Analysis of the new Apple iPad
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 9, 2012 1:37 AM ESTA Much Larger Battery
Apple claimed no decrease in battery life for the new iPad compared to last year's model and only a 1 hour drop over LTE. The problem is that the combination of A5X SoC under GPU load, the LTE baseband and driving/lighting all of those pixels in the Retina Display has a significant impact on power consumption.
Apple addressed the issue by increasing the new iPad's battery capacity by 70%. If the leaked PCB photos are accurate (they look to be), Apple increased battery volume by shrinking the motherboard size and increasing the thickness of the tablet.
The new 42.5Wh battery is downright huge. To put the new iPad's battery in perspective, this is nearly the same battery capacity as the what was shipping in the 2008 13-inch MacBook Pro. This is also a bigger battery than what's used in the 2011 11-inch MacBook Air:
Over the next two years you can expect to see the line between ultraportable and tablet blur considerably. Looking at where the new iPad falls in the chart above really begins to exemplify just how blurry that line is going to become.
With the display off, the new iPad looks and feels a lot like the iPad 2. The additional thickness is hard to see, but the additional weight is definitely noticeable. The new iPad isn't as heavy as the original model, but it's clearly heavier than the iPad 2. I don't believe the added weight is a deal breaker, but it is a step backwards. Maintaining battery life however obviously trumps added weight.
The math is pretty simple. If Apple is claiming 10 hours of battery life with a 42.5Wh battery, the new iPad with the iPad 2's battery would likely be good for just under 6 hours. Such a drop would be unacceptable and thus the new iPad gets a bigger battery and incurs additional weight from the new battery and display components.
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c4v3man - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Why not spend another $5-10 on components and make a $600 32GB transformer the base model? That way you still maintain most of the profit margin you want to have, while also being competitive cost-wise. I can appreciate that you are using some components that may be considered better than the newiPad, but you are also using some that can be considered worse. Past experience shows that tablets priced higher than Apple fail in the marketplace since people can't accept a reality where Apple isn't the "premium offering".Lucian Armasu - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
By the way Anand. Is there any way to test the graphics performance on their native resolutions anymore? I think you should bring that back and show the fixed resolution vs native resolution tests side by side. Because I actually think the iPad 3 suffered a very significant performance drop due to the new resolution, just like the iPhone 4 was always the device at the bottom of the graphics test because of its retina display.So I'm aware that the chip itself should be faster when comparing everything at the same 720p resolution. But that doesn't really mean much for the regular user does it? What matters is real world performance, and that means it matters how fast the iPad is at its *own* resolution, not a theoretical lower resolution that has nothing to do with it.
WaltFrench - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Let's think this through a bit. Users don't run GLBench or that sort of stuff; they run games that a developer has tweaked for a platform. Subject to budget — I haven't had the pleasure myself, but hear tell that it requires good, solid engineering and lots of it — the developer puts out the best mix of resolution & speed that will please the customers the most. (Who would do otherwise?)Obviously, if you don't have the resolution, you go for fps. So it's conceivable that a 720p device could show better speed. But that'd only be true if the dev was pushing so hard on the iPad's 4X of pixels that he sacrificed play speed. If it came to that, he'd pull back on AA or other detail/texture quality efforts. Right? Wouldn't you?
So what I think it comes to is how hard a given game dev will work on a particular platform's capabilities. Here, fragmentation and total sales come to play, big time. Anand might be able to give you a theoretical tradeoff that a dev faces, but it might be quite the challenge to translate that into how well gamers would like a given device for stuff they can actually play.
medi01 - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
In other words, did Apple's marketing department forbid you doing native resolution benchmarks?doobydoo - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
Native resolution test is a flawed test.As I've explained to your other comments, performance has to take into account the resolution. IE, 100 fps at 10 x 10 is clearly worse than 60 fps at 2000 x 1000.
It's very telling that you make this suggestion now Apple has come out with the highest resolution device. Not something you requested previously when Android tablets had higher resolution.
The iPhone 4 was never bottom of any sensible benchmarks because of its retina display. The tests, as always, were done at the same resolution as they always should be. The iPhone 4 was low down in the benchmarks because it had a slow GPU.
rashomon_too - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
If displaysearchblog.com is correct (http://www.displaysearchblog.com/2012/03/ipad-3-cl... most of the extra power consumption is for the display. Because of the lower aperture ratio at the higher pixel density, more backlighting is needed, requiring perhaps twice as many LEDs.jacobdrj - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
I am no coder, but even with my gaming rig, I have a 27" 1900x1200 display (that I admittedly paid too much for), but I flanked it with 2 inexpensive 1080p displays, rotated vertically in portrait mode for eyefinity and web browsing.IHateMyJob2004 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Save your money.Buy a Playbook
tipoo - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Save your money. Buy a toaster.Wait no, I forgot the part where they do different things :P
KoolAidMan1 - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
Not to mention that toasters are actually useful