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Yep. As of today the M1 iPad's are pretty much obsolete!

Because a better model is rumored to launch next year? By this logic, which product is *not* obsolete?

A lack of cpu power is surely not what makes any of the iPad Pros from 2018 on obsolete.

Sorry, no.

The M1 iPads are arguably the first iPad you can keep.

The way Apple optimizes (limits?) things like RAM use means that the M1 iPad has longer legs than ANY iPad ever.

It is the first time an iPad and a Mac are equivalent, long-term investment-wise (because they share hardware).

The concept of a usable 10-year-old iPad was born this year with the M1. Just don't drop it. ;)

Hmmm, I am quite sure he ment it as a joke....

On a more serious note, Safari will be snappier in the 2022 iPad Pro....
 

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What? The last time iPad had the first node shrink was because of their small volume use as "pipe" cleaners.

Anyway , this is from Nikkei on TSMC, which means you can mostly ignore.
 
kind of crazy to think what kind of chips we are already talking about by now while the battery has not improved in how many years? 20? Imagine advanced chips + advanced batteries
There is lots of promising battery tech out there, but most of them fall to the wayside because of lack of funding. Nobody wants to spend the money getting a new chemistry off the ground and scaled up to the level needed for mass consumer devices when Lithium Ion manufacturing is already established, cheap, and “good enough”.
 
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Given iPads outsell Macs this post is objectively wrong.

Only Mac fans say that an iPad needs macOS.

Microsoft already makes the products that Mac-on-iPad fans want. It is FAR more open, flexible, configurable... hell, you can even GAME on them.

Why not get that instead?
Because I don't care about GAMING. And one of the OSes is Posix-compliant (i.e. open, flexible), and it is not Windows.

I understand my needs are not the same as someone else's needs. But for me MacOS provides a great compromise between a well-polished OS and good *X-compliant operating system. One of my most important apps is Terminal.

Apple's Mx is another factor that keeps me on Mac. I do not need a processor which runs x86/x64 machine code but I want to have an energy-efficient computer with good performance.
 
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There is lots of promising battery tech out there, but most of them fall to the wayside because of lack of funding. Nobody wants to spend the money getting a new chemistry off the ground and scaled up to the level needed for mass consumer devices when Lithium Ion manufacturing is already established, cheap, and “good enough”.
I disagree. Batteries are not "good enough". Look at electric vehicles.

Battery chemistries have certain important characteristics, such as capacity, price, mass, volume and durability. If you can improve even one of these significantly without sacrificing the others, it is disruptive.

Dozens of billions of monetary units are used to develop improved battery technologies. Fro example, all big car manufacturers are chasing after solid state batteries, because they know solid state batteries would transform the competitive landscape. If you could double the battery capacity, you would be on the list of richest people in the world, and if you could make it tenfold, you could hire Bill Gates to shine your shoes.

And everyone developing better batteries knows this. No one has been able to bring anything disruptive during the last three decades (since Li batteries) despite a lot of investment. There has been a lot of expensive and tedious evolution, but nothing revolutionary.

It is true that there is a lot of promising battery tech out there — such as inexpensive sodium batteries, aluminium batteries, etc. — but the main problem is that most of it never survives outside the lab. Most commonly the problem is in durability, but there are some promising technologies with difficult manufacturability (due to nanoscale structures, etc.)
 
kind of crazy to think what kind of chips we are already talking about by now while the battery has not improved in how many years? 20? Imagine advanced chips + advanced batteries
Because the extra efficiency is utilized by Apple to cut costs.
 
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it doesn't matter what they do to the ipad, until they put mac os on it, it's a toy

I am a product designer for a big tech company that’s the worldwide leader in its market, my job involves research, analysis, documentation, design, prototyping, pitching and presentations to stakeholders, facilitation of creative workshops and design thinking activities. Since 2018 I don’t own a personal computer, only the computer my company gives us and an iPad Pro, and in 2021 I am able to do 80% of what I described with the iPad itself; the bigger limitation is not software, as a lot of people that don’t know what they are talking about and/or don’t even use an iPad for work or at all keep saying, but partially my choice of going for the smaller format for portability, and mostly the fact that my company gives me a MB Pro, peripherals and a 30” inches screen so I may very well use them. Now that iPads support external displays and touchpad, and Safari server desktop pages, I could very well do everything with my iPad if I wanted do, thanks to web based design/prototyping tools as Figma. And as I described above my job involves a lot of very different tasks.

What’s your job? What did you try to do and you weren’t able to that made you consider iPads ”toys”?
 
I am a product designer for a big tech company that’s the worldwide leader in its market, my job involves research, analysis, documentation, design, prototyping, pitching and presentations to stakeholders, facilitation of creative workshops and design thinking activities. Since 2018 I don’t own a personal computer, only the computer my company gives us and an iPad Pro, and in 2021 I am able to do 80% of what I described with the iPad itself; the bigger limitation is not software, as a lot of people that don’t know what they are talking about and/or don’t even use an iPad for work or at all keep saying, but partially my choice of going for the smaller format for portability, and mostly the fact that my company gives me a MB Pro, peripherals and a 30” inches screen so I may very well use them. Now that iPads support external displays and touchpad, and Safari server desktop pages, I could very well do everything with my iPad if I wanted do, thanks to web based design/prototyping tools as Figma. And as I described above my job involves a lot of very different tasks.

What’s your job? What did you try to do and you weren’t able to that made you consider iPads ”toys”?
👍
True external display support on iPadOS is gonna be the real game changer.
- And make the 11inch iPad the perfect tool for both portability and connected “office work”. IMO.
 
I disagree. Batteries are not "good enough". Look at electric vehicles.

Battery chemistries have certain important characteristics, such as capacity, price, mass, volume and durability. If you can improve even one of these significantly without sacrificing the others, it is disruptive.

Dozens of billions of monetary units are used to develop improved battery technologies. Fro example, all big car manufacturers are chasing after solid state batteries, because they know solid state batteries would transform the competitive landscape. If you could double the battery capacity, you would be on the list of richest people in the world, and if you could make it tenfold, you could hire Bill Gates to shine your shoes.

And everyone developing better batteries knows this. No one has been able to bring anything disruptive during the last three decades (since Li batteries) despite a lot of investment. There has been a lot of expensive and tedious evolution, but nothing revolutionary.

It is true that there is a lot of promising battery tech out there — such as inexpensive sodium batteries, aluminium batteries, etc. — but the main problem is that most of it never survives outside the lab. Most commonly the problem is in durability, but there are some promising technologies with difficult manufacturability (due to nanoscale structures, etc.)
I put “good enough” in quotations for a reason. In the realm of consumer electronics it’s apparently acceptable enough (and let’s not forget CHEAP enough) for the manufacturers to keep using it otherwise Apple or someone else with the capital to invest at that scale would have moved on by now. We as users all want better batteries but as far as phones go it doesn’t seem to be on the horizon.

Electric cars are a different thing entirely. Battery tech is EVERYTHING, and things like range anxiety and fast recharging of the massive battery banks needed to haul a heavy car hundreds of miles down a highway between charges are huge hurdles EV manufacturers have to clear to get the public on board. A ton of investment goes into that tech because it has to for the EV market to really take off and be sustainable.

The priorities of the EV makers and phone makers are not the same. A phone can still do a lot of things on a one day charge from a traditional battery. An EV with a crap battery sits in the driveway because the driver doesn’t have confidence in it to do what he or she needs it to do.

But hey if Tesla wants to spin off a device battery division and start making revolutionary phone batteries I’d love to see it happen.
 
I disagree. Batteries are not "good enough". Look at electric vehicles.

Battery chemistries have certain important characteristics, such as capacity, price, mass, volume and durability. If you can improve even one of these significantly without sacrificing the others, it is disruptive.

Dozens of billions of monetary units are used to develop improved battery technologies. Fro example, all big car manufacturers are chasing after solid state batteries, because they know solid state batteries would transform the competitive landscape. If you could double the battery capacity, you would be on the list of richest people in the world, and if you could make it tenfold, you could hire Bill Gates to shine your shoes.

And everyone developing better batteries knows this. No one has been able to bring anything disruptive during the last three decades (since Li batteries) despite a lot of investment. There has been a lot of expensive and tedious evolution, but nothing revolutionary.

It is true that there is a lot of promising battery tech out there — such as inexpensive sodium batteries, aluminium batteries, etc. — but the main problem is that most of it never survives outside the lab. Most commonly the problem is in durability, but there are some promising technologies with difficult manufacturability (due to nanoscale structures, etc.)

Excellent post. 👍
 
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A technical progress is inevitable. 😉 I am [pleasantly] surprised to hear Apple might be launching an OLED Air in early 2022? Are not Airs usually upgraded in the autumn/fall season?
 
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Good on Apple for pushing hard into cutting edge nodes, even though I - and probably the vast majority of users - will never come close to taxing the power these iDevices already have.
Absolutely. I do not want to see Apple get complacent with their processor technology, like Intel has done.

I want to continue to be able to get great, powerful Apple products in the future.
 
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Apple and Intel are testing their chip designs with TSMC's 3-nanometer production technology

I'm more curious about the Intel part of this article. Has Intel given up on trying to fix their fabrication process and are just going to get TSMC to do it? That would be huge if true.
 
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