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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

This is honestly an absurd proposition. A 13 inch screen Ipad pro with a keyboard and 2TB of memory is $2500. Video editing is something you want power, and a lot of screen real estate, and a good form factor. Even with the GPU shortage, you can buy an extremely powerful, capable, video editing desktop with two large 27" monitors for $1k. Even before you consider limitations in sandboxing, multi-application usage, and freedom, the Apple Tax for this makes a non-starter. If you go with the lowest end specs, that is still $800, which you can buy a significantly more capable desktop for video editing at that point, then you will be editing video on an 11" screen, with no hotkeys or keyboard, and only 128 GB of storage (good luck).

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It depends on what you're doing and what your budget is. Shoot & edit on one device, plus an excellent drawing experience, is pretty compelling when you're talking about a device for a kid to learn on, and the main things it'll be used for are video & drawing. You don't need 2TB of built-in storage for that, either.

Only way I can see that not being the option to beat, is if your goal is to learn the UI (not the concepts or techniques) for pro-tier desktop editing software. Then, yes, of course you have to have a desktop. I think "non-starter" is overstating the case against the iPad, for the particular tasks and user-profile stated.

> video editing desktop with two large 27" monitors for $1k

I need to know where you're buying monitors.

If I'm spending that kind of money on a teenager, not putting it all into one easily lose-able device is a value-add of it's own.

Most devices these days including the iPad and things like Go Pros film in at least 720P which absolutely fills up storage space in no time at all. I started filming my kids' sporting events in HD and editing them on my laptop and I completely filled up 1 terabyte of storage on my computer in no time at all. Then I had to start playing the game of moving older stuff to external storage which totally sucks if you want to go back to it quickly. 1 minute of 1080P video at 60fps is around 200MB depending on the format, an hour is like 12 gigs. The only reasonable way to manage almost any amount of HD video is on a desktop system with loads of cheap(er) storage.

Well yeah, for bulk video storage you could eat 2TB easily. Active files for an editing project at 1080P, especially if you're weeding through footage after each day of shooting (if you don't, you'll go nuts later), 512GB should be OK.

> I need to know where you're buying monitors.

Amazon has Sceptre 27" 1080p monitors for less than $150 right now. The two 4K ones I'm using of the same size/brand were about $250 as of October.

There's nothing absurd about it, you're just looking for something to get mad about.

Your reference to the so-called Apple Tax makes that perfectly clear.

What I actually said is that I, personally, find it fabulous for video editing. I made it clear that I'm an amateur who doesn't make heavy use of any advanced features, and furthermore said that I'm sure that the daughter made the right choice for her.

You blew into my mentions getting mad about price tags, which I never mentioned. Your assertion that someone can get better performance than the M1 for $1K including two large monitors (high DPI?) is something I'd need to see backed up, because quite frankly I don't believe you.

The one thing I'm quite confident of is that the iPad is superior for drawing to a PC and Wacom tablet, because I've used both. I'm quite confident from your pugnacious and unpleasant reply that you haven't used an iPad for either video editing or drawing.

If you are suggesting that desktop computers will be replaced by tablets, I say NO. They are supplemented by them.

I have an earnest question, as I have had to resort to mounting an SMB share in “Files” app because iTunes is an insufferable PÓS: How can you access files on the device and transfer them to a computer, for example?

I think that proprietary platform limited software on iPad is not typically mature as a main video editor or DAW. I record audio and produce music, and while my iPhone and iPad are great for making midi sequences, and even though I CAN connect a usb audio interface, it’s clunky and the opposite of why I would use the device, aka on the train or away from home. I typically record my drum set or guitar or trumpet with a rather large setup involving a rackmount audio interface, hardware mic preamps of good quality, and let’s face it: drum sets are large.

I know many folks that use their tablet connected to their desktop DAW over the LAN to control parameters on a synth or effects processor. In live sound setups it’s a great remote. It’s not a replacement for a larger computer, and size and scale of peripherals and the tasks involved are large. The form factors have legitimately distinct purposes.

> A 13 inch screen Ipad pro with a keyboard and 2TB of memory is $2500.

The 2TB memory is accounting for like half the cost there. You can get a model with less built-in memory and just use an external drive and the price drops down to like $1400.

Lots of tasks don't benefit from ridiculous amounts of memory, but editing video does.

Thats actually storage, not RAM.

I'm sure this is true.

I haven't found 256GB to be much of a limit in editing video, and I do shoot 4K. But I've only really worked with a couple hours of footage at a time, and I'm comfortable with keeping my "b roll" on my NAS. 512GB would probably be a better buy.

Or Apple could stop ripping off their customers and we could just be comfortable paying them a reasonable amount of money for a reasonable amount of storage.

Is that too much to ask?

Onboard storage is just more expensive.

iPads and Apple’s processors had purpose built processes for video editing. My M1 Air is faster than my 2017 15 inch hexa core and respectably close to my 2070 Super in Handbrake. You can probably get away with an M1 iPad Pro for a LOT of tasks. The T2 in the touch bar chip on my 2017 is faster than the intel processor in some encoding tasks I’ve done.

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