Have you used an iPad as a second monitor?

How has your experience been so far?

Comments

[paras chhugani]

I want a second screen for my ios development. I am confused between iPad 8th gen and a monitor ...
Ipad is costing me 21,570 RS and monitor + second-hand iPhone is costing me 18,500 RS ..
If I buy an iPad i will use it for second screen and app testing, and monitor for same.

Can anyone help me here.....

[Tony Dehnke]

I've been using my 10.5" Pro with Duet Display for a long time now and love it.

[Maegan Wilson]

I’ve done it a couple times with Side Car. It’s been pretty useful and definitely gets the job done. I wouldn’t do it full time. I also wouldn’t enjoy it as much if I didn’t have the 12.9” iPad Pro.

[Vítězslav Ackermann Ferko]

I am using Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 as my second monitor, it comes with a nice stand too and the resolution is great together with a 4k XPS 13.

[Peter Witham]

I do use it as a second and sometimes third display like many have commented. I have played around with Sidecar and it works OK, but I still use my LunaDisplay adapter more. I find it works great for me since I lean towards using second+ screens for things like reference materials or monitoring Slack, those sort of 'glance at them' apps for the most part.

[John Johnson]

I've found sometimes my iPad Pro will disconnect when using sidecar. The trick/hack I use to get it to reconnect is to click the sidecar/iPad icon in the top right and click mirror display then I switch it back to separate display.

[oh hi mark 👋]

I too just bought an iPad Pro 11” (pro tip amazon sells them “renewed” for cheap). I’m using it in many ways including an extra monitor. A while back I purchased the Luna Display, it makes things very consistent and retains quality — highly recommended for power users. I also saw someone on YouTube who uses the new raspberry pi as their mobile work environment that they connect to iPad. Very interesting.

[Lindsay Iveson]

Yes! Before updating to MacOS Catalina, I used an app called Duet and it was great! The downside was that I had to connect my iPad to my Macbook Pro (so many dongles) and pay about $10.

But since updating, I now use sidecar, and that's been very smooth and I really like it.

[Alexander Alemayhu]

Other than the connectivity issues, the sidecar is amazing! I put several terminals on there or desktop apps I am working on. Feels much better and so nice to not have to deal with the cables :D

[Front-End Developer for Hire]

I've been using my iPad Pro 9.7 as a second monitor on my 13" MBP for the past couple years and it's been great. I've been using it with Duet.

[RwkY]

Well my experience has been good so far, I like the fact that the latency is really low for a wireless display.
I suggest you get a xiaomi battery, they got some models that can even charge your mbp.

[Corey Thompson]

I use my 6th Gen at Starbucks every morning before going into work. Works great there. However, at the house I have a few spots with lackluster wifi connection and the experience is pretty latent. I end up having to tether at the house. I loveee that each screen each has multiple desktops. Makes using it for development fantastic - 3 instances of localhost on the ipad, each on their own desktop for different resolutions and VSCode on the MBPro. 👌

[Rafay Aleem]

I recently bought the new iPad 10.2. Been using it as a second display on and off over-the-air. Experience has been great as far a second monitor is concerned.

Eventually, I would like to use it more as a design / illustration / note-taking tool that seamlessly integrates with my Mac. That experience has been a bit jittery and I am looking for tips to optimize that. I am using Notability for illustrations and notes and would like to know how you guys use this app in conjunction with your Macbooks.

[Michael Friedman]

If you have an iPad Pro, the dual monitor support is built-in with Catalina now, you don't need to buy any additional software. I've used it pretty extensively and it works great, but I recommend plugging it in with a cable vs a wired connection when possible.

[Tammy Lee]

I have and I very much like the experience.
However, I don't code much when I'm travelling so I usually travel with just my iPad.

• I use Working Copy to update my Hugo website. (Netlify looks for changes in my repo then builds and deploys from there.)
• FE File Explorer when I need to dig around in my iPad for files
• Zoom/Slack for meetings
• Google Docs for writing (easier to share with my PA or my team)
• Web-based Github to review PRs
• Streamlabs for live streaming to Twitch
• Slack for team communications
• Dropbox for cloud storage
• And Zapier zaps to move things from my iPad to Cloudinary/blogs/social etc.

If I were going to code, I'd probably use a cloud-based IDE like Codesandbox or Code Anywhere

Hope that helps! :D