[dijit]

To be perfectly fair here, you're responding as if "productivity" means "Code" and that's not exactly true.

For the overwhelming majority of people: coding is not productivity.

What is? Checking email, jotting down notes, recording meetings and transcribing/dictating them, joining meetings and having reliable video/audio.

Being able to respond to an email with a little drawing is _absolutely_ a killer feature for productivity, having a little 10" portable device which can perch on a desk and allow you the full gammut of features for a _good_ meeting is also pretty damn awesome.

One could argue that these have some moderate competence at artistic creation machines (photos, videos, drawing, some combination), but I'm not creative so I'm not sure how competent these devices realistically are.

I wont comment much on the statement you can't actually code on an iPad, technically you can; gitpods, code-server, coder.com, (and if you work at google CitC) means you already have everything you need. These work with safari; because those features Chrome demands we have are not actually needed for such tasks.

[concinds]

This misses the problem.

Countless, countless, countless iOS devs, even extremely high-profile ones like Marco Arment, can talk all day long about problems they've had with App Review and the capriciousness of the App Store. Tons of high-profile, reputable devs can talk about specific apps they were making or wanted to make, never saw the light of day, not because the apps violate App Store policy, but because App Review is such a minefield that they didn't want to bother.

Apple literally publicly said that devs criticising the App Store, or App Review practices, could expect retaliation.

It's insane that devs are expected to only provide apps through a single storefront, that operates at such a huge scale that moderation is necessarily arbitrary, mostly algorithmic, and inconsistent. The App Store monopoly is indefensible.

[ericmay]

You're just shifting the target from one monopoly app store that's high profile to a dozen or so (maybe fewer) app stores who will also have their own arbitrary rules and moderation.

You might say, well at least they have alternatives from Apple. Sure, but then if those alternatives are sufficiently good competitors we likely lost all of the privacy benefits and so forth from the Apple App Store and they'll have their own arbitrary review practices and retaliatory nature. And if they as good of alternatives then most likely the majority of these apps with "problems" are just scam artists and should be rejected anyway except now they can thrive on people who are susceptible to being scammed.

To me this is a little bit like having a debate over the First Amendment where I'm kind of sitting here and saying yea you shouldn't be allowed to yell fire! in a crowd as part of the amendment from the start and others are just asking for maximum freedom of speech, only to have this legislated later anyway.

[j-pb]

> means you already have everything you need.

Your lack imagination of how much better software development could be given the right interfaces, and interaction modes, is somewhat representative of how the stagnation of iPad OS has crippled our optimism and taste for futurism, constantly improving user experiences and new models of computation.

The iPad has amazing input capabilities, from the pen to laser scanning that could all be used to further improve developer experiences. Be it by augmenting your scrum board, to sharing code annotations with your coworkers, or foregoing coding completely and turning flow-charts to code directly.

But sure, let's all be middle management, and write emails all day.

[smoldesu]

> I wont comment much on the statement you can't actually code on an iPad, technically you can

That's not coding on an iPad, since the code is not being interpreted/compiled on-device. You're right that an iPad can remote into a build server for "development", but so can a $6 Raspberry Pi.

[seti0Cha]

I don't know why I should give a rat's ass what CPU is doing the work as long as the work can be done. Your point seems kind of pedantic in a world where a vast amount of code executes in the cloud or is intricately tied up with networked services so that a freestanding computer is of little value.

[smoldesu]

Hey, if that's your attitude then who am I to stop you? By your definition, the iPad is also a great device for Windows since it can RDP into Windows machines without problems. Of course, as I outlined above, that's not a very impressive superpower, but who cares! In the future, you'll own nothing and be happy: including your own hardware/software.

For me, though, having an internet connection as a prerequisite for running my software is borderline insanity. My software should compile and run locally, I shouldn't need to trust a random third-party or connect to the internet to check how my HTML renders or test a few changes to my software. But I guess that doesn't make a difference on iPad, because even if you did have a proper text editor/compiler it would phone home with OSCP anyways.

[dijit]

IDK, the iPad feels to me like it was designed specifically to be a thin client.

Lots of input capabilities and low processing (yes, I know it has the M1 now, but that feels more like a supply chain thing than a product thing).

I wouldn't get mad if the Sun Ray[0] didn't allow me to compile code natively.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray