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Previously, I've thought that some software or hardware is immediately and obviously useful. Plus, I've thought that some other such things didn't seem so at first, yet over time become vital parts of my work. For the first time, though, Living With has a new category: the product you didn't think you'd especially like, but which instantaneously became the most useful thing you own -- and so much a part of your work that you're sure you must've written about it before.

Seriously. I just searched MacNN for the words "living with iPad Pro," and the closest results I got were to do with long-term use of various things like cases for it. We reviewed it, of course, and I wrote about the case, but not about the iPad Pro. Insane.

It's now six months since I got this iPad Pro 12.9-incher for work, regarding it as an upgrade to my old iPad, not as anything especially different -- but again this week, a meeting was interrupted by someone asking what in the world I was using. It was in a committee meeting for the Royal Television Society in the UK, and I had the agenda on one side of the screen, and my copy of the minutes from last time on the other.

Then I got asked to do something, so with a swipe the minutes were replaced by OmniFocus as I entered a task -- only the task turned out to be emailing some details I knew I had in 1Password, so swipe, copy, swipe, email, sent, next? You "get" that having the near-equivalent of two iPad screens side-by-side is handy, and you readily get that the iPad Pro being fast is great, but the combination is remarkable.

It's like how you know what oxygen is, and you've at least heard of hydrogen even if you couldn't exactly spot it on the street, but together they make water. The speed and the screen size together make this a profoundly different and greater iPad than before -- and I say that as a fan of iPads. Here's how much I like iPads: I was going to sell my original iPad Air to help with buying this iPad Pro, but I didn't -- and I still haven't. I carry both of them around.

This doesn't justify that extravagance, but it helps me: I run monthly writing workshops for kids aged 8-12, and because they're funded by a charity, I have to report how many turned up each time. I'm supposed to do this on a form, a printed form, but that means printing it out every month, and it is years upon years since I could rely on either of the inkjet printers in my house. So instead, I pop the attendance list into an Evernote document with tick boxes, and I give the iPad Air to my assistant. He or she then hands it over to each of the kids, and they tap to put a tick next to their name.

Okay, you're not sold. Try this. It's still no excuse, but it helps. I love reading iBooks, and while I do it a lot on the iPad Pro, I happen to like reading with the iPad in portrait. So I'll work half the day on my iPad Pro, then kick back with a book on my iPad Air -- and wonder why I get eye strain.

Two things about that, though. The first is that I will read ebooks on the iPad Pro when I'm working on or with them: having the book open on the left half of the screen, and writing notes on the right is gorgeous. Or rather, it's gorgeous when the iPad is in landscape: you can do all this split-screen stuff in portrait, but it really isn't designed for it, and looks silly. I'll cope with looking daft, but it's just severely less practical or functional. So my preference for portrait books is fine if I've got something else on the other half of the screen.

Only, there is one piece of work I regularly do where it would be handy to have iBooks and Kindle open at the same time, but it can't be done. It's surprising how many apps haven't been updated to cope with Split Screen, but Kindle is one of them. Once just trying to swipe in from the side crashed the iPad. Usually, though, I can swipe in to use Slide Over -- but never do. Slide Over is worthless, really: it comes in over the other app, so part of what you're reading on the main one is obscured, and you lose the ability to move around that. Once, when I was collating lots of little bits of information from various places, I kept Evernote in Slide Over, and would swipe it open to paste in some detail -- but it's sufficiently a chore that I just don't do it.

The other issue is that I said about working half the day on my iPad Pro. I would like more battery life, please. I get up to work around 5AM most days, so I'm at the keys by 5:30AM at the latest, and I find that by around 1PM I am down from 100 percent to about two percent. That is getting on for eight hours, so I shouldn't complain -- but because I start so early, I hit that redline around lunchtime, which means consequently to me it feels as if I'm not getting a lot. I will recharge it with an Anker external battery as I carry on working, so I'm not interrupted much, but it's not always possible to get that battery out when you're working on, say, a small train seat table.

Only, I don't muck around with this iPad Pro: those hours are spent pummelling it. Most of the time that's pummelling as I write, but I will also play music -- for some reason a lot less than I do when I'm working at my iMac -- and I've edited audio and video on it. Still, I write most of the time, and I have found that I actually write quicker on the iPad Pro than on that Mac. Maybe it's having fewer distractions, maybe it's just that I move to a quiet spot away from my office when I'm doing this, and certainly it needs me to be using an external keyboard.

I have written thousands of words typing on the glass of this iPad Pro, but an external keyboard is hugely, just hugely important and useful. That is of course in part because you cannot fail to type much, much faster with an external keyboard. Yet it's also because without one you lose practically half the screen to the iOS 9 virtual keyboard. More, it's because of how the iPad Pro functions when you're trying to work in two apps.

I'm not very keen on how iOS 9 handles using two apps: you do get them both effectively the same size as full-screen on the iPad Air, but an app that's got a toolbar which usually goes across the top of the on-screen keyboard, now sits at the foot of the screen -- all the way across. So if I want to use two apps that have controls at the foot of their display, I sometimes can't even see them on one or other app. You get used to it enough that I'm struggling to remember where I hit this the most, but I hit it.

I'll tell you, though, having one app full screen on the iPad Pro changes the app. I live in OmniFocus, the To Do app -- and with that full screen, it's like I've spread out all my work in front of me. I'm not tapping on a menu here or writing a task detail there, I have both hands deep inside my To Do list. That means I've got my hands deep inside my work. The glass goes away, only the work remains, and I adore it.

Then, too, a giant amount of my working life involves emails, and then to have OmniFocus on the left with every email due today, plus Apple Mail on the right, it is the single fastest way I've got to storm through a pile of these things. For some reason -- and really, who knows why? -- I answer emails faster on my iPad Pro.

I do see this as a work machine: I got it to do a particular job, and most of the hours I spend on it are creating or editing or writing. Yet I have watched movies on here, I have watched Netflix. I've not listened to radio or music very much, but the video quality is better than my TV, and so is the sound quality.

The first time I played a film, I did so just to hear the sound, because I'd heard the iPad Pro has good speakers. Yep. It has reach-for-the-volume-control and turn-it-down-now good speakers. You get used to that very quickly, though, so now what happens is that I go to watch something on my iPad Air, and think there must be a problem, it's so quiet.

Something else that happened the first few times I used the iPad Pro was that I was scared to death of dropping it; it's so big. It no longer feels big at all, it feels the right size. Weirdly, the iPad Air feels the right size too: it's like these two are the sweet spots of working, just different sweet spots. I'm curious to know what the iPad Pro 9.7-inch is like: I can't imagine that it is as great a productivity tool as the larger one is. However, MacNN staffer Malcolm Owen swears by his iPad Pro 9.7-inch and I don't want to say that he's insane.

These months in, I am now comfortable taking the iPad Pro with me everywhere, but only because of how I carry it. There's the Dodo case which first made me willing to take it out of my office in a bag, then there's the Snugg case which was the first to make me willing to take it outside without a bag. Then there's also the bag: the Knomo Kobe messenger bag holds this iPad Pro 12.9-inch, my iPad Air, a Logitech K811 keyboard, the Anker E7 battery, and half a million other things.

I've got two offices now. The one with walls and a desk, plus the one that fits in that bag. There is so little that I can't do on the iPad Pro that I'd say it feels liberating, except really it just feels right.

One thing: I may never have written anything so entirely, fully, comprehensively praising as this hymn about the iPad Pro, but all is not perfect in paradise. I could do with that longer battery power, but I could really do without the fact that I now have to call it the iPad Pro 12.9-inch. Every single time you've read that number, I've had to look it up. Every single time. I cannot hold 12.9-inch and 9.7-inch in my head.

-- William Gallagher (@WGallagher)