we completed the shot on iphone challenge over two years ago that's
right our amazon ghost store video was shot almost entirely on iphone and none
of you noticed until we pointed it out now you can accuse the apple evangelists
of going out of their way to do stuff like that to paint apple in a favorable
light as for us we only did it because of a
store policy forbidding real cameras which makes the motivation behind
today's challenge all the more confusing yeah uh why am i
what is this what am i doing riley is going to be using our ipad pro to edit a
video this video in 4k off a
Windows-based file server it sounds so wrong but it kind of feels right
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the idea for this video really came out of our experience reviewing the magic
keyboard for the ipad pro in that video we concluded that the ipad pro is now
in every sense of the word a laptop computer and that now the discussion is
really more about how to do computer type things on the ipad pro
so riley replaced his work laptop with
the ipad pro for a week armed with an external monitor and mouse
he did research answered emails and worked with files on our company server
while editing thumbnails and videos and as a notorious lunch break gamer he
even managed to sneak a little bit of entertainment in on the side with an
xbox controller and why not since the ipad pro's processor is more powerful
than an xbox one anyway first off the external monitor situation ipad pros
have supported external displays since the 2018 model arrived with a usb type-c
port but despite the massive progress made elsewhere in transforming the ipad
pro into more of a computer surprisingly little has changed in the display
department 99 of the time a connected monitor will
simply mirror the ipad screen with its frustrating 10 by 7 aspect ratio and all
the other 1 of the time you'll be able to expand the playback window NVIDIA
editing apps or play a game in full screen but you're
still not able to simply use a monitor as extra real estate to do with as you
please like you can on a pc or mac we
couldn't even find a simple list of ipad apps with external display support we
did find an app called shift screen that lets you fill up the entire display
but it's only compatible with a handful of apps it forces you to use its weird
built-in web browser and it does something nasty to your refresh rate so
it had us regretting the 14 canadian dollars we spent on it that there could
have been a big old box of timbits buddy and it's no joke either
connecting a display requires some sort of dongle or if your monitor has a usbc
video input you can connect your ipad pro directly we ended up using this lg
monitor it has a usbc connector that serves as a video input and a hub for
the two usb 3 ports that are built into the back which we were able to use to
connect our accessories like an Ethernet adapter or external hard drive
what you cannot use is a Thunderbolt 3 usbc display or hub we tried a couple of
models that we have here in the office and none of them worked because the ipad
does not support Thunderbolt so if you're setting up your own ipad
workstation at home you'll want to stay away from thunderbolts just like in real
life whatever setup you use once you get used
to the pillar boxing the ipad pro as a desktop computer is
surprisingly great chrome still needs you to specifically request the desktop
version of a website every time but both safari and firefox can be set up to
fetch desktop versions of great websites like lttstore.com by default
awesome come to think of it though actually most of google's apps still kind of suck on
the ipad particularly gmail and docs i guess they'd just prefer you get a
chromebook good luck with that otherwise the
experience of full-on desktop browsing on the ipad pro with a mouse and
keyboard is pretty smooth most of the time i mean riley did have
to take the LTT logo out of his email signature because it was causing the
gmail website to crash in safari but other than that after getting used to
some ipad specific gestures kind of like a chromebook actually if
most of what you do is in a browser you might even forget at times that you're
using an ipad pro and this next bit is actually how you
know the ipad pro is a computer now it breaks youtube premium so if you use the
youtube app a video will stop playing when you go to the home screen sometimes
you'll even see a pop-up asking if you'd like videos to keep playing when you
close the app because you can do that with youtube premium
i guess youtube doesn't know that safari and
firefox will both keep playing youtube audio when you switch to other tabs
unlike the youtube app and it even works when you lock the screen and close the
folio you can just listen to music on your bluetooth headphones without
youtube premium if that's not proof that the ipad pro is a computer i don't know
what is the biggest weakness of the ipad pro as
a desktop however is the RAM a bigger display and better input
devices make it very tempting to push its multitasking boundaries a little
harder than you normally would and more than three or four apps or safari tabs
caused them to reload quite frequently now while the standard six gigs of RAM
found on all the 2020 ipad pro models was an upgrade the problem is it's
simply not enough for professionals who are constantly jumping between multiple
apps
next up in our workstation tests is file
management iOS 13 brought the ability to connect to servers with smb and we were
able to connect to our in-office servers no problem but the files app is still
far from perfect every time we reconnected to the network the files app
wouldn't show anything in the server until we ejected then re-established the
smb link and sometimes transferring a folder would elicit the drag and drop
sound but the files wouldn't actually appear in the new location until we
happened to check on it later video playback chugged a bit even on a 1080p
mp4 file and we know it's not because of our network our network's good baby
trust me there's a few things like that that make it clear that the files app
still has a ways to go in matching what's available on Windows and macOS
it was fantastic when apple added support for multiple Windows and
dragging and dropping files to external drives but the lack of basic things like
a progress bar so you can check the status of a file transfer while in
another app really makes you start asking questions like omg i am using a
tablet as a computer what am i
stupid what
no until you start using some of the apps
that you would think of using a tablet for like for drawing and photo editing
photoshop has come a long way from its early days on ipad when it sort of
existed as like three or four different ipad apps like at least it's just
photoshop for ipad now but unfortunately it's still missing really basic
functionality like adding drop shadows fortunately apps like affinity photo
exist which have all the features that the vast majority of people use in
photoshop and all for a one-time purchase instead of a subscription as
for video editing if you're a video professional who's used to programs like
adobe premiere and final cut lumafusion is
actually pretty impressive in the amount of features that it packs in
there is definitely a learning curve as there is for every editing program but
the basics are surprisingly intuitive and there's way more depth than you
would expect in a mobile editing app we're talking multiple video and audio
tracks robust color grading with lut support excellent speed ramping video
and audio keyframing and it was actually really easy to pull footage off of our
server even if the playback did suck just like in the files app
now someone like taran our very own taren might turn his nose
up at the very thought of editing on an ipad but for the average one-man band
doing simple video editing lumafusion is kind of fantastic unfortunately while
these creative type apps are future rich and run really smoothly on the ipad pro
they're really not optimized for use with a mouse and so again they kind of
break the illusion that the ipad pro is just a more different type of mac
because it's not a mac it's an ipad pro and apps that take advantage of that
like the excellent drawing app procreate make the ipad pro a joy to use for
designers artists basically anyone for whom the apple
pencil would be a help rather than a hindrance but what about us
will riley be switching to an ipad pro as his daily drive riley we all see you
there are you going to switch
i won't but the fact that i even have to think about that question is
impressive during my testing for this script i wrote down that it was surprisingly hard
to be objective about comparisons between the ipad pro and a real laptop
because it actually feels really good to
just navigate around ipad os with the trackpad and that's
dumb but it's also really important the user
experience here is polished it's apple at their best and going through the
process of setting up my ipad pro workflow actually made me appreciate why
people who daily drive the ipad put up with its weaknesses the more stuff that
i discovered i could actually do with this thing the more fun i was having
learning about it it makes sense i mean if the ipad pro
sucked that much as a computer then there wouldn't be this whole genre of
youtube videos made by people who love their ipad as a computer anyway i
haven't joined their ranks just yet but when i switch back to my Windows laptop
a part of me is going to miss the ipad pro
good night sweet prince no no it's too soon i'm not
i'm not ready
hopefully apple and the passionate developers writing third-party apps for
the ipad continue to make this thing better because as much as it gives me a
weird feeling to say it out loud i'm actually
i don't know it's hard to use the word excited
but i'm definitely open-minded ah come on Linus
baby steps okay i'm open-minded
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if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out our total complete review
total complete review play on ad-libbing right now maybe check out our full
review of the magic keyboard it really does
change this device and change the way that well
i think about it change your life