Background
For a few years I used my laptop for everything, it travelled from work to home and back again, it was my only machine at home and at work. At work it got hooked up to three external monitors via dock, at home I didn’t bother.
Eventually all that changed and I needed more power in the office and at home, so it was back to a desktop at each location and my laptop become for travel only.
It didn’t help that I ran out of space on the original 256GB NVMe and tried a couple of different 3rd party replacements (a 512GB and a 1TB) but neither worked all that well - Usually needing an SMC reset after being suspended for a few hours.
Laptop spec
- MacBook Pro Mid 2015
- Intel Core i7 Quad Core
- 16GB RAM
- 256GB, 512GB and eventually 1TB NVMe
Office desktop
- Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 (10 Cores)
- 32GB RAM
- 480GB SSD + 1TB SDD
- AMD Radeon HD 7970
- 3 x Samsung 24" (2048x1280)
Home machine
- AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (12 Cores)
- 64GB RAM
- 512GB NVMe + 1TB SSD
- AMD Radeon HD 7970
- 1 x LG 32" 4k DCI (4096x2160)
As you can see the MacBook was starting to get a bit long in the tooth and annoying with the NVMe issues (I’ve long since misplaced the original NVMe having wiped it), so it was time to look for a replacement.
Options
- A new laptop
- Something different
Usage requirements
These days I primarily need a laptop when I’m away from the office/home and usually only in an emergency i.e. Something is broken and I either need a browser or an SSH terminal to fix it, or very occasionally a Windows Remote Desktop connection.
A keyboard
To make all that easier I really wanted a keyboard. My other iPad has one (a Logitech), but it requires its own batteries and it’s invariably flat when I go to use it. A bonus would be a trackpad, but no essential.
Other hardware
Whatever I chose I needed it to work with my Yubikey hardware 2FA tokens.
Decision time
As you can probably guess from the title I decided to give option 2 a go. As I’ve swapped back to an iPhone from a several year allegiance to Samsung on the phone side I thought I’d give an iPad Pro a go. I already have a 6th Gen 9.6" iPad, so gave that a go first and seemed to manage with it.
After a couple of weeks it was time to decide either way, so on to the Apple online store it was.
The choice
In the end I went for an iPad Pro 12.9" WiFI with 256GB and 8GB RAM along with a Magic Keyboard (adjustable, doesn’t need batteries, has a trackpad) and a pencil.
So far, so good
I’m a few weeks in now and it’s so far, so good. It’s getting far more use than my laptop did and has replaced the various notebooks and pens I used to carry around (or have in the office/at home) thanks to Good Notes.
I’ve also added a small plug in hub that’ll allow me to connect to a Display Port or HDMI display as well as giving me a USB-A slot not just the USB-C on the iPad and keyboard. Another bonus is an SD card slot and 3.5mm jack.
Updates
I’ll try and post updates as I go along, with what I’ve found to work and what doesn’t work so well.