The Apple iPad Review (2012)
by Vivek Gowri & Anand Lal Shimpi on March 28, 2012 3:14 PM ESTWiFi & GPS
The WiFi stack gets an update with the new iPad courtesy of Broadcom's 65nm BCM4330, compared to the BCM4329 used in the previous two iPads. Both 2.4GHz and 5GHz operation are supported, although as I mentioned earlier the carrier-dependent personal hotspot is only available over 2.4GHz.
As with most smartphone/tablet designs the BCM4330 only supports a single spatial stream, for a maximum link speed of 72Mbps. Similar to the iPad 2, Apple hides the WiFi antenna behind the speaker grille at the bottom of the tablet. The cellular antennas (there are now two) are at the top of the tablet, behind the plastic RF window.
| WiFi Performance Comparison | ||||||
| Distance from AP | 3 feet | 20 feet (Different Room) | 50 feet (Different Room/Floor) | 100 feet (Different Room) | ||
| ASUS TF Prime (2.4GHz) | 26.9 Mbps | 9.85 Mbps | 13.5 Mbps | 2.20 Mbps | ||
| Apple iPad 2 (2.4GHz) | 35.1 Mbps | 29.9 Mbps | 26.9 Mbps | 10.6 Mbps | ||
| Apple iPad 3 (2.4GHz) | 35.1 Mbps | 29.9 Mbps | 27.9 Mbps | 9.98 Mbps | ||
| Apple iPad 2 (5GHz) | 36.7 Mbps | 36.7 Mbps | 36.7 Mbps | 11.9 Mbps | ||
| Apple iPad 3 (5GHz) | 36.7 Mbps | 36.7 Mbps | 36.7 Mbps | 11.7 Mbps | ||
With a similar WiFi stack and similar antenna placement, it's no surprise that I noticed very similar WiFi performance to the iPad 2.
The same goes for GPS performance between the new iPad and the iPad 2. Both devices were able to lock and track me driving around in a car with comparable accuracy from what I could tell.
Airplay Support with the new Apple TV
When paired with a second or third generation Apple TV, the iPad supports wireless display mirroring or content streaming to the iPad via AirPlay. In other words, if you have an Apple TV hooked up to your HDTV, you can use your HDTV as a large, mirrored, secondary display for your iPad—wirelessly. The only requirement is that you have a 2nd or 3rd generation Apple TV and that it's on the same network as your iPad. With those requirements met, enabling AirPlay mirroring is simple—just bring up the iOS task switcher, swipe left to right until you see the brightness/playback controls and tap the AirPlay icon.
Mirroring gives you exactly what you'd expect—a complete mirror of everything you see on the local iPad screen. All sounds are also sent over and come out via your TV's speakers—the local speaker remains silent.
The frame rate isn't as high on the remote display, but there's virtually no impact to the performance of the iPad itself. There's noticeable latency of course since the display output is transcoded as a video, sent over WiFi to the Apple TV, decoded and displayed on your TV via HDMI. I measured the AirPlay latency at ms, which is reasonable for browsing the web but too high for any real-time games. If you want to use the iPad to drive your HDTV for gaming you'll need to buy the optional HDMI output dongle.
While AirPlay mirroring on the iPad works at 720p, if you're playing a 1080p movie on the new iPad and you have a 3rd generation Apple TV, the video is also displayed in 1080p rather than downscaled to 720p.
Video playback is an interesting use case for AirPlay and the iPad. If you don't have mirroring enabled, you can actually start playing a movie on the iPad, have it stream to your TV via the Apple TV, and go about using your iPad as if nothing else was happening. Most apps will allow you to stream video in the background without interrupting, however some games (e.g. GTA 3, Infinity Blade 2) and some apps (e.g. iMovie) will insist on streaming their UI to your Apple TV instead.
Although iOS and the iPad don't do a great job of promoting multi-user experiences, using AirPlay to push video to a TV wirelessly is an exception. If you frequently load your iPad up with movies you can use it to keep others entertained while you either get work done or just goof around on your iPad at the same time. It's a great fit for families where people want to do two different things. If you do put a lot of movies on your iPhone/iPad, the 3rd generation Apple TV is probably a must buy for this reason alone.
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doobydoo - Saturday, March 31, 2012 - link
Lucian Armasu, you talk the most complete nonsense of anyone I've ever seen on here.The performance is not worse, by any stretch of the imagination, and lets remember that the iPad 2 runs rings around the Android competition graphically anyway. If you want to run the same game at the same resolution, which wont look worse, at all (it would look exactly the same) it will run at 2x the FPS or more (up-scaled). Alternatively, for games for which it is beneficial, you can quadruple the quality and still run the game at perfectly acceptable FPS, since the game will be specifically designed to run on that device. Attempting anything like that quality on any other tablet is not only impossible by virtue of their inferior screens, they don't have the necessary GPU either.
In other words, you EITHER have a massive improvement in quality, or a massive improvement in performance, over a device (iPad 2) which was still the fastest performing GPU tablet even a year after it came out. The game developers get to make this decision - so they just got 2 great new options on a clearly much more powerful device. To describe that as not worth an upgrade is quite frankly ludicrous, you have zero credibility from here on in.
thejoelhansen - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
Hey Anand,First of all - thank you so much for the quality reviews and benchmarks. You've helped me build a number of servers and gaming rigs. :)
Secondly, I'm not sure I know what you mean when you state that "Prioritizing GPU performance over a CPU upgrade is nothing new for Apple..." (Page 11).
The only time I can remember Apple doing so is when keeping the 13" Macbook/ MBPs on C2Ds w/ Nvidia until eventually relying on Intel's (still) anemic "HD" graphics... Is that what you're referring to?
I seem to remember Apple constantly ignoring the GPU in favor of CPU upgrades, other than that one scenario... Could be mistaken. ;)
And again - thanks for the great reviews! :)
AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
"Retina Display" is a stupid name. Retinas sense light, which the display doesn't do.xype - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
GeForce is a stupid name, as the video cards don’t have anything to do with influencing the gravitational acceleration of an object or anything close to that.Retina Display sounds fancy and is lightyears ahead of "QXGA IPS TFT Panel" when talking about it. :P
Sabresiberian - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
While I agree that "Retina Display" is a cool enough sounding name, and that's pretty much all you need for a product, unless it's totally misleading, it's not an original use of the phrase. The term has been used in various science fiction stories and tends to mean a display device that projects an image directly onto the retina.I always thought of "GeForce" as being an artist's licensed reference to the cards being a Force in Graphics, so the name had a certain logic behind it.
;)
seapeople - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - link
Wait, so "Retina Display" gets you in a tizzy but "GeForce" makes perfect sense to you? You must have interesting interactions in everyday life.ThreeDee912 - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
It's basically the same concept with Gorilla Glass or UltraSharp displays. It obviously doesn't mean that Corning makes glass out of gorillas, or that Dell will cut your eyes out and put them on display. It's just a marketing name.SR81 - Saturday, March 31, 2012 - link
Funny I always believed the "Ge" was short for geometry. Whatever the case you can blame the name on the fans who came up with it.tipoo - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
iPad is a stupid name. Pads collect blood from...Well, never mind. But since when are names always literal?doobydoo - Saturday, March 31, 2012 - link
What would you call a display which had been optimised for use by retinas?Retina display.
They aren't saying the display IS a retina, they are saying it is designed with retinas in mind.
The scientific point is very clear and as such I don't think the name is misleading at all. The point is the device has sufficient PPI at typical viewing distance that a person with typical eyesight wont be able to discern the individual pixels.
As it happens, strictly speaking, the retina itself is capable of discerning more pixels at typical viewing distance than the PPI of the new iPad, but the other elements of the human eye introduce loss in the quality of the image which is then ultimately sent on to the brain. While scientifically this is a distinction, to end consumers it is a distinction without a difference, so the name makes sense in my opinion.