Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

iPad Pro

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 805 posts

Re: iPad Pro

#431

Post by Jtsummers »

Karunamon wrote: post #381
zeroname wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me the huge amount of low cost junk in the App Store doesn't feel right next to the high quality expensive products Apple sells. It might have something to do with all the entitled customers (children?) that will review anything that costs five dollars or more as "a ripoff", unless maybe the game is literally Minecraft.

That's terribly unfair. When the mobile ecosystem settles ~$5 as the price for full-featured apps, with .99 as the price for one-off toys and smaller tools, someone bucking the trend and charging multiple times that for apps that are not meaningfully higher quality than the rest of the charging-five-bucks ecosystem will rightly be judged by the average consumer as overpriced. That's not "entitlement", that's violatio…

Then make something that's worth 4-10x the standard app.

For me, Scrivener was worth the $20. Omnifocus was worth the $40. They added enough value and ability above what other apps in their category had (or paired well, in my case, with apps that I already had on my computer).

It is precisely entitlement that causes people to think that software isn't worth anything ("Code is just typing after all.") or is only worth $5 at most. Good software is worth it's cost if it adds value to your device and workflow or entertains you for a sufficient amount of time.

Re: iPad Pro

#432

Post by ascagnel_ »

minimaxir wrote: post #44
ascagnel_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It lacks a controller, though. And the "best" controller is missing three inputs you'd expect (L3/R3 "stick click" buttons and a select button).

The controllers like the Steelseries Nimbus follow the Made for iPhone spec, which is why they're limited.

I want to say there's a new revision of the MFI controller spec, but nobody's put out hardware under it as of yet.

Re: iPad Pro

#433

Post by stupidbird »

olyjohn wrote: post #380
Invictus0 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you're trying to make the point that most software is bloated/slow/etc. but this is not the example to use for that point. Things don't just get faster because it's current year. The size of photos has increased by orders of magnitude since Photoshop debuted, the size of screens has increased, and the capabilities of the program have increased. In Photoshop, it is not only plausible but commonplace to have mul…

> It's also worth considering that Photoshop only really uses 2 cores at maximum anyway. Seriously? I think this is more confirming that the person you replied to is right. Unless there is some reason that I can think of that only using 2 cores is a good thing?

These are things that are processed better by a smaller number of more powerful cores than a larger quantity of cores.

Multiple cores are really good at handling a lot of smaller processes. Photoshop just has a couple really heavy individual processes.

Re: iPad Pro

#434

Post by kllrnohj »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #330
mLuby wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed that 'fast as lightning' rarely refers to the literal speed of electricity in atmosphere; it's commonly understood to mean 'very fast'. However, there is no such common understanding of the phrase 'edge to edge' meaning almost edge to edge. Edge to edge in English means it goes from the edge of one side to the edge of the other, literally. It's not a metaphor. Only Jobs had a powerful enough reality warp to ma…

You're being silly, it is a metaphor and it's been used before Apple ran with it. The Dell XPS was often said to have an edge to edge display. [0] It didn't, literally, the bezels are similar to this ipad. Because in the context of displays there isn't really any big consumer product out there that actually has no bezel at all. Rather you have all these nearly edge to edge displays. And we talk about them as being ed…

Dell doesn't call it edge-to-edge or all-screen in their marketing.

Anyway looking at the dimensions of the iPad Pro 12.9" model it's 11.04 inches wide with a 12.9" 4:3 screen. The screen itself is going to be 10.32" wide as a result, putting the bezel at .36" or around 9mm. By comparison the XPS 13's bezel is 5.2mm.

Re: iPad Pro

#435

Post by SllX »

ericlewis wrote: post #427
SllX wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably they are already powerful enough to make the leap in at least some cases, that said Apple does not push Macs in the same quantities as iOS devices as to justify wholly new silicon for the line. I have been in an argument with a friend for the past year or so about precisely when (or if) Apple will rip Intel out and use their own silicon. I think they will, but I'm going to try to present his argument to the…

I don't disagree, but I do want to point out that they did release an X variant of the A series with the new iPads.

Ah, I just re-read my post and I was unclear in that portion because I edited it too much.

I meant to say there was no A11X. I'll edit that in shortly.

Re: iPad Pro

#436

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

slavak wrote: post #425
ziftface wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah pretty much. The bezels are smaller than on current ipads, but yeah "edge to edge" is definitely a stretch.

You mean a "lie." Calling a notched iPhone "all-screen" is a bit of a stretch. This is just straight upfalse.

Forgive the humor in a HN comment, but because of you I shall add "upfalse" to my working lexicon.

Re: iPad Pro

#437

Post by wild_preference »

OskarS wrote: post #138
r0fl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a 3gig PSD file. That is pretty impressive.

No! It's not! Not in 2018! You only think it's impressive because you're used to UI's being total fucking shit! That's why it's an indictment of the software industry! I'm not saying it's not hard: it is hard. Programming is hard. Making sure you're not occupying the UI thread for more than 16 milliseconds per frame is sometimes a challenge. You have to use all sorts of scary stuff like "concurrency" and "threads" an…

Sounds like you just don't understand the challenges of what was demonstrated rather than a lamentation of modern software. Like reading kids on /r/gaming complain that a game doesn't have unlimited draw distance yet have no clue why there's a limitation.

Re: iPad Pro

#438

Post by _ph_ »

SllX wrote: post #24

From the keynote, Cook claimed the new A12X Bionic[1] is faster than 92% of portable PCs[2] (in English, laptops, Surfaces) sold in the past year, including some i7 models. - 8 core CPU (4 low and 4 high power cores) - 7 core GPU - HEVC encoding/decoding - Neural Engine (they haven't made any comparisons to the A12 sans X neural engine, so at this point I think it's the same) - Audio DSP, Storage controller, Image Si…

The hardware specs of the new iPad Pro read like the dream mobile machine. If only there were not too many software limitations in iOS which would prevent it to replace a laptop for many tasks, it could take over the laptop space in no time.

- Files is way too limited. It should be possible to exchange the system supported data types between all apps via files. You can't even add a audio track to Music or a video file to the TV app as it is right now.

- The split screen feature is a good one, but so far I rarely found it useful. Not all apps support it, many apps differ in their behavior. The 50:50 split is nice, but the other split ratios I fould less useful. For some tasks you need overlapping windows.

- On the same page, one of my favorite features is the picture in picture for playing video - unfortunately again, apps differ in behavior and I don't understand the size limit. I would like to be able to put the video to any size.

- And of course, coding and running plain Unix utilities. While I am happy about the security the app model with sandboxing brings, for a "Pro" machine, this is too restrictive. Apple should allow something like Termux on the iPad, even if it were limited to a sandboxed file system, it would make the iPad soo much more useful as a computer. Apple might even release a lightweight Linux-VM as an app.

If Apple could remove these pure software-restrictions of the iPad, they could attract a lot of "Pro" users, I think. Disclaimer: I am an iPad Pro owner, fully in the Apple universe :). iCloud sync already makes it a much more useful device, but I keep hitting my head against the limitations. Running "Blink" to connect to my Linux server makes it almost a laptop, but is very limited.

Re: iPad Pro

#439

Post by alexktz »

macintux wrote: post #159
reacharavindh wrote: post #139

Do you all use iPad for serious work? Curious what apps you use? Other than Apple Notes(with Apple Pencil), and watching NetFlix, I dont make good use of it. I'd love to get some recommendation for useful apps to try...

The key feature that drove me to buy the 12.9" iPad Pro last year was the ability to read and mark up PDFs without having to constantly zoom/move it around. Old eyes. I also use it to create routes for road trips for my Jeep club: it's really nice to have my GPS app and a satellite view side by side as I look for interesting back roads. In short: I bought a Ferrari and use it like a Civic.

Would you mind elaborating a little on your workflow / apps used here please?

Re: iPad Pro

#440

Post by kllrnohj »

MontagFTB wrote: post #367
OskarS wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to test the mettle of a computer, try opening a large Photoshop file and doing anything in it. This, right here, is why it's an indictment of the software industry. It SHOULDN'T be impressive that Photoshop doesn't lag. When she said that line, the entire audience should have shrugged and said to themselves "Of course you can zoom into an image in Photoshop. It's 2018. What's the big deal?"

The demo file shown at the event was 12000x12000, 127 layers. It was 3GB on disk, 5GB fully loaded into memory. Double-tap to zoom was happening at 120Hz, fully animated, to anywhere within the document. I realize I'm biased, but on such a machine, the observed performance is anything but rudimentary.

It's not impressive if it's not doing it with ideal sharpness in real-time, which it wasn't.

Tiled zooming into arbitrarily large images is otherwise rather easy to do. Go plop the largest image you can find onto your nearest Android phone and it'll zoom & pan that image at 60fps with nary a stutter or issue. It will take a while for it to re-snap the sharpness as you zoom in, though, but so was the iPad Pro. How fast it was re-decoding at the new scale factor & crop is the interesting question, but one which wasn't covered.

Otherwise we're just talking the same basic tech behind gigapixel viewers. Which isn't interesting or significant in the slightest, and has been used on mobile for years and years and years.

Post reply on HN