Can someone explain to me why an iPad at all, let alone an iPad Air, needs as powerful a processor as a M4? That's stronger than my laptop (a M2) where I run multiple VMs and more.
Personally, they need to put the iPad on a two-year release cycle and focus on improving iPad OS.
I think the percentage of iPad users actually using this level of processing power is small, but there are some ways to do it.
I do really wish they would just allow running a VM on an iPad though at this point. Running a linux or even MacOS VM would be a nice escape valve for a lot of things that can't be done natively.
It's cheaper to use an old generation laptop CPU, than the effort needed to design and manufacture a custom iPad only chip.
Same reason why the Studio Display uses binned iPhone chips.
It's not like Apple is putting any thought into either the UX or the engineering side of utilising the compute properly (except calculating those glass effects extra inefficiently).
Minimise SKUs and get some use out of the binned chips who have a few failed cores.
Maybe there are people out there doing 8k video editing on their Pros, but I’ve yet to meet them.
Apple re-uses the same core across their lineup because it’s cheaper to build 100 million of the same core than to design and maintain two separate CPUs that go into 50 million devices each.
Because marketing? Seriously, the people I see using iPads in coffee shops are rich retired dudes looking at the news on it.
If your question is what do people use it for? Well thats different. iPads have a range of users from people who just browse the internet and will never stress this out, to people who do concept art and CAD who will appreciate the power.
But again, why do people always complain that a device got a spec bump?
8 years later the local apps still run fast, but it struggles with web browsing.
Which is to say, you need a fast processor or web developers will out-bloat your device capabilities in a few years.
You might ask — doesn’t it suck to do either on an iPad? Yep, yet even on my iPhone, I use Photoshop all the time.
VMs are not very CPU demanding usually — usually more RAM demanding.
It's stuck on iPadOS 17.7.10, which is fine. I can only imagine that these new generation iPads will easily go for the next 10 years.
TL;DR sometimes it's not Apple, it's the app devs that deprecate them.
Are the app devs deprecating just because their support matrix is too big, or because current SDKs will no longer build apps compatible with those devices?
I think the later case is less common on the Android side of the fence, but Apple is not great about keeping old versions of the dev tools functional, and you end up needing to keep elderly Macs around to target older versions of the OS.
If someone has a work-around I'd love to hear it. Until then, or until Apple changes this design, I think I'm done with iPads. I don't want to pay that much to "own" something that Apple can simply make obsolete by reconfiguring or turning off a server somewhere.
Edit: fix typo
how is music production on it these days?
90% of the people who use tablets I know (including myself) only has four use case: watching video, reading PDF and comics, taking notes, and playing mobile games.
All of which are very mobile-oriented tasks that are done on tablets solely for their screen sizes. With trifold bridging the gap between screen sizes and, more importantly, screen ratios, I would love to merge them into one device. This is in contrast with laptops, whose differences in OS and use cases are, to me, much bigger and necessary.
Of course, right now they are very much afar from consumers' pockets due to price and reliability. But normal foldables were once in the exact same state, and the fact that Apple is releasing one soon is a sure tale sign of the future of foldables.
iPadOS may not fully be to the point of being an OS UI that really utilizes the benefits of a tablet sized device, but it does have elements that are unique to it that would not really make sense on a phone.
That being said, if your tablet use case really is just a larger phone than a foldable would be great. But i know for myself the way I use my iPad it would not be a suitable replacement. Especially not now, maybe in 5+ years once someone figures out how to make an OS that actually manages different ways of interacting with it in different form factors work, but that has yet to happen.
-some people use it docked
-if it wasn't available, someone else would be complaining about that
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