For me, my iPad 1 still makes a plenty good Instapaper/Kindle/email/writing/basic web/casual gaming device, and my only major hope is that developers like Marco don't drop iOS 5 support way too quick for their apps.
The iPad 1
91–100 of 103 posts
Re: The iPad 1
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
What annoys me: the expensive to replace batteries on iOS devices. My wife and I have new Samsung Galaxy III S phones and I was giving her a little lecture on recharging strategies for maximizing battery life (same lecture as for our iPads, BTW). Then I checked out how incredibly cheap Samsung replacement batteries are on Amazon. Husband fail, but recovery :-) So, I asked her to be careful of her iPad recharging stra…
What recharging strategies are you suggesting? I'm not aware of any need of strategies for modern lithium ion batteries aside from the storage case, so I'm genuinely curious.
don't charge to full, charge to say 80%
Re: The iPad 1
#93Re: The iPad 1
#94The RAM thing is a nice theory until you consider the 4th gen iPod touch has a similar number of pixels as iPad 1, also has 256MB of RAM and also gets iOS6 support. They're still selling it now (just about), so that's probably why. I'm sure with a bit of engineering effort, the memory footprint of iOS could be drastically reduced. (Hire some game programmers who have worked on console games! A 1st gen iPad has about…
>I'm sure with a bit of engineering effort, the memory footprint of iOS could be drastically reduced. Drastically ? The core of iOS is fundamentally the same as OSX and there are shared components. If Apple could figure out how to dramatically reduce memory usage they would have done it by now.
Yes, drastically, I'm sure.
OSX heavily uses swap, even when a lot of memory is available (the dynamic pager). On iOS, the dynamic pager is disabled. This is particularly an issue with a language whose default memory allocation behaviour is as bad as Objective-C's - if an app gets backgrounded and frees all of the objects in a 4K page, save one (no matter how small), it will consume 4K until that changes or it gets killed. As it's not a managed language, the heap can't get compacted.
A second thing that's horrendously inefficient about iOS (as far as I can tell - they don't expose this stuff much) is that all of UIKit/Core Animation uses 32-bit/pixel textures. Things like text labels could easily use 8-bit textures with vertex colours for tinting. 8-bit PNGs or GIFs loaded as UIImages are decoded into 32-bit textures, too - okay, the hardware doesn't natively support palettes, so this would take a little bit of extra work to support. Finally, the hardware does support powerful compressed textures (PVRTC) which would suffice for many (most?) images used in apps.
Re: The iPad 1
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I'm as annoyed at Apple as you are (environmentally friendly my arse), Android devices don't exactly have a history of frequent and timely software updates. The saving grace is that new apps often still support ancient OS releases.
Not so sure about that. What happens if you need to restore your iPad 1 and redownload all the Apps? Do you get the latest version, or the latest compatible version of the App, even if the developer dropped support for your iOS version?
The latest version (if it works) - iTunes on your Mac/PC should store the latest compatible one though. Yes, it's a mess. Apple really need some kind of plan for discontinued devices. What happens when a critical flaw is discovered in Mobile Safari 5 and suddenly the 15 million iPad users are vulnerable to drive-by downloads?
Re: The iPad 1
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really don't know where to start with this ridiculous diatribe. Firstly as for your MacBook Air. OSX runs fine with 2GB and shouldn't be swapping constantly for browsing. And not sure why you are complaining that you got 200 euros for a 4 year old machine. Secondly you seem to be really bitter about not buying the cheaper and arguably nastier laptops. Why not buy them ? Clearly the only thing that concerns you is s…
>Firstly as for your MacBook Air. OSX runs fine with 2GB and shouldn't be swapping constantly for browsing What the hell are you smoking. Safari with multiple tabs will eat all the remaining memory. The whole system itself took 1,4 gb, there was only 700 mb left after startup on a CLEAN system, formatted and reinstalled without a single program running in the background (Mountain Lion). > And not sure why you are com…
I have a 2010 MBA with 2Gb of RAM, it only chugs on browser stuff when I've got a VM running and compiling, a terminal running various bits and 3 windows with about 6-7 tabs open. It works fine. Your personal experience is not a good way to go "What the hell are you smoking", as there's many of us with that model who've had nothing but happy happy joy times with it.
Re: The iPad 1
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am going to have to agree with Nicole060 here. I recently bought one of the new Macbook Pros for work - non retina, 4GB RAM. It became as slow as hell. I am a developer.. I need at least one VM with IE open, I need to have Chrome open, photoshop open, xcode, etc. Luckily I was able to upgrade it with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM, and it's now a pleasure to work with. Apple only offers an 8GB increase on their onli…
I've seen a 2GB mini running Lion where Excel and Word were all but unusable whenever a Time Machine backup started. Perhaps a bit of tuning would have fixed the problem, but additional RAM was an easier fix. On the other hand, on my 4GB (Ivy Bridge, 11-inch) MacBook Air, I regularly run Visual Studio on Windows (8, 32-bit) under VMware, with IE, IIS, and MS SQL Server running in the VM, along with a number of OS X a…
Yes, both are using mechanical harddisks.
I also use utilities like Alfred, etc... I can see how a fast SSD makes your system smoother.
An SSD is my next desirable upgrade.. but a considerable expense seeing as I need at least 512GB (I dualboot OSX and Windows)
Re: The iPad 1
#98Re: The iPad 1
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
What recharging strategies are you suggesting? I'm not aware of any need of strategies for modern lithium ion batteries aside from the storage case, so I'm genuinely curious.
don't charge to full, charge to say 80%
I charge to full if I will be using the device. If I am charging a laptop that I will not be using for a long while, I only charge it half way.
I try to minimize the number of charges so I usually use a device until the battery is mostly discharged before charging.
If this is wrong, please let me know!
Re: The iPad 1
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen a 2GB mini running Lion where Excel and Word were all but unusable whenever a Time Machine backup started. Perhaps a bit of tuning would have fixed the problem, but additional RAM was an easier fix. On the other hand, on my 4GB (Ivy Bridge, 11-inch) MacBook Air, I regularly run Visual Studio on Windows (8, 32-bit) under VMware, with IE, IIS, and MS SQL Server running in the VM, along with a number of OS X a…
Yes, both are using mechanical harddisks. I also use utilities like Alfred, etc... I can see how a fast SSD makes your system smoother. An SSD is my next desirable upgrade.. but a considerable expense seeing as I need at least 512GB (I dualboot OSX and Windows)
Check out the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive. I put one in my MacBook Pro and it's a screamer. Almost as fast as a standalone SSD.