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iPad Air Review

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Re: iPad Air Review

#91

Post by jimbokun »

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…

Apple TV doesn't suit their needs? Sit down on couch, take phone out of pocket, Air Play to TV. Do they watch videos a lot away from the room where the TV is located?

(I don't have an Apple TV, so maybe Air Play is not as convenient as I have been led to believe.)

Re: iPad Air Review

#92

Post by blinkingled »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #72
simonh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android devices switched up to high ram co figs because they had to. A typical Android device runs a ton of stuff in the background such as Facebook uploaders, sync services, location trackers, carrier services, manufacturer UI shells and crapwear, etc you just don't get on iOS devices. To be fair, a lot of these services can do useful stuff and the freedom to run stuff like that is one of the reasons some people lik…

That's interesting. However I've read that iOS doesn't have built in garbage collector, automatically forcing you to write apps that consume less memory.

That's not quite true. Garbage Collector isn't a developer's magical ticket to write careless memory hogs. Android devices have a per app (process really) limit of how much heap memory they can consume. It can be anything in between 32MB to 256MB depending on the device. So developers still have to be very careful to not consume any more memory than absolutely necessary so that their app continues to work on as many devices as possible. Besides frequent GC will pause the app and ruin the experience - so there's that to worry about too.

Re: iPad Air Review

#93

Post by jdietrich »

davidmr wrote: post #77

> It seemed like a foregone conclusion that the 10-inch tablet market was done for, with all interest and excitement shifting to smaller, but equally capable 7 or 8-inch tablets instead. 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.…

Going down to 7" has a drastic effect on portability. You can fit a Nexus 7 into a coat pocket and use it much more comfortably while standing, which is a really big deal for a large part of the market. A 7" tablet isn't much worse than a 10" when used on your sofa, but it is vastly better on a crowded train. I think that the 7" form factor is the sweet spot between a smartphone and a Macbook Air, and that 10" tablets are becoming a niche item.

Re: iPad Air Review

#94

Post by gwright »

blinkingled wrote: post #41
gwright wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not defending them. Just pointing out that there are tradeoffs associated with the configurations you were advocating. That doesn't mean that Apple's choice is right and yours is wrong (or vise versa) just that they are different choices.

I got the tradeoff part when you mentioned it the first time - it's just that I am saying more RAM is worth the tradeoff of whatever unknown amount of possibly minuscule loss of battery life. And I don't say this without a reason - several times a day I get annoyed by background audio / airplay getting killed and my browser tabs getting reloaded. So it's not without a valid reason. Anyway - I think at the very least…

I don't think you get the 'tradeoff' part. At least I don't seem to be clearly communicating my thoughts on the matter.

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.

Re: iPad Air Review

#95

Post by baddox »

widdershins wrote: post #67
baddox wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Due to just the shear size, the iPad mini has always had half the ram as the regular sized iPad. 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?

It matters. You have to hold lots of double resolution images in memory, for example, which obviously eats memory up fast.

I wasn't sure how Retina vs. non-Retina apps behave in memory. Some apps presumably ship both sizes of assets, in which case the OS could load only the smaller ones into memory. But if an app only ships Retina assets, would those go straight into memory, or is the OS clever enough to resize them dynamically and throw that into memory?

Re: iPad Air Review

#96

Post by Groxx »

uptown wrote: post #70
Groxx wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you pass judgement on anything you haven't experienced yourself?

"How can you pass judgement on anything you haven't experienced yourself?" 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 judgeme…

That's my (apparently missed / poorly made) point, in broadening what they did to literally everything in life. People pass judgement by collecting info from multiple sources, from related things they've done, etc. So calling someone out for doing so without having experienced something is pretty naive / willfully ignorant of how they live their life.

Absolutely, argue, you might inform them of something new and swing their decision. But dismissing their opinion entirely is wrong in many ways.

Re: iPad Air Review

#97

Post by [deleted] »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #76
Groxx wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you pass judgement on anything you haven't experienced yourself?

Do you able to venture an opinion on whether it would be enjoyable or not to have your testicles slammed in the door of a car? 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.

[deleted]

Re: iPad Air Review

#98

Post by blinkingled »

gwright wrote: post #94
blinkingled wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the tradeoff part when you mentioned it the first time - it's just that I am saying more RAM is worth the tradeoff of whatever unknown amount of possibly minuscule loss of battery life. And I don't say this without a reason - several times a day I get annoyed by background audio / airplay getting killed and my browser tabs getting reloaded. So it's not without a valid reason. Anyway - I think at the very least…

I don't think you get the 'tradeoff' part. At least I don't seem to be clearly communicating my thoughts on the matter. 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…

It was confusing to me that you were thinking from the corporation's viewpoint! That makes it way more complicated than necessary. a) Apple constantly toots their horn about putting user experience ahead of anything else. b) Apple has lot of money. c) There are lot of products on the market - phones, tablets that sell for both premium and no-profit, that have 2GB RAM. d) Apple sells the iPad at premium price points e) I am certainly not the only one that would benefit from more RAM. I bet lot of people will benefit from having more memory for their "post PC" device.

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.

Re: iPad Air Review

#99

Post by gwright »

blinkingled wrote: post #98
gwright wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you get the 'tradeoff' part. At least I don't seem to be clearly communicating my thoughts on the matter. 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…

It was confusing to me that you were thinking from the corporation's viewpoint! That makes it way more complicated than necessary. a) Apple constantly toots their horn about putting user experience ahead of anything else. b) Apple has lot of money. c) There are lot of products on the market - phones, tablets that sell for both premium and no-profit, that have 2GB RAM. d) Apple sells the iPad at premium price points e…

And yet Apple didn't put in the extra memory. I hope you don't think my quick comments here are any sort of serious analysis of the tradeoffs but you should assume that perhaps Apple itself has done that analysis and ended up with a configuration that is different from your expectations for perfectly defensible reasons (from their point of view).

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 …

Re: iPad Air Review

#100

Post by ohwp »

ableal wrote: post #80
ohwp wrote: post #59

I liked to know more about the weight per size, so here a small list: 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 / cm3

> 0.1542 g / cm3 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.

Whoops. You are the first to notice ;)
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