iPad Air Review
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
My only complaint is I want high capacity, and I find it so ridiculous that to go from 16GB to 64GB I have to pay $200 extra. Two hundred dollars for 48GB. I think the last time I paid that much for 48GB was ten years ago.
Edit:
I wish Apple would put a microSD reader on the iPad. Purely for storage expansion. I realize they don't do this because it would basically kill their storage upgrade options and they'd probably lose money. No one would feel compelled to upgrade beyond 16GB.
microSD readers exist on the smallest devices nowadays, so form factor or weight is certainly no excuse.
That assertion of control makes iOS unsuitable for many users, but Apple has consciously chosen a market segment and its proven itself a large one.
There's probably some correlation between simple(r) products and good customer service.
The second resaon though, is that it introduces a level of complexity Apple are unlikely to be comfortable with[1]. Users now have to be aware of where stuff is being saved (flash or sd card), and the OS UI needs to be updated to provide this option.
[1] unfortunately, iCloud seems to wildly disprove my point ...
I agree that Apple's memory upgrades are expensive (and probably account for a fair chunk of their margin). Supporting an SD card would necessitate a huge re-thinking of many parts of iOS, and create another point of failure and support. I dislike the way Android handles SD cards and prefer just to have more internal memory, it's a nicer experience not to explicitly manage that.
I think Apple should just charge less for memory instead.
Otherwise, I have an iPad 3 and played with the iPad 2. The difference in the retina display is enough for me.
http://www.digidna.net/diskaid/features/iphone-photos-transf...
Wow, Apple is still skimping on RAM at the expense of user experience. It would've been a great time to bump the RAM up to 2GB given the switch to 64-bit iOS 7 seems to be causing 20-30% higher memory consumption. It was already kind of bad on previous gen 32-bit iPads.
It's still tempting to upgrade from the brick that the iPad 3 now feels but I'll live with it until the one with finger print reader, more RAM and fully baked iOS 7.1.x are out.
>In general you’re looking at a 20 - 30% increase in memory footprint when dealing with an all 64-bit environment. At worst, the device’s total memory usage never exceeded 60% of what ships with the platform but these are admittedly fairly light use cases. With more apps open, including some doing work in the background, I do see relatively aggressive eviction of apps from memory. The most visible case is when Safari tabs have to be reloaded upon switching to them. Applications being evicted from memory don’t tend to be a huge problem since the A7 can reload them quickly.
>The iPad Air, like the iPhone 5s, ships with 1GB of LPDDR3 memory. Apple frowns upon dissection of review samples but I think it’s a safe bet that we’re not talking about a PoP (Package-on-Package) configuration but rather discrete, external DRAM here. It’s also probably a safe bet that even the iPad mini with Retina Display will ship with 1GB of memory as well.
Might that not have also been due to the iPad mini having a non-Retina display? Or does system RAM not matter much for that?
But I will defend your right to defend Apple at any cost - known or unknown ;)
That doesn't mean that Apple's choice is right and yours is wrong (or vise versa) just that they are different choices.
Anyway - I think at the very least Apple could shove off power consumption elsewhere in the next round of updates and give us more RAM if that's what it takes.
You are suggesting that the configuration that is best for you is best for everyone and therefore is the best for Apple. But that isn't necessarily true. I don't doubt that it would be the best for you -- that is what you want. But don't assume that your preference is best for everyone or for Apple itself.
It is the nature of tradeoffs that you can't satisfy everyone 100% with a single configuration or even several configurations.
You think that additional memory is the better tradeoff. OK, some quick googling shows 1GB of DDR3 memory might be about $10 wholesale (I found $16 retail). So if you are going to sell 70 million tablets (that is the number of iPads sold in the past year), going from 1Gb to 2Gb is roughly a $700 million decision (per/year) and that assumes stable memory prices (they aren't) so your decision might cost more than that (or less). And you've now cut into your power budget for all future products.
As a user I don't have to care what Apple has to do to get the RAM up - renegotiate with their vendors, improve battery life, sell a different SKU with more RAM and $16 more in price, eat up the cost as a price to pay for user experience etc. You kept explaining why they couldn't do it when others have been there and done that.
Frankly even viewed 100% from Apple's standpoint, none of your arguments are very convincing, especially so if you look at what actually is involved in 1GB of additional RAM and when even lower priced devices have it.
I never said that Apple couldn't put in the extra memory -- I just suggested that there were tradeoffs that suggest why they might not have made that choice. I was trying to add information to the discussion but you seem to want to insist on proving your preference is the right one and that Apple made a mistake (as in the wrong decision for Apple and its customers -- even ones who don't have the same needs as yourself).
Note, I'm not trying to prove that Apple made the right choice -- perhaps it was the wrong one and they could have sold more iPads and had happier customers if they added more memory if they had followed your advice. Maybe they wanted to but couldn't line up sufficient supplies or maybe there wasn't space for the extra memory or maybe they didn't want to eat into their profit margin or …
I've not read about this. Can you cite a source?
Most apps are not using tens of megabytes for pointer based graph-structures etc. or code.
They are however using loads of megabytes for image data, offscreen buffers, etc.
So I doubt that 64-bit changes much.
Also, Apple has the power to mandate that all apps have to run well on whatever old hardware Apple wants to keep supported. There's no good excuse.
Apples approach to extending background services was to engineer a 'motion coprocessor' to handle one class of background tasks as efficiently as possible. Samsung et al just saw the memory utilisation on their devices go up from the services they're running so they jacked up the installed memory.
The second consideration is battery life. Memory uses battery power all the time, whether that memory is doing anything useful or not. Apple is fanatical about power conservation. You don't get 10 hour battery life as a standard feature on your mobile devices by accident.
So yes Android will use more memory if there is some available but there's no evidence to suggest it needs more than iOS.
BTW, there's another class of software Android devices run that consume more RAM. UI widgets. Now that's perfectly legitimate. If you like widgets, Android or WP are the way to go. It's just that they have a cost in RAM utilization, and therefore device memory specs and power consumption. If Apple supported UI widgets, they'd have to also increase memory capacity to maintain system performance and stability, so they don't. This is an area where reasonable people can have a difference of opinion. Apple prioritize battery life and lean system design, Android emphasizes features and customization.
No. I am talking relative here. Relative to my iPad my 1GB Android devices ( N7 (2012) and GNex) reloaded browser pages or lost background audio/video playback noticeably lesser. However on my Note 2 which has 2GB RAM, I very rarely see browser page reloads and don't remember having lost background audio for example at all (something that happens routinely on iPad and sometimes on the N7.)
So what I am saying is that Android devices don't _need_ more than 1GB - anecdotally they offer slightly better multitasking performance for the same 1GB than the iPad. But both on Android and iOS - the experience will get appreciably better with 2GB RAM given how smoother my Note 2 is and given how many times my iPad reloads/loses stuff. (Just check the diagnostics logs for low memory on iOS devices.)
If Apple doesn't let its apps get more intricated, competitors will do it first...
Plus developers have got the increased power of the 64-bit A7 and the features of the M7 chip to keep themselves entertained so it's not as if Apple are treading water.
Besides do we really want to recreate the "requires a minimum of X Gb RAM to run" small print world of Windows games?
Did I miss something? I've been happy with my 10" ipad for years and, especially with the 2048x1536 display, have never felt the need to go smaller. I know most of the android tablets are smaller, but I've been completely satisfied. I suppose I've never used the ipad mini, so it might be all that and a bag of chips.
Is this really the trend? It wouldn't be the first to pass me by, but I'm still surprised.
I'd love to see how the A7 really stacks up against the Snapdragon/Tegra but it doesn't seem like we'll be seeing that any time soon.
Also agree that any benchmarks are useless. We need to code for the lowest common platform, in order to get the best sales.
No one does reviews like Anand—even other reviewers at Anandtech. When I see him as the author, I know I'm in for a treat. I mean, down to the metal, and a full understanding and clear explanation of what it means! Just top quality, every single time, even going back ten or fifteen years to the Pentium and Athlon era. I learned so much from his clear and passionate explanations of CPU structure and design decisions.
I still love that the author name link goes straight to his e-mail address. I think I'll thank him directly.
iPad : 680 g / 6186 cm3 = 0.1099 g / cm3
iPad 2 : 601 g / 3944 cm3 = 0.1523 g / cm3
iPad Air: 469 g / 3060 cm3 = 0.1532 g / cm3
iPad 3 : 650 g / 4213 cm3 = 0.1542 g / cm3
iPad 4 : 650 g / 4213 cm3 = 0.1542 g / cm3Well it's just that. Apple is promoting their size/weight ratio so I just wanted to know there progress. Nothing more nothing less ;)
Density is far less important than the actual size and weight. High density is a demonstration that they've utilized all the available space (since the density of the components themselves are not changing) for components and need less room for heat. Alternatively, it could be a sign that the internal structure matters less than less and only the exterior components (aluminum and glass) are meaningfully different from one version to another.
What makes the iPad Air attractive is not density, it's that there's less of it all around.
An excelent flotation device, if a tad small ...
I guess the volume is off by one order of magnitude - a paper notepad of 20 x 30 x 1 centimeters would be 600 cm3.
The article mentioned 10" tablets and 15" laptops seeming to be on the way out. The difference in largest dimension is even more pronounced with laptops. The last 15" 4:3 Thinkpad was 13.2" wide. The current 15" 16:9 models are 14.7" wide. It's about the same thickness and weight with less depth, but it seems like a much bigger machine because its largest dimension is bigger.
That said, I'm buying the iPad Air as an upgrade to my iPad 2 and I'll be updating my 2011 MBP as well because I think they've really hit homeruns for those two.
> Why are HTC and Samsung doing so well in the phone market? Because they
> offer what clearly millions of people want: a 5" screen.
No one has proven this, it's just a rumour circling the internet. Anecdotally I've seen plenty 'in the wild', but potentially not as many as the 5S (hard to tell aside from the gold), so it's unclear whether it's been a sales disappointment.
Hrm? Apple's first-week iPhone sales significantly beat analyst estimates and their own records. It doesn't seem plausible that those were all 5Ses.
> Why are HTC and Samsung doing so well in the phone market? Because they offer what clearly millions of people want: a 5" screen.
HTC are not doing well in the phone market. As for Samsung, the Note 3 managed 5 million channel sales in one month, with total sales of the series over a couple of years of only 40 million. 40 million sales over two years is a drop in the bucket for Samsung's sales; the bulk of their sales are of low-end devices (with small screens).
> If Apple had introduced a 5" screen iPhone this cycle, how many would they have sold?
Well, I know I wouldn't have bought one, whereas I did buy a 5S. Not everyone wants giant phones.
Surprisingly this is for my parents. They watch videos all the time and watching videos on an iPhone is too small, on a laptop is too bulky and on an iPad is too expensive.
Unfortunately, the resulting product is also an incredibly limited niche.
(I don't have an Apple TV, so maybe Air Play is not as convenient as I have been led to believe.)
The iPad came out what 3 and a half years ago and it's faster, lighter, better resolution, and has gone from a "who would ever buy that" to one of the most popular computers in the world. It has completely upended PC sales and forced a radically different Windows experience on millions of users (for better or worse).
In all honesty, what is most remarkable about Apple is that they can take a industry leading (or defining) product like the iPad and make pretty significant improvements every year or two like clockwork and have those changes not just be superficial, but meaningful changes that make a difference to the end user.
People do this all the time. Have you no opinions on rape, child abuse, or murder? I realize judging a physical device is different than moral, ethical and legal issues - but people will have varying levels of experience on almost everything in this world - and the person with the most experience isn't always the most-qualified to pass judgement.
Absolutely, argue, you might inform them of something new and swing their decision. But dismissing their opinion entirely is wrong in many ways.
You can question the validity of the opinion but we all extrapolate on what we do know and fill the gaps in with views and information borrowed from others and reasonable assumptions.
Are you trolling or are you simply a moron?
The dimensions and weight comparison table ( right smack on the first page [1] ) shows the iPad Air is a good 181 grams lighter than the previous version, the iPad 4.
The second generation iPad at 601 grams is only lighter by 79 grams over the first generation, which stood at 680 grams.
If I remember right the original iPad 1 had no front camera (or was it no cameras at all?).
To me that's a huge upgrade.
Considering only the dimensions, the second generation iPad managed a meager trimmings of 4 mm, 2 mm and 4.6 mm in length, width and thickness for a total of 10.6 mm.
That pales in comparison to a total of 18.9 mm in combined length + width + thickness savings, in the current iPad Air.
So your elusive measure of "perceived bulkiness" falls short of explaining how iPad Air is not the greatest leap in terms of portability over its previous version, over all of the other deltas of iPad generations.
using figured from ohwp's response above:
iPad : 6186 cm3
iPad 2 : 3944 cm3 = saving of 2242cm3
iPad 3 : 4213 cm3
iPad 4 : 4213 cm3
iPad Air: 3060 cm3 = saving of 884cm3 (vs smallest other iPad, the iPad 2)If you don't learn to make your point in a more civilised manner, you'll end up hellbanned...