The 13-inch iPad Pro was made for the internet, not creatives.

I did it. My bank account was now less $799 + tax and I was sitting, staring at 13 inches of glass knowing I held either one of two things: my latest impulse purchase, or a true game changer… a device that could completely revamp my workflow and increase my productively tenfold, or another checkbox on the list of cool, but ultimately unnecessary product purchases that seem all-to-common in the 21st century.

I powered it on, and with almost 6 million glorious pixels gazing deep into my retinas I pulled out my Apple Pencil, reclined, and downloaded the recommended suite of apps so that I might become the dynamic, mobile creative powerhouse all the commercials, advertisements, and actors told me I could be.

I drew, I made mockups, I illustrated, I exported (thanks Adobe). And you know what? It was pretty great. Boy, that Apple Pencil sure is a fancy thing. After exhausting my creative juices, I relaxed. I put on a pot of tea, kicked my feet up, rested the bottom of the Pro against my stomach and opened Safari.

I browsed to dribbble… heart, heart, heart… browsed to Bloomberg.. hello blue.. browsed to Medium and started catching up on my daily reading… and that’s when it hit me. This is a game changer, but not for the reasons I had presumed.

The iPad Pro’s killer feature is the browser.

The web is a document-oriented medium. HTML “documents” both are and were constructed by piecing together semantic elements leveraging physical analogies such as the paragraph, header, and table to construct navigable “pages”. Because the web, as a digital medium, is only made tangible through indirect interaction through some sort of user interface, the need for a page break is replaced by the ability to scroll and traverse an entire document without regard for its total length.

Ignore rich web applications for the moment, while pertinent, they are innovations on a technology that was leveraged in the beginning for a fundamentally different purpose, document ingestion. The semantics of the web’s native markup language to this day uses metaphors that enforce a static physicality.

A significant portion of the web remains textual, even with the dissemination of our attention across various forms of media. For the first time on the web, we have a device that natively embraces the nature of the medium.

Laptop browsing is the vertical video of the web.

I sit with a 12 inch macbook, perfectly designed in a clamshell-like fashion such that when I close the screen, it will physically align with the shape of the standard qwerty keyboard upon which I am writing this article. This physical kismet forces me into a landscape orientation that is wonderful for watching movies, but not optimal for much else.

If you are like me, you are reading this article in a browser that is not taking full advantage of the width of your screen. The sides are cut short such that the browser window resembles more of a square rather than a rectangle. And if you are really like me, unless you have the opportunity to truly make functional use of the extra horizontal space, you never use fullscreen mode.

I believe this is because text informs a document-like nature, and nobody reads books or document in landscape orientation.

The iPad Pro straddles the line between responsive device with a width of 1024@nx being considered the minimum requirement for a “desktop device” while nearly intersecting with the A4 print standard in the physical domain. This allows for websites to be viewed, in portrait orientation, not as a mobile device, but in its native “desktop” configuration.

The similarity to the size of the A4 print standard reinforces a comfortable and traditional form of ingesting content while preserving the digital mechanisms for traversal such as scrolling to access this uninhibited, continuous content.

Even as we evolve the web to leverage content that is not document-oriented, we still see a handcuffing of interactive content due to device constraints informed by unnecessary (now) physical limitations — forcing the default screen orientation to be informed by the built-in keyboard.

Certainly one could say “You’re using an outlier device,” or that we’ve simply become comfortable with our forced orientation for convenience and/or portability, to which I’d respond that I certainly am used to it, but it would be difficult to argue that it is optimal, or that we shouldn’t be pursuing the optimal when productivity is at stake.

We certainly now have the opportunity to act optimally. Because the 13-inch iPad Pro, moreso than any other device to date, meets a minimum physical and digital screen requirement in portrait orientation to be considered both paper-like and not responsive, we are free, for the first time, to browse the internet in a way that intuitively understands its basic intent.

The amount of ingestion I have experienced using the iPad Pro as my primary reading device has skyrocketed compared to normal laptop browsing, making it much more to me than a “large iPad.”

In terms of producing creative content, I don’t use my iPad Pro a lot for much more these days than annotating mockups with my Apple Pencil; I always find my way back to my iMac due to what I believe are the same reasons: It’s the optimal device for the task and is not trumped by convenience or portability.

I leave you with one last example. Thanks for reading.