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Comment by bluesign | Hacker News Reader

For web development it can be OKish, but for the rest it is almost impossible.

Even for web development, there are a lot of obstacles on the way.

It's not even good for web development since you usually need the a separate window for debugging/console output/network monitoring.

so.. two iPads!

Even for web development it's useless for me. Today I had to install new package via composer, install new package via npm, do multiple gulp/grunt runs, regex trough 100k+ lines of log files, ssh multiple times to the server and build docker containers. And that's just average day at the office as PHP/JS dev / devops. Try to do that on iPad.

The author of the post is really using an iPad Pro and a remote Linux server together for software development. With that combination, all the above that you mention is of course easy to do from an iPad.

So he is not using iPad, he is using Linux machine. It's like Google employee saying: "I am running the whole Google search on my phone" after he SSH to main server. iPads, in current form, are not suitable for any efficient and high quality content creation. Of course they can be used as a "terminal" to access machines/devices that can do that but you can't really seriously work offline on it.

With the pencil you can create pretty high quality drawings. It also seems many photographers are happy with the iPad in their workflow. The problem is that 90% of the rest what people do is cumbersome and full of needless obstacles. How should an iPad Pro replace a laptop if you can't export the photos and drawings without a laptop/computer. It's just so, so stupid. On the surface you pop in the USB stick (and virtually all other USB Hardware!) and you're good to go.

Yes, he is using an iPad + remote Linux machine + network connection. It’s an interesting and useful combination for some use cases. You’re right that “you can’t really seriously work offline [for software dev] on it”, at present due purely to Apple-imposed software constraints, IMHO. Regarding “not suiable for any efficient and high quality content creation”, there are some use cases where the iPad 10.5 Pro is pretty useful:

- with an Apple Pencil, it’s a very useful device for sketching out ideas (much like a piece of paper is, but with some neat advantages, e.g., infinite size, scalability, editing),

- with the keyboard and any text editor, it’s useful for banging out text, e.g. a rough draft of a blog post or paper...

Most of the Apple-imposed constraints on local development and code execution were lifted recently: https://www.macstories.net/stories/coding-on-ios-is-more-fea...

Of course, it will likely take a while before developers are able to publish apps that utilize these new permissions to the Store.

Cool; perhaps I will be one of the developers to publish such an app! Without those constraints, I could technically provide a purely local offline App version of https://CoCalc.com...

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