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iPad Air 2 Up to 55% Faster Than iPhone 6, Up to 68% Faster Than iPad Air
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How many times do you find yourself I the grocery store with an iPad and no iPhone in your pocket?
While I agree that some features are useless, I have personally found that productivity features on the iPad are lacking, and I think multitasking would vastly improve it. I love my iPad Air for watching movies and playing games, but word processing is an absolute headache, even with a full sized keyboard. Being able to copy/paste or at least view two documents at the same time would improve productivity. To each his own, but I can't wait for multitasking to be added for the iPad lineup. Until then, I will be using my MBA for any of my work.
Matt
Most of the time the OS is sitting idle so going multi core doesn't do much there. Video hits dedicated silicon and we haven't had performance issues playing 1080p video since the iPad 3 ... So an extra core doesn't do much there either.
Games, definitely it wil help there. But there have been few compelling games out there that have screamed to me that they need extra cpu cores. Frankly, Apple needs to get its act together on the App Store and let developers exceed the 2GB limit. You give extra GPU and CPU power on the one hand, and then artificially restrict the size of the assets needed to even use that performance. crazy!
Nexus 9 is all about inflated useless specs, and iPad air 2 is all about performance.
Logic Pro X could probably run on iPad Air 2. And run well. It runs well on a MacBook with lesser GeekBench scores.
I'm guessing I'll notice the speed improvement over my iPad 2.
Roll on tomorrow.
Roll on tomorrow.
Would love to know why this isn't in the iPhones.....?
At least 2 GB of RAM is likely for next year.
At least 2 GB of RAM is likely for next year.
I type in landscape almost 100% of the time, unless it is unsupported in whatever app I'm using. And I use copy and paste every single day.
I'm not sure I know what you mean. Are you talking about UI-level multitasking (split-screen)? Or background tasks that people would like to run in the background but cannot because of the intermittent CPU (and radio) access?
There are other possibilities (heat management, for example), but when it comes down to it there is this thing called "battery life" that is a direct tradeoff when you add more and higher-clocked cores, and more RAM chips. And Apple is fanatical about battery life--as, provably, are many users of its products.
If Apple had released an iPhone 6 with an A8X in it instead of the A8 version we got, and had sacrificed, say, 6 hours of standby and 2 hours of actual use, there would be just as many people whining on these forums about its poor battery life and saying that they'd sacrifice performance for better battery life.
And in the actual, real world, a very substantial proportion of those tens of millions of iPhone buyers have absolutely no idea what chip is in the thing, how fast it is in absolute or relative terms, and wouldn't likely notice whether it's got 15% better single-core and 60% better multi-core performance while checking Facebook, reading their email, and playing Flappy Bird. They will, however, notice that it gets a couple of more hours of use--particularly two years from now when the battery is in worse shape.
Those are the people, on average, Apple is building the iPhone for. Not you. Not me. My wife, my brother, and my mom.
The iPad, on the other hand, presumably has a little more leeway in terms of performance on account of the much larger battery and larger proportion of its power being drawn by the screen anyway. Even then, I can guarantee that if I replaced my mom or my mother-in-law's current iPad Air with an Air 2, neither would ever notice the difference.
Actually what interests me is how hot it will get, being that much thinner and that much more powerful.
People expect the phone to check for their latest emails in the background.
I'm talking about looking up an actor in IMDB WHILE streaming a movie, for example.
Dat bottom line.
Apple is well aware people will still buy the new iPhone even if it has underpowered hardware. So why not take advantage of this and increase your profits as much as you can get away with?
I can't till next year when I tap my 10" tablet on cash registers!!
You hit the nail on the head. This hardware is incredible but iOS takes poor advantage of it in its current form. They need to re-evaluate its implementation in tablet form. As it is currently, it best serves mobile phones.
And now a trip back to reality.
The iPhone 6 is the fastest smart phone on the market. The A8X chip almost certainly is too hot / draws too much power for the iPhone 6 form factor (could have made it big and ugly, got me there). And the iPad 2 Air has a faster processor, faster graphics, faster LTE, faster WiFi, better camera, better screen, more RAM and Touch ID.
These are both great products. Now, on with the bizarro world that this forum is.
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Nowhere near. Closer to a Pentium 4 from a decade ago. ARM chips really are not that fast. They used to be on par with desktop CPUs, but they fell behind in the 1990's when Acorn stopped making desktops.
They are different chips to a P4 though, many DSPs to do different tasks. But do not go thinking they are in the same league as desktop or laptops of Apple's Intel machine, nowhere near.
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Surely you're not comparing current Geekbench 3 benchmarks to older Geekbench 2 numbers. Version 3 scores much lower on the same CPU.
In Geekbench 3 64-bit, the iPad Air 2 compares roughly to an 2011 Macbook Air (i7 version), and better than some 2010 Macbook Pro models.
That's right.... the iPad Air 2 has taken the iPad to Sandy-Bridge levels of performance. If you extrapolate that out a few years, Apple's A-series chips might do better than Intel... and suddenly it makes sense to put them in a laptop.