u/Effective_Part_604

With an HDMI to USB C cable obviously

I’m now 30. Too old to be a marine. Too old for the Navy. National Guard always appealed the most to me anyway. I’m working on getting in shape, only health condition is psoriasis which responds well to treatment and rarely gets debilitating.

It's been a popular thing in the past year or so to debate whether an iPad can be a laptop replacement. I'm here to tell you that if you your purposes are like mine, it *can* be.

What do I do with my iPad Air M3 11"?

I write and record studio quality music, I watch YouTube videos, I write stories, I do very light photography stuff. On rare occasion I'll need to open and view a .DWG document. I also do all my internet browsing and research on my trusty M3. At all those things, my iPad with its magnetic keyboard folio, is SO much more convenient and better than my laptop. And it looks way prettier doing it, display wise and overall design wise. It's also light as a FEATHER. It was a wonderful experience on a 6 hour plane ride the other day.

Where is the line drawn? I absolutely cannot do any serious photoshop or AutoCAD work with it. The iPad version of AutoCAD is a glorified read-only app, that can MAYBE make a tweak here and there. The photoshop, while a much better experience than AutoCAD, is still nerfed on iPad. And it always will be. That's the nature of iPad OS, and Apple knows it. Even my wife's iPad Pro M4 doesn't close that gap much. Even if it did, she's an OG iPad purist, and never attaches a keyboard to any unit she owns.

Now, honestly, asking all that stuff out of my A16 was pushing it a little. It chugged occasionally. But my opinion right now is that if you have a recent, premium iPad model like the Air or Pro, you can 85% replace a laptop with it. If you jump through hoops, you can get that number up to 90%. But the fact of life is that it cannot replace a laptop for every single possible thing people use laptops for.

That's my speech. Let's discuss!

I have had it up to my receding hairline with f**king screen protectors. No matter what I do or how careful I am, they still get bubbles. And when I do get one that goes on without bubbles, it looks like crap. My Air M3 screen looks worse than my A16 screen that has no protector.

Do I just need to take the drawbacks of a screen protector and get over it? Or can I be careful and go without one? I’ve never broken an iPad screen in my life.