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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

I’m not suggesting using a company laptop for personal projects. But with an IDE up, a web browser for development, a shell, etc. working on just a laptop monitor is painful. I can’t imagine developing an iPad app on a 15 inch laptop.

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Agreed, development on a single monitor is grossly inefficient for me if I'm doing any sort of serious work. It drives me nuts when I have to pair program with someone who doesn't use multiple monitors, or doesn't utilize multiple monitors effectively. Every time you switch a screen from one app to the other adds friction to your workflow in the form of keypresses and mentally keeping track of context. The more of your workspace can be laid out at once, the less friction there is and the more effort can be devoted to the work itself.

I used to love multiple monitors. But I discovered I got work done better on a single, big monitor. A big screen real estate is really what I need.

I agree. Thus the desire for a 27 inch 5K iMac with the effective resolution cranked up.

Personally I prefer multiple big monitors over a single massive monitor because it lets me divide organize things a bit better. But to each their own.

I dunno, I'm comfortable working on a laptop screen - I usually do so for work, even though I also have a work iMac 5k as well. Would it be nice to have more windows side by side for diffing and such, sure, but it's probably only a minor decrease in productivity.

I develop iPad apps on a 13" laptop, and it's not actually too bad. You scale your iPad simulator down so that it fits on the screen and stick it another space if necessary.

When I ramp back up on actually doing side work. iOS Development is on my bucket list along with more web work and I’ll probably need to be running a Windows VM.

I want at least 32GB of RAM.

My ideal iMac setup - 5K, 32GB of RAM, 2TB fusion drive, 4.2Ghz i7 - is $3099

A similarly equipped MacBook Pro would be $3000 with 512GB of storage (that would be enough). But I would still want a 5K external display - adding another $1300.

The last time I used a MacBook Pro to run a Windows VM, the battery life was so bad, I stayed plugged in most of the time anyway.

But back to iPad development. Can you really get a good feel of the UI usability of an iPad with a scaled display? I haven’t done any iOS development before.

When I'm doing UI usability I usually just pull out a real iPad–the simulator is just there for "this change looks about right", and I coalesce a couple of these changes together before running on a real device. I rely heavily on AutoLayout, so most basic UI work is done on the iPhone simulator anyways; I only switch to iPad when I'm testing specific features such as split-screen support.

By the way, battery life on virtual machines has gotten better, I can get around 3-4 hours with a Windows VM running and seven or so with a lightweight Linux one. It seems like Windows has a penchant for preventing the VM from idling which really kills battery life.

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