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Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

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Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#101

Post by cpach »

sublinear wrote: post #57
planb wrote: post #39

I don't see what people expect. The iPad is a portable touch-first device with a small screen and a locked-down operating system. The first two are by-design for the tablet form factor, so this will never change. And I don't expect Apple to open up the system, but it does not sound as if this was the main concern in this article. So why not simply get a MacBook Air, which is a completely capable, awesome coding devic…

Or, just get any laptop really. There's nothing special about a Mac unless you need to do native development for Apple devices, and I'd suggest a Mac Mini for that.

I use MacBook Pro for these reasons: a) Availability of high-quality native applications. b) I like macOS. Good GUI with a Unix underneath. (Installing Homebrew and GNU Coreutils makes it much fresher.) c) The hardware is really nice.

If I was a heavy gamer, perhaps I would consider Windows.

There’s one thing I miss from Linux though: Native support for cgroups. I can live without it, but it sure would be convenient.

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#103

Post by devsda »

planb wrote: post #39

I don't see what people expect. The iPad is a portable touch-first device with a small screen and a locked-down operating system. The first two are by-design for the tablet form factor, so this will never change. And I don't expect Apple to open up the system, but it does not sound as if this was the main concern in this article. So why not simply get a MacBook Air, which is a completely capable, awesome coding devic…

Remember the 'What's a computer Ad' of iPad Pro from 2017?

I'm not saying that OP fell for that marketing and is gullible, but Apple marketed the iPad Pro as a replacement for a computer, so it may not be completely unreasonable to expect a reasonably similar experience on an iPad after 6 years and the n number of iPad generations that went by.

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#104

Post by Donckele »

I think I have the first or second gen ipad. For some years now the OS and apps are frozen in time. I have basically some old games and the old safari browser.

The old safari is slow and, can you believe it, HN does not fully function!

Now, we all know the hardware is premium and this device would probably run linux very smoothly and the touch interface would be a dream. But we can only dream right?

WTF? Apple won’t allow us to use another OS or open software on old non-supported devices? What a waste of physical material!

What a waste of human creativity! What a waste of my money! What a waste of my time! I don’t give a shit how its enabled the masses to be able to do selfies.

This also mostly applies to android devices as well - which is another shit show.

For fucks sake - its 2023 and occasionally we have HN posts that are announcing how we are getting closer to run linux on the latest macs with the new processors. Holy shit! Even with more access and control to the apple macs we still don’t have full linux capability.

Apple has the best mathematicians to optimise for pure profit and as you can see they have done a great job. Apple 1 - Rest of the world 0.

Woz, please have have a talk with Tim (Nice but dim) and tell him the wonders that can be unlocked by allowing apple devices to run linux natively without jailbreaks or hacks. Don’t give me any shit they can’t do that by next month. Until then I can only dream.

Thank god we have surplus machines (eg thinkpads XNNN) available that show us the light of truth.

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#105

Post by cpgxiii »

VectorLock wrote: post #81
sublinear wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, just get any laptop really. There's nothing special about a Mac unless you need to do native development for Apple devices, and I'd suggest a Mac Mini for that.

MacBookPros have been pretty much for the past decade+ the undisputed leader of rugged hardware design. Nobody else to my knowledge sells machined unibody laptops at a competitive price point. (Only half jokingly posting this hoping somebody can't help to attempt to prove me wrong)

Machined unibody laptops aren't rugged hardware. They look nice, and are reasonably robust to minor wear and tear, but they definitely aren't "rugged". Put enough force info the body to bend it, and it's never the same again. A machined unibody like a MacBook offers no damping or shock protection to the boards inside.

Real ruggedized laptops, e.g. those sold by Panasonic or Dell, look very different. It's like the glass-versus-plastic question in phone screens. Glass looks nice, and withstands day-to-day abrasion better. But the stress necessary to shatter glass is way less than that of plastic.

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#106

Post by conductr »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #79
sublinear wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, just get any laptop really. There's nothing special about a Mac unless you need to do native development for Apple devices, and I'd suggest a Mac Mini for that.

I haven’t used a Linux laptop in a while. Is there any that’s competitive to MBP M2 in terms of processing power and battery life? I’ve been working on an MBP M1 for ~1 years now and I’ve yet to hear the fan working or feel the heat (to be fair, it’s a work laptop and most development happens in the cloud). If only for this reason I find it hard to buy anything other than MBPs for work, unfortunately.

I got a surface a few months ago and have been impressed with build quality. I’ve actually never had problems with dell or Lenovo laptops either in terms of ruggedness however I don’t know that I’m actually properly testing that attribute. I don’t view any of my computer usage as rugged tbh.

I just like using / writing code on macOS more than windows, not much else to it.

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#107

Post by madeofpalk »

sublinear wrote: post #57
planb wrote: post #39

I don't see what people expect. The iPad is a portable touch-first device with a small screen and a locked-down operating system. The first two are by-design for the tablet form factor, so this will never change. And I don't expect Apple to open up the system, but it does not sound as if this was the main concern in this article. So why not simply get a MacBook Air, which is a completely capable, awesome coding devic…

Or, just get any laptop really. There's nothing special about a Mac unless you need to do native development for Apple devices, and I'd suggest a Mac Mini for that.

Some people have a preference for macOS and/or Macbook hardware.

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#108

Post by DennisAleynikov »

Donckele wrote: post #104

I think I have the first or second gen ipad. For some years now the OS and apps are frozen in time. I have basically some old games and the old safari browser. The old safari is slow and, can you believe it, HN does not fully function! Now, we all know the hardware is premium and this device would probably run linux very smoothly and the touch interface would be a dream. But we can only dream right? WTF? Apple won’t…

ah yes, the e-waste conundrum when you run an OS that is completely user hostile

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#109

Post by explaininjs »

anon373839 wrote: post #64
divbzero wrote: post #31

In my experience, iPad + keyboard works okay for coding if you SSH into a remote machine [1] and use a terminal-based text editor like emacs or vim. Alternatively, you can use a Git client [2] to code locally but that prevents you from using your preferred text editor or the command line. In theory, Visual Studio Code for the Web [3] could work too though I haven’t tried that approach personally. I first experimented…

Is it possible to do ssh tunneling in iOS? I haven’t tried to use my iDevices for any development tasks, but that would be a key threshold for me to find any utility in them.

VSCode for the web has a built in tunneling service to connect to your desktop.

If you don’t want to use vscode there are of course many ssh terminals available in the app store for you to.. vim from? emacs with? idk, you do you.

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#110

Post by planb »

devsda wrote: post #103
planb wrote: post #39

I don't see what people expect. The iPad is a portable touch-first device with a small screen and a locked-down operating system. The first two are by-design for the tablet form factor, so this will never change. And I don't expect Apple to open up the system, but it does not sound as if this was the main concern in this article. So why not simply get a MacBook Air, which is a completely capable, awesome coding devic…

Remember the 'What's a computer Ad' of iPad Pro from 2017? I'm not saying that OP fell for that marketing and is gullible, but Apple marketed the iPad Pro as a replacement for a computer, so it may not be completely unreasonable to expect a reasonably similar experience on an iPad after 6 years and the n number of iPad generations that went by.

Computers can be used for other things than coding. And I guess an iPad is a perfectly capable device for many of those tasks.
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