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Re:New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support by blihp on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @02:40PM (#22619851)
It's not nonsense, it's just different use cases. For office productivity applications, of course the majority of users will be just fine. For many technical people, 'real' work tends to mean heavy compute and/or I/O workloads which most laptops don't do well with let alone mobile devices.
Re:New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support by qubex on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @03:05PM (#22620110)
I am an inveterate and incorrigible Mathematica user, as most of my “real work” deals with what might be best described in layperson’s terms as “symbolic math”.

Even though Wolfram has not (yet? hope always dies last!) released a version of Mathematica for the iPad (meaning, a frontend notebook coupled to an actual onboard computing kernel) they have released a client for “Wolfram Online” (often referred to as “Cloud Mathematica”) offering. This isn’t quite what I would like, as there’s a significant range of circumstances where I cannot rely on network access (such as when flying) but for most other situations it suits the purpose.

Other mathematics-inclined apps allow even greater range of onboard functionality (Pythonista, MathSudio spring to mind).

Upshot: one can most definitely do significant amounts of data analysis on an iPad.

Re:New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support by vtail on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @03:33PM (#22620363)
I’m in the same boat: Wolfram Language has enlightened me (or you may say, corrupted me completely), so a prerequisite for any new computing device is that it can ran Mathematica.

Which is way I had to switch back from OpenBSD (which doesn’t run it) and Linux (which until today’s update, didn’t have HiDPI support) back to Mac OS.

Re:New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support by chrisseaton on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @02:47PM (#22619934)
Yes everyone has different use cases - so why do we denigrate some people's use cases as not 'real work'?
Re:New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support by blihp on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @02:56PM (#22620030)
I think this is mainly a historical thing with Apple's product naming. Their 'pro' designation doesn't mean what it used to mean and so a lot of the denigration is probably more targeting Apple than their users.
Re:New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support by rapind on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @02:53PM (#22619995)
A proper shell I can ssh with is really all I would need to do my real programming tasks. So even technical work could be broken down further.

I wouldn't use an iPad for this though. The shell's are all a compromise and I'm waiting for a great e-ink display so I can remote from a park / beach / patio.

Re:New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support by mark_l_watson on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @04:04PM (#22620699)
I have relied on my small iPad Pro with the older Prompt SSH app for occasional light programming while traveling. For more regular SSHing, a laptop or Chromebook is better. That said, I love my iPad Pro and I admit a positive bias that may not face honest analysis.