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

iPad Air Review

anandtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 102 posts

Re: iPad Air Review

#11

Post by teamonkey »

nwh wrote: post #7
jason_wang wrote: post #6

The device I really wish exists is an iPad Air minus the computing power. Just a screen to stream videos to from a iPhone, a laptop or a cable box. A portable screen that's a lot less powerful than an iPad but a bit more powerful than a digital picture frame. 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 to…

A first generation iPad then?

The 1st-gen iPad I have has been upgraded into obsolescence. Even watching a YouTube video without the app running out of memory is almost impossible.

Re: iPad Air Review

#12

Post by jason_wang »

mirsadm wrote: post #8
jason_wang wrote: post #6

The device I really wish exists is an iPad Air minus the computing power. Just a screen to stream videos to from a iPhone, a laptop or a cable box. A portable screen that's a lot less powerful than an iPad but a bit more powerful than a digital picture frame. 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 to…

How about a cheap Android tablet? If it is just for watching videos then there are plenty of very cheap Chinese tablets that will work.

This is where I'm leaning right now. A sub $200 Android tablet. But there's something to be said about not having to learn a whole new interview for my parents.

Re: iPad Air Review

#13

Post by programminggeek »

"The iPad Air is the most significant upgrade to the 9.7-inch iPad in its history." I would actually say the iPad to iPad 2 transition was a bigger jump, but maybe just because it's so easy to forget how much bigger and bulkier the original iPad was.

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.

Re: iPad Air Review

#14

Post by blinkingled »

imjoshdean wrote: post #9
blinkingled wrote: post #3

Another great review as usual from Anandtech. 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…

I'm not going to hold my breath on the actual RAM number until we see an iFixit teardown. Due to just the shear size, the iPad mini has always had half the ram as the regular sized iPad. I wouldn't be surprised if the Air had 2GB and the Mini had 1 GB.

From the review -

>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.

Re: iPad Air Review

#15

Post by gwright »

blinkingled wrote: post #3

Another great review as usual from Anandtech. 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…

It is all about tradeoffs. Memory requires power and so more memory means a shorter battery life.

Re: iPad Air Review

#16

Post by blinkingled »

nwh wrote: post #5
blinkingled wrote: post #3

Another great review as usual from Anandtech. 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…

iOS7 does have memory compression though.

Right. But it still seems to be an overall increase of 20-30% for lightest of the use cases.

>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.

Re: iPad Air Review

#17

Post by blinkingled »

gwright wrote: post #15
blinkingled wrote: post #3

Another great review as usual from Anandtech. 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…

It is all about tradeoffs. Memory requires power and so more memory means a shorter battery life.

Yes, in this case more RAM is arguably the better trade off. Less need to reload apps and browser tabs, better multitasking performance etc. are good things to have over the 15 min or whatever of battery loss it might take to power on additional 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM. It's just a vastly better user experience for the common use cases. (Besides there are other tablets with 2GB RAM and they come very close to iPad in terms of battery life so it shouldn't be that big of an issue.)

Re: iPad Air Review

#18

Post by AndyJPartridge »

mirsadm wrote: post #2

As usual Anandtech has one of the best reviews. My only complaint is the CPU benchmarks are more or less useless. I understand there aren't any good cross platform benchmarks right now but using JS benchmarks is completely inaccurate. Not only are there major variations between scores on the same device (across different browsers and versions) but the same browser isn't even available on both platforms. I'd love to s…

Agreed with the review.

Also agree that any benchmarks are useless. We need to code for the lowest common platform, in order to get the best sales.

Re: iPad Air Review

#19

Post by calinet6 »

mirsadm wrote: post #2

As usual Anandtech has one of the best reviews. My only complaint is the CPU benchmarks are more or less useless. I understand there aren't any good cross platform benchmarks right now but using JS benchmarks is completely inaccurate. Not only are there major variations between scores on the same device (across different browsers and versions) but the same browser isn't even available on both platforms. I'd love to s…

> As usual Anandtech has one of the best reviews.

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.

Re: iPad Air Review

#20

Post by Segmentation »

I wasn't planning on buying an iPad Air, as I'm still happy with my iPad 2, but that comparison chart on the first page really sold me that the iPad Air is the first real upgrade to the iPad 2.

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.

Post reply on HN