Three Months of Using an iPad as a Laptop Replacement: The Bottom Line
Bottom line: It depends entirely on the person. For me, it worked as a secondary device but failed as my main one.
Writing documents, sending simple emails, taking notes, and viewing PDFs are genuinely pleasant. It’s light, and the battery lasts all day. Just not carrying a heavy laptop on my commute was enough to make it worthwhile.
But the moment I open an IDE and run multiple servers, it’s over. In the end, I used it by remotely connecting to my laptop at home—and if that’s what I’m doing, I might as well just carry the laptop. If you’re a developer, I’d recommend thinking of it as a supplement rather than a replacement.
3 answers
For real, in the end a laptop is the move for development lol. I only use mine as a secondary device too.
For me, it was the opposite: for taking notes, reading paper PDFs, and viewing lecture materials, the main device was more than enough. I keep a paper and my notes open in split view in GoodNotes and use it all day, and the battery really lasts a long time. Above all, the weight... compared to when I used to lug around a 1.4kg laptop, my bag is about half the weight.
That said, like you said, heavy workloads are just not workable. So I settled on keeping a desktop at home and running only what I need remotely, and once you set that up, it's better than you'd think. If you set up a private network with something like Tailscale, you can connect from outside just fine, too. In the end, I think the first step is to figure out what your workload actually is. If development is your main workload, then a laptop is simply the right choice.