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Comment by scaryclam | Hacker News Reader

Wait, what? This isn't about using an iPad as a development machine, it's about using a server as a development machine and an iPad + keyboard to access said development machine.

I get that the author wants to use his iPad for day-to-day stuff, and that's fine, but it's a stretch to say it's their main programming machine when it's not actually running the "local" setup.

Heck, it would drive me bananas having to stop working every time I went through a tunnel on a train, or didn't have reliable connection to my VPN. Kind of destroys the point of a local environment.

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This is nonetheless a helpful article for pointing out some interesting tools available on iOS and on a server for getting this type of work done. But I agree, the $1000+ iPad Pro here is basically being used as a dumb terminal. If you're willing to accept a less-spectacular screen, look into inexpensive vintage products instead, like a Surface 3.

It's funny to me that you refer to a 2 year old product as 'vintage'. You can barely call it 'old'.

Well, when you consider that most semiconductors have an anticipated operational lifespan of 5-7 years, and the surface contains many such components, 2 years is well into middle-age.

ref. https://c3.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/ObservedFail...

> most semiconductors have an anticipated operational lifespan of 5-7 years,

Funny, my 7 year old laptop seems to be running just fine.

So, still within the 5-7 year range? An operational lifespan is a timeframe in which most of the objects in question are expected to still work, not the timeframe by which most have failed.

If it continues to work for another 5-7 years, that's when you're getting into the "sturdier than average" realm. Your laptop could be a micron's worth of a whisker away from shorting itself out - you won't know until it happens.

Perhaps I should have stated my earlier point differently, but 2 years is still not a small portion of the lifespan of your average computer.

Hardware terminals are back! \o/

Everything that's old is new again.

Yup, they are, but for different reasons.

Today, I believe the push to terminals is due to the slow death of Moore's law. Computer performance today is not getting much faster, and it's certainly not growing at the exponential rate it was from the 1970s-2000s.

Previously, if you wanted to double your performance, you would just wait 18 months or so, and some manufacturer would provide it. Now, we don't have that luxury. If you want to double performance, you basically need to double the number of computers. Unfortunately, doing that takes up physical space and power. So the solution is to create massive server farms with big beefy computers that can run in parallel.

The death of Moore's law is depressing.

I disagree. The death of Moore's law is exciting. It means all those optimization and constraint driven design skills are relevant once again.

For better or worse, working within constraints is frequently much more interesting than "don't worry about constraints, Moore will take care of it".

I'm excited to see where we go now that we've started to plateau.

Indeed the article is about the ipad as a thin/remote client, not as a "main computer for programming" in any way, shape or form.

Depends on the length of the tunnel since he is using Mosh. Also then there's the Macbook for when you know you are going through some swiss megatunnel. ;)

Hey, brace yourself, we have 3g coverage in all tunnels in Switzerland!

> every time I went through a tunnel on a train

The author made it seem that mosh would make that a non-issue.

So mosh is going to guess the auto-complete suggestions or code-docs your editor will offer while you are effectively offline?

Don’t be daft. Mosh can in a limited way eliminate latency, but it can’t provide the intelligence offered by code running on the server if the server can’t be reached.

For this you either need full connectivity or running the full stack locally. And right now only Android (and possibly Windows?) seem to offer the latter option.

I thought the dream was to sit in front of a computer and work on several machines at once? Those machines being anywhere.

“The Network is the Computer“

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