I recently went on my first week-long vacation since joining Tom's Guide. At the airport on the way home, the gate agent announced: the airline was offering $400 to anyone who wanted to take another flight. This number increased to $600, then $800, and then $1,000. In addition to airline credits, gift cards to major retailers were offered.

It was an attractive offer. However, having just missed five days of work, plus a holiday, I knew I could not skip another day. I did not bring my laptop, a MacBook Air, on this trip, but I did bring my iPad Air (2020). Could I work with it, accept the offer, and return home the next day?

TL;DR - The answer is no. So, dear reader, I lost $1,000.

For this trip, I brought along a borrowed iPad Air (2020) review unit that I borrowed to test out a music production app. It worked like a dream and fully deserved its reputation as "one of the best iPads ever," as my colleague Henry T. Casey wrote in his review of this model.

Within a month or so of my getting it, the iPad Air performed at lightning speed; I saw it switch smoothly between GarageBand and Moog's Model D without any hiccups, and it was a pleasure to use. For work use, the iPad Air needed nothing less.

Along with the iPad Air, I had the Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil. While the latter was not really needed for work, the Magic Keyboard would be key to using the iPad as a laptop replacement. In fact, Casey exclaims, "Support for the Magic Keyboard means that the iPad Air is finally on par with a laptop."

Perhaps so, depending on the situation and the person. For myself, it was not a solution to the $1,000 offer.

As a writer, I don't need a ton of special programs to get my work done. Email, Chrome, Slack, and a photo editor like Photoshop Elements or Affinity are all I need. Also, I am in charge of streaming, so I need to be able to watch Netflix, Disney Plus, HBO Max, etc.

All of these apps are available on iPadOS, so I started downloading them right at the airport. Then I opened the apps and logged in to see if I could work a little more normally.

The iPad Air again had no problems even loading and switching between apps. The problem is that the iPad versions of some apps are not as good as the macOS versions.

Chrome, for example, Chrome on the iPad sucks. There are no extensions and accessing bookmarks is a pain. I often use incognito windows to do google queries, but using incognito windows in the Chrome iPad app was a nightmare. It is managed separately from the regular Chrome tabs, and it takes a long time to switch between them. All this may be because the iPad version of Chrome is not really Chrome: Apple forces all web browsers on iOS and iPadOS to use its own WebKit rendering engine.

I also had problems using Slack. On my laptop, I have Slack open in the background while I am working in a Chrome window, Photoshop, a text editor, or some other program. When I get a notification, I can look at it right away and decide whether to address it immediately or later. On the iPad, however, switching between apps to check Slack notifications is annoying; the iPad's split-screen feature doesn't help because it makes Chrome's window narrower.

The other software-related problem I had was downloading photos. I use press sites to obtain images from shows and movies like The Witcher and Black Widow. On one site, I could press my finger on the image and copy it to my photo app. However, another site made me click a download button and the image went to ...... They went somewhere. In the ether; I couldn't find it anywhere on my iPad.

(I learned that they were stored in the Files app, but Chrome didn't explain it well).

Beyond the app differences, I was not attracted to the Magic Keyboard. The scissor switch keys and trackpad are great. But not for typing. For one thing, it is much narrower than the MacBook Air M1 keyboard.

Even using the keyboard for 20 minutes at the airport was an ordeal (and full of typos). As a writer, my job is basically typing. So if typing is difficult or time or energy consuming, magic or not, this keyboard is not the right keyboard for the job.

One more thing. I had to use a combination of trackpad gestures and screen touch gestures, which almost broke my brain.

I was at the airport, downloading apps, gesturing with the trackpad, and typing furiously for about 20 minutes. After reading glowing reviews of the previous generation iPad, I was sure the Air would get the job done. Please, for $1,000, just do it.

Unfortunately, as fast and powerful as the Air is and as promising as the Magic Keyboard is, it just wasn't enough. I imagined myself slaving away at work all day and getting very little done (I was coming off a week's vacation and had a lot of work to do). So I didn't volunteer to march up to the gate agent's desk and get bumped.

Someone else must have done, because boarding began. I took my seat, opened my iPad Air, and started watching a Netflix movie I had downloaded. iPads may not be a laptop replacement, but they are still very good for some things.