He didn’t claim you couldn’t do real work, he claimed there were better alternatives for your money.

And if real work is just taking notes, then I think you really need to question whether an iPad Pro is the right choice among the iPad lineup.

It's not nonsense, it's just different use cases. For office productivity applications, of course the majority of users will be just fine. For many technical people, 'real' work tends to mean heavy compute and/or I/O workloads which most laptops don't do well with let alone mobile devices.

I am an inveterate and incorrigible Mathematica user, as most of my “real work” deals with what might be best described in layperson’s terms as “symbolic math”.

Even though Wolfram has not (yet? hope always dies last!) released a version of Mathematica for the iPad (meaning, a frontend notebook coupled to an actual onboard computing kernel) they have released a client for “Wolfram Online” (often referred to as “Cloud Mathematica”) offering. This isn’t quite what I would like, as there’s a significant range of circumstances where I cannot rely on network access (such as when flying) but for most other situations it suits the purpose.

Other mathematics-inclined apps allow even greater range of onboard functionality (Pythonista, MathSudio spring to mind).

Upshot: one can most definitely do significant amounts of data analysis on an iPad.

I’m in the same boat: Wolfram Language has enlightened me (or you may say, corrupted me completely), so a prerequisite for any new computing device is that it can ran Mathematica.

Which is way I had to switch back from OpenBSD (which doesn’t run it) and Linux (which until today’s update, didn’t have HiDPI support) back to Mac OS.

Yes everyone has different use cases - so why do we denigrate some people's use cases as not 'real work'?

I think this is mainly a historical thing with Apple's product naming. Their 'pro' designation doesn't mean what it used to mean and so a lot of the denigration is probably more targeting Apple than their users.

A proper shell I can ssh with is really all I would need to do my real programming tasks. So even technical work could be broken down further.

I wouldn't use an iPad for this though. The shell's are all a compromise and I'm waiting for a great e-ink display so I can remote from a park / beach / patio.

I have relied on my small iPad Pro with the older Prompt SSH app for occasional light programming while traveling. For more regular SSHing, a laptop or Chromebook is better. That said, I love my iPad Pro and I admit a positive bias that may not face honest analysis.

Stop shutting your brain off because you don't like peoples terminology.

This argument pops up regularly on HN and it's always the same - it's all people talking past each other. One half is saying "iPads don't cover as many use cases as laptops" and the other half is saying "but look, my specific anecdotal use case is covered". You're not even disagreeing with each other, just missing the point.

He's not being a barrister on his iPad though, he's just taking notes. And I question whether an iPad pro gives you anything over the cheaper options for that.

> he's just taking notes

That's how a barrister does part of their work.

When I develop software I'm 'just writing a program'. But I'm not - I'm forming a mental model of what I want to do and working out how to express it.

You can make any job sound silly by reducing it to its constitutive actions.

My point is the barrister does most of their work outside of the software - taking notes is not unique to being a barrister. A software engineer, or artist, or architect, or CAD modeller, or audio engineer, or accountant (just some examples of the kind of work I'm thinking of) do the majority of their work in software. Some of these workflows are doable on an iPad, some of them are not. All of them are doable to a professional level on a regular PC or Mac though.

Actually, handwritten note taking in particular is a professional task that you can not do on a regular PC or Mac. As a theoretical physicist, doing math "on paper" is not something I can do on a PC or Mac, and doing it on an iPad is orders of magnitude better than using actual paper, as it allows for moving things around and revising.