The iPad Air Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 29, 2013 9:00 PM ESTUsability & iOS 7
The iPad Air remains one of the best consumer tablet experiences around. The OS and Apple’s first party applications are both extremely well suited to the tablet, and there’s a very healthy ecosystem of third party applications to fill in the gaps left by Apple.
Lately Apple has been doing wonders to limit those gaps. Both iLife and iWork suites are now free with the purchase of any new iOS 7 device, including the iPad Air. Previously each of the three iLife apps set you back $5 a piece ($15 total), while the iWork apps were priced at $10 a piece ($30 total). Apple has truly embraced its role as a devices and software company and is using the latter to help sell the former. On the one hand this is an admission that the market is growing more competitive, as tossing in free software is a great differentiator. On the other hand, freeing up iLife/iWork is a vote of confidence in Apple’s ability to continue to demand a premium for its hardware. Neither suite comes preinstalled on the iPad Air, but upon a visit to the App Store users are reminded that they can get all six of the apps for free if they should desire to. I suspect part of the reason that they’re not bundled by default is to avoid eating up space on the devices with less NAND by default.
The core iOS apps are quite approachable and easy to use. Applications like Safari and Mail make great use of the high resolution screen. Obviously the same can be said for things like Photos and iPhoto. The virtual keyboard experience is great on the large display (especially in landscape mode). Honestly, if there was a good Google Hangouts app (the Android version is much better in my experience) for iOS 7 I think I could be very comfortable and productive on the iPad Air.
I find that task switching is far better on the iPad than it is on the iPhone since multitasking gestures are supported. A four finger swipe left/right between applications or up/down to bring up the task switcher is so much quicker for me than a double tap of the physical home button. Similarly a five finger pinch to get back to the home screen from any application is significantly faster. The new iOS 7 multitasking UI feels so much more at home on the iPad’s large display as well.
My only complaint about task switching on the iPad Air is that UI frame rate will regularly drop below 30 fps during some of these transitions. The added GPU performance on the A7 doesn't seem to really impact things compared to the A6X, so I’m fairly convinced at this point that the solution to the problem will have to come in software. It’s quite reminiscent of the Retina MacBook Pro UI frame rate issues under Mountain Lion, although not nearly as bad (and I’m hoping it won’t take a year to get these ones resolved).
The release of iOS 7.0.3 addressed (at least partially) some of my concerns around the OS. As I already mentioned, stability on 64-bit platforms seems somewhat improved - at least compared to the initial release of iOS 7. The other big improvement in my mind is the ability to turn off/reduce the transition animations. The impact to usability on the iPhone 5s is huge, but it’s also pretty significant on the iPad Air. The animations themselves are pretty but I find that they get repetitive after continued use.
Memory Size & The Impact of 64-bit Applications
The iPad Air, like the iPhone 5s, ships with 1GB of LPDDR3 memory. Apple frowns upon dissection of review samples but I think it’s a safe bet that we’re not talking about a PoP (Package-on-Package) configuration but rather discrete, external DRAM here. It’s also probably a safe bet that even the iPad mini with Retina Display will ship with 1GB of memory as well.
Something I didn’t have time to address in my iPhone 5s review was the impact of 64-bit applications on memory usage. I actually ran some tests after the 5s review hit but never got the chance to share the data, so I figured now is as good a time as any to do just that.
Unlike traditional desktop OSes, iOS doesn’t support paging to disk (or in this case, NAND). Application data can either reside in memory or the associated process is terminated and has to be reloaded the next time you request it. It’s a decision likely made to both maintain user experience and limit the number of program/erase cycles on the internal NAND.
The good news is that iOS was architected to run on as little hardware as possible and as a result tends to be quite memory efficient. There are also power implications of going to larger memories. The combination of these two things has kept Apple on the conservative side of increasing memory capacity on many iDevices.
The move to a 64-bit platform however does complicate things a bit. Moving to a larger memory address space increases the size of pointers, which in turn can increase the footprint of 64-bit applications compared to their 32-bit counterparts. So although there’s clearly a performance uplift from app developers recompiling in 64-bit mode (more registers, access to new instructions), there’s also an associated memory footprint penalty. Since the iPad Air and iPhone 5s don’t feature a corresponding increase in memory capacity, I wondered if this might be a problem going forward.
To find out I monitored total platform memory usage in a couple of scenarios. Before measuring I always manually quit all open apps and performed a hard reset on the device. Note that the data below is reporting both clean and dirty memory, so it’s possible that some of the memory space could be recovered in the event that another process needed it. I hoped to minimize the impact by always working on a cleanly reset platform and only testing one app at a time.
I looked at memory usage under the following scenarios:
1) A clean boot with no additional apps open
2) Running Mobile Safari with 4 tabs open (two AnandTech.com tabs, two Apple.com tabs, all showing the same content)
3) Infinity Blade 3 (64-bit enabled) sitting at the very first scene once you start the game
4) iOS Maps in hybrid view with 3D mode enabled, with a WiFi assisted GPS lock on my physical location
5) Google Maps in the same view, under the same conditions. I threw in this one to have a 32-bit app reference point.
In general you’re looking at a 20 - 30% increase in memory footprint when dealing with an all 64-bit environment. At worst, the device’s total memory usage never exceeded 60% of what ships with the platform but these are admittedly fairly light use cases. With more apps open, including some doing work in the background, I do see relatively aggressive eviction of apps from memory. The most visible case is when Safari tabs have to be reloaded upon switching to them. Applications being evicted from memory don’t tend to be a huge problem since the A7 can reload them quickly.
The tricky part is you don’t really need all that much more memory. Unfortunately as with any dual-channel memory architecture, you’re fairly limited in how you can increase memory capacity and still get peak performance. Apple’s only move here would be to go to 2GB, which understandably comes with both power and financial costs. The former is a bigger concern for the iPhone 5s, but on the iPad Air I would’ve expected a transition sooner rather than later.
Although things seem to have improved with iOS 7.0.3, the 64-bit builds of the OS still seem to run into stability issues more frequently than their 32-bit counterparts. I still see low memory errors associated with any crashes. It could just be that the move to 64-bit applications (and associated memory pressure) is putting more stress on iOS’ memory management routines, which in turn exposes some weaknesses. The iPad Air crashed a couple of times on me (3 times total during the past week), but no where near as much as earlier devices running iOS 7.0.1.
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tipoo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Agreed, a sub-name only makes sense if a second product is coming out. 12" iPad Platform based system in a MBA form factor, mayhaps?User.Name - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
This device, like so many recent Apple product announcements, is both very exciting, and very disappointing at the same time.Dropping 1/3 of the weight from the iPad and making the device smaller while keeping the same display size is a huge improvement over the old hardware.
But there are so many things I have wanted Apple to address, that they have not.
1. The display is not bonded to the glass. My television from 2010 has this, so does my notebook, my phone, and Microsoft manage it with the Surface. This needs to change.
2. Even though moving to 64-bit requires more memory, they stuck with 1GB of RAM. I was already constantly running into a lack of RAM on my iPad 3.
3. It still starts at 16GB. 16GB on my iPad 2 was tight, and it got worse once apps started coming with retina assets. With no external expansion, 16GB seems awfully tight now.
4. There's no A7X. Yes, the A7 may be a fast chip, and there are less thermal restrictions inside the iPad than the iPhone, but the demands of the iPad are significantly higher. I suppose with them making the device a lot smaller, this is the compromise they thought best, but it's still disappointing.
I sold my iPad six weeks ago in preparation of the new tablet devices, fully intending on replacing it with a Surface Pro 2, but after seeing that they just stuck with the old display rather than improving its color accuracy (all they did was load an ICC profile) and the disappointing battery life, I decided against it.
Being without the iPad for six weeks though, has made me reconsider whether I want one. It was originally my fallback plan if the Surface didn't work out, but now I'm unsure that I want another. The main reason I was moving away from it to begin with was due to the software restrictions, and annoyances such as the screen reflections and lack of RAM, which have not been addressed at all with this update.
I'm having a very difficult time trying to find something which meets my requirements.
dugbug - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
"4. There's no A7X. Yes, the A7 may be a fast chip, and there are less thermal restrictions inside the iPad than the iPhone, but the demands of the iPad are significantly higher. I suppose with them making the device a lot smaller, this is the compromise they thought best, but it's still disappointing."Why? Why do you need an A7X and why is that disappointing?
User.Name - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
In some of the tests, it seems to be performing worse than the iPad 4.In many of the tests, performance is lower than that of the iPhone 5s - by as much as 50% in some tests.
I expect better performance from a large tablet device than I do from something which fits in my pocket.
It means that if a developer does a "simple" port from one device to the other, the iPad version is going to perform worse than the same thing running on an iPhone. I think that's very disappointing, and it's the reason the A5X and A6X existed.
errorr - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I don't think there are any apps out there that can stress the A7. I see it more that Apple chose ro put a throttled tablet SOC into a phone. It has way too much power for the 5s screen and will bottleneck elsewhere first.dugbug - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
The A7 has a lot of headroom, way overkill for the phone. seriously, this is such an edge concern.Kvaern - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I don't quite get the fuss about the 16gb baseline.I mean if it isn't enough for you then get a larger model but why would you want to force 32gb on people who needs no more than 16gb?
User.Name - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Apple seem to operate largely by keeping their prices fixed, and introducing better hardware at the same price point. 16GB is not a lot of storage now, considering what Apple is charging, and when there is no option to expand that.As I said in my previous post, I originally purchased a 16GB iPad 2, without knowing how restrictive that would be - you get less than 16GB usable space, and what you may not realize is that you also have to keep 1-2GB free to be able to update apps. (or at least you did at the time; iOS 7 may have changed this?)
Once apps started adding retina assets, many of them increased 2-3x in size, further reducing the number of apps you could keep on the device, even though the iPad 2 itself had no use for those assets.
I think the base spec being 16GB really hurts the user experience. I constantly found myself having to remove apps from the device, and couldn't really store any media on the device itself. (even podcasts had to be restricted)
I then went with a 64GB iPad 3 the next year, and now I would probably recommend that most people buy the 32GB model. I know too many people that bought a 16GB iPad, only to find themselves replacing the device the next year, not because they wanted a faster device, but because it didn't have enough storage for all the apps they wanted to run. (games and educational apps seem to be the worst offenders)
I'm sure there are some people whose usage is fine with 16GB, but when Apple are charging a premium price, I just don't think 16GB is enough.
It's a similar situation to the RAM in the device. 64-bit now requires more memory than previous generations of the iPad, but they stuck with 1GB of RAM, making the user experience worse than it was before.
akdj - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
"64-bit now requires more memory than previous generations of the iPad, but they stuck with 1GB of RAM, making the user experience worse than it was before."Hmmm....I read the whole article, didn't notice that mentioned at ALL! Seemingly, overall...Anand's experience with the 'Air' was significantly 'better' than ANY other tablet he's reviewed/used.
As far as NAND/Storage size....this is ubiquitous throughout the industry. Most OEMs are shipping 16GB models as their 'entry' level device. For folks not interested in downloading games or 'big' apps (My mom loves her iPad 2 16GB and has never run out of space)---that amount is just fine. No other tablets are shipping with 128GB currently, right? You've got choice. Use it. Use your head. Now that you know 16GB isn't enough for you....and 64 is too much, you've finally figured out you need 32GB. Good for you....as I'd also like to see Apple start off with a 32GB iOS device as the minimum, they're not aiming the 16GB model at power users...they offer 4 different sizes with your choice of WiFi or LTE. Same thing, gotta make that choice. I'd love every model to include LTE. It doesn't. You HAVE to make a choice that benefits YOU.
Everyone uses their tablets differently. With cloud storage (Dropbox, iCloud, Box, Google Drive, et al.), one has the option to store their information outside of the tablet and access it when necessary. Many folks don't game. You can now stream from iTunes Match...no need to d/l the entire movie first. That said...if you want more storage, BUY more storage! Apple is in parity with the rest of the entry level OEMs....16GB is pretty standard, other than some that are still releasing 8GB models (first Nex7?)....or models with only options of 16 or 32GB on board.
J
User.Name - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Yes, but other devices shipping with 16GB storage are significantly cheaper, and/or have expandable storage options. (plug in a 64GB SDXC Micro card)And to move from 64GB to 128GB (+64GB) costs $100 - the same as moving from 16GB to 32GB. (+16GB)
I'm quite sure they could offer a 32GB at the current price.
As for 1GB RAM affecting the user experience, I suppose it depends how you use the device.
I was constantly running out of RAM on my iPad 3, which also had 1GB - and that is effectively more than the Air has.