M2 iPad Pro versus M2 MacBook Air how do you choose well today we are going to
compare everything from the design the ports the displays the speakers the
cameras and much more to help you make the right choice now personally I'm
really curious about the performance of the M2 Chip in an iPad and as you guys
can see here I have it on the magic keyboard but the beauty of the iPad is
that you could take it off and you have such a small and thin device that is
really powerful compared to the empty MacBook gear which is also really nice
and small and lightweight but it still does not compare to the dimensions and
the weight of this iPad the 12.9 inch iPad is literally the same dimensions as
this lid but shorter and then you guys saw that thickness there it is thinner
than even the bottom portion of the MacBook of course it has those feet that
raise it off but with that if you go ahead and add the keyboard case to to
make it a Macbook replacement well obviously look at that it gets even
thicker than the MacBook and it is actually heavier as well that is one
chunky keyboard and not only that it is more expensive as well because this is a
350 keyboard the iPad by itself is at least eleven hundred dollars and if you
match up the storage you're looking at a thousand five hundred and fifty dollars
compared to twelve hundred and if you want to make use of the apple pencil
well now you're up to almost Seventeen hundred dollars so let's see if it's
worth spending that extra money now as far as ports the Mt MacBook Air has two
Thunderbolt ports whereas the iPad has one the MacBook also has a magsafe
charging port which is really nice but if you buy the magic keyboard for the
iPad you do get additional USB type-c port for charging now unfortunately that
Port doesn't charge as fast as plugging into the iPad itself whereas the MacBook
it can actually charge to 50 percent in less than 30 minutes compared to an hour
and a half and the MacBook can charge fully in an hour and a half compared to
three hours for the iPad even though it has a larger battery and we're gonna
talk about battery life in just a bit now on the back of the iPad you guys see
that camera system which the MacBook doesn't have and not only do we have a
standard camera we have an ultrawide camera and we have a lidar sensor for
those that want to do scanning for augmented reality all of that stuff and
that definitely adds to the cost but for some people being able to have a camera
in the iPad built in could be very useful now we also have some major
differences with the front cameras but
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link in the description and the coupon code Max Tech 20. now as far as the
front cameras the MacBook has a normal setup built in whereas the iPad it still
has the camera off to the side so when you're on your keyboard I'm looking
straight at the display right now right in the center and it looks like I'm not
paying attention do whoever I'm talking to so uh that is definitely a downside
and as far as the microphones you guys just go ahead and let me know which one
sounds better the MacBook or is it the iPad now with that front-facing camera
we also have face ID so right there you guys saw it instantly unlock me I'm
gonna tap again to get into uh iPad OS and it's so quick and convenient and
with that you could also log you into different apps uh to fill in your data
whereas with the MacBook even though we have that Notch we do not have face ID
so it's just touch ID which isn't too bad but not as convenient now before I
cover displays I want to talk about the keyboards and the track pads the magic
keyboard is really nice the keys feel better than any other tablet keyboard
the trackpad also works really well but it is not as nice as an actual MacBook
and I think what a lot of people don't talk about is when you have the iPad on
your lap it is not that balanced because the iPad is really heavy so the whole
thing is top heavy and it bounces around compared to the MacBook which is bottom
heavy so it is nice and stable so overall if you're using it on your lap
the MacBook experience is definitely better and with that the magic keyboard
does not have a function row so if you want to do things like adjust your
brightness skip songs you're switching to the display to do those kind of
things whereas the MacBook we have that full function row key it's very
convenient now hopefully in the future Apple will update this keyboard like
their new folio which does have that but for now we are stuck with this on the
plus side we also have the apple pencil for the iPad which you can't get on a
Mac it attaches and charges and pairs automatically at the top there and you
can do things like writing quick notes you can draw with it but as you guys see
even my handwriting sucks so I don't really use it for that but for some
people the apple pencil and the ability to have a touch screen is is worth it
alone to go for an iPad getting into displays the actual detail and sharpness
isn't much different but the iPad has 120 hertz Pro motion so everything is
super smooth as you guys could see in the slow motion shot now we also have a
big difference in brightness and manually upping both of these to the
maximum you can see that the iPad is a little bit brighter it's 600 nits
compared to 500 the viewing angles of the iPad is also a lot better than the
MacBook but when you're watching HDR content the iPad looks much better
because it's using a mini LED display so it can reach up to 1600 nits compared to
just 500 so video really pops and if you're watching in a darker environment
the difference is absolutely massive because you have almost pure black
levels like an OLED compared to the LCD in the MacBook which has gray everywhere
so the movie watching experience is much better with the iPad now with mini LED
you can get blooming sometimes if it's turned up Max on brightness and it's
pure white on black but the MacBook has blooming everywhere because the LCD is
making everything bright so when I'm at home or I go somewhere and I want to
watch a movie I'm planning for that I definitely want to take the iPad now
with that we also have a difference in speakers the iPad has quad speakers it
has woofers and tweeters all around compared to speakers that are built in
and hidden inside of the case itself with no speaker holes so with that let's
go ahead and compare the speaker quality and let's take a listen
bring me back [Music]
now Apple advertised the MacBook speaker system that it has woofers and tweeters
built in but the iPad sounds so much better in the mids you have way more
bass it's louder better Clarity and not only that but when you're watching one
thing you guys can't hear online is the separation if you're watching a movie
the speakers are on the sides so the whole sound is surrounding you it just
it is such a great experience watching something or listening compared to the
MacBook where a lot of the sound is coming from right here in the center
where the speakers are packed so as far as audio it is way better on the iPad
and now let's get into the performance starting out with our disc speed test
I'm going to run blackmagics here and jaspy test here now the base MacBook Air
only comes with a single Nan chip which makes the storage slower and we have a
right speed difference of 1421 compared to 953 now this is the 128 gigabyte
version of the iPad Pro but the 256 gig version is 2
124. that's getting near twice as fast as the MacBook in terms of the read
speeds we have 1443 compared to 1570 so even the 128 gig is faster but the 256
comes in at 3240 much much faster now the internal
speed is just one aspect what about real world transfers both of these do have
Thunderbolt ports so you think they would be the same but I tested out
transferring a 24.6 gig file and it took 36 seconds on the iPad compared to just
16 seconds on the MacBook now if you think that's just because the slow ride
speed of the 128 gig well you would be wrong because even the 256 gig model
took about the same time 37 seconds and that is because for some reason the
Thunderbolt port in the iPad is nowhere near as fast for data transfers compare
here to even a base MacBook we had this issue with the M1 iPad Pro and I was
hoping it'd be fixed but nope the M2 still does the same thing now as far as
web performance I'm going to run speedometer 2.0 right here and a test
loading JavaScript web-based apps things like that and as you guys can see both
of these are incredibly fast faster than anything else uh the iPad 1 by a little
bit doesn't really matter but in terms of how it feels because of the promotion
it does feel a little bit snappier now in terms of the M2 Chip performance I'm
going to go ahead and run geekbench right here to see the performance some
people are worried about the M2 Chip being slowed down in a such a thin
tablet and both these do have eight gigs of RAM now the MacBook you can actually
get up to 24 gigabytes but more importantly you could say with the lower
amount of storage and still bump up to 16 whereas with the iPad you have to buy
at least a terabyte to get 16 gigs and you're paying extra for the 16 so Apple
locks it down or in turn forces you to get 16 gigs when you might not want it
or need it with iPad OS if you want a terabyte we have our performance
resolved and the MacBook beat up the iPad by a little bit in terms of single
core and multi-core performance but it is very minor now as far as graphics
performance I'm going to run our metal compute test which tests a lot of
different things and looking at the results the iPad is actually faster with
its M2 Chip and that is because apple does not bin the 10 core graphics for
the iPad whereas with the MacBook you have to pay extra to get that or it just
comes with an 8 Graphics core M2 Chip which is about 25 slower now in terms of
gaming performance I'm going to run 3D Marks Wildlife extreme test in the
unlimited mode and looking at the results the iPad even though you might
think it just will Throttle Down in such a thin body it's still about 22 percent
faster in terms of frame rates now I ran this multiple times here and after
you've been gaming for about 15 to 20 minutes the iPad will slow down almost
to the performance of the MacBook after it made multiple runs so the MacBook
actually throttles faster almost right away whereas the iPad gives you a little
bit more oomph and then that goes away so they didn't really need to give it
that extra Graphics at least for a longer kind of renders now I don't just
want to run those benchmarks I want to run something real world and a lot of
people love doing photo editing on the iPad it's great with the apple pencil
you have a lot of control but I'm curious about the performance here I
have 50 42 megapixel of raw files I have edits on all of the images here and
snappiness they are both great so I'm going to go ahead and Export these I'm
gonna start my timer right here and I'm using Lightroom Mobile on both of these
so same software same chip we just have iPad OS versus Mac OS that the MacBook
hit 108 degrees Celsius almost right away and now it is throttling down to
103 104 but it is still exporting faster than the iPad bam we are done here
actually I have to save first and without counting that saving the iPad
took 2 minutes and 58 seconds compared to two minutes flat on the Macbook so
the MacBook is 50 faster even though everything else is the same and I
noticed that across a few different apps testing Mac OS compared to iPad
previously where Mac OS is just faster and that brings me to the whole
operating system with Mac OS you can run a lot of iPad apps but you have full
access to say the full version like Lightroom classic which is even faster
than this mobile version with iPad OS we have the full app store that has a ton
of apps that are there you have great media apps you have good apps for
productivity we have procreate there there's just an insane library of
different things you could do for example you have some video editing
applications and they are all very inexpensive compared to a lot of Mac
apps which you'll spend a lot more money on but it's worth it for example Final
Cut you get the full version DaVinci Resolve as well now that's going to come
to the iPad soon but it is a minor cut down version still not the full thing so
as far as applications it's hit or miss you have more stuff for the iPad but
more powerful things for Mac OS and then with that multitasking we still don't
have full multitasking for the iPad now Apple did add stage manager where you
can bring apps together you have a lot more control and scalability we have
that sidebar you can stretch stuff in and then you can pull out that sidebar
and have different pairs of apps so it is a nice update but you don't have full
control like you do with the Mac where you can have Windows however you want
you are not limited so over overall I just wish the Apple would add Mac OS to
the iPad instead of limited us with you know this regular view of AD before or
stage manager it would just open up so much possibilities it would make this
truly a pro device with that the files app still has issues there's still no
way to eject a hard drive so in the previous test when I was testing out the
transfer speeds even though I was so careful it still corrupt my SSD I have
to use a Mac to repair it and people have been complaining about this kind of
stuff for such a long time but if Apple added Mac OS here well you wouldn't have
to buy a Mac and an iPad you could just buy an iPad you could see how powerful
it is but at this point iPad OS is still limiting and now let's talk about the
battery life the MacBook has a battery that's about 27 larger than the iPad and
with that the iPad screen gets much brighter and it also supports Pro motion
now Apple's battery life figures are very vague but if you're doing very
light tasks with the iPad you can get up to 10 hours compared to about 15 on the
MacBook but if you're pushing both machines for example photo editing and
you're raising up that brightness people have said they get as low as four hours
for the iPad compared to eight hours for the MacBook because that screen doesn't
dry anywhere near as much power so the battery life difference can be pretty
massive and with that the MacBook charges twice as fast as the iPad if
you're using a faster charger for both devices so it's definitely a big win for
the MacBook in terms of battery life so with all of that said should you buy one
of these M2 iPads or just get an Mt MacBook Air well it is still a very
tough choice and if you know that you want the apple pencil you want the rear
cameras you want to be able to hold it in your hand like this it's obvious you
get the iPad but if you're mostly using your machine like you would a laptop and
you want the iPad to be a laptop replacement well I personally prefer to
have a Macbook most of the time even though the display is not as good the
speakers aren't as good it's just very convenient the form factor the weight
balance it's not wobbling it's a lot less expensive and you have full Mac OS
which is a huge selling point so for me as long as I'm not watching a bunch of
media and music and movies I'd rather have the MacBook and save some money but
if you want the app library from the App Store and some of those other things the
iPad is a good choice you'll just be limited to when you want to use it as a
Macbook replacement if only Apple would fix the software but of course they
don't want to let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below click
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