Until we have the ability to make iOS apps on-device, this will never be an option for a lot of folks it could be very useful for.
I also repeatedly say that I’m waiting the day when the iPad Pro actually gets some Pro software - where is Logic ‘Pro’, my daily driver that keeps me locked to MacOS as much as xCode does.
xCode and Logic Pro are the reasons I have a Mac at all.
I assume you mean compiling remotely ? The problem to does not seem the coding itself (i think that is what you mean) but instead the running in a simulator or on device. To check if the code works and for debugging
Agreed, though have you seen Garageband on iOS lately? It has inherited quite a few features from Logic like the drummer, more customizable plugins / inserts, etc. Also, Cubasis and Auria are pretty powerful. Still not as powerful as Logic proper.
Yes...but it still lacks basic automation beyond Volume...is stuck to one BPM through the track and one time signature...even on an iPad Pro there's still only a 3-channel EQ...we don't have notation mode (which would be perfect for the Apple Pencil in Portrait!)...we don't have a sample/waveform editor or flex time/pitch...it's barely usable for me as a sketchpad, although it has improved drastically.
GarageBand has a crazy/arbitrary limit on length of like 640 bars or 30 mins? I would have loved to use it to make a long mix of multiple tracks but that simple tasks butted up against that limit and I wasted so much time until I had to google this weird thing where it didn’t lengthen any further... wish audacity existed on the iPad.
Often, it isn't even just the "desktop" application itself but the associated workflow plugins that have to run on the iOS as well. For a lot of modern electronic music producers, tools like Serum are a must.
Depending on what you use logic for, check out ferrite on ipad.
If you do music production, hennythabizness has some good videos on youtube about how me makes all his music on ipad. Jonathan Morrison did a couple of great features on him:
It would obviously be a huge proof of concept if you could make native apps on the iPad Pro, but I don't see why it's a crucial requirement for most developers to switch to an iPad Pro, since it would only affect iOS app developers.
For instance, I'd much rather have great ways to develop web applications on an iPad Pro.
Web development is mainly hampered for me by the lack of a basic shared file system - Coda, however, is phenomenal. I've been able to do a lot on the go with Coda alone.
I'm looking forward to the release of the full Photoshop on the iPad Pro - once we get that, Logic, and some semblance of Xcode I can start taking a serious look at it again.
Having investigated this possibility as someone in the Apple ecosystem, I think Android might be ahead of iOS for web development.
Reason? Browsers on iOS are crippled: no dev tools, no view as desktop, and no alternatives to Webkit. Another reason is no mouse support. Essentially you'd be using it as a very expensive thin client.
What is intriguing about using Android is that you can actually install Ubuntu on your Android device:
Browsers on iOS are crippled: no dev tools, no view as desktop, and no alternatives to Webkit.
The degree to which this is true is pretty egregious. It has been since the beginning. How is it that Apple can keep browsers on iOS this locked down, while there was some sort of anti-trust ruling against Microsoft favoring their own browser on Windows?
I imagine it is because the percentage of people using iOS is so small that it can't be considered a monopoly or worthy of anti-trust by any stretch of the imagination.
That’s not what they referred to. That’s still loading the built in version of WebKit. On Android for example I can download Firefox and Chrome and they run on their own rendering engines.
True, but that's more of a problem with Safari than WebKit. Here's Gmail's desktop interface zoomed way out in an iPad sidebar using iCab's desktop mode: https://i.imgur.com/Qr56fYx.png
You can force it to always allow zooming, block App Store links, spoof other user agents (Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera, Googlebot, etc), download and upload files, and do all sorts of other stuff that Safari doesn't support.
User interface is admittedly more crowded so it's not my daily driver, but it's handy to keep around.
Side note, several of these restrictions are App Store restrictions and not OS restrictions - i.e., with Xcode but without a jailbroken device you can run custom browsers just fine. But there's no market / user base because Apple limits how many devices a developer can install test versions of apps on, so nobody has bothered to build such a browser, as far as I know.
I'd love to see an open-source project that helped you get set up with Xcode on your own device (or your favorite cloud Mac host... I wonder if you can make Travis work for this, honestly) with your own developer key, so you can build non-App-Store permitted apps for your own small number of iOS devices and not run into the private distribution limit.
I’ll start supporting support for third party web engines on iOS when Google and Mozilla start putting efficiency first and whizz-bang features second. I have zero desire to be forced into using Chrome on my iPad and iPhone and taking a hit to battery life because front end web devs couldn’t be bothered to support Safari properly, which will most assuredly happen shortly after thirty party engine support had been added.
Because if they’re available, it’s then possible for web developers to use the old “go download Chrome to use this site” cop out and then stop supporting mobile Safari. After a while, so many sites will fail to work properly in Safari that the only choice I’ll have if I want a smooth browsing experience is to give in and use Chrome. It’ll be like the 90’s with IE except this time the monopoly browser is “good” so the monopoly is somehow OK.
You see this happening with sites and web apps not intended for mobile use already. Once WebKit is no longer the only option on iOS, Chrome will take over entirely.
>How is it that Apple can keep browsers on iOS this locked down, while there was some sort of anti-trust ruling against Microsoft favoring their own browser on Windows?
Windows was a monopoly. Back then Windows was 96%, Mac 4% and the rest OSes negligible. OS X is hardly 40% of the market (and no, you can't have a "monopoly" on your own platform, as in "but Apple sells 100% of iOS devices").
But even the near 100% of Windows wasn't the actual problem, even with MS bundling the browser. What got MS in trouble with antitrust laws was both having the monopoly AND abusing it by forcing vendors (Dell and co) into special deals.
Apple doesn’t have the same market share Microsoft had at the time of the 1990s anti-trust case. They haven’t exercised the same level of anticompetitive and monopolistic practices.
Get them to 90% of the market share. Get them to cripple other companies by withholding (or threatening to withhold) OEM-priced licenses if they work with a competitor. Get them to drop billions on a broken web browser to undercut their competitors (they lost money on IE in order to cut into Netscape). Then we can go after Apple for their browser (and other) policies.
This is where Microsoft blew it. Instead of taking over all the business desktops in the world, they should've left it just at a huge fraction, but got their customers into their own tightly controlled walled garden.
Get them to cripple other companies by withholding (or threatening to withhold) OEM-priced licenses if they work with a competitor.
I'm reminded of how they'll not let you publish your app if it uses a different browser engine.
Apple does not have such a sufficient hold on the market that anyone has to target their users for customers. Android has the majority of the market share for mobile devices by a pretty decent margin. Apple has not gone out of its way like MS did to block people from entering the general market (like MS did with BeOS and Netscape), let alone the market on their system.
BeOS was going to be sold by Compaq. MS told Compaq that they'd have to pay the higher, direct-to-customer, cost for Windows licenses if they also sold BeOS, as opposed to the OEM license cost. Compaq nixed the deal with Be, because they couldn't afford the hit to their profit margin (PC margins were slim then, though they got tighter in the future).
MS spent the money to develop IE, and then a billion dollars marketing it. And they gave it away for free. Why? Because Netscape offered the potential (though still in its infancy) for web apps that would reduce/eliminate the market for native applications, which MS relied on. Not because MS sold applications (they did, and do, of course), but because they sold the OS that most native apps ran on.
Apple may eat up a lot of profits (30% cut) and restrict a lot of options (can't use third party browser engines, limits on use of embedded languages and side loading applications). But they aren't pulling off half the shit MS did, and have nowhere the influence to do it if they wanted to (w.r.t. market share).
For me the only thing missing from iOS is the ability to share directory trees, which is why we get swiss-army-knife apps like Coda instead. If Coda suits your needs that's great, but I'd prefer it if a Git client could create a directory that is in turn accessible from other apps like editors, command line emulators, etc.
I'm pretty sure Working Copy can do that, at least for apps that support opening directories in place like Textastic. WC 3.6 can even import folders from any app that uses iCloud Drive folders or local storage and mirror them to a git repo, so editors don't need to know anything about git.
I'd say it's equivalent, but not a fantastic option. I think all it does is send over a different user agent for a desktop browser. On responsive web sites, I just see the same thing with the feature on as with it off. On sites that redirect based on UA, I've seen it take me to the desktop page instead.
I wish the "Request Desktop" option actually faked a typical screen size (say, 1280 x 800, 96dpi) and all the other attributes that would make a site think it's displaying on a desktop browser. It's frustrating to really want the desktop version, and have no way of doing that when the site is too "smart" for me.
I know what I'm in for (lots of zooming and panning). For some sites, it's the only way to reach certain features that the site didn't include in their mobile version.
It doesn't work on a lot of sites. The user agent is still mobile safari, and web devs often have bugs for that browser in a larger screen form factor. Needs a desktop user agent.
I've met a guy who had Ubuntu on his tablet, but that was back when Ubuntu Touch was freshly released so it's still a mystery to me how he managed to put it there, especially given that it seemed to be the sole OS on that device.
If anyone has rsi issues, I've found the ipad very helpful. The apple pencil is a great input device, and I use anker bluetooth ipad keyboard that I find very comfortable and ergonomic. I have a stand I can put my ipad in to raise it up in desk mode, but it's often just in my lap.
Got me through a rough period of rsi, and the 120 hz screen was a joy. I didn't do all my work on it, but it let me heavily reduce my computer usage.
Now that I've fixed the rsi and got a better mouse, I'm going to go back to a mac for most stuff. All the little frictions in safari on ios are starting to annoy me: it's hard to manage webapps for my business there.
But I'm going to keep using the ipad pro. I have a few drawing/video recording workflows where it is the main device, and it is a good admin device when I'm not at the computer.
Will also be getting a better computer monitor and computer. The ipad's screen, 120 hz refresh rate, and fast, fanless performance have spoiled me. Those factors are part of why I kept using the ipad even though it was worse at some tasks.
I'm glad to hear that your rsi was helped by using the iPad Pro as a (near) laptop replacement. I, too, suffer from some form of rsi in my left hand (i.e. not my mouse hand) and was wondering what other steps you took to "fix" your rsi. Was it mainly due to the reduced use of a keyboard with the iPad, or did you take other actions at the same time? Thanks for the great review of the pros and cons of your experience.
Switching to a tackball did the most good for my wrists and forearms. I also bought the curved kinesis keyboard. It takes a while to,get used to the kinesis key layout, but now that I have I type insanely fast on it.
Thanks very much. I'll look into the Kinesis keyboard. I have a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 connected to my MacBook Pro right now, but the design of the Kinesis looks interesting. My non-mouse hand (left) is the issue, but perhaps I will think of switching to a trackball as a preventative measure for my right hand. Fiftieth B'day coming up next month - don't get old! (actually, it's not that bad - yet).
Getting old is definitely the worst option except for not getting old, of course ;)
Just to be definitive, I suggested the kinesis Advantage2. It should help with your non-mouse hand. There are plenty of reviews of people who claim it saved their careers from RSI.
Good luck! I’ve not had any rsi pain since switching to the advantage plus a trackball. I hope it works similarly for you!
second kinesis.
after getting one for work, the wrists are not hurting anymore!
also, now I touchtype on other keyboards as well, which I could not do before.
First off, I'll say that all cases are unique. For example, I tried trackballs, as the poster below did, and they made it worse. I also tried a kinesis, it didn't seem to help. But they help many! So, you'll have to think about what seems to be causing your issues and test things. But, here's what helped me:
* A sit stand desk. I do stand at it, but it helped the most because I could lower my desk. Most off the shelf desks were too high for me and it hurt my arms
* Raised the monitor to proper height with books. It's also asjustable, as proper monitor height differs when sitting and when standing
* Investigated which keyboard shortcuts strained my left hand and remapped them. This may be very relevant for you....
* Trigger point massage therapy. This was essential, and the most helpful. Also tried regular massage. It's helpful, but forceful trigger point massage is one of the most effective things I've found. Can be hard to find a good practitioner. The trigger point therapy workbook can also be good for some self therapy. Deep tissue massage is a good place to start looking if you can't find a trigger point person.
* popsocket on my phone. Helps reduce pinky strain. Good phone positioning too, and trying to raise it up for neck positioning.
* physio. I used a physio who's worked with sports teams and does MAT among other things
* I switched to a handshoe mouse. Mice had caused me rsi for years: switching back to one at an external monitor is what precipitated the recent bout. The handshoe is large and comfortable, and you move your shoulder and not your wrist - it basically forces you to. I now have no mouse rsi. Also, I stopped using the scroll wheel, even on the handshoe. Note: if you can't get one or can't afford one, focus on moving the mouse with your shoulder and not your wrist
* I remembered that seven years ago I had typed a million words (really) on a cheap logitech keyboard, the mk320. I saw one in a store, bought it, and instantly found it more comfortable than any fancy ergonomic or mechanical keyboard I had tried. Can't tell you why, but it works.
* a foam roller has been helpful for my back
* the armaid has been extremely helpful for working out forearm tension
So basically a mix of better tooling, more attention to workspace and posture, and a heck of a lot of physical therapy. Had to do a lot of massage at first, but am in maintenance now.
If anyone has small signs of rsi, don't ignore them: they can expand quite a bit, and quickly. I lost a few months work.
I'm glad it happened though. I had low grade rsi for years that I couldn't fix, using a laptop and trackpad. Now, I still can't use that well, but I can use an external monitor pain free.
I don't think there's a too late in most cases....the recovery just takes longer. Like, took me 4-6 months to get back to pain free.
One final tip: in my experience, things that work show progress fairly quickly. Like, 1-2 attempts. They won't cure it that quick, but you'll usually notice some sort of positive sign.
I say this because there are all manner of treatments that don't really do anything or may not do anything for your particular case. People can end up doing 5-10 sessions of something to no avail and at considerable cost.
I've noticed that many photographers are switching to use iPad Pros (or even regular iPads) as their main computers.
With shoots that happen on location, mobility becomes important and the ability to show clients a quick preview of the shoot right after it happens makes mobile devices ideal for many photography usecases.
Even as a 'prosumer' photographer, I've started using my iPad to download and do quick ratings and edits on a flight back from a shoot rather than waiting for days till I get back to my desktop or carrying a heavy Macbook/Air around to a location. The real killer here was Adobe's ability to store raw images in the cloud and sync edits made on different clients.
My macbook pro is not much extra size / weight above an iPad, and my workflow (lightroom for canon, capture one for fuji) is hard to recreate on iOS anyway.
The uses for the iPad on shoots I totally get is if you're Mike Kelley and you need to check that flash fills could be composed into a final image for architecture stuff.
I had some time to kill and stopped by a Microsoft store to check out the Surface Go 10" 8GB. It was surprisingly usable and the pen digitizer had low latency, perhaps not quite as low as the iPad Pros but good enough not to feel laggy.
I kept on the lookout for an Android tablet for light work on-the-go but the Surface-Go hits the mark much better. I would also be interested in a similarly size/weight laptop but they tend to be much lower quality and performance at that size. The MacBook/Air is close, more expensive and I don't like the keyboard at all.
I got both an iPad Pro LTE and a Surface GO LTE. My simple experience:
* Surface Go: You can do pretty much anything on this device. There's no software limitations, but it may just take a while as the performance is just slow.
* iPad Pro: It's really speedy. Everything is smooth and quick, however there's too many things that iOS just can't do. Apple makes a lot of complex things easy to do, but they also manage to make some very easy things very difficult.
As I got older, I started gaming less (or not at all anymore), and after alot of Mac bashing (14 years ago), and tired of installing Windows 93 every few months for every family member, a huge Apple adaptor: just because I want to get things done, work, get paid for that, and spend my free time not messing around with Window’s flaws. That’s biased, I know, things probably improved by now, but every time I picked up a MS tablet or was given one, I still felt it was wacky.
That said, I now have all Apple stuff, even though I’m not a Apple fanboy: I just want my stuff to work and spent my free time with my wife and kids.
This sums up that I have a Macbook Pro, Ipad Pro, and an iPhone. The Macbook Pro is imho, one of the worst products they ever made. Poor battery time, crappy keyboard, no escape key, the only nice thing about it is the screen.
My iPad Pro, on the other hand... is a work of art. An incredibly good battery time (btw, battery time is also not just living on the battery, but also: working on it without a electricity socket).
So it’s safe to assume that the Ipad’s are wayyy more energy friendly then the MBP’s.
What I don’t understand about Apple is that even though the iPad’s are great machines: we need people to build software for them. So, traditional PCs (where we can connect 2-3 monitors to, etc) are still essential. I think Cooke forgot about that. Jobs, nomatter what - still kept developers in mind.
I love my iPad, and am for regular browsing not using my overpriced MBP anymore. But to replace it? To get real work done? To have a “norton commander” like interface? I think it’s still along road to go to replace the traditional desktops. And btw, the Apple iMac’s are objectively good products, that’ll last a long time for a reasonable price.
It’s painful to see Lenovo releasing these frequent up-to-date great hardware laptops, and Apple, with all their billions in the bank, doing a minimalistic effort on even upgrading the Mac Mini, Mac Pro, etc.
Is it arrogance? Focus? Steve more awknoledging the coders, even in his own way?
Either way, with many Chinese developers introducing new hard and software features (foldable phones, wireless charging) and Apple always being late to the game (but then executing it well). I wonder what their strategy is there for the moment. I know no-one of my family is going to put +1000$ for a new phone.
To me, the biggest key Apple has is MacOS which is superior to any OS out there, in consistency and user-friendlyness for any end-user. Oh: and everything looks pretty and intuitive too. Even for my mom.
I hope they step up their game and make things more dev friendly, otherwise it’ll be a open game, and really soon.
>The Macbook Pro is imho, one of the worst products they ever made. Poor battery time, crappy keyboard, no escape key, the only nice thing about it is the screen.
The keyboard is crap. Battery life is great. And besides the screen, the speakers and trackpad are also great, and the SSD is top notch as far as laptop SSDs go.
IMO a solid dev machine simply does not exist right now. For about the past three years I’ve moved between Windows, MacOS, ChromeOS with crouton and Ubuntu. They all suck quite badly in their own ways. I’ve chosen Ubuntu as the least bad of the bunch and stuck with it. But I’m hopeful crostini will be my savior.
I’ve just switched to new MacBook Air (after feeling the same way for the past few years).
Use case is typical Rails dev work, react front end, databases, docker etc.
I was worried going from a 12 core Mac Pro, to the dual core MBA, but so far I haven’t noticed any difference except for those things that are faster now.
The keyboard isn’t as good as the 2015 MBP, but is far better than the previous butterfly. I don’t mind typing on it at all.
Great battery life too.
I think the new MBA might actually be the first decent apple laptop for devs in a few years.
Ever tried Debian? It's a lot snappier than Ubuntu, especially when running a lighter desktop-- MATE and Xfce are easiest to set up IMHO. (The one pitfall I've run into is that you do need to install from media with non-free firmware if you want Wifi to work on hardware that's anywhere near current. With hardware that's newer than ~2016 you might even need to use a pre-release installer for the "testing" release)
I have, but many years ago. It’s on my todo list to try out some more distros and Debian is top of the list. My main problems with Ubuntu are things like it doesn’t always suspend, sometimes waking up from suspend the keyboard doesn’t work, etc. Minor things, but they add up after a while.
On my MBPs (2017 and 2015 models) battery life length takes a very heavy hit from Chrome and Chromium-based apps as well as from Firefox. Running native apps only alongside Safari I get great life, but if I have to open Chrome, Spotify, etc battery gets chewed through like crazy.
I had a similar journey but I went back to the Windows PC for my occasional gaming and my developer/operations experience as a Mac user became more and more broken over the years.
I'm back to Linux and OpenBSD workstations and phasing Macs out again. My iPad Pro 12" is a busted, glitchy POS and so have my last 3 iPhones. So have my last two MBPs.
Never again. I'll remain on iOS phones until there is a viable (secure) alternative.
I've been drawing digitally for around 15 years, starting with the original Wacom tablets. For drawing, my iPad Pro (2018) with the Pencil 2 feels like magic. In my experience, its latency is much better than the Cintiq or the Surface. It feels so much like drawing on paper, especially with a matte screen cover. Every time I use it to draw, I feel like I'm living in the future. No piece of technology has impressed me to this degree.
That being said, outside of digital art, it's pretty clunky. The lack of a mouse pointer and proper multitasking makes it less than ideal for business uses.
But when I'm drawing on it though, man, I feel like Tom Cruise in Minority Report
I’ve been working on iPads for years now, largely for sysadmin and back-end dev stuff. A lot of the pains go away when you remote to someplace (and in some cases, you can use a Citrix X1 mouse with your iPad), but in general the pains are:
- Lack of a permanent “desktop mode” setting in the browser (the engine can handle it, it’s just the defaults that suck)
- Lack of an official CLI (there are a few stabs at that, some quite creative, but all third-party). There is no lack of excellent SSH/mosh/VNC/RDP apps, which for me is enough.
- Lack of a way to background _anything_ (you can run a local web server in Pythonista and some editors, but it’s always a pain)
- Lack of a filesystem (apps like WorkingCopy mostly fixed that for doing git and use external editors, and iCloud Drive sort of nearly works as advertised, but sandboxing breaks things across apps)
That said, I manage to do quite a lot of sysadmining/writing/prototyping on an iPad, and it is still my “most personal” computer, but if I did front-end development, I’d be severely annoyed.
(I carry a Surface Pro 4 for work and love it, but I keep corporate work and pro bono/personal stuff apart)
Also, on a personal note, the music production ecosystem on iOS is nothing short of amazing, so if you have creative hobbies, the iPad is a pretty solid choice for leveraging technology without the hassles of a regular computer.
My particular blocker for using an iPad (Pro) as a (non-development) PC is that none of the messaging apps I use (SMS on Android, WhatsApp, Signal) have iPad versions, so even though I've got a perfectly functional iPad with keyboard in front of me, I have to use phone or PC/Mac for messaging.
It’s really quite ridiculous that neither WhatsApp or Signal have iPad support. The way their UIs are arranged, they could have iPad support for nearly free if they used UISplitView. There’s absolutely no excuse, especially in WhatsApp’s case.
The Surface Pro 4 he mentions in the article is 4 years old. It was released in 2015. Things are hopefully better since then with the 5th gen and 6th Surface Pro devices.
I'm now on a Dell XPS 13, but the Surface Pro 4 I once had did definitely have plenty of bugs. I ended up getting my device swapped at least twice as it often would not wake up after being put to sleep.
My Surface Pro 3 never BSOD'd, it just frequently crashed the display driver. The screen would go unresponsive for 5-10 seconds, then it would redraw and pop up a little notification in the lower right saying the driver had crashed. The keyboard was also unpleasant to use, and the touchpad stopped clicking after a couple months.
I've never had a BSOD on my Surface Pro 3 but I have had lots of issues where the rear upper right side of the case gets too warm to comfortably hold like a tablet.
Back in the 90s I got a kick out of people claiming Macs don't crash. no they just routinely locked up where you literally had to pull the plug from the wall. but that doesn't count as a crash.
Nobody with any credibility claimed that Macs don't crash pre-OSX (the 1990s). They crashed and froze all of the time. That's why everyone was begging for an all-new operating system.
Hopefully, we will soon be able to use a tablet running the Linux desktop stack as a "main" computer. I can't stand iDevices or Chromebooks - they feel like they're running some Fisher-Price OS. Even plain vanilla AOSP is just barely usable. (I mean, with current solutions I have to go through local VNC just to get a sensible Linux desktop and apps. That's crazy)
As the big iPad Pro yes; I like the small iPad Pro a lot more though. A lot of people I know, including me, find it incredible Apple stopped making the small MacBook air. Besides the worthless screen, I thought that was a perfect on the road dev laptop. I got great battery life out of it (unlike my current MBP) and it was fast enough to do dev. The current 12 inch MB is not really nice for dev and too big for me, so a lot of times when I have to travel short times, I bring my iPad Pro only. It is definitely not perfect but it works for most things I have to do on the road.
> While the iPad provides enough develpoment possibilities enough for me (someone who is only using HTML CSS and JS) the sandboxed nature of the OS means you can’t run a local web server.
The biggest issue for me frankly (in the old days) was a lack of ad blocker. Now there's plenty of choices for iOS that are highly effective and so browsing on the web isn't a horror show.
Another article confirming iPad Pro is pretty good for graphics designers. Yep. Still not gonna code on it. My iPad Air is still good enough for my entertainment time, and my laptop is still better for coding.
I've seen more and more people using this instead of a graphic tablet. That sounds really interesting to me as the Cintiq are quite overpriced if you're not a professional.
For me it's basically pornography: a beautiful fantasy that I love pretending is real but is actually completely unrealistic (at least in my case). The idea of ditching my laptop and traveling the city with a thin client, not caring if it breaks or gets corrupted because all the data is sitting somewhere up in the cloud, backed up and taken care of. No fans, no worries of processor power or RAM, incredibly flexible form factor, instant-on and everything full screen by default, notifications that just work and work in a unified and consistent way. No distractions, just zen working in a park with a fountain and a chocolate croissant.
Problem is I do web development and app development, neither of which are terribly feasible on a tablet. A man can dream though. A man can dream.
I mean, it just comes down to OS at that point, yea? Why not get a turbo-thin ultra book and throw Ubuntu on it, then use cloud storage for everything? Could just SSH in as well.
You could even install ubuntu on an android tablet.
If what you want is the form factor and speedyness of solid state everything, you could get a tablet that isn't an ipad. Lenovo makes some that would be trivial to swap out for Ubuntu or whatever https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/tablets/c/TABLETS
A big part of it is the zen. I love Linux and it powers my entire career as a server OS but it is anything but zen and I would never use it as a desktop OS.
Having done it for non-work related code development and personal use past 3 weeks, I would recommend trying it.
Not having a mouse may be cumbersome sometimes, but I’m starting to really get used to the touchscreen to the point that I almost find myself trying to touch my MBP’s screen.
iPad Pro also supports the Smart Keyboard (which in itself is great to type on) as well as regular USB keyboards (with the Lightning/USB-C to USB adapter). I was able to use my Pok3r keyboard just fine.
For shell access, definitely check out Blink. Even using VI isn’t bad as you can remap your `~ key to ESC. Most of my work is done remotely anyway.
The only downsides are the occasional apps that don’t support full iPad screen scaling - so they appear like iPhone apps.
Out of curiosity what makes this more tempting for you than a laptop? Is it just the slightly better portability combined with it seemingly being "good enough" now for productivity work?
I'm not the person you're asking, but I also have this dream. It's mainly the complexity of desktop software. The older I get (and the more responsibilities I have) the less I appreciate knobs and buttons and menu bars and the more I appreciate unified system notifications and "good enough" default settings and a full screen window with nothing behind (or in front) of it. If I need more, SSH exists.
The limitations of a tablet form factor force UI designers to be thoughtful, and the limitations of iOS force app developers to all converge on the same solutions.
I want my hardware and OS to just get out of my way so I can get my work done. Chromebooks and iPads get this right in my opinion. I feel like Android still gives me too much freedom, and I invariably always break something because I am an irresponsible child when I get bored.
When I'm working, I want to think about my work, not about my OS or hardware.
My problem is workflows that involve more than 3 apps. I just can't be productive when I am switching back and forth between apps and not able to see most everything at once.
It’s the ability to instantaneously open up the iPad and have the screen available to me. I don’t have super lengthy workflows (max 2-3 apps at the same time) so ALT-TAB works perfectly fine for me.
For those times when I really need to, I can always split screen.
I also repeatedly say that I’m waiting the day when the iPad Pro actually gets some Pro software - where is Logic ‘Pro’, my daily driver that keeps me locked to MacOS as much as xCode does.
xCode and Logic Pro are the reasons I have a Mac at all.