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When you buy an iPhone SE you know it is not the top of the line as the iPhone Pro Max exists. When the 2020 iPad Pro was sold it was the top of the line iPad, you could not buy a more powerful iPad and there was no indication an M–based anything was coming. Ironically, LiDAR was the defining feature of the 2020 iPad Pro and future features that rely on it will probably be limited to M1 only iPads.
The 2020 iPad Pro is no longer the. top of the line iPad.
 
For a lesser/entry level model to not get the fancy features is… somewhat more understandable. The problem is iPad Pro 2020, which was literally Apple’s flagship and expensive iPad before the M1 version. Sure, in reality it’s running a hardware from 2018, but Apple still released it as its top of the line iPad in 2020. I completely understand how users paying top dollar for the iPad Pro 2020 are upset.
It’s no longer top of the line. That’s what happens to all computing devices after the new uograded model comes out.
 
No, it's not. The A12x and A12z are fantastic chips, but Apple shipped them alongside crappy storage and a tiny amount of RAM, and it's those two things that are causing it to be a bad enough experience for them to just not release the feature.

The iMac Mini Apple Silicon dev kits that had A12z chips in them also came with 16GB RAM and desktop class storage, which people tend to forget.

Most of the M1 ipad have 8gb only. I don't think sad grade storage can be that different.
 
What a drama. People haven’t even used it but already can’t live without it. Maybe it’s as useless as the App Library.

Point is: your iPad is as great as it was the moment you bought it. I rather have Apple focussing on the issues in the current user experience. And there are plenty!
 
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Bit of a bummer for now, however I expect the next mini to be updated with the M1 too, as it has a separate market that doesn't conflict with the sales of other iPads.
I can see a product line where all the ipads have M1-2 chips except for the entry level.
I understand that some 2020 iPad Pro users might be a little disappointed, however with technogy it's always like thay...stay behind a few years and that's it, you miss features.
Even the cutting of features on Intel macs has been quite drastic, and we're only 2 OS into the apple silicon transition.
Wouldn'y be surprised if macOS 13 would be the last one to support Intel.
 
Im not surprised in the slightest. Look at the cube animation when switching users?

2010 MBP choppy
2019 MBA choppy
M1 MBA super fluid
 
Most of the M1 ipad have 8gb only. I don't think sad grade storage can be that different.
The iPad Pro 2018 had 4GB of RAM. And think that all you want, but everything I've seen points to the NAND storage in the 2018/2020 iPad Pros being unsuitable for swap file usage.
 
“The new iPad Pro with an eight-core A12X processor is faster than 92 percent of portable PCs sold today!”

That was in 2018. Just saying.. 🤔
 
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This guy is a clown. They've had the ability to do this for years now with lesser architecture so what he's really saying is that his team is so incompetent they can't figure out how to do something others did years ago

What do you mean? What lesser architecture?
 
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Remember for years apple had been shipping iPhones and iPads with a fraction of the ram that android devices had. Yet still having better performance and overall smoothness. do people not realise this was achieved with laser tight memory management (I.e. if your app runs out of memory that’s it, no extra lives here).

now People expect that they can just flip the switch or “optimize” this Stuff away like it didn’t exist!

no mac has ever had less than 8gb of memory for about 15 yrs or some thing silly. IOs was playing with 2gb/3gb pretty much since it was released.

you cant on one side guarantee multiple apps can run at the same time when you’ve for years been letting apps take huge amounts of ram as They know their generally the only thing running at one time. it would be very hit and miss how the system performed on systems with lower amounts of ram.

on top of that they are doing the memory swapping in the chip itself no the m1‘s. So they can mitigate for any memory overuse without apps pausing waiting for ram to be available. I.e. It’s just smoother and less janky.

ultimately apple don’t want to have janky versions of stuff out in the wild where people see it and say iPads are rubbish, look at how slow the things run. pc and android users seem to love seeing underperformance. I think it makes them feel good when they upgrade. They feel like they are getting a difference in power. It’s all psychologiCal I suppose.

I do understand people feel their expensive devices should be able to have the latest features. But as they always say, buy things for what they can do for you now. Not what you think they will do later.
 
Another software engineer here and here are a few reasons for not giving you Stage Manager on non M1 iPads:

1. RAM is quite low so more swapping needed, resulting in possible lag
2. Flash Memory is slower, resulting in possible lag
3. Graphics card is slower, resulting in possible lag
4. Because of the above limitations the CPU needs to do more work, resulting in higher battery use

So probably Stage Manager might work on some of the faster non-M1 iPads but it is likely to cause lag and result in faster battery draining. Both bad user experiences!
And can you already here the screaming saying Apple gave us **** with Stage Manager!! So yes, I totally understand what Apple is doing here. Giving a good UX experience to those who have the iPads for it, while not having to deal with the fallout from a less than ideal UX for the rest.
Awesome to see a CS in here! I am an RF-EE (in the dark side of marketing now lol) and I’m sure you have had a lot of Program managers down your throat about getting a piece of Code out or a new hot fixes like yesterday.

Timelines and pressure to fulfill any kind of AGILE style gates is really killing our industry and causing this friction between advances in hardware and ability to code for the latest hardware. We need remember that user bases tend to migrate quickly on software and slower to hardware.

I totally get it, I think it goes to show that the Berkeley and by Extension the UC system (UCSD Grad 21’) way of producing CS/EE cross pollination and saying look software should help inform hardware and vice versa is alive and well at Apple. What we did lose in that cross pollination is the ingenuity (maybe even a WOZ factor) to make software run efficiently and portable across the broad base of processor technology/platforms things like open standards try to fix this but can’t be on bleeding age (ratification by IEEE or other CS certs take a while).

Because Apple makes both hardware and software they are in the unique ability to say whatever they want and nobody can really tell them other wise because nobody does what they do. That’s why I buy their products.

But what really grinds my gears is when we literally have evidence of stage manager working on a core M3 equipped MacBook but the A12Z which was literally trotted out next to an I7 on stage has more raw Performance Per Watt can’t do it is kinda eye-watering. Not to mention my A12Z machine can run full screen applications on external display can multitask while doing this with split screen yet I can’t have an extended display support on Home Screen is beyond me.

So weather we call a business decision, lazy coding, planned obsolescence or whatever else we’ve cooked up to explain this. Is that the fact Apple has decided to start dropping feature support on a device that was on sale less then 18 months ago, I think that’s excessive. Now we are told it was tested but was not “satisfactory” performance why should they get to set a bar that nobody outside Apple can see.

As engineers we know the risk of running chips hot, sending too much transmission power over radio waves to increase signal performance (but at a cost to amplifiers). We should at least get to choose if we wanna run this at reduced functionality or performance hit or battery life consumption these are our products we bought.

I’ve tried to explain before that there is a balancing act between business and engineers, as someone who’s seen both this looked like more of a business decision or at least a overzealous shepherding act by Apple then a hardware one. I’m glad they’re being forced to clarify and hopefully they see this as a fragmentation of OS functionality within 18 months.

I hope you all have fun chewing on this, I’m sure I will be hearing it now being called “cheap” or “why would you invest in a product’s hopeful functionality.” I might pick up the M2 variant Pro but I also know that this is wasteful, not necessary and is spurred on by Apple quest for record profits all so I can have one app running in my iPad window and another on a secondary display.
 
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Remember for years apple had been shipping iPhones and iPads with a fraction of the ram that android devices had. Yet still having better performance and overall smoothness. do people not realise this was achieved with laser tight memory management (I.e. if your app runs out of memory that’s it, no extra lives here).

now People expect that they can just flip the switch or “optimize” this Stuff away like it didn’t exist!

no mac has ever had less than 8gb of memory for about 15 yrs or some thing silly. IOs was playing with 2gb/3gb pretty much since it was released.

you cant on one side guarantee multiple apps can run at the same time when you’ve for years been letting apps take huge amounts of ram as They know their generally the only thing running at one time. it would be very hit and miss how the system performed on systems with lower amounts of ram.

on top of that they are doing the memory swapping in the chip itself no the m1‘s. So they can mitigate for any memory overuse without apps pausing waiting for ram to be available. I.e. It’s just smoother and less janky.

ultimately apple don’t want to have janky versions of stuff out in the wild where people see it and say iPads are rubbish, look at how slow the things run. pc and android users seem to love seeing underperformance. I think it makes them feel good when they upgrade. They feel like they are getting a difference in power. It’s all psychologiCal I suppose.

I do understand people feel their expensive devices should be able to have the latest features. But as they always say, buy things for what they can do for you now. Not what you think they will do later.
15 years ? check history first maybe 2017 above yes . me 2014 mac mini 4 gb
 
Looking at the difference between the current iPad Pro and the current iPad Air, it's not 16 GB of RAM that is required and not the Thunderbolt port either. The iPad Air has neither. It must be the M1 chip that is needed. It may be the graphics engine that makes it easier to get the wanted results without too much optimization, or without heating the machines.
 
It makes sense if you think of the developers. For many years the developer community has been promised a minimum set of resources when writing an application for the iPad (which to be fair was never originally a multi tasking device). When the iPad Air 2 came out (I think) they added split screen, which even to this day only a subset of applications support.
As soon as you have 2 applications running you have to half the maximum resource allocation that you’ve promised developers… which you can understand would be an issue for applications that have been designed to utilise the full memory/processor/screen allocation. I guess that’s why not all applications support split screen…
Stage Manager steps that up a notch… I don’t know for sure, but my assumption is that it’s no longer optional… this means that developers will have to live with only having a fraction (half or less) of the resource pool… which requires work from Apples end in order to support. You either have to take resource away from the applications that are already using it… which can be really tricky to do, or you have to timeslice that resource so that everyone can use all of it some of the time, this however requires the use of swap file to store a copy of the memory that belongs to the app(s) not currently having their turn in the spotlight (as such).
It’s a difficult problem to solve, and one that has been an issue on all hardware ever since multi tasking was dreamt up… the difference with your 1ghz pc from 20+ years ago, is that the developers knew that they had to deal with those issues when they wrote their applications… and it’s that problem that Apple are addressing now. The M1 and it’s successors have the hardware capability to support (consistently) the resource allocation issues, the introduction of a swap memory, storage speed and processor make it possible using the previous architecture as a baseline.
 
But what really grinds my gears is when we literally have evidence of stage manager working on a core M3 equipped MacBook but the A12Z which was literally trotted out next to an I7 on stage has more raw Performance Per Watt can’t do it is kinda eye-watering. Not to mention my A12Z machine can run full screen applications on external display can multitask while doing this with split screen yet I can’t have an extended display support on Home Screen is beyond me.
The A12Z is a great chip, but the storage and RAM in the A12Z iPad Pros is not so great.
 
Because some of us have been using computers for 30 years. It has been many, many years that we have been running several programs concurrently. We started doing so with computers that had single-core processors that were less than 1GHz, and with less than 500 MB of RAM.

So don’t try and tell us that several mobile apps can’t run concurrently on a device with less than an 8-core M1 with 6 GB of RAM - it’s just not reasonable.
Yep I give up on the iPad long ago being pro device. I just buy the cheaper $320 base iPad and by a desktop PC running windows. And split view and slide over is good enough as I have no need to run more than two apps at one time.

I”m not going to spend $1,000 or more on a iPad that can’t do basic windowing that windows 95 could do and run way more than 8 apps at one time. Not to say windows 95 has way better file manager than iPadOS.
 
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Yep I give up on the iPad long ago being pro device. I just buy the cheaper $320 base iPad and by a desktop PC running windows. And split view and slide over is good enough as I have no need to run more than two apps at one time.

I”m not going to spend $1,000 or more on a iPad that can’t do basic windowing that windows 95 could do and run way more than 8 apps at one time. Not to say windows 95 has way better file manager than iPadOS.
PocketPC and Symbian had a better file manager than iPadOS 🤣
 
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Are you sure? If yes, please provide us with the specs of the flash memory inside these 6Gb iPads!
Off my A12Z 2020 256GB iPad Pro
 

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