You'd be amazed. The screen is high-res, the touchpad is precise, and the keyboard is complete. You occasionally find key combos that are hard to type - switching VTs springs to mind - but otherwise, it's almost as usable as a full size laptop. I haven't tried it yet, but I think (light) coding on it would be quite practical.

Actually, let's try it:

  #include <stdio.h>
  int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
      while(1) {
          printf("All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!\n");
      }
  }

Seems okay.

Like an iPad: read some web pages, mail, etc; a little light editing. But in a lightweight, long battery life with the benefits of a keyboard rather than the crappy virtual keyboard.

I used to have an Apple “MacBook” which at 2 lbs (900 g) was great for carrying around, flying all over the world, etc. As I develop in Emacs, development was great, though complication was slow; I’d often compile in the cloud. It was a great machine. I use an m1 air these days which is half a pound heavier and is a great development machine.

Despite what I said about crappy virtual keyboards I am typing this comment on about 450 g of ipad.

I’ve used a 12-inch MacBook for years as my daily driver for backend web development. It’s perfectly usable if you don’t run any Electron crap or Docker (on Linux it would actually be fine, but Docker for Mac is terrible) and the portability and battery life is amazing.