M1 MacBook Air VS 2020 iPad Pro! Is the iPad DEAD?! By The Everyday Dad

The brand new MacBook Air and the current iPad Pro don't really sound like something you would normally compare welcome to the everyday dad because as the lines between what an iPad can do and what these new m1 mac books can do, as that line begins to blur, I do think that, from a productivity standpoint, these two are basically in direct competition. Now, like fighting they're gonna fight, can you guys fight their computers? They can't talk. The iPad Pro starts off at 799 dollars, but when you add in the very useful and very functional magic keyboard, you are smack dab like you are: smack dab right in line with the base model of the MacBook Air. Okay, I pointed correctly so if you are looking for a light, portable and efficient productivity machine which of these two comes out on top, let's find out that was really satisfying. What's up everyone, I'm the everyday dead, and if I can figure it out, you can figure it out. Frankly, though, I don't think when the original idea for either of these devices came to be that the teams behind them ever really thought that the iPad Pro and the MacBook Air would be in direct competition.

But us darn users find all sorts of ways to mess with what the developers intended and today, after substantial use of both products. I'd have to say that these are the two best productivity tools that I've ever used period. I'm an office worker, that's what I do like productivity is something that I do on a daily basis. These are the best I've said this many times in the past, but I have a desktop computer that does all of my video work right now. It's the Mac mini, but throughout the day I don't always like being trapped at my desk, so most of my work actually gets done at places other than my specific work spot in my house, which, yes, that probably means I should make a better work spot, but once you start having the freedom to move to any of your comfortable chairs or when working on the go, even though not too much of that is happening right now, it's hard to want to sit down at a desk to answer an email or do some clerical administrative work.

So the main goal of today is to save between the iPad Pro and the MacBook Air, which one will I use going forward and for which purposes would each one of these be better for you, because neither of the spoilers for the whole video? Neither of these is objectively better than the other. There are trade-offs to both so first up, let's compare specs and prices if you've never heard of either of these machines. If you haven't, you clearly have not watched my videos. Welcome to welcome to the team. The iPad Pro comes in two separate sizes.

You can get the smallest 11 inch version, which is the one that I haven't preferred, or the slightly larger 12.9 inch model, whichever size you get both do have the same base specs, but because the size difference there is a difference in price the 11 inch can be had for 799 dollars, while the 12.9 goes for 999 dollars. That base model comes with 128 gigabytes of storage and can be equipped with LTE cellular service for about 150 dollars more tacked onto whichever way you spec it out at 150 bucks you get LTE. You can also add some additional hard drive space all the way up to one terabyte, which will run you 12.99 for the 11 and 14.99 for the 12.9. So many numbers, but if you do want the best typing experience, you're going to get on an iPad you'll, also need the magic keyboard, like we already said, which will set you back another 300 to 350, depending on which size of the iPad you get. It's not cheap.

It is good more on that later the new m1 MacBook Air, on the other hand, has only one size. Its base model comes in at 999 dollars and gives you 256 gigabytes of storage. The base model doesn't have what I would call the full m1 processor experience, because you do only get that seven GPU cores where normally you would get eight, but you can get a version that has the eight core GPU for twelve hundred and forty-nine dollars, and you can add some more unified memory and up to a two terabyte solid state drive for a max amount of two thousand and forty-nine dollars. I didn't speak too much about other internal specs like that unified memory, because, honestly, if you were looking at these two specifically for productivity work, the difference is not going to matter. Okay, that was a lot of spec information and honestly, I wasn't planning on this part taking that long, but dang once you like dive into it.

Once you get down into the spec differences, there is a lot of options in both the iPad line and the MacBook Air line. It's a little more diverse than you might think. Now we're not going to go over performance benchmarks with two computers today, because honestly much like active memory, those benchmarks- don't really matter, but let's talk about a few key overall performance categories and see where each of these computers shakes out starting off with the overall. I guess you'd call it power performance. Both computers are now running Apple Silicon chips.

The iPad Pro has the a12 z processor, which is an eight core CPU much like the m1 processor inside the MacBook Air. I wouldn't if we were to pull these chips out and look at them directly. I wouldn't be surprised if both of these chips were nearly identical, because it certainly seems that if the m1 isn't a modified a12 z, the a12z was definitely a building block and substantial part of the m1. Each of these computers will have snappy performance and in most cases you will never want for more power for your specific app unless it's an intel program running on this that hasn't yet been optimized, but because that it's hard to speak about performance here, iPadOS much like iOS, is really hyper optimized around each individual application. With that split screen functionality, though, you can have a couple of products open at once and have lightning fast results on both the MacBook Air is running traditional macOS.

This version is called Big Sur, and it can basically run whatever you want so long as you stay within the memory limitations of your specific computer and that Rosetta 2 can actually run it and a pretty big benefit on the side of the MacBook Air is, if you really want to keep using specific iPad or iOS apps, the new Apple Silicon mac books run them just as well as the iPad. What's nice, is it's not complicated or hard to do you just click on the button to switch from the mac, OS app store to the iPad, OS app store, and you're done when it comes to performance like we said we're going to talk about a couple of things and sure the power and use is great, but length of use also matters a lot if you're not going to be sitting at your house all day. So how is the battery life on both of these? Thankfully, both of these machines do easily meet my standard 8 work hour battery life. The iPad Pro is rated to 10 hours of on-screen time, while the MacBook Air is rated to 18 hours of on-screen time. I'll pause, we'll pause, one second, for you to catch what I just said.

Yes, the MacBook Air has almost double the battery life of the iPad Pro and while I've never cared that much about battery life again, my standard metric is an eight-hour workday. You can really tell the new m1 chips. Are something special for length of use? Quick example, as I was typing this script, which I typed in the MacBook Air remind you. I haven't actually charged this MacBook in three days and, as I was typing the script it still had 32 percent battery life left, I'm still every time I see some kind of battery life metric on the MacBook Air. I'm always impressed that's legitimately wild stuff, but 10 hours is fine on the iPad and while the MacBook is shockingly good, the iPad is regularly good performance also comes down a lot to what their screens can do, because this is basically all screen, while the MacBook has been stopping the iPad a bit so far in the video here.

The screen performance is where the iPad does have some serious advantages. The iPad screen is amazing. It is amazing, either size option has a beautiful retina panel that has the ability to go to 600 nits of brightness. It also has the newest of apple's design, aesthetic with very minimal bezels and, as a very nice bonus, it has p3 color accuracy that is just gorgeous to look at plus with its pro motion technology. Furthermore, it can refresh up to 120 hertz and the most obvious of all we haven't touched on so far is its touch screen get it.

We haven't touched on it. It's a touch screen. The MacBook Air has a perfectly fine display, that's also a very sharp retina panel, but in the negatives' category it will only go up to 400 nits of brightness and as much as I keep tapping on the screen, nothing happens sad face. I don't. Actually I don't tap on my screen plus.

If you are a graphic designer or artist, the difference becomes a little more striking as the iPad Pro all models of the redesign since 2018 can use the Apple Pencil version, 2 for very precise, drawing and graphical uses, I'm not a very creative person, so I never use it because when I draw stuff they just end up being terrible, stick figures: now we have we've kind of shifted from performance to the physicality of the two devices. There's really only one more thing that I want to talk about from the physical standpoint of these two computers and that's the port situation. Both devices do have USB-C ports on them. The MacBook Air has two, and the iPad only has one or a second for charging. If you do have the magic keyboard, but though the ports look similar, they do behave differently.

The ports in the MacBook are also thunderbolt 3, meaning they have a few key advantages. Over the more traditional USB on the iPad transfer speeds will be faster. You can use more accessories. You have better display compatibility, it's just an overall, better port that is currently one of the best you will find, and obviously it's the best that you will find on a Mac device. Normally, when we talk about the iPads, I very much enjoy the USB, but you are limited by certain dongles and other accessories when compared to that true thunderbolt port and as we started touching on accessories, how did the two approach additional pieces of tech that make them a little better? That was a really weird way to say that how do they do with accessories? Obviously, as a straight-up laptop, the MacBook doesn't need anything else to get going.

You take it out of the box, turn it on its good to go and the cool thing about having thunderbolt 3 ports is, if you do want to use this as a desktop replacement, you can absolutely plug this into some kind of thunderbolt, 3, dock or dongle, and push out to a 6k display. My personal dock is a cal digit, ts3 plus, which gives me power SD card slot, lots of USB and Ethernet all, while only using up one of my thunderbolt ports, pausing here really quickly to make my normal comment that I do wish. There was one on each side, but that's not the point of this video plus with Bluetooth. All other things are possible, as it's just a snap to have a keyboard and a mouse paired here, as it is a little different. I do consider the iPad more like a Lego, set sure by itself it's a phenomenal content, consumption device, but because of its pretty basic size and shape, you can add almost anything you want to it.

You can build so much around this. There are dongles out there like the ones we've talked about previously. That will also give you HDMI power, SD card, etc. , but you won't get as many connections and a weakness of the iPad is when you are using an external monitor, you are stuck with a 4x3 aspect ratio much like the MacBook. You can also pair a keyboard and a mouse, and I really like the iPadOS mouse integration.

It's neat, it's just this little dot that hovers over and sort of locks on to what you want to click sounds confusing. It only takes a few seconds to get used to, and once you do, it is kind of hard to go back to traditional mouse cursors. I wish the iPad cursor would just come over to macOS plus we've already kind of talked about it. A little, the iPad gets one of my favorite accessories ever made the magic keyboard. This is what's hilarious about making this video.

Normally, when I make a video about the iPad as a computing tool, that's my trump card. When we talk about any other device compared to the iPad, I bring out the magic keyboard and the iPad wins over everything, but what if the other device also has a magic keyboard, one that is actually better in every single way, crap iPad we're not we're not prepared for this run away seriously, though, when we compare typing on the two devices, I do have the 11-inch magic keyboard, so maybe the 12.9 would be a better comparison, but I've always just preferred the 11-inch iPad. So that's what we talk about. It's mine. Welcome to my channel the iPad magic keyboard, though it's great for what it is, the keys are snappy.

Can you hear that it's very snappy, they're well spaced out, and it's a really nice keyboard to work with, especially given the size constraints that they were under making this all the keys are great? The trackpad is also very big compared to the body, and it gives you a whole new level of functionality and that extra charging port is so clutch, but as good as it is, nothing beats the MacBook Air keyboard. In my opinion, this is the best laptop keyboard on the market. The keys are very satisfying. They just feel like more substantial. It's got a bigger trackpad, obviously, because it's a bigger computer.

It also has a row of function, keys at the top that the iPad doesn't have it's just so good, and this was the hardest part to write this part of the video, because I'm such a typing nerd was. Furthermore, it was tough to do because there's nothing wrong with either of these keyboards. Furthermore, it's just that the MacBook has the far superior option we've gone through what I think of as the major differences between the two. So, let's get into what I think is the better option, honestly with the price of the entry level, MacBook, air and the performance, it's really hard to recommend the iPad Pro anymore, especially when it comes to productivity. That's that's the keyword, though you get twice the storage twice: the ports and better ports, a built-in keyboard, full macOS and the ability to run iPad apps.

If you really need them, you get insane battery life. You have power for days. This right here is just a monster, work, computer. I think this is the best work computer currently available, though I mean the iPad is obviously better for those that need the touch screen, functionality and a slightly better and brighter screen. But if I'm doing work, I think the MacBook's better.

However, if you're looking for two devices in one, that's where I think the iPad might be the better option, it does have that dual usability to go from a mini laptop, like we've, seen so far to an amazing video viewing device instantly. All you got to do, pull it off the keyboard. That was instant and, let me tell you watching movies on the iPad is way more enjoyable than watching them on the MacBook, so this video is obviously not as clear-cut as some might have hoped. But personally, since getting this new MacBook Air, I haven't touched my iPad Pro. The work experience is so much better and the device is far more versatile than the iPad.

For my use case, if you are still just looking for an iPad, and I was going to make a recommendation, it would probably be the iPad Air 4. You get most the same functionality of the iPad Pro, but for a few hundred dollars less and that few hundred dollars less would actually give you the magic keyboard. So you can get an all-in-one package for actually less money. Neither is bad they're, both great they're, just great in different ways, and if you like this video, and you're now more curious about the MacBook Air. Here is my one-week later impressions video that I released a couple of weeks ago, and you find that by clicking right here.

Click, click, click, click, click, click, thanks for watching.

Source : The Everyday Dad