What 's your opinion?

[G+_Peter Upton]

What's your opinion? 

[G+_Dave Trautman]

Good points, Charles Walker. Within the context of what you wrote I would say a "professional" is someone who had equipment which someone else paid for. It might seem silly to think of it this way, but bear with me.

 

At a millwright job you don't bring your own computer controlled milling machine. You use the one the company has bought for the purpose they need. So a professional millwright is capable of using a variety of milling machines with different capacities and different specifications. A good millwright can move from one machine to the other and me just as effective.

 

Having said that, in the parallel world of milling materials, I would say a professional uses the computer which was either provided to them to do a specific job or which they acquired to be able to get contracts for doing said jobs. I am a professional in my field. I have 40 years of this. I have used gear which was provided to me when various companies employed me. As a contractor I have my own gear for doing what people need done, but those people who pay my contracts also bought me my equipment. In every case, whatever gear I needed I "invested" in through revenue from contract work specific to that gear.

 

Now let's address the iPad Pro.

 

I believe the Pro has a place in the professional field but it may not be with traditional computers. Doctors were late to the party when it came to accessing and inputing data about their clients. But with today's mobile devices they can bypass the paper and clipboard and get right to the database. And now, even millwrights, can look up specs, upload them to computer controlled milling machines, and monitor their progress using an iPad.

 

When I look at the revolution which happened in my field – when the tablet came out years ago – I feel proud of the widespread adoption and the enhanced collaboration it fostered on the teams. Paper was literally eradicated from conception to delivery. What was once a paper-driven industry with strict rules about text, colour, font, and binding has been transformed into an entirely digital sharing of the text and digital notations on the process, and with digital content as the product it is now delivered entirely in digital form. A short ten years is all it took.

 

Artists and engineers are an obvious market for the new iPad Pro. Sketching and drawing on the iPad has been demonstrated to be a remarkably better experience than ever before. But if you begin to image where the screen of the iPad is then indistinguishable from actual pencil and paper then you might look around you and see so many hundreds more professional applications. But it's an interesting question.