You are serious about this, aren‘t you? Split view in Portrait mode would be a non-starter for me, and in landscape everything would be tiny. I think it‘s nice that we can only do so on iPad.
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A12 Bionic in New iPad Paired With 3GB RAM, Clocks in at Same Speed as Latest iPhones
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Most people pay cash out of pocket in full for iPads. Meanwhile, even the crazy expensive iPhone Xs Max can be had for less than $50 per month.
Prior to the switch to device payment plans, most people just paid $200 or so every two years for the latest iPhone with carriers subsidizing the remaining $400-450 of the cost.
That's how phone manufacturers can get away with crazy high prices.
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True. While the Pro 10.5 is in stock and on sale for similar prices, I do recommend that.
I rather not. It doesn’t make any sense. If you already have 10.5 Pro, fine. This new iPad won’t worth the upgrade but to say it’s better to pay $200-300 more for 10.5 Pro? No chance.
So there's still an opportunity for Apple to make a little money selling those to upgraders, win-win surely?
Yet another useless feature Android users are always hyping up. I don’t need to watch some dinky little video in PIP on a phone screen nor do I want to cut my Apps in half just so I can see two at once.
iPad11,4 also has only 3 GB RAM. I checked all the 11,2 and 11,4 entries below, and all have 3 GB RAM.The first Geekbench benchmark of one of the new iPad models (11,2) surfaced shortly after Apple's announcement, confirming a 2.49GHz clock speed, identical to the iPhone's clock speed. The benchmarked iPad also features 3GB RAM, 1GB less than the iPad Pro and 1GB more than the 9.7-inch iPad. 3GB RAM is also the amount of RAM in the iPhone XR, while the XS and XS Max feature 4GB.
At this point in time, we don't know if iPad 11,2 is an iPad mini 5 or a 10.5-inch iPad Air, but given the similarity in specs between the two tablets, we suspect that both models are using the same clock speed and RAM.
Also, it seems that about 11600 is a top end multi-core test score. The 10.5" Pro scores about 9800, which puts the 10.5" Air at about 18% faster for CPU.
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They are hardly overpowered. I have Apps where I still have to wait to complete tasks on my 2018 iPad Pro. When everything you do is instant, then devices will be “just powerful enough”.
The A10X is slightly slower in CPU and slightly faster in GPU making them very similar. However, the A10X is missing one important feature the A12 has - an NPU. That’s going to make it better in the future than an extra gig of RAM.
Could you elaborate on your last bit here? I am curious. How does the NPU (is that the neural engine?) help more than RAM? Thanks!
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Ok I’ll rephrase, they’re overpowered for virtually every common task they’re asked to do in practice, and more than sufficient to complete others in a reasonable time.
That is a bold prediction and very much remains to be seen. I think there’s massively more chance of future apps or IOS updates proving unworkable on existing devices due to lack of ram, then there is of anything essential being prevented by a lack of NPU.
Another nice thing is that they made the new iPads Logitech Crayon compatible as well, which means if you don’t need the pencil for artistry stuff, but editing and redlining, you can save an extra $30 by going with the Crayon.
I’m glad they didn’t make the Mini Pencil 2 compatible, because I’d hate to pay the $130 price for that.
I disagree, but it depends on the user. I personally am totally uninterested in all that AI stuff and augmented reality stuff that Apple has been pushing. Hell, I usually don't even use Siri. About the only place I consider using Siri is in the car, but even then I often don't because it's annoyingly inaccurate. Moreover, in the car, the battery life potentially saved by an NPU for Siri use is irrelevant, because in the car one can plug the phone in anyway. (I don't know if the NPU actually does reduce power usage for Siri listening, but my understanding is it can theoretically.)
Maybe Apple's neural processing unit will become more interesting to me in a few years, but I think in the near to mid-term the neural processing unit isn't that important for most people unless you must have your next-gen animojis. When I think it will really be important is when these mid-range iPads get Face ID. But they don't have Face ID so it's kinda moot.
OTOH, the extra Gigabyte of RAM is arguably more important globally in the OS, especially as iOS and its apps become even more memory hungry. I agree that 3 GB is probably the sweet spot in 2019 for mainstream users, but that will change gradually with time as iOS gets updated, and limitations on iOS app memory utilization are relaxed.
Furthermore, there are also other tangible features such as ProMotion, better camera, and quad-speakers that can be important today.
Overall I think both are decent machines, but at least from my perspective, I find it very difficult to be excited by A12's neural processing unit, esp. considering the iPad Air doesn't even include Face ID.
There is a $24 difference between the pencil and crayon on amazon - plus there is no stand or case for the crayon. Makes the crayon something that doesn't get charged as easily or transported without getting damaged as easily.
I never said an NPU helps more than RAM. I said an NPU is better than an extra gig of RAM. Or, an NPU on a 3GB device will be more useful to users than 4GB with no NPU.
If you think the NPU is only for Animoji or AR then you need to learn more about what it’s food for. A lot of everyday things people do are improved with the NPU. It’s used by the camera to take better pictures, by the Photos App to help organize and search for photos and by third party Apps for all sorts of features (like photo retouching). Futures uses could include predicting your usage habits to optimize battery life or to decide which Apps you’re likely to use at certain times of the day to make sure they’re ready.
Why do you think iOS and Apps are going to become even more “memory hungry”? Where’s your proof this is going to happen? Apple has added a ton of stuff (and APIs) to iOS in recent years but the pace is slowing down (as is the RAM requirements). This is why 3+ year old devices still with 2GB of RAM still run great. 3GB is going to be plenty for the majority of users for many years to come.
You could also say 4GB is massively overRAM'd for virtually every common task you do in practice.
The NPU is a component that drives future innovations and new features. An extra gig of RAM does absolutely nothing to drive innovation/features.
Again, I think that's an opinion you're entitled to but as someone who struggled for years with an iPad Air with 1Gb of RAM in a world where 2Gb of RAM had become the norm for iOS, I can tell you point blank that I would have accepted a RAM upgrade for that machine over an NPU any day of the week and twice on sundays.
All of those things - even your suggested possible future uses - are nice-to-haves. They're not essential, they wouldn't be desperately missed by anyone, and I doubt they're even dependent only on the NPU. Some of the battery optimisation you're imagining already exists in devices without the NPU.
Because it's always happened in the past, it's practically Moore's other law. 2GB has been the standard for a while but then so was 1Gb for a while before that, and 512mb before that. The fact that there have also been 4Gb iPads around for a while now makes it tempting for both Apple and third party developers to make use of that extra capacity.
Err... but the camera on the iPad Pro already takes better pictures than the non-Pro models.
Photo retouching is done in software on the CPU (or on the GPU) with third party apps. It may help with native Apple apps in the future, but this is just not really a major consideration for most people. In my case, for the few photos I might edit on the iPad, I'm fine with the CPU-based battery life hit. Most of the others will be edited on my iMac.
Historically, memory usage has ballooned over time. This is fact. Remember, the first iPad actually ran OK with just 256 MB RAM. However, I specifically refused to buy this model because I knew 256 would get old really fast, and it did.
Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone buy an iPad with anything less than 2 GB RAM, which is 8X the amount of the original iPad, despite being a functional minimum. 3 GB is decent, but that's judging by 2019 standards.
Yep, 4 GB has been around quite a while in iPads, and in fact, Apple now has 6 GB iPads.
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Why are you talking about how poorly a 1GB device performs when we're talking about devices with either 3GB or 4GB? Even current 2GB devices perform very well. 3GB will be plenty enough for many years to come.
Yet here we have Apple spending significant resources to add a much more powerful NPU into the silicon of the A12 processor. Do you actually think Apple did that without expecting it to be used? This isn't an API or simple software feature tacked onto iOS or a core App. Perhaps you should look at what Apple is doing and wonder why they bothered to do it instead of claiming it's not needed because you can't think of anything it might be used for.
In fairness, 256MB was just barely sufficient for the 320*240 iPhone 3GS. Even on an iPod touch, 256MB was already too low never mind the iPad. In the early days of modern smartphones, hardware was playing catch up. Nowadays, they're actually quite sufficient for typical non-gaming usage.
My Linux desktop is usually sitting at less than 1GB RAM used and with 4GB RAM installed, I've never seen it hit the pagefile. To be honest, I don't think I've ever seen it go over 2GB used.
It's called learning from the past. That poorly performing 1Gb device was equipped the maximum RAM of *any* iOS device when it was released just 5 years ago. It performed extremely well at that point. You couldn't buy a better ipad (or tablet generally for that matter).
The next year, the iPad Air 2 doubled that RAM to 2Gb and iOS and its apps grew to fill it. You're talking about how current 2 or 3Gb ipads will perform for "many years to come" - in truth that iPad Air was struggling after one year. Although it still runs current iOS, it has for "many years" struggled with insufficient RAM.
I don't expect that to happen to the new iPad Air within a year, or even two. But it will happen, and it will happen sooner than the lack of an NPU is seriously felt by anyone on other devices.
Apple developed the NPU for the A11 originally as an essential element of Face ID (which of course isn't on the iPad Air), therefore it's in the A12. I'm sure Apple want to make the most of it since it's there, and I'm sure it will have other advantages, but suggesting it's now more important than RAM is overegging it. In fact, like most things, it probably needs a good deal of RAM to be utilised to the full anyway.
Can people who think more than 3 GB of RAM is useless please explain why Apple put 4 GB in the XS?
No one's saying it's useless. Just that it isn't absolutely essential.
Besides, you're comparing a $500 iPad and a $1000 iPhone. Apple's got a lot more leeway in their phone markup to add the extra RAM while keeping profit margins high.
Well, the iPhone 3G has only 128 Mb, However, even if you think 512 MB is the proper minimum for the era, that means RAM minimums now are still 4X as much as before.
BTW, I upgraded my 2008 MacBook, which is just our kitchen surfing and recipe machine, from 4 GB to 8 GB, and it made a noticeable improvement.
I had guessed that 4 GB would be fine and indeed it actually was fine but I was already used to an 8 GB 2009 MacBook Pro and “fine” wasn’t quite good enough. I made sure to get 16 GB for my 2017 MacBook.
On the Windows 7 and Windows 10 side, 4 GB is an enormous improvement over 3 GB.
On iOS, memory is managed differently but nonetheless Apple already thinks 4 GB is a useful configuration to have, and 4 GB being a 33% increase over 3 GB is nothing to sneeze at.
But given that Apple famously never even talk about how much RAM is in these devices, that 4GB has zero marketing value to them, so why encroach on that margin at all by including it - *unless* it does make a difference (or they're expecting it to in the near future).No one's saying it's useless. Just that it isn't absolutely essential.
Besides, you're comparing a $500 iPad and a $1000 iPhone. Apple's got a lot more leeway in their phone markup to add the extra RAM while keeping profit margins high.
As has been said, 4Gb and even 6Gb have been standard iOS configurations in higher end devices for a while now. That's not been by accident.