The Apple iPad Review (2012)
by Vivek Gowri & Anand Lal Shimpi on March 28, 2012 3:14 PM ESTThe Display: In Numbers
Apple is very big on maintaining a consistent experience between its products. We see this a lot in our Mac reviews where it's not unusual to see similar white points across virtually all Apple products. It's no surprise that the with the move to the Retina Display Apple wanted to retain as much of the original iPad's display characteristics as possible. We'll start with an analysis of brightness and contrast, both of which remain relatively unchanged from the iPad 2:
Apple is expected to have triple sourced panels for the new iPad, so you can expect to see variation in these results but for the most part you can expect the new iPad's display to perform similarly to the previous model.
Despite similar brightness and contrast to the previous model, the new iPad offers remarkably better color gamut and color reproduction than its predecessor. Relative to other tablets, the iPad's display is spectacular.
As we mentioned in our Retina Display analysis, Apple delivered on its claims of a 44% increase in color gamut. The new iPad offers nearly full coverage of the sRGB color space and over 60% of the Adobe RGB gamut:
Below is the CIE diagram for the new panel with an sRGB reference plotted on the same chart so you can visualize the data another way:
Color accuracy has improved tremendously if we look at delta E values for the primary and secondary colors:
Remember from our display reviews, lower delta E values indicate greater color accuracy. Values below 4 are typically considered good and you can see that the iPad 2 as well as the Transformer Prime both fell short in this department. With the new iPad Apple has clearly focused on color accuracy, which makes sense given it was used as the vehicle to introduce iPhoto for iOS.
Apple still has a lot of work ahead of itself to really put forth a professional quality display in a tablet, but for now the Retina Display is easily the best we've seen in a tablet and a tremendous step forward.
What's most absurd about the iPad's Retina Display is that you're able to get this resolution and panel quality in a $499 device. While we must be careful not to give Apple too much credit here as Samsung, Sharp and its other display partners clearly make the Retina Display, it's obvious that Apple has really been pushing its partners to develop solutions like this.
The biggest problem in the production of any commoditized component is the primary motivation for innovation is to lower cost. For years I argued with notebook PC makers to use higher quality LCD panels but no one was willing to commit to the quantities that would lower costs enough. I was also told that as soon as you put these notebooks on shelves at Best Buy, users wouldn't really care whether they were getting a high quality IPS display or not—all that mattered was the final price.
Apple, under the leadership of Steve Jobs, had a different mentality. Steve's pursuit was quality and experience, cost was a secondary concern. Through slow and steady iteration of this approach, Apple was able to build up a large enough customer base and revenue to be a significant force in the industry when it came to driving costs down. Apple can easily fill your fabs and eat all that you can produce, but you'll have to do whatever it wants to get the order.
Apple's behavior since it got rich has been to drive down the cost of higher quality components, LCDs being a perfect example. Unfortunately other companies don't benefit as much here as Apple tends to buy up all of the production of what it has pushed to create. That's one reason why, although ASUS was first to introduce a 1080p Transformer Pad, it won't launch until well after the new iPad. From what I've heard, the panel makers are all busy servicing Apple's needs—everyone else comes second.
Eventually the entire industry will benefit and all indications point to Apple doing something special for "pro" users in the notebook space next. As I've said previously, Apple has raised the bar with the iPad's Retina Display. The time for average display quality in a $500 tablet is over, the bar has been raised. It remains to be seen whether or not Apple will be able to maintain this quality across all suppliers of its Retina Display. On the iPhone Apple has been entirely too lax about maintaining consistency between suppliers. If it wants to be taken seriously in this space Apple needs to ensure a consistent experience across all of its component vendors.
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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.