I've been using an iPad Pro for coding for a year now.
I traded in a M1 MacBook Pro for it and don't miss it at all.
It's great if you use a text-based IDE or can Tailscale back into your home network and connect to VSCode remotely.
Aside from Tailscale, I use Screens to VNC into my Macs at home and Blink to SSH in.
I really enjoy being able to detach the tablet from the keyboard and use it for drawing stuff/reading/etc. Super nice during flights when you're taking off or landing and can't use laptops.
It's also absolutely killer for demos. I'm in presales. People LOVE hand-drawn demos or slide deck demos that you can draw on, since most people are very visual. I look like a goddamn magician every time I go from drawing "slides" on my iPad to firing up a terminal with ease.
(That said, iOS REALLY needs to support global external monitor resolutions. There is an API that allows apps to display at different resolutions, but users have zero control over that.)
The only things I miss are shortcuts for Mission Control (I use virtual spaces heavily) and screenshots (you can take a screenshot by diagonally dragging a finger from the bottom right side of the screen to the center, but that's tedious and so is the UI for handling the screenshot)
I tried this many years ago with the 2018 iPad Pro and was much less successful then due to iOS limitations.
All this said, I can definitely see people hating the experience. You can't do multiple windows (Stage Manager sucks and split screen is limited) and you can't work locally at all.
I traded in a M1 MacBook Pro for it and don't miss it at all.
It's great if you use a text-based IDE or can Tailscale back into your home network and connect to VSCode remotely.
Aside from Tailscale, I use Screens to VNC into my Macs at home and Blink to SSH in.
I really enjoy being able to detach the tablet from the keyboard and use it for drawing stuff/reading/etc. Super nice during flights when you're taking off or landing and can't use laptops.
It's also absolutely killer for demos. I'm in presales. People LOVE hand-drawn demos or slide deck demos that you can draw on, since most people are very visual. I look like a goddamn magician every time I go from drawing "slides" on my iPad to firing up a terminal with ease.
(That said, iOS REALLY needs to support global external monitor resolutions. There is an API that allows apps to display at different resolutions, but users have zero control over that.)
The only things I miss are shortcuts for Mission Control (I use virtual spaces heavily) and screenshots (you can take a screenshot by diagonally dragging a finger from the bottom right side of the screen to the center, but that's tedious and so is the UI for handling the screenshot)
I tried this many years ago with the 2018 iPad Pro and was much less successful then due to iOS limitations.
All this said, I can definitely see people hating the experience. You can't do multiple windows (Stage Manager sucks and split screen is limited) and you can't work locally at all.