My iPad Pro experiment

&gt; But PCs are still around. &gt; &gt; I’m not happy about this.<p>He is not happy that everyone not switched from real computers to media-consumption gadgets where programs are curated by central company? Where even content displayed in these programs must be censored using Victorian standards?<p>Maybe we should replace internet with TV? You can watch news and talk shows on TV, and picture is better! Why use ancient Sumerian technology of text from 3000 BC, when you have 4K video with quadro sound? Disruptive!

Text selection on iPad has been royal pain since iOS 6 (if I’m remembering correctly), and Apple has done absolutely nothing to remedy the situation since. You tap hold once to select a word, then you drag this tiny blue dot as it glitches out and jumps to a random spot on the screen every time you move your finger. It’s insanity, and I can’t believe Apple went another year without fixing it in iOS 11.

I have an iPad Pro and a Macbook Pro. Trying to force the iPad to replace the Macbook is like trying to replace a truck with a hatch back. You can do &quot;most&quot; of the things you need, but for some tasks it&#x27;s a real chore and trying to make it work just leads to frustration. My iPad gets me 80% of what I need, but trying to grasp that last 20% ends up causing insane work arounds that just tarnish the whole experience.

&quot;But PCs are still around. I’m not happy about this.&quot;<p>Would be nice to read why you are unhappy PCs are still around.<p>Though personally i don&#x27;t see why one should replace the other. Their own dimensions, weight, power inside etc, limits or enables one device to do something the other can&#x27;t. And touch is nice, but think you really need to be able to pair a mouse to your iPad to get a desktop feeling anyway. Then again, those are just my personal opinions about using iPad as a desktop.

&gt; Some of the worse experience I have is with email. Simply put, I cannot quickly select a large chunk of text and delete it. Selecting text on an iPad is infuriating. [...]<p>&gt; The pain that is selecting text affects pretty much all applications where text is involved.<p>&gt; Copy and paste is unnecessarily difficult.<p>I think this is the key issue. I love my iPad Pro, but deal with text—selecting it, moving the cursor, copying, pasting, has always always sucked. Even with a keyboard, even with the pencil and touch screen. I don&#x27;t know why this is so bad, but I agree with the author, it is. In my eyes the pain of dealing with text is the biggest issue holding back wider tablet usage.

Articles like this come up periodically. The big drag is that you are stuck doing development over ssh for the most part, which is why professional developers don’t really do this.<p>If your workload is more focused around “productivity” apps, you can use email, office, etc on an iPad mostly just fine, but text selection&#x2F;manipulation becomes a problem.

I love this idea in theory, but iOS is just not there yet, for me. Quoting a previous comment of mine on the subject:<p>I have one major thing that holds me back from considering iOS a viable replacement for a more traditional OS for daily computing: App and browser tabs are seemingly (not sure what is actually happening on a technical level) backgrounded if you switch away to a different app&#x2F;safari tab. This results in the app restarting&#x2F;browser tab reloading.<p>Perhaps this is some sort of caching behavior, and prior apps&#x2F;tabs are ejected to make room in memory? Either way, it&#x27;s very disruptive to have apps&#x2F;webpages reload when switching back.<p>Until I can count on basic things, like my webpage to still be there if i open my laptop on a plane with no wifi, or my SSH session not to be logged out simply because i switched to a different app, iOS simply cannot serve as my main computing OS.

I’ve been doing the same. The Smart cover keyboard is better than I expected, totally usable for programming.<p>I use Shelly as terminal app + a Linux VPS. I can login to my work’s VPN, carry keys using ssh-agent, and even develop html&#x2F;css&#x2F;js locally using Coda.<p>App switching is incredibly fast (even alt-tab works), and I find it much easier to spatially keep track of apps without overlapping windows. Split screen on the 12” is amazing. Battery life is better than what any laptop can offer, 2+ days of normal use.<p>My main disappointments are with external hardware: the Smart Cover actually causes smudges in the screen and leaves a very clear straight line where the keyboard folds. It also appears to double the total weight. The keyboard randomly disconnects if moved, and the Pencil charging position is just ridiculous.

The device is nice and the form factor is good for some people, but I wonder where people will draw the line in regards Apple dictating the way they use computers, now they will be at Apple&#x27;s mercy to get software on these devices and it won&#x27;t be your choice, I read people complaining about copy-paste but, is this really the big issue here? are you willing to sacrifice freedom for convenience?

The 12&quot; iPad Pro is Apple&#x27;s most amazing device. Ridiculously smooth to operate. So fast. And a great screen and speaker.<p>I&#x27;m using it much more than I&#x27;ve used any other iPad, probably more so than a laptop.<p>If it had proper XCode and a good SSH terminal, it would replace my MacBook Pro.<p>As it stands, it seems Apple is trying to keep the Macs their actual pro development platform.

I have two iPad Pro’s — a smaller one and the larger one (dueling personalized gifts that couldn’t be returned). I use the larger one at home, and when I’m walking around town or waiting for appointments or going to PT. I love using the smaller one when I’m traveling.<p>For 99.999% of my use cases, having mosh-server installed on my digital ocean server, along with blink, allows me to do what I want to do. For the other .001% of the cases, there’s usually safari. My <i>only</i> complaint is that it took me far too long to get comfortable with the “internationalized keyboard” button where the control button normally is.

I&#x27;m willing to bet that <i>no</i> future platform will succeed the PC unless it&#x27;s an open platform. This automatically disqualifies the iPad. If the next bitcoin&#x2F;bittorrent&#x2F;app-store&#x2F;web-browser-level idea can&#x27;t run on your device without corporate intervention, it can only ever be a follower, not a leader.

Keyboards. To me a computer is a keyboard. It may happen to have a monitor attached. That&#x27;s certainly a big feature.

I wanna to use iPad for development (so I can walk outside home and sit anywhere) but for the kind of development I do, I still haven&#x27;t find a good setup.<p>I work with python, F#, html, sqlite, postgresql (plus mnay things more. MANY).<p>I will not learn VIM o Emacs. I have use both, I don&#x27;t like them at all. I will be fine with nano if it were more robust.<p>I could use ssh, but:<p>- Need a good terminal editor, not VIM or Emacs, with good syntax highlight and light auto-complete. - Need to easy run&#x2F;compile&#x2F;build&#x2F;etc. Is ok If I need to setup the comands myself but need a way to execute them easily on the editor.<p>And the most important thing is how I do sql? things like the psql are too bare, and my sql tend to be LARGE. Exist a terminal based &quot;ide&quot; for sql?<p>-----<p>I have Textastic, Pythonista, Prompt and a few others. None have the editor + terminal and way to create macros that run on ssh. I think Coda of panic have it, but no for the languages I need (F#, C#, etc).<p>---<p>The other way is to run a HTML Editor (Maybe monaco of VS Code?) coupled with a JS SSH client and customize the iPad keyboard with the extra keys. I have tried several online IDES but none are made for this use-case!

The Galaxy Note 1 ended my use of the iPad as a tablet.<p>The iPad, however can&#x27;t fully replace desktops until it can use a mouse.<p>Even being a heavy keyboard shortcut user, the mouse can&#x27;t simply be touchscreened away. There are many tasks where the precision and speed of a mouse can&#x27;t be beat, much like typing is faster than using the touchscreen keyboard (for most)<p>The software is there, but I&#x27;m not sure why Apple wouldn&#x27;t expose the ability to use a mouse.<p>If tablet sales are plateauing&#x2F;declining, maybe they can merge into laptops with bluetooth mouse access, which will never really go away.<p>Unfortunately Chromebooks (today&#x27;s netbooks), or Android tablets even allow more to be done. It&#x27;s a shame because iPads have so much horsepower.<p>The fun thing I&#x27;m looking forward to is using your iPhone&#x2F;Android as the computer itself, attached to a laptop shell&#x2F;dock. Apple has filed for a patent on this, and you can order a superbook from Sentio on the Android side, it&#x27;s pretty slick and inexpensive.

I use a 10.5&quot; iPad Pro in place of a laptop, but I rarely do any development on it (that&#x27;s what my desktop or my company laptop is for). Personally I find programming &quot;on the go&quot; to be really annoying and distracting anyways.<p>The portability, battery life, and LTE are huge advantages for the iPad.

I bought an iPad pro 10.5 + LTE in June, and after fixing a bunch of bugs in CoCalc.com (online coding, LaTeX, and data science), I have been pretty surprised to find myself using my iPad most of the time for backend development (for frontend dev, there is an app called &quot;Inspect&quot; that is kind of like Chrome dev tools). As the linked article says, copy paste is a big pain point.<p>What I like: speed, LTE, surprisingly good keyboard, screen nice to look at, light weight, battery life, excellent built in cameras, the new files app<p>What I don&#x27;t like: websockets are disconnected in background tabs after about 30s, copy&#x2F;paste sucks, lack of chrome dev tools, lack of a real Google Chrome browser (it&#x27;s really webkit).<p>(Disclaimer: I work on CoCalc.)

I have been doing a similar experiment with the 10.5 ipad pro. I work in IT&#x2F;sysadmin. I work in a mainly Windows shop, and have been leaving my laptop behind, and taking my ipad pro on service calls across campus. My biggest complaint is file&#x2F;folder manipulation. I cant really access our network at all (I use Jump Desktop to remote to windows machines). As a temporary workaround I use my android phone, which seems to love browsing the network, downloading files, and even connecting to USB devices. I really, really want my ipad pro to be my &quot;goto device&quot; but its just not there yet. It may never be for me.

If staying within the Apple ecosystem is a requirement, this is about the only practical way to get a portable computer with a moderately large touch screen. If it is not, then there are many hardware options. The tradeoff of Mac for iOS is why this is a story and the absence of a similar tradeoff is why &quot;My Surface Pro Experiment&quot; would be a dog bites man headline.<p>I am not saying the tradeoffs here are or are not worth it. Just that the reason it is an experiment is because of Apple&#x27;s decisions regarding its product line.

Having owned a couple, I’m no longer interested in the iPad form-factor until the devices are even thinner and are physically flexible.<p>A big rigid piece of glass that you have to baby does not sufficiently meld into the world so that you can use it unceremoniously without thinking about it. There’s still a conscious “I’m going to go on the iPad now”.<p>Call me when we can have 10 of them on the same desk, interchangeable, and sling them around like office supplies. The iPad is physically still in its awkward phase and we will be laughing at today’s form-factor in years to come.

Yeah, text selection alone would probably be enough for me not to do this. It&#x27;s insanely bad on iOS, and you need to do it all the time if you write code. Constantly.

Being able to use a mouse would solve most of these issues?

Can you select text using Alt + Shift + Left&#x2F;Right arrow? That&#x27;s the way I do it on MacBook, but I don&#x27;t have an iPad Pro keyboard.

I never get these pieces...<p>I own a couple of different computing devices and they are just tools. Some fit a certain job better then others. Why limit yourself?

if you could code visually (like scratch) but with ability to also write code then I think coding on a touchscreen will take off. there are 100s of coding paradigms that could translate to drag and drop and for the rest you can switch to the keyboard.

Why not just use a Chromebook if you are going to limit computing environment intentionally?