

We can still do a lot of cool things that we’ll cover in the apps section, but staying at the base level of iOS, there are a few things worth remarking. Namely, I can’t do things like work with the command line and command line tools, build Docker images, and more.īut that doesn’t mean we’re at a total loss. It’s ultimately limited in some of the things that I do on a regular laptop that I unfortunately could never truly replace something like my work laptop for an iPad. Though Apple has made strides toward making iOS more appealing to production customers (even recently rebranding iOS on iPad as iPadOS), it’s still iOS at its heart. Screenshot taken by author of Medium, Pythonista, and PIP video Is it possible? Technically yes, but the experience is so awful that I’d rather use a lower end laptop for my work at that point. If you have a regular iPad and have no interest in buying these additional accessories, you just flat out are going to have a terrible time performing data science activities on your iPad.

Again, this was another huge leap forward in using the iPad as a production machine, but these extras don’t come cheap.
#Using react with textastic Bluetooth
In summer 2020, Apple formally added cursor support in iOS 14 to use Bluetooth enabled mice and more. (Not to mention the fact that the virtual keyboard takes up a ton of valuable screen space.) It’s been a while ago now that iPad added support for physical keyboards, and that has helped a ton. Using a virtual keyboard and using your finger as a cursor is a very clunky experience.
#Using react with textastic full
I personally a 16" MacBook Pro for my day job as a machine learning engineer, and for working in Python, I’d say my iPad Pro is equally as fast as the full MacBook Pro.īut we can’t ignore the giant downside: the iPad in and of itself is a big touchscreen. We’ll get into this further on down with our apps, but using the apps to load in datasets from CSVs and exploring them using Pandas has been a very snappy experience. I think it’s safe to say any iPad that’s been released in the last two years has strong enough performance to rival most regular laptops. This post is going to cover the iPad hardware, software, and apps for an experience not reliant on cloud computing.) The Hardware (Oh, and one more thing… I am 100% aware you can definitely get by with using the iPad as a production machine if you use cloud services like AWS or GCP, but that feels like cheating. In the remainder of this post, we’ll see how we can make use of the iPad in the data science field and give a final verdict on how useful the experience is. With the groundbreaking support for using a cursor in iOS 14 to baking in a trackpad in their latest iPad keyboard, I’m now curious to revisit how viable the iPad is as a data science machine. Of course, I quickly had to get myself a new laptop in early 2019 as it became clear that I was going to need it for data science.īut here we are in January 2021, and Apple has continued to make strides for the iPad to become more of a production machine. In fact, before I became a data science student in 2018, there was a time when I totally ditched my laptop in favor of solely using an iPad. From adding keyboard support to allowing for a really nice graphic design experience with the Apple Pencil, the iPad has creeped further and further into true laptop replacement territory. But admittedly, the iPad has always lacked the stuff to make it a really good machine for production.Īs time has gone on, Apple has slowly added more and more features to make the iPad more and more of a production machine. Whether it be watching your favorite show on Netflix or browsing the web, the iPad is the best personal large screen experience that isn’t a full blown laptop.

In my opinion, the iPad is unquestionably the best consumption machine. And I did not regret getting it, even though you really couldn’t do much on it. Back then, I was still a poor college student, so I had to save a hefty penny to save up for my first one. Ever since its launch in 2010, I had to have one. Checking out some apps to support your data science learning path on an iPad
