iPads have gotten better and better. And now they sometimes cost more than their laptop counterparts. I tried to switch from my MacBook to an iPad before. But that was 3 years ago! A LOT has changed. So let’s talk about how much things have really changed and if I’d consider switching to just an iPad.

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Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
0:30 Form Factor
2:29 Software Differences
5:33 Accessories
7:23 Day-To-Day Experience
10:48 Conclusion

Macs with M chips can run iPhone and iPad apps by directly downloading them from the App store, and iPads have been getting more and more desktop quality apps. An iPad can connect to servers, plug in external webcams, storage, and other accessories. There’s even better multi-tasking capabilities now when you plug the iPad into a monitor, letting you have different windows on the external monitor like a computer. And you can actually do cool stuff like turn your ipad into a display for a game console. You can use google drive, and all your different google docs, sheets and presentations. You can save files to external drives, or to a server. But the problem with the ipad is, once you’re more of an advanced user in some of these apps, doing things can take a little longer, is more difficult to do, or can’t be done at all. Like, in Microsoft Excel, you can do formulas but can’t run excel macros. In Final Cut Pro for iPad. You can’t edit directly off external storage. You’ll have to move your footage off the drive, onto the ipad, taking up all the capacity there, to edit it. Basically. When it comes to how similar an ipad app is to it’s windows or mac os equivalent, you have to know what you’re doing with it, and figure out if it can do it, before you fully jump to just an iPad.

When you buy a laptop, you’re buying a complete package, you got everything you need for it to be a laptop. But with an ipad, there’s added costs if you’re trying to make it more laptop-like. Apple however sells a magic keyboard for their ipad air and pro lineups. That gives you laptop-like levels of tiling, and a 65% keyboard, a trackpad, and a usb-c port that can only be used for charging, but that frees up your iPad’s remaining USB-C port for any other accessories, or you can use a dongle to add even more ports. There are 3rd party keyboards, but those don’t elevate the ipad higher, or provide another port that charges your ipad. In my opinion, the Magic Keyboard makes iPads feel the most laptop like out of all the other offerings. There’s just a ton more unique accessories for a tablet vs a laptop as a whole. Like this Lab22 ipad stand created by fellow YouTuber Sara Dietschy, which is pricey but gives you full control over the positioning of your ipad, it’s built well, and feels nice too. It’s nice to have if you want to use your ipad with an external display for a desktop with a drawing tablet type smaller screen, you can do that, angled to any position you want.

What makes the ipad feel the most like a computer is when it’s plugged into a monitor. You can do this with either an hdmi cable connected to a USB-C dongle, or directly to a monitor that supports USB-C. And it will charge directly off the cable if the monitor or dongle supports it. Then, on the external monitor, you can have up to 4 apps on the screen at once, add any more and it just slaps it into the stage manager sidebar, which contains all your active apps. I can have youtube, my script, and two instances of safari open so I have everything I need, on my screen at once for easy reference. So when the external display works, it works great. When it doesn’t you get weird stuff happening.

For me personally, I don’t think an ipad can replace a laptop but when I talked to some more non-techy people, it seems like most of them use ipads or other tablets as their primary machine at home for all their computing needs. The iPad air or iPad Pro will be all the computer you ever need. If you want to do more than that, It can’t really replace your computer just yet. Even if it does have a chip used in Apple’s laptops and desktops.