The Apple iPad Review (2012)
by Vivek Gowri & Anand Lal Shimpi on March 28, 2012 3:14 PM ESTVivek's Impressions
Over the last two-plus years, I’ve had an interesting relationship with the the iPad. I never intended to buy the original iPad, but I ended up getting one simply because the "oooh shiny" factor was too much to resist. It was a little buggy, a little slow, and mostly useless. In a footnote that may or may not be related, I returned it 12 days later.
After my experience with the original iPad, I was keen on revisiting the experience a year later with the iPad 2. I appreciated the industrial design and performance boost, along with the thriving iPad-specific application ecosystem, though I noted that the XGA display wasn't aging well. I said I wanted to give it a shot at being a real productivity device, and bet that I wouldn't end up returning it. Thankfully, I'm not a betting man, because if I was, I would have lost my money. I used it a lot the month I got it, as well as the month leading up to my iOS 5 review, but other than that, it ended up sitting around my house until I sold it in December. It just didn't function properly in my usage model, nothing about a tablet fit into my workflow.
And it wasn't just the iPad; I had more than a dozen other tablets go through my hands over the last 12 months. iOS, Honeycomb, webOS (R.I.P.)...it didn’t really seem to matter, I just couldn’t get a tablet to feel like anything other than an accessory that made my computing setup that much less streamlined. I've heard Anand and Brian convey similar thoughts multiple times over the last couple of years. We're writers; as devices without keyboards, tablets work for us as laptop replacements roughly as well as wheel-less bicycles would do as car replacements.
Regardless of that minor concern, I ended up at an Apple Store on the launch day of the new iPad for the third year in a row (at 6AM, no less). And for the third year in a row, I ended up purchasing the latest and greatest in Apple slate computing. It's relatively rare to see Apple compromise form factor in favor of more screen, more GPU, and more battery, but Apple breaking from the tradition (philosophy?) of sacrificing anything and everything at the alter of thinness has resulted in a device that's actually very interesting.
I liked the iPad 2 hardware. It was a better tablet experience than the original, and the new iPad builds on that. Adding the Retina Display and LTE gives the form factor a breath of fresh air, but there’s another 16,000 words describing how and why. The main points: it’s new and it’s great to use, but the question is (also asked by Anand), will I be using this in six months? The answer for the original iPad was a resounding no; for the iPad 2, the answer was still no, but getting there. The new iPad? We’ll see.
The new iPad comes into my life at an interesting point—I got rid of my MacBook Pro because I felt like changing things up, and since then I’ve been bouncing from notebook to notebook (mostly review units) for the last eight weeks. With my mobile computing situation in flux until the next MacBook Pro launch, what better time to see if the iPad can really fit into my life?
To find out, I picked up a Logitech keyboard case for it, one that turns the iPad into something approximating the world's greatest netbook. Early returns are promising, I've gotten more written on the iPad in the last two days than I did in the entirety of the 9 months I owned the iPad 2. Shocking, that having a keyboard would make it easier to write, but in all seriousness, it allows me to be as productive on the iPad as I might be on a netbook. Probably more so, in fact. Also helping the case: dumping Google Docs Mobile (mostly terrible) for Evernote (less terrible). Multitouch gestures make switching between tasks less of a pain and the screen is finally crisp enough for the iPad to be a viable ebook reader. The new usability enhancements and the keyboard have significantly changed the usage model for me, now to the point where it has a daily role as a primary mobile computing device.
I don’t know how long it’ll last, but finally, the iPad is actually playing a meaningful part in my life.
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name99 - Friday, March 30, 2012 - link
Just to clarify, this is NOT some Apple proprietary thing. The Apple ports are following the USB charging spec. This is an optional part of the spec, but any other manufacturer is also welcome to follow it --- if they care about the user experience.darkcrayon - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
All recent Macs (last 2-3 years) can supply additional power via their USB ports which is enough to charge an iPad that's turned on (though probably not if it's working very hard doing something). Most non-Mac computer USB ports can only deliver the standard amount of USB power, which is why you're seeing this.Your Lenovo *should* still recharge the iPad if the iPad is locked and sleeping, though it will do so very slowly.
dagamer34 - Friday, March 30, 2012 - link
I did the calculations and it would take about 21 hours to recharge an iPad 3 on a normal non-fast charging USB port from dead to 100%. Keep in mind, we're talking about a battery that's larger in capacity than the 11" MacBook Air.snoozemode - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
http://www.qualcomm.com/media/documents/files/snap...Aenean144 - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
Anandtech: "iPhoto is a very tangible example of where Apple could have benefitted from having four CPU cores on A5X"Is iPhoto really a kind of app that can actually take advantage of 2 cores? If there are batch image processing type functionality, certainly, though I don't know if iPhoto for iOS has this type of functionality. The slowness could just be from a 1.0 product and further tuning and refinement will fix it.
I'm typically highly skeptical of the generic "if the app is multithreaded, it can make use of all of the cores" line of thought. Basically all of the threads, save one, are typically just waiting on user input.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
It very well could be that iOS iPhoto isn't well written, but in using the editing tools I can typically use 60 - 95% of the A5X's two hardware threads. Two more cores, at the bare minimum, would improve UI responsiveness as it gives the scheduler another, lightly scheduled core to target.Alternatively, a 50% increase in operating frequency and an improvement in IPC could result in the same net benefit.
Take care,
Anand
shompa - Friday, March 30, 2012 - link
*hint* Use top on a iOS/Android device and you will see 30-60 processes at all time. The single threaded, single program thinking is Windows specific and have been solved on Unix since late 1960. Todays Windows phones are all single threaded because windows kernel is not good at Multit hreding.With many processes running, it will always be beneficial to have additional cores. Apple have also solved it in OSX by adding Grand central dispatch in their development tools making multithreaded programs easy.
Iphoto for Ipad: Editing 3 million pixel will demand huge amount of CPU/GPU time + memory. Apple have so far been able to program elegant solutions around the limits of ARM CPUs by using NOVA SIMD extensions and GPU acceleration. An educated guess is that Iphoto is not fully optimized and will be at later time.
(the integrated approach gives Apple a huge advantage over Android since Apple can accelerate stuff with SIMDs. Google does not control the hardware and can therefore not optimize its code. That is one of the reasons why single core A4 was almost as fast as dual core Tegras. I was surpassed when Google managed to implement their own acceleration in Andriod 4.X. Instead of SIMD, Google uses GL, since all devices have graphics cards. This is the best feuture in Android 4.x.)
name99 - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
[/quote]Apple’s design lifespan directly correlates to the maturity of the product line as well as the competitiveness of the market the product is in.
[/quote]
I think this is completely the wrong way to look at it. Look across the entire Apple product line.
I'd say a better analysis of chassis is that when a product first comes out, Apple can't be sure how it will be used and perceived, so there is some experimentation with different designs. But as time goes by, the design becomes more and more perfected (yes yes, if you hate Apple we know your feelings about the use of this word) and so there's no need to change until something substantial drives a large change.
Look, for example, at the evolution of iMac from the Luxo Jr version to the white all-in-on-flatscreen, to the current aluminum-edged flatscreen which is largely unchanged for what, five or six years now. Likewise for the MacBook Pro.
Look at the MacBook Air. The first two revs showed the same experimentation, trying different curves and angles, but Apple (and I'd say customers) seems to feel that the current wedge shape is optimal --- a definite improvement on the previous MBA models, and without anything that obviously needs to be improved. (Perhaps the sharp edges could be rounded a little, and if someone could work out the mechanicals, perhaps the screen could tilt further back.)
And people accept and are comfortable with this --- in spite of "people buy Apple as a fashion statement idiocy". No-one will be at all upset if the Ivy League iMacs and MBAs and Mac Minis look like their predecessors (apart from minor changes like USB3 ports) --- in fact people expect it.
So for iPhone and iPad. Might Apple keep using the same iPhone4 chassis for the next two years, with only minor changes? Why not? There's no obvious improvement it needs.
(Except, maybe, a magnet on the side like iPad has, so you could slip a book-like case on it that covered the screen, and switched it on by opening the book.)
Likewise for iPad.
New must have features in phones/tablets (NFC? near-field charging? waterproof? built-in projector like Samsung Beam?) might change things. But absent those, really, the issue is not "Apple uses two year design cycles", it is "Apple perfects the design, then sticks with it".
mr_ripley - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
"In situations where a game is available in both the iOS app store as well as NVIDIA's Tegra Zone, NVIDIA generally delivers a comparable gaming experience to what you get on the iPad... The iPad's GPU performance advantage just isn't evident in those cases..."Would you expect it to be if all the games you compare have not been optimized for the new ipad yet? They run at great frame rates but suffer in visuals or are only available at ipad 2 resolutions. The tegra zone games are clearly optimized for Tegra while their iOS counterparts are not optimized for the A5x, so of course the GPU advantage is not evident.
This comparison does not seem fair unless there is a valid reason to believe that the tegra zone games cannot be further enhanced/optimized to take advantage of the new ipad hardware.
I suspect that the tegra zone games optimized for A5x will offer a tangibly superior performance and experience. And the fact that the real world performance suffers today does not mean we will not see it shortly.
Steelbom - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
Exactly this.