You do realize it already well exceeds the resolution of the iPhone 6+... Unless you hold the iPad a foot from your face at all times, there's no reason to trade performance for pixels. 1080p video is already scaled up and won't magically get better scaled even more.
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New Images of iPad Air 2 Parts Show Touch ID Home Button Cable, Logic Board With A8X Chip, and More
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You do realize it already well exceeds the resolution of the iPhone 6+... Unless you hold the iPad a foot from your face at all times, there's no reason to trade performance for pixels. 1080p video is already scaled up and won't magically get better scaled even more.
You are probably right, the ipad needs more ram, but I don't understand how come people won't use an alternative browser ? There are browsers capable of holding even 20 tabs open without reloading.
You will probably lose some features with those, like animations, but if you need to research stuff and open tons of tabs, there are alternatives.
You will probably lose some features with those, like animations, but if you need to research stuff and open tons of tabs, there are alternatives.
iPad Air 2..."same as it ever was".....'Talking Heads'.
What I want is a new Mac Mini optimized to make Yosemite fly.
I would prefer to Yosemite optimized to make my mac mini fly
ipad is 7.5mm
at one point I was hoping for this, but I am afraid split screen multitasking may not quite be ready yet.
I hope not
not always...
I am a 2D game and 3D game developer, I haven't used metal yet, but my colleagues are not fans of using metal.
sell it now!
One of my long running Apple grumbles they STILL dam well refuse to change due to bloody mindedness.
They allow you to use a different browser.
And I think they have finally allowed 3rd part browsers to use the 'Engine' that Apple were keeping secret so that other browsers can finally perform as well.
But they still refuse to allow you to set the default browser, so that whenever someone sends you a link in an email or on a chat program, it will fire up Safari and not the browser you want to use.
How is it acceptable to only cache 4 tabs? That's a problem with Safari, not a feature to brag about.
BTW, just looked at firefox on the desktop right now 1G of ram and 30 tabs opened, at least half in pretty intense Web page. That includes all type of memory, even the one swapped to disk. That'S about 20 mb per pages, if we exclude the space taken by the Firefox and all its extensions.
As for javascript whatever taking memory, are you joking, I did the same thing 90% of those pages do in 1998 on computers wit 32MB of memory. Yes, even extending pages dynamically on the fly. People seemingly have no clue at all. I can understand images taking memory, but even there, most web pages are not that image heavy. We're not talking flickr or Instagram pages here!
Pages that induce reloads must be very badly coded indeed. One thing I hate are forums that keep expanding at the bottom instead of paging. These, and there are many of them, are memory hogs. But, even there, It shouln'T take more than 50mb if properly coded.
As for javascript whatever taking memory, are you joking, I did the same thing 90% of those pages do in 1998 on computers wit 32MB of memory. Yes, even extending pages dynamically on the fly. People seemingly have no clue at all. I can understand images taking memory, but even there, most web pages are not that image heavy. We're not talking flickr or Instagram pages here!
Pages that induce reloads must be very badly coded indeed. One thing I hate are forums that keep expanding at the bottom instead of paging. These, and there are many of them, are memory hogs. But, even there, It shouln'T take more than 50mb if properly coded.
Maybe you actually have to struggle to notice it. Many people can notice the difference readily, which is partly why the 6+ is selling better than expected. People see that gorgeous display and want it.
You're not alone here, even Dr. Raymond M. Soneira who runs DisplayMate has flipped on this issue. He called ultra high pixel density displays "overkill" in his iPad 2 review, then once he had a chance to actually use them, he raved about their utility in later reviews: beginning in an Android phone shootout, and then in virtually every review after it, including his 2014 display tech roundup:
He goes on about a few other cases where a higher pixel density may be of some benefit. I'm not convinced that's true for densities beyond human acuity, but computer tech has a way of proving us wrong. In any event, 326 ppi isn't enough, we need 400+ ppi. Apple were smart to wait to implement ultra-high pixel density until SoC tech caught up with the processing needs. It was also a good move to keep it around 400 ppi, as going much higher with current LCD tech results in extreme efficiency losses. If Air 2 rumors prove true, then Apple will succeed in delivering way higher pixel density while staying light, going thinner, and maintaining battery life.
Brings the focus on efficiency for the A8 into a new light, doesn't it?
I do agree that pixel density is a more subtle difference than something like color gamut or laminating the display to the cover glass. But every part helps to create a stunning display.
From the front page article:
Looks like it is indeed a mic. I would have preferred a physical switch, but I guess control center is easy enough to access.
If this new iPad Air 2 is really so thin that the switch had to go, then it looks to be amazingly light. My main problem with tablets is holding them (due to CTS), so I'd been holding out for the lighter Mini, but if the Air is nearly as light, I'll be buying one for sure. Reading articles on an uber-light ultra-dpi Air 2 is going to be sweet!
You decide which package of features to apply your dollars to, Apple decides what package to develop based on how many dollars you're willing to give. There's really no way for you to decide how your dollars are spent any more granularly.
I think you're making my point better than I did. Optimizing for the n% of the 10% of users who both use multiple tabs and care about reloading means burdening the 90+% with either a higher price phone or fewer features that they actually care about.
I doubt it's an endurance problem, and more likely a capacity issue-- you're saying you need 8GB to cache your web pages, and the minimum config iPhone is 16GB. I've got a 64GB and I'm constantly playing games at sync to fit within it.
So they'd either have to set aside appreciable storage to cache a webpage you can reload anyway, or not set it aside and most of us would still be reloading.
Plus, Flash is slow and power hungry to erase-- filling it up with cache data would make everything less responsive as you swap out to bulk storage.
Either way, the argument that Apple is making decisions to "pad their margins" is kinda silly. That's not how things work. Companies design products to maximize profits. Profits are units*(price-cost). Higher price means higher margins but less units. Lower cost means higher margins but fewer features in a competitive market and therefore less units.
What happens is Apple sets a target margin to recoup R&D and provide sufficient return to investors. Then they figure out everything else from there. That's the way most large companies work.
It's hard to argue they're using the wrong formula when they are one of the most highly valued brands on the planet... You can say they've begun to stumble, but you won't know the truth until years out.
Good points. I do have one quibble though - if it were a NAND capacity issue, then Apple could designate Safari cache size based on NAND capacity. What better way to upsell consumers to higher capacity models than offering improved Safari performance? Actually I'd prefer a user-adjustable cache size, but that's not Apple's style.
It's not due to battery life since NAND uses far less power than network access, either WiFi or cellular. Web browsing battery life would be far longer if every single background tab were cached to NAND.
So, probably either NAND capacity or NAND endurance has Apple sacrificing battery life to reload background tabs. Of course the higher the NAND capacity, the higher the NAND endurance, so it may well be that more NAND is the solution regardless of the exact problem
A little off-topic, but I think iPads would be more compelling if Apple wasn't so stingy with silicon. Set RAM to 4 GB; storage options at 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB. It would still be cheaper for Apple than the cost of RAM and NAND on the original iPad.
Whatever the cache size, it's going to eat into valuable storage space. Your 8GB number, while probably off the cuff, is 1/8th of my total storage, and I bought top of the line at the time. And since I don't have much of a problem with the current system, I'd rather keep the flash for music and games.Good points. I do have one quibble though - if it were a NAND capacity issue, then Apple could designate Safari cache size based on NAND capacity. What better way to upsell consumers to higher capacity models than offering improved Safari performance? Actually I'd prefer a user-adjustable cache size, but that's not Apple's style.
It's not due to battery life since NAND uses far less power than network access, either WiFi or cellular. Web browsing battery life would be far longer if every single background tab were cached to NAND.
So, probably either NAND capacity or NAND endurance has Apple sacrificing battery life to reload background tabs. Of course the higher the NAND capacity, the higher the NAND endurance, so it may well be that more NAND is the solution regardless of the exact problem
The power numbers are a little dated (I can't find a date on the paper, but it looks like it was presented in 2010), but the point is worth considering-- uncached has a power implication as well. I can't find data sheets on any of the part numbers I've seen tied to iPhone, so I can't do a sanity check.
I did find this though, which suggests that the reliability is 3k program erase cycles for the SK Hynix part in iPhone 6+:
http://hynix-china.com/mail/newsletter_2010_03/eng/sub03.html
That translates to about 5 cycles a day for a 2 year life-- which probably isn't enough for web caching. Wear leveling would give you another factor of 10 or so for the cache sizes you're discussing, but it's still pretty weak.
What really got me to reply back though is that I forgot to mention that squirreling away the text data to repopulate on reload sounds like a reasonable software solution to the problem that shouldn't require much in the way of storage. Unfortunately I don't know enough about web protocols to know how viable it is...
Thanks for posting this comment, it's the 1st every remark I've heard from a developer, or someone in contact with devs about Metal.
I am aware Apple if the KING of bullpoo when it comes to selling something as OMG Amazing.
So may I ask, why are you, or people you know now all rushing to use this METAL which Apple has said will give you all this amazing new speed?
What'd the problem with it?
Or is it just because you don't wish to use it, as it will limit the game ect from running on an earlier device that does not support Metal ?
98% of games on the Iphone 6 dont need it. The only games that really need it are the most expensive ones to devellop (they are not going to be developped ONLY for IOS), most of those that will come to IOS I believe will be ports of games that right now would have run too slow using the standard API.
Since Metal is pretty new, it could take a while to see a lot of games using it. More than a year after, few games even use the full capacity of A7 and A8 with the standard API.
Yeah the 3K P/E cycles is what has me thinking it's a NAND endurance problem. When dealing with tiny storage capacities there just isn't enough spare area for wear leveling and replacement of bad blocks.
I wonder why they (a) didn't do an A7X last year, and (b) why they're doing an A8X this year. I guess the A7 in the current iPad Air was still technically superior to the A6X in every way that mattered and different enough from the A7 in the iPhone 5s and second generation iPad mini so that they used a different version. Still seems like stupid marketing to me. Bodes very well for the prospect of more RAM in a more powerful iPad Air. Sorta stinks when it comes to feature parity for the iPad mini, which it seemed like they had established enough this past year.
The Mini screen is smaller, even they boosted its resolution. So, if they stick and A8 with boosted clock in it (like they did with a boosted A7) last year, you'd still get a fantastic performance on par with the new air with a higher specced screen. The Mini would have a tremendous battery life if they don't increase the screen resolution; unmatched really.
The mini's screen has the same number of pixels as the Air, even if it is physically smaller, which is all that matters from a processing standpoint.
I believe they're talking about an rMini 2 running an A8 vs. an Air 2 running a new, higher resolution like @3x running an A8X.
The additional speculation is why use an X variant when they didn't for the previous gen running the A7 - sort of suggesting the Air 2 might need more GPU processing power than just a slightly higher clocked A8 (supporting the idea of a higher res device).
You changed tabs 10 times in a 30 second video. Stay on one tab for a few minutes and then switch. It will reload.
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