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Comment by JollyGiant | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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