After 6 months owning a powerful 2019 16” MacBook Pro, probably the best base model in a long time for Apple, my new day job at algolux.com was providing me with a work laptop.

When I heard the news, I looked at my desk with the MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro on it. I had bought the latter as a light sidekick machine mostly to compile iOS apps against, and I slowly fell in love with its balance of ARM power and OS minimalism.

That’s when I realized that for a 9 to 5 use, the financially wise decision was to cash in on that still-very-new MacBook, and go iPad Pro as my main computer.

It’s been 3 months and I can say that it was a really great decision. Some errands are detailed in Geeetech CoreXY Conversion (GeeXY) for now, I’ll move them over soon! 🏗️

The story is now published at:

• https://unicorn-utterances.com/posts/living-off-the-ipad-as-an-engineer/
• https://pierremtb.medium.com/living-off-the-ipad-as-an-engineer-31f42f05e5ec (repost)

Some setup notes, accessing an M1 Mac Mini

Local access

• Make sure the hostname is easy and fun, eg.closetlaptop
• Open up SSH on port 22

On macOS, it's currently under System Preferences > Sharing

Remote access

Disable password authentication is a good thing to do right away, so only client with preauthorized keys can login. One can easily add a key with the following command.

ssh-copy-id closetlaptop

Then on closetlaptop:

sudo echo "PasswordAuthentication no" >> ~/.ssh/sshd_config