
Using the iPad Pro as my main computer - robin_reala
https://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/using-the-ipad-pro-as-my-main-computer
======
lostgame
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.

~~~
dankoss
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.

~~~
lostgame
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_.

------
csytan
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:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6eC-
CH8UG4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6eC-CH8UG4)

~~~
stcredzero
_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?

~~~
blakesterz
How to request the desktop version of a website in mobile Safari...

Visit the affected site in Safari.

Tap and hold the Refresh button in the URL bar.

Tap Request Desktop Site.

The website will then reload as its desktop version.

~~~
_asummers
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.

~~~
wlesieutre
They said both: "no view as desktop, and no alternatives to Webkit"

It has view as desktop, it doesn't have alternatives to webkit.

~~~
nsxwolf
It doesn't work for many responsive websites since you can't spoof your screen
metrics.

~~~
wlesieutre
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](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.

------
graeme
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.

(It's also better at others, to be clear)

~~~
jjw1414
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.

~~~
ianai
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.

~~~
jjw1414
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).

~~~
ianai
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!

------
umeshunni
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.

Now Adobe has launched a preview of the 'full' Photoshop and Lightroom CC on
the iPad Pro ([https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17969754/adobe-
photoshop...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17969754/adobe-photoshop-
apple-ipad-creative-cloud)) and this makes the entire workflow very smooth.

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.

~~~
bigdubs
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.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0WKNYObucY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0WKNYObucY)

------
karmakaze
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.

~~~
sahaskatta
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.

------
ddoolin
Discussion last week related to using an iPad Pro for development purposes:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18820530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18820530)

------
5_minutes
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.

~~~
city41
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.

~~~
shimms
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.

~~~
jmkni
I thought the new MacBook Air had the older butterfly keyboard?

~~~
robin_reala
Nope, it’s got the latest 3rd gen one, same as the Pro. You’re thinking of the
MacBook which is stuck on gen1.

------
howlingfantods
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

------
rcarmo
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.

------
Marsymars
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.

~~~
kortilla
Doesn’t the messenger app for iPhone sync to all of your apple devices?

~~~
Marsymars
Yes (for SMS and iMessage), but I don't have an iPhone, so there's nothing for
my iPad to sync to.

------
MagicPropmaker
I have several surface computers. While they do have their issues, the "BSOD"
he showed was not one of them. I've never had a BSOD on them.

~~~
paulie_a
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.

~~~
zerohp
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.

------
zozbot123
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)

~~~
dredmorbius
Purim's Librem line:

[https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/19/purism-introduces-
privac...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/19/purism-introduces-privacy-
focused-2-in-1-tablet/)

------
dredmorbius
Is there anything resembling Termux or other Linux userland environment for
iPad?

Otherwise, I'm holding out for Purism's Librem tablets.

------
tbrock
I don’t understand people’s fascination with this. The MacBook is more
powerful and basically the same size with a keyboard.

~~~
tluyben2
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.

------
saagarjha
> 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.

You can't? I'm pretty sure that this is possible.

------
SpikeDad
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.

Still no real mouse support is annoying..

------
cheschire
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.

------
baby
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.

------
fmfamaral
This is becoming more and more tempting...

~~~
p1necone
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?

~~~
freehunter
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.

~~~
nsxwolf
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.

~~~
freehunter
Workflows that involve more than 3 apps are exactly what I’d be trying to
avoid with this setup :)

Of course that’s still just a dream. But it is a beautiful dream for me.

------
tomcam
Exactly the article I needed because I've been evaluating the same workflow.

Metacomment: Dude is a gifted, working illustrator--and is colorblind!

