So, transparency kills the performance on the iPad air. Bringing down spotlight or using any heavy transparency effects with the keyboard chop the frame rates right down. What fixes this and dramatically increases the fluidity is turning transparency off. Couldn't Apple have just kept the same transparency effects as present on iOS 7? It ran so smoothly. It almost seems as if they've purposely gimped the software.
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Transparency on iOS 8 kills iPad air performance
- Thread starter Afluffykitten
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Yep, really disappointing. There's no way this thing should be lagging, especially considering it's been out for only a year and certainly has a powerful enough processor to handle the effects. I don't understand why these effects are so demanding.
This sucks, I hate the air 2's form factor, the speaker vibrations alone are a deal breaker for me. I would love an air with an a8x and 2 gigs without all the bs that comes with an overly slende body. It's like theyre forcing me not to upgrade.
Transparency
I, too, made the mistake of updating to iOS 8.1 even though I knew that the lag was an issue. I guess I thought I could figure out what settings would make it be smooth again.
I turned off transparency, and got used to the keyboard not showing me the depression of my keys. Sure it's not the solution we all hoped for, and I'm still disappointed by the crappy performance that ios 8.1 brought to the original air, but I figured I'd rather have a perfectly smooth ipad than a laggy one with transparency effects, a keyboard that shows my strokes, and a transparent dock. You get used to it, even though it's not right. Disappointing, but at the end of the day, it's not worth the net cost of about $150-200 of selling your iPad and buying an air 2.
Maybe some jailbreak tweaks will fix this?
I, too, made the mistake of updating to iOS 8.1 even though I knew that the lag was an issue. I guess I thought I could figure out what settings would make it be smooth again.
I turned off transparency, and got used to the keyboard not showing me the depression of my keys. Sure it's not the solution we all hoped for, and I'm still disappointed by the crappy performance that ios 8.1 brought to the original air, but I figured I'd rather have a perfectly smooth ipad than a laggy one with transparency effects, a keyboard that shows my strokes, and a transparent dock. You get used to it, even though it's not right. Disappointing, but at the end of the day, it's not worth the net cost of about $150-200 of selling your iPad and buying an air 2.
Maybe some jailbreak tweaks will fix this?
General movement through the UI is fine but things with transparency are slow, i.e. Spotlight, rotating when the keyboard is up, etc.
The transparency is exactly the same, iOS 8 is just harder on devices because of all of the changes Apple made, it needs to be optimized, maybe it will be fixed in 8.2.
I'm getting dropped frames during scrolling, which is incredibly irritating as that's one of my number one gripes with Android. I'm definitely not happy with 8.1 on the Air 1.
I think it's just **** ios 8. Pulling down for quick reply on my iPhone 6 is like pulling down Notification Center on my iPhone 4. It drops frames horribly. It's really quite sad
My iPod touch is a nightmare but the iPad works like a charm. There's glitches but performance wise none of these things happen.
It has to be poor coding because iOS 7.1.2 has plenty of UI transparencies and it ran far smoother than this on iPad Air.
Ive disabled transparencies on my Air for now.
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With transparency disabled the keyboard shows that I'm pressing the keys on Spotlight but not in Safari. Weird eh? Another design inconsistency.
Ive disabled transparencies on my Air for now.
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With transparency disabled the keyboard shows that I'm pressing the keys on Spotlight but not in Safari. Weird eh? Another design inconsistency.
Really you're still getting dropped frames in Android? I haven't seen any at all in 4.4 even on an old underpowered OG Nexus 7. What version/device are you using?
I'm using a 2013 N7 on 4.4.4, it's not anywhere near as bad as the first N7 I owned (the 2012 version), but I still get dropped frames in the Play Store and occasionally in Chrome.
Huh. Well here I am messing with mine and I can't get it to drop frames. Maybe you have something going on the the background? Maybe try killing off a bunch of your background processes and see if you can find the culprit(s).
I've got very little running on mine and it does the same upon restart, it has also performed like that the whole time I've owned it.
The frame rate is damn near flawless on iPad air 2. But I agree they need to just optimize better. iPad air was fine last year with iOS 7. Hopefully a software update comes soon that actually fixes issues instead of just adding all the promises that were supposed to ship with 8.0.
I remember when 7.1 came out and it made the original air really nice.
I remember when 7.1 came out and it made the original air really nice.
