Ask HN: Has the iPad Replaced Your Laptop? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has the iPad Replaced Your Laptop?

21 pointscarlycue44 comments

If we read online and on social media, people think iPads are subpar and can never be a laptop replacement. However, I see more people use iPads with keyboards than laptops in real life. Has the iPad replaced your laptop?

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How many times must we have this same conversation?

There are three answers.

1. “I would totally switch to an iPad if it could run MacOS, making it a Mac instead of an iPad and therefore having little relevance to this conversation”

2. “My workflow includes things that iOS will likely never allow (installing whatever program you want, a real shell, etc) and therefore I cannot switch to an iPad and probably consider them to be an inferior device with no real purpose”

3. “I just do lightweight stuff like web browsing and email or things that have well respected native apps like photo editing, so yeah an iPad is fine”

I don't think "instead of" is right for number 1, because a lot of those people want "mac with removable keyboard" and that is not a product you can get right now.

4. It did replace my laptop because I use remote computing resources and there was no meaningful difference between the iPad and any other mobile computer modulo screen size.

How do you interact with those resources though? I still haven't found any decent terminal or editor to work from the iPad.

I use Blink shell to SSH (well, Mosh) into a remote Linux shell and work from there. It works surprisingly well and I can get emacs/vim/whatever running without issue.

Basically this, though Blink supports using VS Code now but I haven't explored that much yet. Also Working Copy for using git to bring code to the iPad and I've been mostly happy with Textastic as an editor if I edit things locally.

And Blink + mosh + tmux + Tailscale has been an effective combination.

https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code

I had a second gen iPad and it never got very much use. I decided to give it another shot last year and bought an iPad Pro and it’s been an amazing piece of tech. Probably my favourite piece of tech I’ve bought in the past 3 years.

It has completely replaced my laptop for personal use. I still use a laptop for work, but having an ipad that I use pretty much exclusively for fun is a huge positive change for me. It has an amazing screen and a great set of speakers. With a good keyboard case (I like the Logitech detachable one) it’s probably pretty close to a laptop replacement for anyone who doesn’t need pro software.

My favourite part is using it as a video call system though. I live far from my extended family and travel often. I use it to make video calls for hours most days. A pair of iPads is easy enough for most people to reliably use without trouble (though the particularly elderly might not like the touchscreen).

I don’t think they are laptop replacements for people who go on HN, but for people who just want to send emails etc it’s a great device, and way easier to use. I would encourage you to try one out as a second tier device even so.

No. The iPad is a consumer device designed for passive consumption. A laptop has a keyboard and you can do pretty much whatever you like with it.

And it's so closed, tightly shut. I have a hand-me-down-ipad. I had to buy -- BUY -- a program to be able to load PDFs onto a reader application. My laptop, my android phone, put in a stick or cable it up and you can do anything.

iPads are iPadded Cells.

The Files app can read (and edit!) PDFs. And I use an iPad Pro with a trackpad and keyboard almost all the time.

Ditto. I do multitrack professional music and video production on an iPad, and it’s fine unless I want to use odd time signatures or unusual special effects. Then I dust off my MacBook.

This may have been true 10 years ago, but it is certainly not true now. The creative solutions on iOS - specifically the iPad - are fantastic. Paired with the Pencil it has a lot of power behind it.

I love my M1 iPad Pro. Being able to hold the web in your hands at tablet size is great. It has completely changed my workflow as a semi-pro photographer: Lightroom and Affinity are amazingly performant, and this iPad has Thunderbolt I/O. Lumafusion for video is also incredible, and I can't wait to get my hands on DaVinci Resolve.

The biggest thing I miss, and it's a dealbreaker for a lot of my work, is the lack of a shell. I would be over the moon if they released Terminal.app for iPad, even if just in a persistent sandbox environment with no real access to the system. I just want to be able to manipulate local files with that toolbox. Obviously, full homebrew support would be key.

There is just still no "app" that can (ever, probably) replace the utility of a shell.

Have you tried iSH shell on the App Store? It’s a containerized alpine environment that you can grant file access to.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ish-shell/id1436902243

I was trying this the other day but I had a strange bug where some lines were missing when screen refreshes the output making things like scrolling in emacs close to impossible.

check out blink. very good shell for the iPad.

I don't see how I could. On my M1 pro mbp 16 inch with 32 GB mem and 512 GB I'm running at the moment:

- 4 VMs (Ubuntu via Vagrant and VMware)

- two instances of Chrome, each with around 100 tabs

- safari

- two instances of Pycharm

- VLC playing a movie in the background

- 3 PDFs

- iTerm with 7 tabs

Everything is smooth and noise-less. The 16 inch screen is just perfect. Can't imagine running all of that on an iPad.

What an incredibly timely post.

In 2016, when I first tried this, the answer back then was "absolutely not." Between a Wi-Fi only iPad, a not-so-great official keyboard, iPadOS being too touch friendly, and it being militant about backgrounding, that experiment was largely a failure.

Today, like four hours before I saw this post, I am deciding to give it another go and trading in my MacBook Pro and 11" iPad Pro for a 12" iPad Pro and a Mac Mini.

Tailscale, cellular iPads, the Magic Keyboards, and the iPad's being on M1 chips has made them much more viable for being a true laptop replacement. It's not ready to completely absolve me of a desktop (can't write code locally on it...yet), but it's getting there for sure.

The day I can run Firefox with proper extensions is the day I buy an ipad. Until then the macbook air is fine.

You may be interested in Orion browser. It’s not Firefox, but it supports the same web extensions that Firefox/Chrome uses.

https://browser.kagi.com/

I've never even seen an iPad in real life. I do most of my reading and web-browsing on an eink tablet though.

Which e-ink tablet are you using?

I am a student. I use my iPad in lecture, because it's a lot smaller and easier to carry around. Also, when combined with the Apple pencil, it has essentially replaced any notebook/paper I'd ever carry around.

It does not replace my laptop, however. There's many things that are technically possible, but they're just a pain to do. In addition, many websites that I normally use with ease on my laptop do not work [properly] on my iPad.

It might be fine for replacing some of the things I do, but iPadOS is still a hamstrung mess. Without a package manager, local shell, Docker support, VM support or a reasonable way to install my own software, daily-driving an iPad would be impossible for me.

Maybe if Apple unlocks the iPad bootloader the situation would change somewhat, but these days Chromebooks get the upper hand from a productivity standpoint (for my workload).

I have recently bought a Samsung Dex docking station. I wish it wasn't such a unusable consumer only product. I wish I'd have all in one pocket computer with complete access without spyware, essentially GNU/Linux that I could use like a communications device but also a fully-featured work computer I can just carry around in my pocket and when sitting on a dock use like a real computer.

Not much use for it. Lying on table. When I am on table, good for streaming.

For browsing in places other than iPad’s table, I still use my phone since it’s lighter.

All these devices need batteries. I can keep track of charging a laptop and a phone. The other devices either have to remain plugged in, or when I need them, have to be charged from zero, which is a bummer.

I had the same issue with battery being dead often when I wanted to use my iPad. I solved this by setting up a Siri automation to add a task in Todoist to charge the iPad whenever battery dips below 50.

I have Samsung Galaxy Book in ARM version for testing Windows ARM apps and I will take it every time over iPad or any Android tablet simply because it has a keyboard and the LCD is attached to the keyboard, so I can type on my knees, in the bed or on the plane.

When I want to browse web and read stuff, yeah tablet is good enough for it.

No. Got a recent one a month or two ago -- it's not even charged anymore. Wildly overrated device, horrible OS.

Thanks for telling us why.

It has not been a replacement for me. But I use my computer's keyboard a lot. If I mostly consumed content and sent out a few emails then the ipad would be a great fit. I think I use my phone more than my ipad. It's simply because it's way easier to type out a message if I need to send one.

I manage things like file backups for family photos and documents, writing somewhat complicated word documents or spreadsheets in office, and the iPad fails for those use cases. If you are exclusively on cloud and never need local file or nas access it’s great but it’s abstraction limits a lot of tasks.

Try booking any sort of non trivial vacation or do some research with split tabs and it’s always going to be way easier on normal OS.

If one day I can boot-up an Apple device in a iPadOS or macOS mode depending on my needs at that moment, it will replace it. Sometimes I prefer iPad experiences when writing by hand, reading, or watching something. Sometimes I prefer macOS experiences when coding, researching, or general multi-tasking.

On the 11” keyboard is too small (not a full sized one), plus requires buying the keyboard itself, plus Apple’s one is not super versatile. If I read I still prefer to scroll using arrow/trackpad rather than keep lifting my arm. And then there’s iPadOS…

In my family the iPhone has replaced all other computing devices. I’m the only one with a laptop.

When I used to go to Hackathons or similar events I would go with a cheap android tablet and cheap bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and kickstand. If I was doing throwaway development I'd just spin up one or more cloud servers and connect with RDP or ssh.

as much as I’d like, not happening yet. The closest pathway I’ve seen as a mostly web developer is GitHub’s hosted VSCode paired with Codespaces. I haven’t cared enough to try them together yet. My use case would be the ability to work from new places without the bulk and battery concern of an actual laptop. But after switching my laptop to a M2 Air, even those concerns are invalidated.

To anybody who wants a smaller working setup, check out the M2 Air. It’s a refreshing change from the MacBook status quo of warm laps and having to find a plug every few hours

no, I used an iPad as a main computer for non-work for about 5 years, but couldn't really create - couldn't write code (besides pythonista, which is pretty good), editing videos wasn't as full featured, although photo editing with Affinity was almost as good as on desktop. Recently got the M2 Air which is much better for creating stuff.

Biggest advantage versus desktop is that some apps are nearly as good and way cheaper. $5 for affinity photo vs. $50 on the desktop? great deal!

I don’t have any use for a laptop and don’t like carring one with me. I also don’t carry the ipad around but i like using procreate on it. Best software experience i ever had.

Yes. I have a laptop at work and don’t have one for home use anymore. The iPad Pro does everything I need to at home: TikTok, websites, email, videos, etc.

Nope, I really tried to have one replace my desktop. But in the end I went for a laptop instead.

The iPad pro tries to be a tablet and a laptop, but ends up just being bad at both

to me it kinda replaced, for example, social media and web surfing there is no need to use a laptop. My family mostly use the iPad but due to the poor multi-tasking and single user account we still use our macbook m1.

Not even close, no.

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