Much has been speculated on the future of ipads and mainstream computing. Most recently, that there needs to be a iPad Pro for real serious people that’s as large as a laptop, allows multiple windows - but also isn’t less ergonomic, more complicated to use, or less capable than OSX. So magic then.

Thing is, I think we may pretty much already have the iPad Pro - just buy another iPad and use them both together.

Imagine you have 5 sheets of paper stacked on top of each other, this is the ipad right now:

Even if you can quickly switch between pages, you can only view one thing at a time. This one screen, one app model is really easy to understand but doesn’t scale to complex workflows so well.

If you wanted to view two of those paper sheets side-by-side what would you do? You’d likely just put the pages next to each other.

In the same vein, if you wanted to view a news story, while editing a photo to put into a blogpost why wouldn’t you use a device for each task/app?

The reason you probably wouldn’t do that right now, is because iCloud isn’t sophisticated enough for this yet. But if it was?

• A designer working on a website with a stylus could have an image editor in one iPad, a copy of diet Coda in another and a site preview in another. iCloud would let you reference the image in your site’s code and the web preview would instantly update.
• Or, a programmer using a physical keyboard could grab an additional ipad to become a second (or third) text editing window. iCloud would detect the nearby device and enable a shared clipboard and a single active cursor between the devices.

You could probably come up with others, from everyday useful to full on apple ad.

Revolutionary products tend to look obvious in retrospect. Sometimes they’re obvious even earlier.

p.s. That being said, you’ll have to pry my Mac out of my cold dead hands.