If you use a mid range windows or mac like the article author uses an ipad pro, meaning nothing running in the background and no high cpu build steps on the mac

If you use a mid range windows or mac like the article author uses an ipad pro, meaning nothing running in the background and no high cpu build steps on the machine itself, then latency and battery life would be excellent. The ipad is not magical. Were you to run actual dev workloads on the machine itself it would be sluggish with terrible battery life.