There are some issues that are specific to me, like the fact that I can't yet find a batch resizing and watermarking app that suits our system. That's not an issue that's going to affect the majority of folks who will use the device. The muscle memory for pretty much everything else still works, and, after a few days, I didn't even notice that I wasn't using a desktop -- except for the fact that you need to pull into Control Center to change music tracks, which is a total productivity killer.

One big trade-off between a personal computer and the iPad Pro is that the latter can't really be the center of your digital universe. An iPad can't host the sum of your iTunes media library, and you can't sync devices with it. If you're a fully paid-up member of the iCloud ecosystem, then that's less of an issue. But if you're still attached to physical media, you're not going to be able to make that split so easily.

Another criticism, and one that's often lobbed toward Apple, is that the iPhone and iPad are "closed" devices, hampering you from doing some of the things you would do on a desktop. Now, some of those things may not be on the right side of legality, but it may be something that you do anyway. Let's imagine, for instance, that you enjoy watching controversial condiment-based cartoon Rick and Morty.

Here in the UK, Rick and Morty is available to view on Netflix seven days after its initial US broadcast. That's easy to circumvent, however, since YouTube (and every other video hosting site on the internet) has streams of it available minutes after it airs. Now, on a desktop or laptop, you could simply visit one of the thousands of illegal streams on YouTube or elsewhere, save it to your hard drive and watch it at your leisure later. Or perhaps save it to a USB stick and then transfer it to a media player downstairs for family viewing.



You'll get no prizes for guessing that such a job is difficult and very fiddly to implement on an iPad without plenty of help. Because you can't simply save the file that's being played in Safari, you need to use some creative workarounds. A service such as KeepVid, for instance, will paste the purloined files to your Dropbox account, from which you can then move them on. For all of Apple's claims that iOS 11 will free your iPad from the tyranny of sandboxing, there's still plenty of incentive for you to keep to your lane.

iPads, for all of their compactness, aren't always the ideal machine for road warriors. On field trips, I use my MacBook Air's two USB ports to charge all of my digital devices, from my iPhone and headphones to my Kindle. That way, all I need to do is carry the charging cables, rather than the wall plugs, and I can charge up to three devices at a time.

An iPad, on the other hand, can share its battery only with the Pencil, and so is useless for power sharing. Whatever bag weight you've saved by not toting around a hefty laptop and its power adapter, you'll make back by bringing USB plugs for all of your various devices.

On the upside, the iPad Pro occupies a lot less horizontal space than a laptop, making it better-suited for working on a train or airplane. You'll never entirely eliminate the stresses of crunching elbows with your neighbor when typing, but it does help to mitigate the problem. And there are plenty of scenarios when the iPad's speed enables you to get short bursts of work done much faster.

I often think that iOS will always be relatively hampered because macOS exists. The former is a sleek, stripped-down race car designed for speed and getting people to their destination in record time. The latter, however, is a pickup truck, useful and slow and versatile in all the ways its sibling is not.

It's with that in mind that you should approach the notion of whether you could live your life with the iPad Pro as your primary -- nay, only -- machine. For the electronic minimalist in us all, the device can do plenty of the usual things you'd use a desktop for. But you'll always find that you can very easily butt up against the limits of what the iPad, and iOS 11, can do.

On the plus side, I love how focused the iPad Pro made me, and how comfortable the keyboard is to use. The screen, packing 120Hz ProMotion and True Tone display technology, is beautiful, and I actually really enjoyed spending time with it to work and read. Not to mention that, because it's so fast, light and portable, it's far easier to work with in places other than your office. You can prop it up beside you at breakfast or on the couch late at night, and it's much easier to use where space is at a premium than a laptop.

What you're giving up, however, is that sense of control and the ability to do what you want to do, how you want to do it. Because Apple has a very ingrained sense of how computing is done, and its devices are built to enforce that sense at all times. If you feel that you can cope with the rigidity, then you will probably have no qualms about making the switch.

It's weird, because on one hand, I feel like I could do 90 percent of my job with an iPad Pro and eliminate so much stuff from my office overnight. But that in doing so, I'd have to always have a laptop on standby for when I needed to do things that Apple doesn't want you to do. The biggest drawback to recommending one, right now, is that the iPad Pro is this useful only because of its Smart Keyboard, and the price for the two together is $968 for the base model 12.9-incher. This is an awful lot of money to spend on a very beautiful device that can't save a video straight from Safari or efficiently batch-resize camera images suitable for publishing.

Can an iPad Pro replace a personal computer? No, and it's likely that it won't be able to for some time. But do you really need a personal computer for the majority of the things you do each day?