iPad 2 Beats Out MacBook Pros In iMovie Speed Tests!
Now that iMovie has made its way onto our iPads, you may be curious to see just how well it performs. We were just as curious. The question we want to answer is this: If I am going to be shooting video on the road, what portable machine do I bring to edit/encode videos?
Context & Ripple Effects
The iPad 2 has barely shipped, and the benchmarks are already arriving: alongside same-day camera comparisons against the Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab, App Advice ran iMovie editing and encoding tests pitting the new tablet against MacBook Pros — and the iPad 2 came out ahead.
The result lands one week after an analysis arguing Apple will dominate the tablet market for years, and it sharpens the uncomfortable question underneath that claim: whether the tablet is starting to eat jobs Apple itself sells laptops for.
First-order effects
- Road warriors deciding what to pack for shooting and cutting video now have a benchmark-backed answer: the iPad 2, not a MacBook Pro, is the lighter machine that edits and encodes iMovie footage faster.
- Apple faces an early cannibalization data point — its $499–829 tablet beating its own ~$1,200+ pro laptops at a creative task the Mac line has long owned.
Second-order effects
- Rival tablets in the March 2011 comparison field, notably the Motorola Xoom and Galaxy Tab, are pushed to demonstrate equivalent mobile video-editing capability or concede the 'creation device' framing to Apple.
- Intel and PC makers selling ultraportable laptops get a new competitive reference: a tablet-class chip matching laptop silicon on a real workload, not just browsing.
Third-order effects
- If tablet chips keep closing the gap with notebook processors on media workloads, the laptop's role narrows toward heavy production while capture-and-edit moves to tablets — forcing both Apple and PC OEMs to reposition their portables around power rather than portability.
The trend: Tablets are beginning to match laptops on genuine content-creation workloads, turning the iPad from a consumption device into a direct substitute for entry-level portable editing.