 We completed the Shot on iPhone challenge over two years ago. That's right, our Amazon Go 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, 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. Like this segue to our sponsor, Thermal Grizzly. Thermal Grizzly's Conduct-a-Knot liquid metal thermal interface material offers maximum cooling performance for your PC. Check it out and keep your PC cool at the link below. 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 in video 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. Thought 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 USB-C video input, you can connect your iPad Pro directly. We ended up using this LG monitor. It has a USB-C 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 USB-C 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 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, ooh, 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 cause 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 reestablished the SMB link. And sometimes, people don't even know that the SMB link is a file. Then reestablished 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 the apps 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 key framing, 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 Taron, our very own Taron, 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 driver? Riley, we all see you there. Are you gonna switch? Oh, just... Uh... Uh... Uh... 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 comparison 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! 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. Come on, Linus. Baby steps, okay? I'm open-minded. Little babies, like slowly stepping toward this message from our sponsor. What's in your online security toolkit? Adding a VPN lets you mask your IP and encrypt traffic to and from your devices, be they desktops, laptops, or... Laptops. And private internet access has reliable service with over 30,000 servers in more than 30 countries. They've got no bandwidth caps, configurable encryption, and an internet kill switch to keep you in control of your connection. When combined with private browsing, private internet access can make websites think you're in a different country, and you can try it out risk-free with their 30-day money-back guarantee. You can connect up to five devices at once with clients for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS... iPadOS. And Linux. And their MACE feature blocks requests to known malware and tracking domains altogether. Check it out today at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out our total complete review... Total complete review? It's gonna add living 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.