What is going on, everybody?
My name is Mike.
Welcome back to talk 24/7 TV.
I am glad that you are back with me today because we are
talking about my 90-day review of the 12.9 inch M1 iPad Pro.
Now I know what you're thinking, Mike.
90 days.
This thing's been out way longer than 90 days.
Well, truth be told, I swapped out the version I had for
the 5G version.
I thought it was really important to include that
in this feedback.
So in today's video, we're going to talk about the
12.9 inch M1 iPad Pro.
We're talking about how I use it, what I use it for and
how it helps keep me grounded as a productive individual.
Because like many of you, I have a lot of different roles
I play in my life.
I'm a husband, father, son, an employee,
a business owner, and the M1 iPad Pro is my go-to device.
I still have the Mac Mini here, but 70 percent of my
computing tasks are completed on the M1 iPad Pro.
So in today's video, we're going to give you my
90-day review, how I'm using it, why I'm using it,
and what I think about the end.
Let's get started.
Before we get the video, folks, YouTube tells me that 90
percent of you watching today's video are not subscribed
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I think it's a real shame if you do me a solid,
click subscribe.
Maybe consider hitting like on the video.
The algorithm loves when people hit like on the video to bring
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Bring more people into the circle because we have a lot
of fun here.
Now My iPad of choice is the 2021 12.9 inch M1 iPad Pro.
It is one (1) terabyte (TB ) of internal storage and 16
gigabytes of RAM.
It is 5G, and I am all in on team space gray.
I'm using the Pitaka MagEZ Case 2 to protect its sides and back
when I'm not using it inside the Magic Keyboard.
It's probably my favorite accessory because it
is so confirmable.
There are all these different accessories, but we
will talk about that more later on.
If you are thinking about buying the Magic Keyboard,
I mean, honestly, unless you are comfortable with getting
dirty and showing marks because it will, and it does.
Don't buy it.
Save yourself some money, because if you don't,
you're not comfortable with getting marks.
You are going to have a hard time using it.
I am not comfortable.
I thought it would be, but it's got a few marks on it, and I
wouldn't say I like to use it because I'm always in
this paranoid state, thinking that it's going to get
more and more dirty, and I don't want to take it out of
the case or even take it out in other places.
But I do.
I'm getting past it.
I'm a grown up.
It's going to be OK, Mike.
I had a 512 GB iPad Pro from 2020, which I upgraded to
the one terabyte version, and I bought that based on the amount
of RAM allocated for the one (1) terabyte (TB ) and a two
(2) terabyte (TB ) versions.
I always buy the cellular model.
Verizon was giving a $200 discount on it here in
the states, and while I'm traveling, I let my son,
my wife, tethered the devices off of my iPad, so it's
like family sharing.
It's not that much money from Verizon.
I think it's maybe like ten or twenty dollars a month.
And for me, that's more of a convenience.
I would rather pay than connect to unreliable Wi-Fi or public
Wi-Fi and worry about that from a security standpoint.
So that is my deal, and I'm OK with 20 bucks per month,
if you're not, sure.
As I mentioned in the beginning, I'm someone who
fulfills many different roles in my life, just like I'm sure
many of you do.
I'm a husband and a father.
I'm an employee; I'm a business owner.
So the iPad Pro is my Go-To device for computing tasks,
which I talked about at the beginning, where I'm using
it for about 70 percent of my computing tasks.
It is small enough.
It is compact enough and is versatile enough where it can
handle many of those tasks.
During the week, my day typically begins around
6:30 6:45, where the very first thing I'm doing is getting my
son ready for school and out the door.
Once that's complete, I'm getting my device off the
multi-device charger from Satechi, and I'm
going to sit down and have some coffee before anything
else is done.
Since I want to be successful both in my normal nine to five
job and here on the channel, I find it almost imperative
that I use time blocking as a method to accomplish things I
need to complete for both of them.
I'm very mindful of how I spend my time and hustle in the
margins throughout the day.
I accomplish this during the day by using time
blocking in fantastical.
Now Fantastical is a subscription model.
Many people think that the $40 per year is a little bit
too much, and I don't necessarily disagree, but I
offer you two things.
So one, if you're buying a paper calendar or
planner book, it might cost you some in the neighborhood of
40 bucks, depending on how nice it is.
Thank you, Holden, for that reminder.
In two, there are things that you can do in Fantastical that
you can't necessarily do in the stock calendar app, which is
going to be important to me.
Like if I want to duplicate events and both my calendar and
my wife's calendar without having to make the
event twice.
I
It's a lot easier that way in fantastical.
Now the place I hold all of my kind of external brain is going
to be Notion.
I use Notion to export things from my brain, and I rely on
Todoist for my task management.
I recently switched from OmniFocus to todoist because I
thought that OmniFocus was not necessarily lightweight as
it could be.
it took a lot of overhead to manage and maintain
the database, which I'm not looking for.
I want to do this in a relatively expedient matter,
and I'm not looking for a lot of overhead.
Todoist doesn't feel that way, though.
It's only been about 90 days since I've been using this.
Once my day is planned, I'm clear on what tasks I need
to do, what calls I need to join, and if I need to
travel anywhere for any meetings.
That's when I switch gears from Mike, the business owner,
to Mike, the professional, and I'm going to go to my
office and where I'm going to find myself or most of the
morning doing work for my job.
Now, for context, I work in IT at an enterprise
software company, and I spend most of my day
on conference calls.
They can be either video calls, but mostly
they are audio calls.
So when I am sitting here at my desk, my iPad Pro is
next to me, and I'm taking notes in my app of choice,
which is going to be GoodNotes, and that I'm
organizing those notes, organizing that I'm organizing
those notes in MindNode.
Now I'm a very visual thinker.
That means that the way I approach problems is usually by
drawing things, and the 12.9 inch iPad Pro helps eliminate
that fear of claustrophobia.
When you're writing on something,
you might write a little too big, but it feels like it's
taking up the entire page.
Well, the 12.9 inch iPad Pro eliminates that for me.
And I don't necessarily have the best handwriting.
It's right about lunchtime when I shift gears from Mike to
professional back to Mike, the business owner.
I spend the first 30 minutes of my hour batching and processing
emails in Spark, which I find the best cross-platform email
app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Now it is cross-platform.
The apps are designed well.
It does allow you to go out and delegate emails to team members
and has a template feature that allows you to quickly respond
to repetitive emails if you get a lot of them as I do.
This is also when I review my current set of projects
for the channel, or I try to reschedule anything that needs
to be pushed to later in the week.
After I've processed and batch emails, I spend
the last, maybe 30 minutes of my lunch hour eating lunch,
actually and taking time to relax and maybe
watch some YouTube.
Watching Netflix depends on what it is, but the display on
the 12.9 inch iPad Pro adds to that.
One.
It's a huge, bright, highly color accurate
supports HDR, and the Dolby Atmos sound helps play a part
in the immersive experience on the iPad.
Now it's after lunch, and I'm going to find myself back
in my office.
Depending on what day it is, it might be a weekday might
be a weekend.
I might find myself back on my computer.
I might be editing video, and if I am, it's not like my
iPad is going unused.
I'm taking my iPad; I'm connecting it to
my computer, my Mac here using Sidecar.
And when I'm using Sidecar, I'm using something
like Final Cut.
I might be using something like logic, where my 12.9 inch
iPad Pro is acting as a secondary display, and it's
holding all of the information, all the
additional palettes, all the additional screens that might
be relevant to the task at hand.
And this is where I think the 12.9 inch iPad Pro excels
because the screen is so big and holds much more information
than most people have on their laptops.
So this is key to being productive while I'm on my
Mac as well.
The work has come to an end, and at this point, I'm done
using my iPad for work-related tasks for the next
couple of hours.
I'm finding myself going to pick up my son from school,
and I'm hanging out with my family.
Spend the next three to four hours hanging out and
doing family things.
After that point, it's about nine o'clock at night,
and that's where I usually have a couple of extra hours to do
some different things, depending on what I will use
my iPad for.
Now, I'm probably changing context from leaning forward to
something I'm going to be highly engaged with and
responsive to leaning back.
Something more relaxing.
And so you have to be as attentive to that content.
I could be playing a video game on my iPad.
I could be watching something on television while using the
iPad itself as a second screen.
I could be editing photos in Lightroom.
It just depends on what the day is and what everyone else is
doing in my house.
The 2021 iPad Pro is overly capable.
While I do have some use cases that benefit from the power and
the hardware of the 2021 iPad Pro, arguably some
use cases don't, and my use cases could be done with it
$329 9th generation iPad or even the iPad Mini.
And truthfully, I will probably never get to a place where I'll
be able to use the iPad Pro as my singular
computing platform, having it replace my Mac Mini or
my MacBook Pro.
That's because one: the software for my use cases
does not exist.
Two: If it does exist, I need to jump through a ton of
different hoops to go and use it effectively.
Or three, once the software and the platform a mature enough,
my skillset has already moved on and I'm doing something else
that would need more advanced support from software.
It's all about conformability to those use cases and ensuring
that the tool fits its purpose.
Now it's time to decide whether or not the M1 iPad Pro is
for you, and arguably it's not an easy decision.
First, the new M1 iPad Pros is excellent at RAM management,
as I talked about.
Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, Photoshop,
those things will benefit from having more RAM and being
allocated more RAM.
The iPad Pro is the only device in the lineup today that
developers can use the entitlement that Apple offers
to allow the device to use more RAM when available.
Otherwise, most traditional apps don't require
the additional RAM, and you're going to pay for something
that you probably do not need, and you will never
experience the benefit from.
Second, if you already don't have a primary computing
platform like you're not using a Mac, you're not using a PC,
and you're debating purchasing the 12.9 inch iPad Pro.
I think this is a strong recommendation one, because of
the screen size, you're going to get more information,
whether you're using one app, two or even three apps in split
view on the 12.9 inch iPad Pro than you would have on the
smaller version of the 11 inch iPad Pro.
It's more information going to make you more effective can
make you more productive.
It's an easy recommendation.
There's also ring true if you already have a primary
computing platform like a Mac and you want to use it in
Sidecar because again, the big display will give you more
information that's available to you in that context when
you're using Sidecar.
And three, I don't like to recommend someone buy the 12.9
inch iPad Pro because you're consuming content because the
display is so great on it.
But if that is your use case and you want the best display,
this is it.
The display is awesome.
I don't necessarily have any problems with the blooming that
was talked about in the beginning.
I mean, it looks good in low-light performance.
All right, guys.
Thank you very much for watching my 90-day review of
the 12.9 inch M1 iPad Pro.
Sorry it took so long.
But again, I love this thing.
It is my go-to machine.
Let me know what questions or comments you have down in
the comments below.
Now I'm reviewing the 8.3 inch iPad Mini next, so make sure
you subscribe for that, and I'll talk to you in
the next one.