4 ms·

A minimum of $1697, assuming you want the keyboard, for something with much less capability than a regular laptop.

by luke2m 5y ago

dharmab 5y ago
But also something I could break down and carry with me in lots of contexts that I wouldn't bring my laptop. I have a family member replacing her grad school MacBook Air with an iPad Pro now that she's returned to the industry and has a work computer again for her programming/bioinformatics needs. And a lot of her workflow could be done in Jupyter Notebooks, honestly.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  > But also something I could break down and carry with me in lots of contexts that I wouldn't bring my laptop. Can you elaborate on this? Surely two tablets, a case, and a keyboard is not going to be smaller / more compact than a laptop. I also can't think of any contexts where I would prefer a setup I need to set up and "break down".
  - dharmab 5y ago
    As in I can leave the second tablet behind, flip the Magic Keyboard up and slip the tablet into my bag. It takes less space than my laptop + charger and works with the smaller charger I would have for my phone anyway. And I can pull it out and use it in contexts where a laptop would be awkward. I prefer using my iPad over my Macbook while having a meal or sitting on a couch- to say nothing about using it outside at a park, being a passenger in a car, standing in a queue, or taking a break on a local hike.
- handrous 5y ago
  > I have a family member replacing her grad school MacBook Air with an iPad Pro now that she's returned to the industry and has a work computer again for her programming/bioinformatics needs. And a lot of her workflow could be done in Jupyter Notebooks, honestly. Programmer for over 15 years. Only reasons I bother to have any personal (non-work-supplied) computers other than an iPad or two (Pro + a Mini, if I had two) and an iPhone are: 1) I can't quite let go of PC gaming, 2) the Preview app on Mac (yes, really), and 3) frankly, piracy and related activities (setting up Kodi or Jellyfin stuff, emulation, major metadata-fixing sessions, that sort of thing) On that last one, I'm increasingly unsure it's actually worth it. If that weren't the only (reasonable) way to get/enjoy certain things that I like quite a bit that point would probably go away and I'd have to seriously consider whether the other two were worth the cost, hassle, & space.
  - dharmab 5y ago
    I used to be big into the private tracker/warez scene. Nowadays I find it generally easier to pay for streaming subscriptions (especially since I have less free time anyway and need less media to fill it). The things I miss most are foreign films and music- it is very hard to find 90%+ of foreign media for sale in USD!
    - handrous 5y ago
      My main problem at this point is that I'll need to manage some disk & backups, one way or another, to keep hold of a few things that are really hard/impossible to come by[0], or really inconvenient to use[1], if purchased legitimately. So I've gotta either give up on 100% of those things forever, or manage a bunch of files & either local disks or a couple cloud storage providers (and, ugh, that extra expense), plus keep whatever I need to actually use those files working... indefinitely. If I choose the latter option, that's easiest on a Real Computer. I wish someone would hurry up and get us nigh-indestructible, 100+ year lifespan, non-rewritable data crystals or something, so I can stop screwing around with storage and its ongoing costs and constant risk of failure or destruction-by-user-error, for anything that I want to keep long-term. Write two crystals, keep one to use and have a friend store the other in case of a fire. Done. Spend zero time worrying about it or spending more money on it unless one of the crystals (or whatever they are) is destroyed, which may very well never happen. Oh, and then there's family photos and videos. Sure I can stick mine in iCloud and Dropbox easily enough, but what about ones coming in from family? That's a pain to manage all on iOS devices and stick in the same cloud storage as my auto-uploaded phone backups. So I'm back to managing disks or redundant bulk cloud file storage of some kind. Sometimes I think I need to get some more Buddhism in my life and just accept not keeping all this stuff, and never experiencing any of it again. Let it all go. Everything dies, nothing's permanent. [0] Example: Certain TV shows with the original music, that's been replaced in home/streaming releases over rights issues (similar things have happened too some games, too). Cuts/versions of movies that essentially don't exist outside the world of piracy (e.g. anything very close to the original theatrical version of Star Wars) [1] Example: Any older console video game that's only available on used, physical media for the original, rapidly-aging-and-increasingly-annoying/expensive-to-keep-working-and-hooked-up-to-a-TV console. Say, Goldeneye on the N64, to pick a fairly famous example.
handrous 5y ago
A regular laptop can't replace my iPad Pro. If I were mainly an iOS dev, Xcode on the iPad Pro very well might let it replace my laptop. Either way, if you're doing much iOS dev, you're probably gonna have one iPad of some kind, and one iPhone around for testing, so that doesn't change much whether the main dev device is a MacBook or an iPad Pro.

A minimum of $1697, assuming you want the keyboard, for something with much less capability than a regular laptop.

by luke2m 5y ago

A minimum of $1697, assuming you want the keyboard, for something with much less capability than a regular laptop.

But also something I could break down and carry with me in lots of contexts that I wouldn't bring my laptop. I have a family member replacing her grad school MacBook Air with an iPad Pro now that she's returned to the industry and has a work computer again for her programming/bioinformatics needs. And a lot of her workflow could be done in Jupyter Notebooks, honestly.

dahfizz 5y ago
> But also something I could break down and carry with me in lots of contexts that I wouldn't bring my laptop. Can you elaborate on this? Surely two tablets, a case, and a keyboard is not going to be smaller / more compact than a laptop. I also can't think of any contexts where I would prefer a setup I need to set up and "break down".
- dharmab 5y ago
  As in I can leave the second tablet behind, flip the Magic Keyboard up and slip the tablet into my bag. It takes less space than my laptop + charger and works with the smaller charger I would have for my phone anyway. And I can pull it out and use it in contexts where a laptop would be awkward. I prefer using my iPad over my Macbook while having a meal or sitting on a couch- to say nothing about using it outside at a park, being a passenger in a car, standing in a queue, or taking a break on a local hike.
handrous 5y ago
> I have a family member replacing her grad school MacBook Air with an iPad Pro now that she's returned to the industry and has a work computer again for her programming/bioinformatics needs. And a lot of her workflow could be done in Jupyter Notebooks, honestly. Programmer for over 15 years. Only reasons I bother to have any personal (non-work-supplied) computers other than an iPad or two (Pro + a Mini, if I had two) and an iPhone are: 1) I can't quite let go of PC gaming, 2) the Preview app on Mac (yes, really), and 3) frankly, piracy and related activities (setting up Kodi or Jellyfin stuff, emulation, major metadata-fixing sessions, that sort of thing) On that last one, I'm increasingly unsure it's actually worth it. If that weren't the only (reasonable) way to get/enjoy certain things that I like quite a bit that point would probably go away and I'd have to seriously consider whether the other two were worth the cost, hassle, & space.
- dharmab 5y ago
  I used to be big into the private tracker/warez scene. Nowadays I find it generally easier to pay for streaming subscriptions (especially since I have less free time anyway and need less media to fill it). The things I miss most are foreign films and music- it is very hard to find 90%+ of foreign media for sale in USD!
  - handrous 5y ago
    My main problem at this point is that I'll need to manage some disk & backups, one way or another, to keep hold of a few things that are really hard/impossible to come by[0], or really inconvenient to use[1], if purchased legitimately. So I've gotta either give up on 100% of those things forever, or manage a bunch of files & either local disks or a couple cloud storage providers (and, ugh, that extra expense), plus keep whatever I need to actually use those files working... indefinitely. If I choose the latter option, that's easiest on a Real Computer. I wish someone would hurry up and get us nigh-indestructible, 100+ year lifespan, non-rewritable data crystals or something, so I can stop screwing around with storage and its ongoing costs and constant risk of failure or destruction-by-user-error, for anything that I want to keep long-term. Write two crystals, keep one to use and have a friend store the other in case of a fire. Done. Spend zero time worrying about it or spending more money on it unless one of the crystals (or whatever they are) is destroyed, which may very well never happen. Oh, and then there's family photos and videos. Sure I can stick mine in iCloud and Dropbox easily enough, but what about ones coming in from family? That's a pain to manage all on iOS devices and stick in the same cloud storage as my auto-uploaded phone backups. So I'm back to managing disks or redundant bulk cloud file storage of some kind. Sometimes I think I need to get some more Buddhism in my life and just accept not keeping all this stuff, and never experiencing any of it again. Let it all go. Everything dies, nothing's permanent. [0] Example: Certain TV shows with the original music, that's been replaced in home/streaming releases over rights issues (similar things have happened too some games, too). Cuts/versions of movies that essentially don't exist outside the world of piracy (e.g. anything very close to the original theatrical version of Star Wars) [1] Example: Any older console video game that's only available on used, physical media for the original, rapidly-aging-and-increasingly-annoying/expensive-to-keep-working-and-hooked-up-to-a-TV console. Say, Goldeneye on the N64, to pick a fairly famous example.

handrous 5y ago

A regular laptop can't replace my iPad Pro. If I were mainly an iOS dev, Xcode on the iPad Pro very well might let it replace my laptop. Either way, if you're doing much iOS dev, you're probably gonna have one iPad of some kind, and one iPhone around for testing, so that doesn't change much whether the main dev device is a MacBook or an iPad Pro.