Exploring the benefits and pitfalls of using Apple’s popular tablet for data science work
A few years ago (2021), I published a blog post on how I was using an iPad for my own data science work, so I thought I’d share a follow up given that, yes, I am still using an iPad for my own work here in September 2024. I ended the 2021 post with the following note:
And so we finally come to the question we’ve all been waiting for, and that is, can we finally use solely the iPad for data science work? The unfortunate answer is ultimately no. Because iPadOS isn’t a traditional operating system, there are many things I cannot do due to my reliance on command line tools, Docker images, and more. I’ll be interested to see if Apple is ever able to overcome these hurdles, but they’re unfortunately still here in January 2021.
At the end of the day, this is still unfortunately true. Apple’s iPadOS operating system still inhibits the iPad from being as versatile as computers leveraging other operating systems like Windows, macOS, or Linux.
Still, the iPad has experienced a number of updates since my original post, both in terms of iPadOS itself as well as other software services that can be supported on the iPad. Interestingly, much of the content from that…