I travel by motorcycle. My big, fragile laptop takes a lot of precious luggage space, so I'd love to have something smaller.
I thought of using just a tablet to replace my laptop and my paper notebook, but thin client development only works with a fast, stable Internet connection.
This isn't possible everywhere. It's not even possible on German intercity trains/buses. It's also not possible across the oceans due to latency.
Even when the location is fine, there are bad wi-fi connections, paygates and network outages. Hotel wi-fi is hit or miss. Camping wifi is mostly miss. Censorship is also an issue in some countries. Some wi-fi networks block certain ports too.
My definition of anywhere includes those places, and far more remote ones. Therefore I need a local development environment, so I'm taking my laptop with me.
However, I really love the idea of working from a quiet place outdoors. I spend a few hours on my small balcony every morning. I was considering working from quiet places in the woods like you do.
Whats stopping you from using a macbook air? they are incredibly small for the power they pack. Plus you get a descent keyboard to boot.
To add some context. Had to take my fully specced out 2018 MBP 15" to get the battery replaced. Basicly, I had to go a week without my daily driver and I didn't have a backup. So I picked up a macbook air since they have a 14 day no questions asked return policy. I expected this thing to do some light work. I didn't expect it to actually keep up with my entire workload but it did and without getting particularly warm either. This tiny 1k laptop with 8 gb of ram was ding the job of a 3.5k fully specced mbp with 32 gigs of ram.
can't wait to see what they do with the m1x but I think the macbook air will handle everything you need + allow you to devlop locally.
My M1 Air is fantastic with thus far only one exception - recent frequent OS out of memory notices, but no apparent single cause. I imagine it's a software problem that will be soon resolved (and it's the first such memory problem I've ever encountered on any Mac in 10+ years).
With 16GB, I normally have open: RubyMine, DataGrip (two heavy JetBrains products), a terminal with two tabs, one having tmux and multiple local subshells and one with a remote connection to a server which has tmux (love tmux!), PostgreSQL, MailCatcher, any number of custom app servers (some ruby, some Node), Firefox with far too many open tabs, Spotify, and a handful of other apps.
I'm just about to find out how this thing handles 4k video processing as I got some new video toys to travel with. Maybe I'll end up needing the extra cores of an M1 Pro Max, but hopefully not.
> My M1 Air is fantastic with thus far only one exception - recent frequent OS out of memory notices, but no apparent single cause.
Mmm. That's disconcerting, as I just bought my fiancee an M1 Air with 8gb. (Getting her to spend more than strictly necessary on a laptop would be worse than pulling teeth.) Hopefully that's not an issue with her computing needs, which should be fairly minimal ... Word, Excel, BlueJeans for teleconferencing, Chrome.
For the record, 8GB was unusable for me as someone who habitually leaves tabs open.
I use IDEs that are heavier duty than the average user, but those didn't even seem to be the issue, once I had more than about a couple dozen or so tabs open the machine would start grinding to a halt. Sometimes so badly that even closing applications was difficult.
I upgraded to a 16GB and have zero issues now. It seems browser tabs just don't play to the strengths of the M1's memory setup
Something changed which brought these errors on... I suspect it was an OS update. My usage habits did not change, and for the first few months I had none of these errors.
I also started getting these recently on two different Macbooks, and I think they were being caused by the screensaver loading a large number of photos up front rather than just when they're needed.
I had configured the 'sliding panels' or whatever it's called to use a whole album of about 1000 photos, and noticed that I was getting these weird OOM notices, and when I checked in activity monitor, there didn't seem to be any memory overuse. But I realised it was happening when I was waking my computer from sleep.
I reduced it to 100 photos and now I don't see the warnings any more, so my guess is that the screensaver was trying to read all 1000 or so photos into memory at once, which was causing the issues.
If you have a photo screensaver, worth checking (possibly also the desktop background).
I've been getting these a ton recently, on both a 2018 15" Intel MBP w/ 32g memory and an M1 Air w/ 16g.
I suspect its just a recent MacOS bug that will get sorted out, and not an actual OOM issue. Chrome can use a lot, but I've never gotten close to using 16 gigs in my workflows, let alone 32.
I'm guessing that's the kind of laptop the person you're replying to is using. That's what I used when I first went on motorcycle rides with a laptop. I put a leather case from TwelveSouth around it, and it rode in the saddlebags of a Harley Sportster for thousands of miles without a problem.
I'm getting a MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro next, since I really want the ability to drive more than 1 external monitor. But if the Air could do that, I'd be all over it now even with the original M1.
Seems like you didn’t realize this, but the new MacBook pros are available as of this week, and they aren’t called M1X. They’re as exciting as you imagined
Starlink is currently region locked but the regions are very large. What I did was pick my favourite camping areas around Sydney and put the Australia Post down as my service address. This means when Dishy ships I’ll have internet in mint places that are completely empty during weekdays.
> but thin client development only works with a fast, stable Internet connection.
One needs a stable connection (Edge network connectivity is all I need), fast is not needed. If there’s high packet loss I switch over to using mosh+ssh and elinks.
Yes, this is a thing. There are some good tutorial videos out there, and it looks pretty great. However, it's more overhead and more individual things to keep up with, whereas an M1 Air can do more for the same overall volume of equipment space.
> I thought of using just a tablet to replace my laptop and my paper notebook, but thin client development only works with a fast, stable Internet connection.
I bought a Chromebook Duet at Best Buy for $259. Works very well for software development without internet (runs Debian out of the box). I can plug it into an external monitor and add a keyboard and mouse when they're available. Otherwise the case comes with a keyboard, so I can program at any time.
Tbh. Software development in 2021 without internet (regardless of iPad or other device) is almost impossible which is why I invested heavily into my internet connectivity - https://ghuntley.com/internet
Not out yet, but in a few months the PinePhone Pro will offer a faster experience for less money. They even have a small keyboard that makes it like a tiny phone laptop.
There's non-Apple tablets that could work, iirc Apple is the only one that doesn't allow running code or sideloading apps that can do so. And there's plenty of more portable laptops; a Macbook Air isn't that much bigger than an ipad with a keyboard.
How does running side loaded code fix the wireless connection problem discussed in the post you're replying to?
There are local / offline code editors on iOS that will sync via Git next time you're online, and Git itself is pretty tolerant of bad connections. As is blink terminal client, over mosh.
He means a tablet that is open enough to run code or sideload apps can run a full development environment on its own and not have to be continuously connected.
These scenarios are different for standalone app devs versus system or enterprise devs.
For enterprise or systems devs, the negatives of attempting to host a complex system environment on your laptop outweigh the challenges of marginal network coverage (except when there is no network coverage).
Because of those negatives, even dedicated full time dev machines on gigabit connectivity are moving towards CodeEnvy style local (and portable) workspace for edit, with remote deploy/run/debug models. That's basically thin client / thick client debate coming around again.
Vast majority of enterprise/system devs are not so remote as to have to run a simulated cloud environment (e.g. minikube) locally, and I've found almost zero rural areas in the US that can't do a mosh session over the iPad Pro's cellular chip.
I’m in Tucson for the week (with 5g connection) and needed to edit a pdf. Couldn’t even manage to do that without pulling out my partner’s Mac book air. Actual software development on an iPad? Forgetaboutit - none of the tooling I used in my programming career runs on an iPad and trying to use it as a thin client sounds horribly suboptimal. Great for watching a movie or reading a book, still not as productive as a laptop for anything else.
Acrobat and PDF Expert are two great bets for editing a PDF on the iPad.
As a counter-piece of anecdata:
With connectivity, VS Code runs on an iPad, blink mosh terminal client, remote desktops of all kinds, etc. Without connectivity, various code editors with full syntax highlighting and git sync, to the point I've been handling enterprise software dev via iPad Pro for several years now. It used to be hard, now it's trivial.
Since circa 2017 I've only taken MacBook Pro on a trip if I'm somewhere more than 3 weeks, and ever since the keyboard with trackpad and now the Xbox controller for Xbox cloud gaming, I'm not even sure I need that. The MBP is probably a crutch.
Given the portability, true lap top usability, all-day battery life, built in cellular connectivity, ability to transform into a Kindle or touch device, etc., along with tools needed to code both online and offline, most devs with an iPad Pro 12.9 can ask, "What's a computer?"
Typing this on my iPad right now. For things such as editing PDF’s (see https://www.jabmaker.com) I RDP to my homelab in the sky (see bottom of blogpost for details about the setup).
For day-to-day software development. Use Gitpod or GitHub Codespaces or Mosh+SSH to a Baremetal machine.
What’s your technology stack? What’s the tooling you need to do?
Well, congrats. But none of the tooling I used in my tech career (which I left 2 years ago) ran physically on the ipad then, and none of it does now either. I tried doing the thin term thing and it was just a hassle. Good on you if it works for you, but I’d rather pack a laptop if I’m doing more than editing a few characters- for the screen size if nothing else
Let’s be honest - you didn’t want to edit the pdf on your iPad. I say that because if you wanted to, or it’s something you need to do even once in a while, there are dozens (hundreds?) of serviceable pdf editors for iPadOS. There are even many really good ones. And they cost the proverbial cup of coffee..
Just let’s be honest: I paid for the pro version of adobe brcause I had business deals depending on the documents I was editing. I failed to successfully split or delete pages on any of the contracts I tried and I resorted to borrowing the laptop. So there you go and I stand by what I wrote.
What I now discovered, after drooling about similar idea of remote work: in most scenarios, children put a halt to that.
Children want stability, access to age-appropriate entertainment (playgrounds, soft play centres, or cinemas and suchlikes for older ones), good schools, friends with similar age.
All those things funnel you to populated centres, likely wealthier ones (for schools, though this varies by locale), and hence also pricier ones.
Sure, some kids are super-happy slumming it in a van, or a shack somewhere beautiful, and enjoy outdoors so much that they don't mind missing out on the other things, and I'm sure (I know in fact) that you can have a very valuable childhood this way. But I guess this is not great for most kids, or at least unsuitable to many.
I’m divorced. I’ve got two kiddos - five and seven. For school holidays we go away on extended adventures around Australia and on weekends we go camping. During weekdays the kiddos see me before and after school most days and I’ve rented an office nearby for co-working from when in Sydney.
The van is setup like a house (office) on wheels with all the typical luxuries such as toilets, running water, seperate sleeping areas, microwave for popcorn+movies, massive electrical system and “the best interest in Australia” - https://ghuntley.com/internet so it is hardly slumming it.
Well done, sounds like you're a very dedicated parent.
Mine are 1 and 3 (1's a bit young for major exploring, admittedly, but 3 is getting there). The 3-year old likes outdoors, but I can't picture her living permanently out in the sticks. She likes her big-city nursery, her little friends, going for croissants etc.
In a way it's a shame, I'd love to pack up and live in the back country, but how things are for me, I could only do it at a detriment to my kids development - YMMV.
Have always had the off-grid van dream, but as the father of a 6yo I’ve come to accept what you have said as my reality, having experienced the results on myself and my family after much trial and error over the last few years, including building out a shipping container on 5 acres, living in hotels full time, buying a van, and attempting to settle down in many different urban communities. I finally find myself now settling down in a suburban family-focused community, for my son to start 1st grade. And after a couple months already, I wouldn’t say the amount of happiness is what’s changed, but the total amount of stress. It is extremely freeing in its own right, just like falling asleep in a van in the desert is. I still haven’t given up, I love setting off to explore the unknown, but life has a funny way of giving you exactly what you want while not giving you anything you may have expected to begin with.
Though I found the content sounded very interesting I kept losing focus while trying to continue reading. The interruption sections look too much like advertising. I think I'm having a gut reaction thinking the article was over.
Yeah I had a similar reaction. Chalk it up to the chum bucket fatigue at the end of listicles.
I am recently considering that imagery on the web is too powerful. It can be detrimental or subversive to my attention. I feel rejuvenated from HN much of the time because it's textual and thoughtful, not so much of the web that's trying to influence me with images (moving images even more so). Using reader mode / pocket can help.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the plus side, it's more secure (which is especially nice since my less-than-tech-savvy family use iPads quite a lot). Moreover, even if you had an unlocked iPad, it would be inferior to a laptop in most respects anyway (most standing cases don't allow you to actually work from your lap, keyboards are awful, etc). So while it would be neat to be able to do development work from an iPad, it's really only useful in those rare occasions where you really can't afford an extra cubic inch (or whatever the difference between a MacBook Air and an iPad is) in your luggage.
In college a lot of students get a device that needs to last for 4 years, not knowing what classes they’ll end up taking (often they switch majors).
Lots of students will get iPad Pros as their only device. When they decide to take a class that requires coding, they’ll run into all the support problems, and either need to do all their work in a library or pony up more money they don’t have to get a worse-spec computer that they can actually do their assignments on.
These classes typically have support guides for MacOS and Windows. Even making it possible to install MacOS on an iPad Pro would make the device good enough to be a student’s only computer.
I would contend based on my earlier post that they would still be better served by a MacBook Air at a similar price point (even if they could unlock their iPad). In other words, I don’t see an advantage for the overwhelming majority of students.
Being able to take notes with a pen is huge. iPads are a bit cheaper than Macbooks, and they're easy to use if you're familiar with a smartphone. If you won't need any specialized software not available for iOS, I'd say iPads should be plenty great for studying. I've used mine a lot back then, and that was way before the Pencil (using a third-party stylus) and it worked really well.
I own an iPad with the Apple Pencil precisely because I was excited to take notes with it, but the handwriting recognition is awful, and without handwriting recognition there isn’t much point in using the iPad versus paper notebooks for notes.
Anyway, if as much as I enjoy handwriting, taking notes via keyboard is much better: you can type a lot faster than you can write and you get all of the benefits of handwriting recognition (searchability, editability, etc). And if you’re using an iPad, your keyboard experience is significantly poorer than with a laptop. The only compelling advantage for a stylus is diagrams IMO.
As for “learning curve”, I have a hard time believing that children will have a significantly harder time with macOS versus iOS. Kids seem pretty smart when it comes to technology.
The greatest thing about books is that they are easier to read in bright sunlight. I wish we could crack that problem for computer screens, even really bright screens like the iPad essentially must be used in a very shady environment.
That's still just trying to get away from the sun at a smaller scale, and honestly even sitting in shade in bright sun is too bright for most screens to really work well in my experience.
I thought eReader screens were supposed to outperform paper? The problem with these is that they have very low refresh rates relative to typical laptop screens (but still far higher than paper!)
Unless he's really invested in the apple ecosystem, I can't help but feel the author might have been better off with a Surface Pro. Similar form factor but with a desktop OS. Granted it's not as powerful as an ipad pro but I would argue that it might provide a better overall development experience.
I don't understand why Apple doesn't give Ipad pro users an option similar to Samsung Dex. There seems to be an aversion to enabling MacOS on touch devices.
Anyway enough with my rambling, the author seems pleased with his setup so it is what it is.
This is a great read. I absolutely love the iPad, and it's one of the few devices I still find magical everytime I pick it up. I have an older iPad Pro 10.5" with a Smart Folio keyboard and I wonder if his setup is a big step up in terms of ergonomics. I've tried using my iPad for productivity related tasks but I find it too cramped.
The 13” screen enables me to do split windows and multi task effectively. I don’t see split windows working well on an 10.5”. Having said that - iPad’s can connect to external monitors so 10.5” might just be a perfect size. K33g over at GitLab (who is also a core committer to golang) uses a 10.5”
> If it could run Xcode natively it would be so much better
That made me think, Apple must have some internal prototype of Xcode for iPad? Creating iOS apps on iPad could be a killer 'Pro' app, convincing people to choose a Pro version over the regular iPad. Maybe they are worried apps created on iPad wouldn't be quite the same standard as apps created on regular Macs?
My problem with using the 13" iPad was that with the keyboard, it's not that much smaller/lighter than an Air. You still have a big battery and display, which will be roughly the same size. While I like the keyboard, it adds a decent amount of bulk.
I also use my iPad for drawing / handwritten note taking. This is a use-case which the iPad is clearly superior compared to a MBP/MBA. :)
I have the iPad pro (12.9") but I don't use external screen (but I used to work with an Air 11.6" for years)
And with GitPod it becames almost the perfect notebook
btw, I'm not a core committer to golang but gololang (based on Java & invokedynamic)
I wish they would make docker and external monitor possible on an iPad. VSCode for iPad + docker that is shipping with it + VSCode Remote that runs dev. environment in that docker would solve all the developers requirements (except for power).
I tried this setup a few years ago, over a couple of weeks whilst in Spain on holiday. iPad Pro (1st gen + apple's keyboard case), shared Wifi from my iPhone (4G in roaming), blink, and OpenBSD VM from Vultr.
It was surprisingly OK. Mosh definitely works for dodgy connections, tmux keeps the session(s) around and all works fine. I was writing C in vim, so that also helped, no heavy tools other than the compiler.
I only wish I had the bigger iPad model. And I wish there was a way to attach that keyboard when in portrait mode (far superior for coding on iPad).
I've been trying to build a remote dev setup using code-server [1] on a 2017-ish iPad Pro 10.5" and a Logitech K380 keyboard for when travelling and when on the indoor bike. I have code-server running in a big fat docker container with language SDKs, utilities, fish shell with custom prompt, etc. installed as well, and it works great in a desktop browser, but I can't quite get it to be fully usable on the iPad. It seems this still has a bunch of very rough edges.
Using code-server in iPad Safari means Cmd+N etc. won't work and also losing very precious display real estate to Safari's UI. Adding it to the home screen and launching from there solves that, but now switching to Safari and back causes keyboard input to stop registering at all in code-server. The Serverediter [2] app doesn't have that issue, but its UI and parts of the code-server UI will jump around for a second when Cmd-Tab-ing to it, which is pretty unnerving.
Then there's connectivity: Apparently background SSH tunnels get killed by iOS after a while. Serverediter has its own SSH client, but port-forwarding any other ports than code-server's doesn't seem to work. Not being able to expose a running web service on my local device makes lots of things infeasible. Maybe I'd need a separate VPN between the code-server machine and my iPad? But that adds more complexity to an already quite complex setup. And finally, https with self-signed certs isn't exactly a walk in the park with iPads (I can't use letsencrypt), but without it I believe the clipboard won't work right.
I realize there are SaaS offers that will make some (or most?) of these issues go away, but those don't seem to be all that customizable, and since I'd use this for personal projects that don't earn any money, keeping costs down is a priority as well (so if I can self-host on hardware I already have, I'd rather do that).
So while I totally get the appeal, I really wonder how others make it work for them. It doesn't seem to be quite as straight-forward as the blog posts made it look.
The iPad has the advantage of cellular data. But if your nomadic goals are not cramped by being near WiFi, I find a cheap thin ChromeOS client (ideally with a 3:2 display) works substantially better. I have been code-server'ing from a gaming desktop for three years now this way. My clients have been a Asus C302, Pixelbook, an Acer Spin 13, and now a Framework laptop on Manjaro Sway edition. It's been a revelation. The desktop cranks on web dev stuff in a way no laptop can.
Recently did the exact same thing and came to the exact same conclusion, even if code server worked well enough the lost screen realestate pissed me off so much I don't think I could have lived with it.
I picked up an iPad Pro more or less to chase this same ideal. I'm using blink shell and tailscale. Originally I wanted to use code-server but none of those web vscode instances support the extensions I want to use, so now I'm just trying to pick up vim.
If only Textastic had the ability to edit files over SSH instead of having to transfer files back and forth first, pairing Textastic with an SSH client to a remote server would be absolutely ideal for me. The problem is that good text editors without obvious compromises for iPadOS are extremely difficult to find.
What I do is install Xrdp on a recent Ubuntu LTS and use Jump Desktop to do RDP over SSH. It is much more flexible than trying to jump through hoops with Safari keyboard and selection handling.
I’ve been doing this for a long, long time, and RDP over SSH ato a recent build of Xrdp (with Openbox and a minimal DE) has been very productive.
(As an aside, the blog post is… disconcerting. I was expecting long form and not what my brain initially believed to be a mass of banners interrupting the actual text. Extremely hard to end until the end, reminded me of TikTok).
I have a Ipad with Magic keyboard that I tried to make work for just keeping up on work while I travelled not even as a primary dev machine and without background tasks it was just not possible.
Ended up giving it to my wife and getting a surface go 2 m3, its lighter smaller and 1000% more capable, couldn't be happier.
Same for me. Tried to use it for various things but it never works well for me. Now it is function as a Zoom meeting and videos. It is so locked down which make it behaves like a smartphone rather than actual productivity device.
> One goal of Open VSX is to have extension maintainers publish their extensions according to the documentation. However, you may be missing specific extensions that have not been published by their maintainers: either they are not willing to do it, or they haven't found time to do it, or simply they haven't heard about Open VSX yet. Though the preferred solution for such a situation is to convince the maintainers to start publishing themselves, you can add the extensions here to have them published by our CI workflow.
I tried the Surface Go 2, and it would indeed be a better option. However it's terrible as a drawing tablet (the reason I looked into tablets), and I just can't deal with Windows anymore. After spending a whole day (including several hours of looking at the update screen) making Windows halfway usable, I decided to just return it.
He has powerful and expensive hardware in perfect condition, that he can’t use because it depends on a closed-source OS and is controlled by Apple’s policies. He recommends another device running another closed-source OS and controlled by the same corporation for software development. Wouldn’t a better choice be a device that you can actually own?
Consider a standard node_modules and installing via pnpm - that’s a lot of network round trips and downloads if you are on a marginal internet connection. When your development machine has Gbit uplinks all that pain melts away.
These cloud style development environments are lovely because all development is happening in a data centre and frankly it’s all sandboxed. Every time you run “git pull && make” from GitHub you are essentially rolling the dice that the end result is not “rm -rf /*” or “sudo apt-get install miner” (if you are lucky)
Please don't run code from the internet without glancing at first. I also believe parent was discussing the fact his laptop managed to get bricked because he left a beta program...
as mentioned in the article, blink is a remarkable tool. it really is indispensable for any dev work on an ipad. i absolutely love it. worth every cent
I thought of using just a tablet to replace my laptop and my paper notebook, but thin client development only works with a fast, stable Internet connection.
This isn't possible everywhere. It's not even possible on German intercity trains/buses. It's also not possible across the oceans due to latency.
Even when the location is fine, there are bad wi-fi connections, paygates and network outages. Hotel wi-fi is hit or miss. Camping wifi is mostly miss. Censorship is also an issue in some countries. Some wi-fi networks block certain ports too.
My definition of anywhere includes those places, and far more remote ones. Therefore I need a local development environment, so I'm taking my laptop with me.
However, I really love the idea of working from a quiet place outdoors. I spend a few hours on my small balcony every morning. I was considering working from quiet places in the woods like you do.
To add some context. Had to take my fully specced out 2018 MBP 15" to get the battery replaced. Basicly, I had to go a week without my daily driver and I didn't have a backup. So I picked up a macbook air since they have a 14 day no questions asked return policy. I expected this thing to do some light work. I didn't expect it to actually keep up with my entire workload but it did and without getting particularly warm either. This tiny 1k laptop with 8 gb of ram was ding the job of a 3.5k fully specced mbp with 32 gigs of ram.
can't wait to see what they do with the m1x but I think the macbook air will handle everything you need + allow you to devlop locally.
With 16GB, I normally have open: RubyMine, DataGrip (two heavy JetBrains products), a terminal with two tabs, one having tmux and multiple local subshells and one with a remote connection to a server which has tmux (love tmux!), PostgreSQL, MailCatcher, any number of custom app servers (some ruby, some Node), Firefox with far too many open tabs, Spotify, and a handful of other apps.
I'm just about to find out how this thing handles 4k video processing as I got some new video toys to travel with. Maybe I'll end up needing the extra cores of an M1 Pro Max, but hopefully not.
Mmm. That's disconcerting, as I just bought my fiancee an M1 Air with 8gb. (Getting her to spend more than strictly necessary on a laptop would be worse than pulling teeth.) Hopefully that's not an issue with her computing needs, which should be fairly minimal ... Word, Excel, BlueJeans for teleconferencing, Chrome.
I use IDEs that are heavier duty than the average user, but those didn't even seem to be the issue, once I had more than about a couple dozen or so tabs open the machine would start grinding to a halt. Sometimes so badly that even closing applications was difficult.
I upgraded to a 16GB and have zero issues now. It seems browser tabs just don't play to the strengths of the M1's memory setup
I had configured the 'sliding panels' or whatever it's called to use a whole album of about 1000 photos, and noticed that I was getting these weird OOM notices, and when I checked in activity monitor, there didn't seem to be any memory overuse. But I realised it was happening when I was waking my computer from sleep.
I reduced it to 100 photos and now I don't see the warnings any more, so my guess is that the screensaver was trying to read all 1000 or so photos into memory at once, which was causing the issues.
If you have a photo screensaver, worth checking (possibly also the desktop background).
I suspect its just a recent MacOS bug that will get sorted out, and not an actual OOM issue. Chrome can use a lot, but I've never gotten close to using 16 gigs in my workflows, let alone 32.
I'm getting a MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro next, since I really want the ability to drive more than 1 external monitor. But if the Air could do that, I'd be all over it now even with the original M1.
No need to wait, they're available starting this week!
https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-14-and-16/
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-pro-max-everythin...
One needs a stable connection (Edge network connectivity is all I need), fast is not needed. If there’s high packet loss I switch over to using mosh+ssh and elinks.
I bought a Chromebook Duet at Best Buy for $259. Works very well for software development without internet (runs Debian out of the box). I can plug it into an external monitor and add a keyboard and mouse when they're available. Otherwise the case comes with a keyboard, so I can program at any time.
Guessing you might’ve, given how much effort it looks like you’ve put into this, but if not, it’s worth a look. Integrates really well with Alfred.
There are local / offline code editors on iOS that will sync via Git next time you're online, and Git itself is pretty tolerant of bad connections. As is blink terminal client, over mosh.
For enterprise or systems devs, the negatives of attempting to host a complex system environment on your laptop outweigh the challenges of marginal network coverage (except when there is no network coverage).
Because of those negatives, even dedicated full time dev machines on gigabit connectivity are moving towards CodeEnvy style local (and portable) workspace for edit, with remote deploy/run/debug models. That's basically thin client / thick client debate coming around again.
Vast majority of enterprise/system devs are not so remote as to have to run a simulated cloud environment (e.g. minikube) locally, and I've found almost zero rural areas in the US that can't do a mosh session over the iPad Pro's cellular chip.
As a counter-piece of anecdata:
With connectivity, VS Code runs on an iPad, blink mosh terminal client, remote desktops of all kinds, etc. Without connectivity, various code editors with full syntax highlighting and git sync, to the point I've been handling enterprise software dev via iPad Pro for several years now. It used to be hard, now it's trivial.
Since circa 2017 I've only taken MacBook Pro on a trip if I'm somewhere more than 3 weeks, and ever since the keyboard with trackpad and now the Xbox controller for Xbox cloud gaming, I'm not even sure I need that. The MBP is probably a crutch.
Given the portability, true lap top usability, all-day battery life, built in cellular connectivity, ability to transform into a Kindle or touch device, etc., along with tools needed to code both online and offline, most devs with an iPad Pro 12.9 can ask, "What's a computer?"
For day-to-day software development. Use Gitpod or GitHub Codespaces or Mosh+SSH to a Baremetal machine.
What’s your technology stack? What’s the tooling you need to do?
Also, iSH allows you to install Alpine Linux along with many packages.
The feature is there, but it's not readily discoverable.
For that reason, I mentioned PDF Expert, which doesn't have Adobe's lack of UX sensibility baked in.
(Was doing that was back with a gen 1 ipad, a pencil from “53” and a cheap pdf editor.)
Children want stability, access to age-appropriate entertainment (playgrounds, soft play centres, or cinemas and suchlikes for older ones), good schools, friends with similar age.
All those things funnel you to populated centres, likely wealthier ones (for schools, though this varies by locale), and hence also pricier ones.
Sure, some kids are super-happy slumming it in a van, or a shack somewhere beautiful, and enjoy outdoors so much that they don't mind missing out on the other things, and I'm sure (I know in fact) that you can have a very valuable childhood this way. But I guess this is not great for most kids, or at least unsuitable to many.
The van is setup like a house (office) on wheels with all the typical luxuries such as toilets, running water, seperate sleeping areas, microwave for popcorn+movies, massive electrical system and “the best interest in Australia” - https://ghuntley.com/internet so it is hardly slumming it.
Mine are 1 and 3 (1's a bit young for major exploring, admittedly, but 3 is getting there). The 3-year old likes outdoors, but I can't picture her living permanently out in the sticks. She likes her big-city nursery, her little friends, going for croissants etc.
In a way it's a shame, I'd love to pack up and live in the back country, but how things are for me, I could only do it at a detriment to my kids development - YMMV.
I am recently considering that imagery on the web is too powerful. It can be detrimental or subversive to my attention. I feel rejuvenated from HN much of the time because it's textual and thoughtful, not so much of the web that's trying to influence me with images (moving images even more so). Using reader mode / pocket can help.
In college a lot of students get a device that needs to last for 4 years, not knowing what classes they’ll end up taking (often they switch majors).
Lots of students will get iPad Pros as their only device. When they decide to take a class that requires coding, they’ll run into all the support problems, and either need to do all their work in a library or pony up more money they don’t have to get a worse-spec computer that they can actually do their assignments on.
These classes typically have support guides for MacOS and Windows. Even making it possible to install MacOS on an iPad Pro would make the device good enough to be a student’s only computer.
Anyway, if as much as I enjoy handwriting, taking notes via keyboard is much better: you can type a lot faster than you can write and you get all of the benefits of handwriting recognition (searchability, editability, etc). And if you’re using an iPad, your keyboard experience is significantly poorer than with a laptop. The only compelling advantage for a stylus is diagrams IMO.
As for “learning curve”, I have a hard time believing that children will have a significantly harder time with macOS versus iOS. Kids seem pretty smart when it comes to technology.
https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley/status/14531947902169538...
I don't understand why Apple doesn't give Ipad pro users an option similar to Samsung Dex. There seems to be an aversion to enabling MacOS on touch devices.
Anyway enough with my rambling, the author seems pleased with his setup so it is what it is.
https://twitter.com/k33g_org?s=20
> I still find magical everytime I pick it up
So magical. I love mine so so much. If it could run Xcode natively it would be so much better and I would not need to carry around my M1 MacBook Pro.
That made me think, Apple must have some internal prototype of Xcode for iPad? Creating iOS apps on iPad could be a killer 'Pro' app, convincing people to choose a Pro version over the regular iPad. Maybe they are worried apps created on iPad wouldn't be quite the same standard as apps created on regular Macs?
I also use my iPad for drawing / handwritten note taking. This is a use-case which the iPad is clearly superior compared to a MBP/MBA. :)
btw, I'm not a core committer to golang but gololang (based on Java & invokedynamic)
It was surprisingly OK. Mosh definitely works for dodgy connections, tmux keeps the session(s) around and all works fine. I was writing C in vim, so that also helped, no heavy tools other than the compiler.
I only wish I had the bigger iPad model. And I wish there was a way to attach that keyboard when in portrait mode (far superior for coding on iPad).
Using code-server in iPad Safari means Cmd+N etc. won't work and also losing very precious display real estate to Safari's UI. Adding it to the home screen and launching from there solves that, but now switching to Safari and back causes keyboard input to stop registering at all in code-server. The Serverediter [2] app doesn't have that issue, but its UI and parts of the code-server UI will jump around for a second when Cmd-Tab-ing to it, which is pretty unnerving.
Then there's connectivity: Apparently background SSH tunnels get killed by iOS after a while. Serverediter has its own SSH client, but port-forwarding any other ports than code-server's doesn't seem to work. Not being able to expose a running web service on my local device makes lots of things infeasible. Maybe I'd need a separate VPN between the code-server machine and my iPad? But that adds more complexity to an already quite complex setup. And finally, https with self-signed certs isn't exactly a walk in the park with iPads (I can't use letsencrypt), but without it I believe the clipboard won't work right.
I realize there are SaaS offers that will make some (or most?) of these issues go away, but those don't seem to be all that customizable, and since I'd use this for personal projects that don't earn any money, keeping costs down is a priority as well (so if I can self-host on hardware I already have, I'd rather do that).
So while I totally get the appeal, I really wonder how others make it work for them. It doesn't seem to be quite as straight-forward as the blog posts made it look.
1: https://github.com/cdr/code-server
2: https://servediter.app/
There is a hack to get background ssh connections to stay alive: https://docs.termius.com/faq/troubleshooting/cant-run-in-the...
https://blink.sh/
https://tailscale.com/
(As an aside, the blog post is… disconcerting. I was expecting long form and not what my brain initially believed to be a mass of banners interrupting the actual text. Extremely hard to end until the end, reminded me of TikTok).
Ended up giving it to my wife and getting a surface go 2 m3, its lighter smaller and 1000% more capable, couldn't be happier.
> One goal of Open VSX is to have extension maintainers publish their extensions according to the documentation. However, you may be missing specific extensions that have not been published by their maintainers: either they are not willing to do it, or they haven't found time to do it, or simply they haven't heard about Open VSX yet. Though the preferred solution for such a situation is to convince the maintainers to start publishing themselves, you can add the extensions here to have them published by our CI workflow.
It fizzled. But we didn't have all the advantages he has.
These cloud style development environments are lovely because all development is happening in a data centre and frankly it’s all sandboxed. Every time you run “git pull && make” from GitHub you are essentially rolling the dice that the end result is not “rm -rf /*” or “sudo apt-get install miner” (if you are lucky)