take to the office.

LiquidText for reading books and articles, Notes Plus for note taking. Both are a little more finicky than other options, but they each have unique features I find indispensable. (If you haven’t completed a handwritten problem set with lasso-and-drag and scribble-to-erase, you don’t know what you’re missing.)

I do most of my writing straight into Google Docs on the Apple keyboard cover. I also have a LaTeX app and a Jupyter console (Juno) that see some use when I’m away from home, but I still prefer to work on that stuff at a PC.

Edit: Oh, and outside of work, I use GarageBand with a Lightning stereo condenser mic to record music. I doubt if anyone with real production skills would enjoy it, but it works perfectly for my purposes.

Scrivener and Goodreader. The latter stores a lot of PDFs and such for me. The former works out pretty well for working on documents while I'm out and about (versus taking my laptop). A nice feature of Scrivener is that you can attach files as well. So it's turned out to be a great study tool (that split-screen apps kind of eliminate the need for) because I can open a PDF of a text and have it adjacent to my notes on that section or the part of the paper I'm writing that's relevant to the PDF.

My secondary use case is board games. Carcassonne and others have pretty good ports which was very handy for playing with people while traveling or instead of carting a bunch of boxes (or bags) over to friends' homes. Everyone but me has gotten married and had kids so gaming is much less frequent these days, and usually hosted by the guy who has the biggest board game collection when we do gather.

My final (present) use case is tabletop roleplaying games, but that's also covered by my current device. Hero Lab has an iPad port which was handy for some games I ran in the past, and hope to run again in the future.

I write on Pages. The Shortcuts app is a great way to sutomste time tracking or anything else: toggl is good in conjunction with this.

Affinity designer is a great vector program. Lumafusion is good for editing, though I havem’t used it much. Ferrite is good for audio. Most areas have a few standout apps, depends what you want to do.

Explain everything is good for making educational videos.

Most of my team at a major financial switching from Surface to iPad Pro as daily driver.

Killer app is (a) ultra portability with genuinely all day battery and LTE for meetings and commute with (b) every tool an office user uses.

Some if us also code (servers and infra not desktop or mobile apps), works great for ‘Git Ops’ workflows.

I recently wrote an article[0] about how I use my iPad. A few of my favorites are: I write in Apple Notes and Working Copy[1] (for markdown). I wireframe and do basic layout design with Keynote. Keynote is surprisingly good for this, especially because I can collaborate easily with other team members. I also use Procreate[2] for sketching. I do some server management (mainly connecting to a RaspberryPi I carry) using Blink[3].

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[0] https://medium.com/@headquartershq/how-to-use-your-ipad-to-d... (fyi: there are some links to products we carry in this article, all app links are non-affiliate.)

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/working-copy/id896694807

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/procreate/id425073498

[3] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blink-shell-mosh-ssh/id11567...

Im comfortable plugging a USB keyboard into it and SSHing into a remote machine to do dev work.

I have a MacBook Pro as well now, so I hardly ever use the iPad Pro for that sort of thing anymore but it was a pretty good experience.

It’s also an excellent music creation device. I originally bought it so I could use apps like Korg Module and Gadget and it’s great for that purpose.

It’s also my favorite device for reading kindle textbooks.

Two of my children do most of their schoolwork on iPads now. They're 8th grade & freshman in college — one we got for drawing (2017 iPad Pro) and the other to view college textbooks (2018 basic iPad), and both quickly became primary devices because they're good enough for web and GSuite — and we got keyboard cases & Apple Pencil for each.

It's great in the creative industry (like painting) where you need to look at reference photos. I leave it on my desk to look at. Anything cheaper would do I suppose, but I prefer to go all out :p

I mostly use it for displaying sheet music / band charts, and occasionally as a Presonus Studio One remote control.

I think I would like to move to using Adobe Lightroom on the iPad.

What do you use for sheet music? I use ForScore with the Pencil, and it has been an amazing pairing that a magnet-mounted Pencil will only make better. One of my bandmates uses an Android tablet and generic stylus, and it's not even comparable how much better my setup is. I'm sure there are a dozen Android tablets with active styli, but I haven't seen them.

As a band leader, I have produced score material using Sibelius for years, and have been using Avid Scorch Sibelius file viewer on the iPad. Unfortunately, Avid seems not especially interested in supporting this product... this is a case where I can really see practical value in Free Software! I would love to be able to contribute some fixes and improvements.

But it works well enough.

I am looking forward to the Steinberg Dorico team putting out a MusicXML viewer for iPad... and have also occasionally contemplated developing one myself, to make sure I get the feature set I want. :-)

[There are good PDF-based systems, but we sometimes need to switch keys for vocalists, and MusicXML works better for that, if you don't know in advance to prepare a new document.]

All of my scores are PDFs scans of actual paper music I have (and own, copyright, etc), so ForScore being a glorified PDF viewer has been more than fine for me. It's super cool to hear about alternative uses, especially around more dynamic music notation, like MusicXML (of which I know nothing).

I've done iOS dev in the past (it's not my daytime gig at the moment), so if your contemplations ever get more serious and you want an enthusiastic partner, hit me up. I'd love to do something musical.

Contract management! Reading / searching / bookmarking sections works excellently on this, it just seems more natural than when using a normal laptop. More like reading a (significantly larger) paper copy of a contract.

I've used it at conferences and occasionally out and about when I need a machine with access to tools (browser, Slack, etc) but I know I won't be doing any development.

I really like OmniGraffle. It's got a free trial, but the trial is short enough that I'd wait to start it until you can spend a little time kicking the tires.