Comment by tammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tammer | Hacker News Reader

These types of articles come out periodically and annoy me quite a bit. iPadOS has been my interface to the digital world for going on 6 years. Here are the things I do exclusively via an iPad Pro:

  * administer a dozen HPC clusters
  * perform all the digital tasks required of a non-profit board member
  * learn/read, communicate, consume media, photo edit and all the other normal life things one does on a computer nowadays

It’s true that I don’t have a podcast. But I think I’m in the majority of computer users there! I’ll also say that I have had to accept some limits or look for workarounds in the past, but the big additions of file downloads, safari compatibility modes and finally stage manager have effectively taken care of those.

But isn’t that the point of the article? The iPad works great for the things you want to do on it because Apple has decided to support those workflows (or you have been able to adjust your own practices to suit the device). But on a Mac (or Windows, or Linux), no-one needs to think ahead for your use case. Someone can just build software that enables it.

Software development is a much less niche area than podcast recording but one that is equally unsupported on the iPad. I doubt many are itching to swap their dev machines for an iPad, but given the hardware it sure would be nice if I could tinker with stuff on the sofa. But no amount of workarounds or developer ingenuity would enable that because Apple has decreed that I cannot run arbitrary code, or run a local server.

Yeah, same. I think at the end of the day, some folks don’t want to work that way. Which is fine.

I do all of my personal business on an iMac. The big gap for me was the shell, which is now not an issue with iSH available. There’s literally nothing I cannot do that I need to do that can’t be done on the iPad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com