Jean-philippe Gams / Article / 2024 / May
iPad Pro M4
Okay, so I succumbed to Apple marketing, or should I say to YouTube marketing, because, I just purchased the iPad Pro 11” with the magic keyboard and the Apple Pencil. The reasoning behind the purchase? I want to replace my MacBook Pro M1 with this iPad. I do believe, that this is possible for 90% of my use, the other 10% is coding and a few things I do with Photoshop.
So basically, I’ll try this solution for a few weeks to see if I can manage, if not, I’ll just return it. And I must say that after one day of use, things have changed a lot since I used an iPad a few years ago. I can now plug it into my Studio Display and use it fullscreen. And the form factor is actually quite nice.
Photography
For my photography, it’s way better than using my Mac. Because the Leica Photos App is so simple and straightforward, I just connect my Leica Q3 via Bluetooth, download the pictures I want to the App, send them straight to Lightroom Mobile for editing and that’s it. No cables, no memory card, nothing. I can save them directly to Photos. It’s so straightforward it almost felt like I skipped a step when I did it.
Video editing
I haven't tried video editing yet, I know it’s possible, you can even use FCPX or even DaVinci Resolve, but I’m not sure my workflow will adapt, and since I have a lot of effects I use on FCPX that I can’t bring over to the IPad I don’t think that will do, but at least I’ll try it out.
Coding
I can’t have a local host on the iPad so this part I won’t even try. I know I can use VsCode server, I’ve seen some people using that on YouTube but that seems daunting to set up just to write some HTML and CSS.
Conclusion
Those two weeks will be a test to see how much the iPad can make me forget those two last fails, to the point where I can justify keeping both my M1 MacBook Pro and the iPad or if it is still too early to replace a laptop with a tablet. I must admit that if I didn’t write code and edit videos, I would have switched a long time ago. Time will tell if this is it.
Written on the iPad Pro 11’