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Comment by rib3ye | Hacker News Reader

As a Mac cultist and latest iPad Pro owner, it’s pretty obvious the desktop’s time is running out. Most UI innovation is now being poured into how to make iOS a pro-friendly experience. The keyboard/track pad combo was a huge step up, can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

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I for one welcome the decline of the desktop. Why, you ask?

Because 35 years ago the desktop was a machine built by nerds, for nerds. iOS has never been that, will never be that. If the desktop Mac goes back to being a machine used primarily by nerds, I'm okay with that.

Developing for the Mac was easy then, your customers were you. You knew that they wanted because it was what you wanted. The same can be said of the engineers working the OS: they had tech-leads, not "marketing". They knew what we wanted because it was what they wanted.

We all got the machine and upgrades we wanted. I would love for it to return to that.

I'm not entirely sure how you expect Apple's "pros" to do their job on an iPad. The majority of Apple's pro market consists of developers and engineers, none of whom will be able to effectively do their job on a CPU that can hardly compile to it's own instruction set. If you do photo retouching or watch Netflix as a "job", then maybe an iPad is usable as a daily driver.

+1 on that, I’m using iPad Pro as my only device for design & code for the last 9 months, and I couldn’t be happier. I moved to it after using over the years different MacBooks Pro and Mini’s. Yet, it’s not for everyone and many will find limitations that are impossible to live with.

I am looking forward to the next version of iPad OS to see what else they will improve. :)

Whats your development environment & workflow like? I've been considering making the switch.

I wrote a small piece a month ago, maybe this will help you in some way: https://dev.to/monkin/using-ipad-pro-for-work-2dbe it’s mostly accurate, but I made a switch from Linode to AWS this month.

What kind of coding are you doing on the iPad?

Front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) and back-end (Go). Everything using Blink Shell + AWS EC2 instance. Blink is single most used app by me on an iPad (37 hours last week) with Safari (36 hours last week).

And yes, I like to work directly in the cloud that I use to deploy my sites. :)

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