OWC Rocket Yard Review

After eight days MY IMPRESSIONS are:
  • This puppy is FAST. Geekbench scores are roughly 50% faster than the previous generation iPad Pro and slightly better than the M1 Mac mini (probably because macOS has more tasks running in background than iOS does)
  • The Magic Keyboard and its trackpad fit my big hands better than their equivalents on MacBooks 🤷‍♂️
  • The Apple Pencil and Scribble offer significant functionality that is not available on Macs
  • Sidecar allows that functionality to be shared with Macs
  • The battery life is amazing (see this calibrated Batteries+ report (Note the numbers are for a battery at 76% charge not 100%)
  • 5G cellular is nice and Apple does an amazing job managing it to conserve battery life.
  • All of my critical production apps are available for both MacOS and iPadOS and in one or two cases, to my surprise I prefer the iPadOS version 😵‍💫
  • There are many iOS apps (perhaps thousands) that are useful but not available on macOS 😡


CONCLUSION If I were limited to a single device, it would probably be a MacBook Pro but the M1 iPad Pro would certainly be a contender. Since I use an M1 Mac mini for my desktop machine, M1 iPad Pro is easily the superior choice for taking on the road and as an adjunct to the Mac mini.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein