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Comment by darklion | Hacker News Reader

> Cool, but nothing about any focus on making > the machine realistic for development.

What are you developing? What would you need?

built in terminal with access to (even a sandboxed) filesystem where I can do the stuff I do in the terminal on a mac -- install and use packages (homebrew might work? it's Darwin underneath iPadOS too, right?) and do other bash/zsh stuff; text editors/IDEs (I'd personally like an iPadOS version of vscode); and some mac-only software, like Sketch.

If they had those, I'd switch to an iPad Pro today.

Pretty much all of this. If I could have sandboxed dev environments, a terminal interface is all I really need since I do most of my dev work in a terminal. I suppose some nice-to-haves would be the ability to spin up local servers that I could access from Safari.

FWIW my brother carries around a little Raspberry Pi with all his Linux dev stuff on it and uses that when he wants to work on his hobby projects using the iPad. One big advantage is he can use the same thing with a Chromebook or phablet or whatever is handy, since he's just ssh-ing in.

I've thought about doing the same, but it just kinda irks me that I have this insanely powerful and robust tablet-form computer with good security, and I can't even have the equivalent of a Docker container. So instead I mosh into a Digital Ocean droplet and grind my teeth whenever the café's WiFi drops out. :-(

This is EXACTLY my thinking on this, too. An iPad Pro is, I think, more powerful than the computer I used for work just a couple years ago. Let me use it like a macbook pro already! It's way too powerful (and not to mention, expensive) to just be an ssh client. I could use an underpowered out of date samsung tablet for that.

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