hey guys welcome back to the channel if you new here my name is Ellie I’m a junior doctor working in Cambridge and in this video I’m gonna be answering the age-old question of whether an iPad pro with Apple pencil can really replace a MacBook Pro or equivalent laptop and because I’m a fan of upfront conclusions I’m just going to tell you what I think right now and that is your iPad probably can’t replace your laptop I can see what you’d want to I can see why it’s a romanticized notion of an iPad replacing a laptop but unfortunately we’re not yet at the point where an iPad can feasibly replace a laptop so that’s all you wanted to hear then that’s fantastic could you drop a like on the video and then you can click away and do something more interesting with your time but for the rest of the video I’m gonna be elaborating on this point a little further and explaining exactly why I don’t think an iPad can really truly replace a MacBook so as usual the structure of the video that’s going to appear alongside there in front of my cambridge degree that i’ve artistically mounted on the wall i don’t if you noticed and also in the video description so you can click to the timestamps but before we go forward I just want to say that this video is very kindly sponsored by uni days who are a fantastic company for getting student discounts I have saved about 300 pounds on this macbook about 150 pounds on this ipad i save a fiver every month on my spotify premium membership with uni days they just verify your student status using your email it’s free you get a free app and yeah you might as well give it a go if you’re a student you just save loads of money on loads and loads of different brands in pretty much every country in the world okay so structure of this video I’m gonna start by talking a little bit about why you might think that an iPad might want to replace your laptop and the few cases in which is good to have an iPad instead of a laptop but then I’m gonna spend the bulk of the video talking through various use cases that I found when I tried to this out for myself where like an iPad can sort of do what a laptop can but it’s just such a pain in the bottom and I think that’s kind of the story of this whole debate that you you maybe sort of can sort of replace your laptop with your iPad but it would be such an annoyance for a lot of things that you want to do that it’s probably normal doing okay so why might you want to replace your laptop with an iPad I can see why you want to do that maybe you watched my previous video about how I take notes on my iPad Pro and you were inspired to suddenly start handwriting for your notes and taking notes and that and that’s absolutely fantastic and maybe you realized that oh I kind of want a macbook pro and those start at about 1500 pounds these days that’s a lot of money or maybe you’ve decided that yeah occasionally if you do have to type up essays or whatever in class you can just get the Apple keyboard attachment for the e for the iPad then you can type up whatever you want and if you’re just using your computer to browse YouTube and Netflix and Facebook and stuff that works perfectly fine on the iPad so if you’re just doing those things like writing a few assignments making notes in class and watching multimedia it kind of makes sense doesn’t it that you want to replace your laptop with with an iPad but unfortunately I don’t think that’s quite the full story and now I’m just gonna talk about various instances in which you would be glad that you’ve had a laptop instead of knob and iPad firstly let’s talk about general efficiency at using a device an iPad and a MacBook and any kind of device these are all just tools for your own creativity for your own tasks so if you’re a student you probably have to write an essay or do some kind of assignment or something along those lines and in my opinion the device that gets that done the fastest is the device that you want to have because as a student and especially if you’re at university or whether there’s loads of stuff going on you don’t want to be spending a lot of time doing work you want to be spending that time doing more interesting things with your time instead and if we’re talking about general efficiency then the iPad is not a very efficient device the touch navigation thing is cool but is it’s objectively slower than navigating using a keyboard on a macbook so let’s say you want to open a web address in the iPad you’d have to swipe up from the bottom to get the dog you have to click on Safari and then you’d have to click on the little address bar then you have to type it in the keyboard while your you know your a list but if you have a MacBook and you’re using it to its full potential by using stuff like spotlight and Alfred and things that help with the keyboard navigation then pretty much whatever you thinking that you want to do on a computer you can just be done that little bit faster on a MacBook rather than on an iPad and I’ve tried this out for a few days I genuinely tried replacing my MacBook with an iPad you know just for standard student stuff and I found that while it was possible I was getting frustrated with how slow the whole process was because for me I’m very used to you know as soon as thought of something that I want to do on a computer I want that action to be done as quickly as possible and with a fast typing speed and something like Alfred a spotlight you can do that but with an iPad you’re kind of a bit encumbered by by the software and by just the general touch interface of the iPad so that was point number one general efficiency on an iPad is just a little bit reduced compared to a MacBook which is why I find it a bit annoying using an iPad for a long extended period of time secondly let’s talk about writing essays and especially if you’re writing any kind of essay or long assignment that requires references finding good reference software and integrating it within a word processor on the iPad is a lot more of a pain in the bum than it is on a MacBook or on a Windows laptop on a MacBook or Windows laptop you’ve got stuff like EndNote and Mendeley I use mentaly personally and it just works nicely you’ve got a market work plugin and you know you sort out your references everyone knows how to use mentally you know it’s just like a standard thing and if you passed that document on to other friends who also likely have Mendeley and Microsoft Word then they can add references to it and there have been quite a few occasions in my time in med school where I’ve collaborated with friends on different papers and it’s been so useful all of us having Microsoft Word with the Mendeley plugin so that our references stuff didn’t get screwed up and that would just be a lot more of a pain in the bum on the iPad compared to the MacBook Pro so if you’re writing any sort of essays with references you’ll be glad in a long run that you have a laptop instead of just an iPad certainly or if you want to print something and yeah I know it’s 2018 who prints anything these days but even someone like me who’s gone completely paperless and you know I grew find myself because I’ve gone competing paperless and love the fact that I’ve gone completely paperless I still have to print stuff very occasionally those stuff like travel expense forms when claiming money back from the University for travelling to my medical school placement or occasionally you do have to print something off and hand sign it for some very odd reason and printing stuff from an iPad is it’s possible but again it’s just a story it’s a bit more of a paint you can always email it to a friend and ask them to print it you could use you know HP air print or Apple air print but really who has an AirPrint enabled printer these days where it actually works and actually connects to the Wi-Fi with a laptop you know that if your printer is being completely screwed all you have to do is just plug the USB cable into the laptop and you know you’ll reliably be able to print something out so again if you want to print stuff having that having a macbook makes it a bit more of a pleasant experience than having to struggle with the interfaces of an iPad what about presentations presentations are really common like depending on what sort of degree you’re doing what sort of school you’re at chances are you’re going to have to do some kind of PowerPoint or keynote presentation at some point and again like while it is possible to create PowerPoint and Keynote presentations on an iPad it’s just a bit more of a pain than is creating it on a MacBook it’s so much faster doing it on a laptop we’re we’ve used to the interface we’re doing on a laptop we know where the buttons are we know how things work and if we’re handing it off to someone they’ll know how it works doing it on an iPad is possible but it takes more time and therefore whenever I’ve had to make a presentation and I’ve been on the go I’ve kind of started off with my iPad I’ve used keynote on my iPad I’ve you know at one point I was running a teaching session for some of the students in the air below and I thought to myself you know what I’m gonna be one of those people that just uses my iPad to make this presentation I’ll connect it up to the projector and just navigate with my iPad and after about five minutes of struggling with keynote to try and make this presentation I just gave up I decided to go home get my MacBook out and do this properly it was a lot quicker a lot more a lot more efficient and just ultimately I was more productive and could do better things with my time because I had a laptop instead of just an iPad finally let’s talk about spreadsheets spreadsheets are again a bit of a pain to navigate with the iPad I use Google sheets for lots of things I use it for my active recall spreadsheets I use it for spaced repetition you can check out some my videos about evidence based study tips if you’re into that sort of stuff and although I can sort of use Google sheets on an iPad again it’s the same story it’s more of a pain it’s much easier just going on my macbook logging into Google sheets and then just being able to do stuff a lot faster let’s I need to put a formula let’s I need to conditional formatting let’s they need to drag down formally across cells you can do all of that on an iPad but again it’s just it’s just more converse that was just more of an aim if you try and just use an iPad instead of a instead of a laptop you find a lot of these little things like in theory it seems like a very reasonable thing like if you’re a student you want to handwrite your notes all you’re doing is watching Netflix it seems reasonable to think that well why don’t I just you know replace my laptop with my eye with my iPad it’s easier to carry around it makes me feel a bit more hipster and edgy that I’m just using an iPad pro with Apple pencil I would have thought that until I tried it and realized that actually unfortunately we’re still not at the point where an iPad can fully replace a laptop so having said all that I still absolutely love my iPad pro I use it every single day I use it at work for my to-do list I use it whenever I’m drafting a YouTube video I use it whenever I want to take notes and anything but essentially for the most part I’m using my iPad as a glorified piece of paper and a glorified piece of paper is not the only device that you want to have on your person if you really are in that position where you’re choosing between an iPad and a laptop you should definitely go for the laptop though they’re just my two cents so yeah hopefully you found this video useful we talked about why I think a laptop cannot replace an iPad I hope I’ve given you some kind of opinionated framework to to decide this if you want to give it a go then by all means give it a go and let me know how it goes in the comments and maybe in a few years time when you know maybe tablets get more advanced or if I ever decide to switch over to the Microsoft ecosystem god forbid and start using a surface which is like a hybrid laptop and a hand tablet then maybe I’ll make another video reading this point but I have recently tried just use my iPad instead of my MacBook and I find myself going back to the MacBook always and just using the iPad as a glorified piece of paper so thank you very much for watching and thanks again to uni days for sponsoring this video if you liked the video please give it a thumbs up if you haven’t subscribed to the channel yet please consider doing so have a lovely day and I will see you in the next video goodbye [Music] you