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Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

technicallychallenged.substack.com

21–30 of 533 posts

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#21
It would be great if the iPad could be used for local development, but outside of static markup, I don't see that happening until Apple allows virtualization environments.

The sheer number of tools a developer needs to install for most modern stacks is non-trivial and its hard to fathom how a modern development stack would work on a system as restricted as iOS.

But, if you want a small, fast, lightweight device with great battery life there's the Macbook Air. It's the same chip.

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they are so close to unlocking iPad and iPhone's potential but sadly keep doubling down on the locked experience. even the vision pro, seem really disappointing that its essentially running iPadOS with ARKit

Exactly! That strikes me as the biggest problem with the Vision Pro that is consistently overlooked: by running what appears to be an iPadOS derivative, its usefulness will be mostly limited to web browsing with Safari. Being able to code in multiple VR monitors while traveling actually sounds like a good potential use case that Apple has locked themselves out of with their crippled OS.

Try doing that on airplane Wi-Fi!

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#25

you can't code on iOS why would even attempt this lmao. this isn't the thing they try to sell you on, its other kinds of apps and professions not engineering xcode for ipad is on the horizon but I ain't holding my breath, they took years to implement something similar to Samsung DeX and even then its really poorly implemented and doesn't work well. (not to mention it isn't rolled out to all ipads)

>The #2 reason I considered the iPad was because Apple had announced at WWDC 2021 that their Swift Playgrounds app would be updated to support SwiftUI and be able to release complete iOS apps on Apple's AppStore.

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#27

This is silly - just get a MacBook Air.

I have both — I’d love the to use iPad as a secondary travel machine, since it’s far lighter and also was much less expensive. But sadly it really can’t be used for much beyond light web browsing.

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#28
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hosted vscode, github codespaces etc - coding on ipad is very much possible.

"you can visit a website" okay my smart toaster is an excellent dev machine as well I'm looking for something like swift playgrounds++ so baby xcode, not a remote window

Does your smart toaster have a form factor and portability that leads you to suspect it could be a useful coding device? I can't say I've found the two to be equally useful in all situations... like, I'm personally way more comfortable using my iPad in the bath than my toaster.

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#29

you can't code on iOS why would even attempt this lmao. this isn't the thing they try to sell you on, its other kinds of apps and professions not engineering xcode for ipad is on the horizon but I ain't holding my breath, they took years to implement something similar to Samsung DeX and even then its really poorly implemented and doesn't work well. (not to mention it isn't rolled out to all ipads)

>The #2 reason I considered the iPad was because Apple had announced at WWDC 2021 that their Swift Playgrounds app would be updated to support SwiftUI and be able to release complete iOS apps on Apple's AppStore.

yeah that was some weak bait by apple. give us xcode already!
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