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Comment by tyleo | Hacker News Reader

I'm 26 and the iPad Air and iPad mini do not appeal to me but I own an iPad Pro and I am enamored with it. I use the iPad Pro at my full-time job as a Software Engineer at Microsoft. I get a lot of mileage by taking notes on it in OneNote and preparing/reading documents from the other Office apps. I also use the iPad to listen to music with Spotify (my headphones have trouble connecting to my work PC). Outside of the office, I use the iPad as a second screen for my Windows Laptop with Duet (https://www.duetdisplay.com/), reading books, web browsing and more Spotify.

My major complaint with the device is the poor IDE support. I think I would love to be able to use it with Visual Studio Code as it is much easier to carry around than my laptop and I don't need the powerful laptop all that frequently. It has basically replaced all of the functionality of my laptop except for my development work.

Hope you find that helpful.

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As a Surface Pro user it tickles me that Microsoft people are using iPads for the stuff the Surface was designed to excel at (no pun intended).

I really really considered getting a Surface Pro, but:

* no airdrop

* poor development environment vs mac's unix

* apple ecosystem (this one, I really hate)

So instead I bought an iPad pro. I wish Apple would make something more like the surface book 2.

If I got a tablet/laptop hybrid I wouldn't use it with Windows. Linux is a great development environment.

Ah true, didn't think about that.

Problems I can think about: I want to be able to switch easily to tablet mode or to draw, and it's probably better to stay on windows for that. I'm not sure how well linux is supported on the surface book as well?

It is true that pen support on Linux isn't perfect, but a friend of mine uses Xournal for his notes. Took a bit of configuring, but seems to work well.

It doesn't have any ink simulation and I'm not sure whether there are apps/drivers that support it.

I was very pleased to discover that Visual Studio Code has been ported to ARM64 Chromebooks, and runs just fine on my cheap little Samsung I bought a couple years ago. Along with the unix shell they've recently added to Chromebooks (without needing to go into developer mode), it's not a bad development platform for a lot of things.

Also, you can install Android apps, so if you have a stylus enabled machine, you can use good note taking apps like onenote or squid. Linux sadly still lacks a good handwritten annotation/note taking app (to my knowledge).

How much RAM is in that thing? 4 GiB? I hope you turned swap on...

2gb, I think. Might be 4. It runs fine, though. A text editor, even with lots of features, is less load than a browser session for a complex website. Likewise, local node.js servers aren't very expensive.

Visual Studio Code is a browser session for a complex website. I've had the OOM killer kick in on moderate C compilation loads -- well below what I subject my Linux daily driver to. I've even seen OOM when running Emacs for a long enough time on Termux on my cellphone.

In general, any long-running environment that can generate a lot of garbage presents a risk of triggering the OOM killer, especially when you have to share your development environment with effectively a whole 'nother OS. Enabling swap helps mitigate that risk.

> I use the iPad Pro at my full-time job as a Software Engineer at Microsoft.

This surprises me. I'm not an engineer, but the main pain point for me with the iPad Pro is the crappy UX of Google Drive. Is there a huge difference between the Google suite and the MS suite on the iPad? I'm legit looking for a PC laptop right now because I need something to work on emails and Drive-type work, at the coffeeshop, and my MacBook Pro is not enjoyable to type on.

Microsoft does a great job with its ios apps. Great ui, sync using other services like dropbox if you want, lots of updates, great apple pencil support, etc

Using office apps on ipad went a long way to turning around my opinion of microsoft.

Could self-host code-server[1], or use their commercial version.

[1] https://github.com/codercom/code-server/

for a software develop what is the material difference between a pro and and air? the higher refresh rate of the pro?

I got the Pro for two reasons: the screen-size (for use as a 2nd laptop monitor) and because the pencil was only supported by the Pro when I bought it.

I don't use the 2nd screen as much as I thought I would though and there is a good chance any of the other iPads (which are all smaller) would have been better for me. Hard to tell exactly what size has the max utility. Smaller isn't better necessarily because my iPhone can do pretty much all of the same stuff but is too small to be useful. A good heuristic might be "large enough that the keyboard is comfortable".

A12x vs A12. 120 refresh vs 60. Pencil gen 2 vs gen 1. More RAM in pro. Quad speakers in pro.

that's just listing off the specs page... what do those thing provide to a developer who may not be maximizing the pros potential?

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