Yes, he is using an iPad + remote Linux machine + network connection. It’s an interesting and useful combination for some use cases. You’re right that “you can’t really seriously work offline [for software dev] on it”, at present due purely to Apple-imposed software constraints, IMHO. Regarding “not suiable for any efficient and high quality content creation”, there are some use cases where the iPad 10.5 Pro is pretty useful:

- with an Apple Pencil, it’s a very useful device for sketching out ideas (much like a piece of paper is, but with some neat advantages, e.g., infinite size, scalability, editing),

- with the keyboard and any text editor, it’s useful for banging out text, e.g. a rough draft of a blog post or paper...

Most of the Apple-imposed constraints on local development and code execution were lifted recently: https://www.macstories.net/stories/coding-on-ios-is-more-fea...

Of course, it will likely take a while before developers are able to publish apps that utilize these new permissions to the Store.

Cool; perhaps I will be one of the developers to publish such an app! Without those constraints, I could technically provide a purely local offline App version of https://CoCalc.com...

With the pencil you can create pretty high quality drawings. It also seems many photographers are happy with the iPad in their workflow. The problem is that 90% of the rest what people do is cumbersome and full of needless obstacles. How should an iPad Pro replace a laptop if you can't export the photos and drawings without a laptop/computer. It's just so, so stupid. On the surface you pop in the USB stick (and virtually all other USB Hardware!) and you're good to go.