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czx4f4bd | 2 years ago

I don't know, when I impulse bought my iPad Pro a few years ago to supplement my laptop that stopped charging, I did about 15 minutes of research and found a lot of people claiming that you can comfortably code on an iPad Pro. That turned out to be completely untrue for my use cases, but it would've taken a lot more than 5 minutes to figure that out.

That said, the iPad Pro is my biggest mistake I've never regretted. I've used mine every day since I bought it and I love it. It sucks for coding but it's great for handwritten notes, typed notes, drawing, music production, casual web browsing, mobile games, watching YouTube, controlling Spotify remotely, etc. It's a perfect companion to my regular laptop and a great travel device when I don't want to take my laptop with me. Even the lack of a full OS is an upside for me. iPadOS hinders multitasking enough that it ends up being a more focused device than my normal laptop.

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adastra22|2 years ago

There's a lot of people in this thread mistaking "Pro" for meaning "Developer." The iPad sucks for writing code. But there are tons of professional things you can do on it. I use it more than I use my laptop.

What differentiates the iPad Pro from the regular iPad is/was its high refresh rate display, which makes the Apple Pencil much more responsive, and True Tone color. These are definitely Pro-level features. Just not developer-Pro.

AmericanChopper|2 years ago

> That turned out to be completely untrue for my use cases, but it would've taken a lot more than 5 minutes to figure that out.

Couldn’t you figure that out when you noticed that it doesn’t have any IDE you’ve ever heard of, and no compiler or runtime for anything? I know there are iPad for coding advocates out there, but it really doesn’t even take 5 minutes to figure out that the developer experience is completely terrible, as evidenced by the lack of any developer tools.

czx4f4bd|2 years ago

My use case didn't require an IDE. My main intent was to remote into my batteryless laptop, so in principle the iPad didn't need much functionality of its own.

That said, I don't know what you mean by "the lack of any developer tools". There are absolutely code editors, IDEs, SSH clients, and even runtimes for iPadOS. There are also lots of web-based IDEs and editors now, even self-hostable ones like code-server. Obviously I wouldn't have bought mine if those didn't exist.