So an interesting question about the current polemicising about whether the iPad Pro is “real” computer or not and I’m going to add a little current story to the mix about how an iPad Pro can be a really useful tool.
So today I was spending some time in a server room at a small company and we were upgrading the storage system and I was dealing with the fact that the previous sysadmin adhered to the (incomprehensible) policy of leaving extra space between the servers in the rack. This meant that I needed to free up some additional space by moving a bunch of equipment in the rack to consolidate the available free space into a 2U block where I could install the new disk expansion enclosure. Fortunately, I got enough space from moving some ESXi servers so it’s just a matter of putting them in maintenance mode, shutting them down, deracking, moving the rails, re-racking, boot up and on to the next one.
Side note: rail technology has really improved a lot in the last few years. Dealing with the old stuff is a real PITA - good thing I always travel with a multi-tool – as much for the screwdriver as for a solid chunk of metal to whack things.
So of course I had my MacBook Pro connected to the network (no wifi in the server room) and wasn’t paying attention to the fact that I was chewing through my battery with the backlight on full and that the room only had PDU style plugs and I didn’t have that adapter with me. So the inevitable happened and I ran out of power.
But since I travel with the iPad Pro as well, I realised that there is nothing about the general tasks of operating an infrastructure that actually require a full-fledged desktop OS to do the job. What I needed were :
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Safari to access the vCenter HTML5 UI along with a few other internal web-based tools
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Prompt for SSH access into a ZFS server that needed some maintenance
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Microsoft Remote Desktop to access the Windows only management tool for the storage system we were upgrading
Now that the new iPad Pro uses USB-C instead of Lightning, I was able to simply plug in the USB-C Ethernet Adapter that had been connected to my MacBook and I was off to the races.
Next trip I’m going to start with the iPad Pro and see how far I get – I suspect the running out of battery won’t be an issue…