I started writing a reply to the GP in this vein, but the examples I came up with didn't quite fit.
Yes, the iPhone shipped without copy and paste, but that was never meant to be a computer; it was merely "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communication device" rolled into one. The original iPad shipped without multi-tasking (pseudo or otherwise), but it was primarily competing with netbooks, which couldn't competently multitask anyway.
I cannot recall any Apple products in the "modern Jobs era" that were quite as much of a solution in search of a problem as the iPad Pro. The iPad Pro is a $1,000+ product aimed at professional artists and content creators who by definition spend their days working on various assets aka files. But the iPad Pro doesn't have a file manager, just a bunch of kludgey workarounds.
I can quite easily take files from cloud storage like Dropbox or S3, copy them to my local device, make changes and push it back to cloud. Or I can edit directly from cloud storage.
And if the iPad was such a hopeless device for content creators you wouldn't see Adobe bringing their full Photoshop product to it would you ?
Possible poor choice of words on my part. There is technically a file manager, but it's gimped. For instance, plugging in USB storage devices flat out doesn't work. If you plug in a camera or SD card, you can only copy photos to the built in Photos app, and nothing else. Lots and lots of reviews mentioned this.
Apple's official solution for software like Photoshop? There's a Siri shortcut that will import a photo into Photoshop and delete it from the Photos library. This is what I consider a kludgy workaround.
It is absolutely possible to make the iPad Pro functional for these workflows. But iOS is going to fight you where it should be trying to help.
The funny thing is I have seen screenshots of a internal storage file manager in the Files app. Not sure where I saw them, but it seems it had the capability at least once, but the feature was pulled. Not sure if it is still accessible or not.
You can install any third party file storage app like Dropbox, Google Drive etc and they are all accessible from the Files app as well as any program that needs o save and store files. There are file storage apps that store files only on the local file system and expose an ssh server and/or web server that allow you to upload/download files directly from your phone.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, as it is often in Apple’s case, the real market were well-off ordinary people who like premium, shiny products. I know one such person, with top of the line ipad pro, how just uses it for emails and web browsing.
Yes, the iPhone shipped without copy and paste, but that was never meant to be a computer; it was merely "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communication device" rolled into one. The original iPad shipped without multi-tasking (pseudo or otherwise), but it was primarily competing with netbooks, which couldn't competently multitask anyway.
I cannot recall any Apple products in the "modern Jobs era" that were quite as much of a solution in search of a problem as the iPad Pro. The iPad Pro is a $1,000+ product aimed at professional artists and content creators who by definition spend their days working on various assets aka files. But the iPad Pro doesn't have a file manager, just a bunch of kludgey workarounds.