The Apple iPad Pro Review
by Ryan Smith, Joshua Ho & Brandon Chester on January 22, 2016 8:10 AM ESTSoC Analysis: Apple A9X
Diving into the heart of the iPad Pro, we have Apple’s latest generation tablet SoC, A9X. Like the other Apple X series SoCs before it, A9X is by and large an enhanced and physically larger version of Apple’s latest phone SoC, taking advantage of the greater space and heat dissipation afforded by a tablet to produce a more powerful SoC.
Apple's A9X (Image Courtesy iFixit)
That Apple has developed a new SoC to launch alongside the iPad Pro is in no way surprising, but just as how the iPad Pro has ramifications for the overall iPad lineup as Apple gets into the productivity tablet market, iPad Pro’s genesis is reflected in its component selection. Apple already needed a powerful SoC for the iPad Air 2 in order to keep performance up with the tablet’s high resolution of the screen, and iPad Pro in turn pushes Apple’s performance needs even harder. Not only is there an even higher resolution screen to drive – the 2732x2048 display has about 66% of the pixels of a 4K display – but now Apple needs to deliver suitable performance for content creation and meaningful multitasking. I don’t want to imply that the A9X was somehow specifically designed from scratch for the iPad Pro, as there are a number of more important engineering considerations, but I do want to highlight how the iPad Pro is not just another iPad, and that as Apple expands the capabilities of the iPad they need to expand the performance as well if they wish to extend their reputation for smooth UX performance.
Looking at the specifications of the A9X, it seems like Apple always throws us a curveball on the X series SoCs, and for their latest SoC this is no different. With A8X Apple delivered more RAM on a wider memory bus, a larger GPU, and surprisingly, three Typhoon CPU cores. To date it’s still not clear just why Apple went with three CPU cores on A8X – was it for multitasking, or as an alternative means to boost performance – and A9X’s configuration only serves to highlight this enigma.
| Apple SoC Comparison | ||||||
| A9X | A9 | A8X | A6X | |||
| CPU | 2x Twister | 2x Twister | 3x Typhoon | 2x Swift | ||
| CPU Clockspeed | 2.26GHz | 1.85GHz | 1.5GHz | 1.3GHz | ||
| GPU | PVR 12 Cluster Series7XT | PVR 6 Cluster Series7 (PVR GT7600) |
PVR 8 Cluster Series6XT (APL GXA6850) |
PVR SGX554 MP4 | ||
| RAM | 4GB LPDDR4 | 2GB LPDDR4 | 2GB LPDDR3 | 1GB LPDDR2 | ||
| Memory Bus Width | 128-bit | 64-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | ||
| Memory Bandwidth | 51.2GB/sec | 25.6GB/sec | 25.6GB/sec | 17.1GB/sec | ||
| L2 Cache | 3MB | 3MB | 2MB | 1MB | ||
| L3 Cache | None | 4MB | 4MB | N/A | ||
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 16nm FinFET | TSMC 16nm & Samsung 14nm |
TSMC 20nm | Samsung 32nm | ||
Instead of continuing with a triple-core CPU design for A9X, for their latest X series SoC Apple has dropped back down to just a pair of Twister CPU cores. The catch here – and why two cores is in many ways better than three – is that relative to A8X and A9, Apple has cranked up their CPU clockspeeds. Way, way up. Whereas the iPad Air 2 (A8X) shipped at 1.5GHz and the iPhone 6s (A9) at 1.85GHz, the A9X sees Apple push their clockspeed to 2.26GHz. Not counting the architectural changes, this is 22% higher clocked than the A9 and 51% higher than the A8X.
The fact that Apple dropped back down to 2 CPU cores is unexpected given that we don’t expect Apple to ever go backwards in such a fashion, and while we’ll never know the official reason for everything Apple does, in retrospect I’m starting to think that A8X was an anomaly and Apple didn’t really want a tri-core CPU in the first place. A8X came at a time where Apple was bound by TSMC’s 20nm process and couldn’t drive up their clockspeeds without vastly increasing power consumption, so a third core was a far more power effective option.
A9X Die Shot w/AT Annotations (Die Shot Courtesy Chipworks)
Overall this means that iPad Pro and A9X will set a very high bar for tablet CPU performance. As we’ve already seen in the iPhone 6s review, the Twister CPU core is very potent and in most cases faster than any other ARM CPU core by leaps and bounds. Cranking up the clockspeed a further 22% only serves to open up that gap even further, as Twister is now reaching clockspeeds similar to the likes of Cortex-A57 and A72, but with its much wider execution pipeline and greater IPC. This is also the reason that an Intel Core CPU comparison is so interesting, as Intel’s tablet-class Core processors in many ways are the target to beat on overall CPU performance, and we’ll be touching upon this subject in greater detail a bit later.
GPU: Imagination PowerVR 12 Cluster Series 7XT
Meanwhile on the GPU side, as expected Apple has further increased the number of clusters on their SoC to drive the higher resolution display of a tablet. Whereas A9 used a 6 cluster design (PVR GT7600), A9X doubles this, giving us a relatively massive 12 cluster design.
In Imagination’s PowerVR Series7XT roadmap, the company doesn’t have an official name for a 12 cluster configuration, as this falls between the 8 cluster GT7800 and 16 cluster GT7900. So for the moment I’m simply calling it a “PowerVR 12 cluster Series7XT design,” and with any luck Imagination will use a more fine-grained naming scheme for future generations of PowerVR graphics.
In any case, the use of a 12 cluster design is a bit surprising from an engineering standpoint since it means that Apple was willing to take the die space hit to implement additional GPU clusters, despite the impact this would have on chip yields and costs. If anything, with the larger thermal capacity and battery of the iPad Pro, I had expected Apple to use higher GPU clockspeeds (and eat the power cost) in order to save on chip costs. Instead what we’re seeing is a GPU that essentially offers twice the GPU power of A9’s GPU.
However to put all of this in context, keep in mind that iPad Pro’s display is 5.95Mpixels, versus the 2.07Mpixel screen on the iPhone 6s Plus. So although Apple has doubled the number of GPU clusters for A9X – and I suspect clocked it fairly similarly – that increased performance will be very quickly consumed by the iPad Pro’s high resolution screen. Consequently even a 12 cluster GPU design is something of a compromise; if Apple wanted to maintain the same level of GPU performance per pixel as in the iPhone 6s family, they would have needed an even more powerful GPU. Which just goes to show how demanding tablets can be.
Memory Subsystem: 128-bit LPDDR4-3200, No L3 Cache
Responsibility for feeding the beast that is A9X’s GPU falls to A9X’s 128-bit LPDDR4 memory controller configuration. With twice as many GPU clusters, Apple needs twice as much memory bandwidth to maintain the same bandwidth-to-core ratio, so like the past X-series tablet SoCs, A9X implements a 128-bit bus. For Apple this means they now have a sizable 51.2GB/sec of memory bandwidth to play with. For an SoC this is a huge amount of bandwidth, but at the same time it’s quickly going to be consumed by those 12 GPU clusters.
| Geekbench 3 Memory Bandwidth Comparison (1 thread) | ||||||
| Stream Copy | Stream Scale | Stream Add | Stream Triad | |||
| Apple A9X 2.26GHz | 20.8 GB/s | 15.0 GB/s | 15.3 GB/s | 15.1 GB/s | ||
| Apple A8X 1.5GHz | 14.2 GB/s | 7.44 GB/s | 7.54 GB/s | 7.49 GB/s | ||
| A9X Advantage | 46.4% | 101% | 103% | 102% | ||
It’s also while looking at A9X’s memory subsystem however that we find our second and final curveball for A9X: the L3 cache. Or rather, the lack thereof. For multiple generations now Apple has used an L3 cache on both their phone and tablet SoCs to help feed both the CPU and GPU, as even a fast memory bus can’t keep up with a low latency local cache. Even as recent as A9, Apple included a 4MB victim cache. However for A9X there is no L3 cache; the only caches on the chip are the individual L1 and L2 caches for the CPU and GPU, along with some even smaller amounts for cache for various other functional blocks..
The big question right now is why Apple would do this. Our traditional wisdom here is that the L3 cache was put in place to service both the CPU and GPU, but especially the GPU. Graphics rendering is a memory bandwidth-intensive operation, and as Apple has consistently been well ahead of many of the other ARM SoC designers in GPU performance, they have been running headlong into the performance limitations imposed by narrow mobile memory interfaces. An L3 cache, in turn, would alleviate some of that memory pressure and keep both CPU and GPU performance up.
One explanation may be that Apple deemed the L3 cache no longer necessary with the A9X’s 128-bit LPDDR4 memory bus; that 51.2GB/sec of bandwidth meant that they no longer needed the cache to avoid GPU stalls. However while the use of LPDDR4 may be a factor, Apple’s ratio of bandwidth-to-GPU cores of roughly 4.26GB/sec-to-1 core is identical to A9’s, which does have an L3 cache. With A9X being a larger A9 in so many ways, this alone isn’t the whole story.
What’s especially curious is that the L3 cache on the A9 wasn’t costing Apple much in the way of space. Chipworks puts the size of A9’s 4MB L3 cache block at a puny ~4.5 mm2, which is just 3% the size of A9X. So although there is a cost to adding L3 cache, unless there are issues we can’t see even with a die shot (e.g. routing), Apple didn’t save much by getting rid of the L3 cache.
Our own Andrei Frumusanu suspects that it may be a power matter, and that Apple was using the L3 cache to save on power-expensive memory operations on the A9. With A9X however, it’s a tablet SoC that doesn’t face the same power restrictions, and as a result doesn’t need a power-saving cache. This would be coupled with the fact that with double the GPU cores, there would be a lot more pressure on just a 4MB cache versus the pressure created by A9, which in turn may drive the need for a larger cache and ultimately an even larger die size.
As it stands there’s no one obvious reason, and it’s likely that all 3 factors – die size, LPDDR4, and power needs – all played a part here, with only those within the halls of One Infinite Loop knowing for sure. However I will add that since Apple has removed the L3 cache, the GPU L2 cache must be sizable. Imagination’s tile based deferred rendering technology needs an on-chip cache to hold tiles in to work on, and while they don’t need an entire frame’s worth of cache (which on iPad Pro would be over 21MB), they do need enough cache to hold a single tile. It’s much harder to estimate GPU L2 cache size from a die shot (especially with Apple’s asymmetrical design), but I wouldn’t be surprised of A9X’s GPU L2 cache is greater than A9’s or A8X’s.
Building A9X Big: 147mm2, Manufactured By TSMC
Finally, let’s talk about the construction and fabrication of the A9X SoC itself. Chipworks’ previous analysis shows that the A9X is roughly 147mm2 in die size, and that it’s manufactured by TSMC on their 16nm FinFET process.
At 147mm2 the A9X is the second-largest of Apple’s X-series tablet SoCs. Only the A5X, the first such SoC, was larger. Fittingly, it was also built relative to Apple’s equally large A5 phone SoC. With only 3 previous tablet SoCs to use as a point of comparison I’m not sure there’s really a sweet spot we can say that Apple likes to stick to, but after two generations of SoCs in the 120mm2 to 130mm2 range, A9X is noticeably larger.
Some of that comes from the fact that A9 itself is a bit larger than normal – the TSMC version is 104.5mm2 – but Apple has also clearly added a fair bit to the SoC. The wildcard here is what yields look like for Apple, as that would tell us a lot about whether a 147mm2 A9X is just a large part or if Apple has taken a greater amount of risk than usual here.
A9X continues to be the largest 16nm FinFET ASIC we know to be in mass production at TSMC (we’ll ignore FPGAs for now), and while this will undoubtedly change a bit later this year once the next-generation discrete GPUs come online, I don’t think you’ll find a better example of how the contract chip manufacturing market has changed in a single generation. 4 years ago it would be GPUs leading the charge, but now it’s phone SoCs and a rather sizable tablet SoC that are first out of the gate. After almost a decade of catching up, SoCs have now reached the bleeding edge for chip fabrication, enabling rapid performance growth, but also inheriting the risks of being the leader. I won’t dwell on this too much, but I’m immensely curious about both what A9X yields are like as the largest FinFET ASIC at TSMC, and just how much of TSMC’s FinFET capacity Apple has been consuming with the production of A9 and A9X.
Finally, it's also interesting to note just how large A9X is compared to other high performance processors. Intel's latest-generation Skylake processors measure in at ~99mm2 for the 2 core GT2 configuration (Skylake-Y 2+2), and even the 4 core desktop GT2 configuration (Intel Skylake-K 4+2) is only 122mm2. So A9X is larger than either of these CPU cores, though admittedly as a whole SoC A9X contains a number of functional units either not present on Skylake or on Skylake's Platform Controller Hub (PCH). Still, this is the first time that we've seen an Apple launch a tablet SoC larger than an Intel 4 core desktop CPU.
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jasonelmore - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
This, there is no filesystem. The hardware can be as fast as it wants, but it's severely limited by it's input options, and it's locked down nature. A ipad, or a phone for that matter, will never be able to replicate a x86 device. aarch64 is crude in comparison to x86 as detailed in the 2nd page of this article.Sure they can re-write a lot of it, and make a bunch of compramises to make it work, but they wont' waste the time, because:
1: nobody wants to pay more than $10 for apps on the platform because it's seen as a toy and disposable within 4 years
2: Lacks a true filesystem for moving files from physical media, to the devices
3: Lacks precise input methods for quick and ultra precise manipulation of the software (unlike mouse or trackball on pc). Like Slicing a video file, or selecting text and making it Bold, italic, underlined
4: platform lacks pro level payment and upgrade options for developers
Sc0rp - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
There's a file system, you just don't have access to it.1) Pretty much any computer is disposable in 4 years because the shelf life for hardware before it goes obsolete is about 3 years. Protip: If you 'upgrade' your processor, video card and/or motherboard (!) you just assembled a new computer. It doesn't matter that it is in the same case that your old computer used. Also users are willing to pay more than $10 for software. But, to be honest a lot of legacy developers from the desktop realm have been giving their users the shaft on software prices for years and years and consumers are more apt to pay $6 for an app that actually does that they need rather than $700 for one that does way more than they ever will need.
2) There is a file system. You can plainly see it and interact with it when you use software like iExplorer. Personally, I have no problems with handling files on iOS9 and moving them about.
3) Apple Pencil. Have you heard of it?
4) Actually those options already exist on the platform. I don't know why you think they don't when they so clearly do and have been demonstrated by iOS game developers for years now. You mean to tell me that I can pay $6-20 for a ship or $100 for a bushel of smurfberries but somehow there's no way to add in upgrade options? Dude, just make it optional DLC.
jasonelmore - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
keep drinking the kool-aid man.1: apple has succeeded in convincing you that computers are disposable within 4 years. Thousands of schools around the world are using Pentium 4's and Nehalm Pc's. These pc's can run the latest photoshop CC, Office Suite, or any other software that has been made recently.
I know a ton of people using i7 920's and are playing the latest games no problem. With apple, the applications just wont load at all, because they require a certain OS. WIndows 10 Supports very old hardware, and very slow hardware. Same with any flavor of linux. OSX and iOS do not.
2: the file system is not accessible within the device. So your argument is basically this. Use a 2nd machine, install a third party application, and access the files. Really? Pro's don't need a hidden or in-accessible file system, they need file permissions, and only a jailbreak can give that to them.
3: The pencil is a drawing device first and foremost. It is not designed, nor meant to be, a primary way of interacting with the device's OS and applications. Moreover, only one device in apple's entire product history, supports this peripheral. Good luck slicing video with precision. A mouse can hover over a precise point, and offer two context actions via left or the right mouse button. A pencil can hover over a precise point, and do nothing. any actions require tap and hold, and buttons aren't used anywhere except for drawing apps.
4: Developers want to be able to charge yearly fee's for updates, instead of release a whole new app. Like Tweetbot 1, 2, 3,, 4. In-app purchases are not meant for upgrades. They are meant to be used as a glorified "demo" system. You demo the app, and then buy it if you like it. There are a number of articles and reddit posts about developers leaving ios and going with their own distribution platform due to apples store policies. Big developers too, not little ones.
Constructor - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
You clearly don't know what you're talking about.1. The iPad 3 which I have just replaced with an iPad Pro has just started its new life for a new user after 4 years of perfectly up-to-date and fully supported use by me. It is still fully supported and almost everything that's available for iOS still runs on it, most of it very well – and that on a device which has about 1/10th of the iPod Pro's performance!
The main reason why you can still use old Windows PCs (or old Intel Macs, for that matter, like I'm doing right now!) without too many disadvantages against new ones is that Intel has entered a prolonged stagnation phase since they've bumped into the end of Moore's Law with their ridiculously outdated x86 architecture. There simply is hardly any movement forwards any more on the Intel front.
Meanwhile Apple is cranking up the performance of their own processors at a speed we haven't seen for a decade on the desktop (it's actually a major achievement that the older iOS devices run as well as they do compared to the multiple times more powerful new ones!).
2. Where I want filesystem access under iOS, I have it. I use Good Reader as my general-purpose local file manager for all kinds of files (including local or remote up- and downloads) and I can use iCloud, Dropbox and others for online shared filesystems. Your imagined problem is pretty much just an imaginary one.
3. The Pencil is a precise pointing device. Which can be user everywhere. It's just not needed most of the time, in part because the touch interface can be used very precisely without it already.
4. Payment is actually a lot easier and simpler than on any desktop platform, and in-app-payment is explicitly not permitted for "demo unlocking". Where it's done well it can unlock additional features, which can be used for featured upgrades as well.
Your whole post betrays above all a profound ignorance about iOS and looks a lot like a panicked attempt to somehow justify why the exact habits you happen to have formed somehow were the only possible way to do anything for everybody.
But as always, the world is not as simple or as limited as that.
jasonelmore - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
1: what about the iphone 4, or ipad 2? Stuck on iOS 7 and can't be updated any further2: Physical media? USB drive? Even android can take a thumb drive. This allows android to be more of a traditional computer. You can store ISO's on your phone, EXE's, etc, and use your phone as a mini-laptop for working with other machines. Your goodreader just lets you view the files, so your solution is to email it or dropbox it everytime you need it on a different device? that's what we call a "work-around".
Sending everything over the cloud is not something everyone wants to do, or can do. What if your in a area with no service, or better yet, you don't subscribe to service, and you want to use the phone as a computing device on wifi.
3: again, the pencil is not comparable to a mouse or trackpad. the ipad has no cursor, Your fingers are large compared to a mouse selecting a single pixel on a screen. Main actions, and contextual actions are done via tap, long press, etc.. selecting text on a touch screen should be a good enough example to understand what i'm getting at.
4: did you know apple will not even let you update apps you already own, if your credit card expires, or does not have any money on it?
the fact that you are trying to argue this point, only shows that you have not been following public out cry on this subject. No Paid upgrades, No demo's (very important for expensive pro like apps), no way for developers to respond to bad reviews, at any given time apple can replicate your app, and since apple apps are not sandboxed, they have a inherit advantage. everyone else must be sandboxed, and pay a 30% royalty.
Regarding payment on PC, pretty much everything pro level has gone to a subscription model. If by easy, you mean having a credit card on file for all purchases, then ok, it's easy. But it's also locked down, and like i said, you cant update the app if your card suddenly runs out of money or you go over the credit limit. it will force you to enter a new credit card, just to update a app you already paid for.
look man, if your ok with apple making all the choices for you, then by all means, keep on doing what your doing. but some people have different ideas and want to customize the device to their needs.
i can tell your a fanboy because you started insulting me there at the end, and that only shows your having a hard time justifying what you say to be true. These are not my habits, they are established work-loads that people have been doing on their computers for decades.
you really do need a filesystem to be called a comptuer. and you need a cloud service that is compatible with all platforms and file types. Your solutions to a lot of my arguments is used a bunch of third party programs. a file system is fundamental to computing. there should be a 1st party file explorer (even a restricted one with the option to run root). To deny that access is basically saying "we are apple and we know better, you don't need that option"
Constructor - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
1: what about the iphone 4, or ipad 2? Stuck on iOS 7 and can't be updated any furtherWrong again, both directly and contextually.
First, The iPad 2 is still supported by iOS 9.2.1 which is the current version. Only the iPhone 4 has iOS 7 as its latest version.
This is a pretty illuminating comparison of iOS device performance historically:
http://browser.primatelabs.com/ios-benchmarks
(Select Multi-Core results)
iOS 9 now covers a performance range from the iPad Pro down to the iPhone 4S which is 13 times slower.
The iPhone 4 is even 26 times slower, and it only has a single CPU core, contrary to all devices which are still currently supported to this day (including the iPad 2).
And I'm pretty sure you'd be right in front raking Apple over the coals for iOS 9 running less than smoothly on that single-core iPhone 4.
It's actually quite remarkable how well iOS still runs on those over four years old devices after the breakneck performance development of the past years in the iOS space.
2: Physical media? USB drive?
And then where is that floppy drive "everybody knows" is absolutely required..? ;-)
Even android can take a thumb drive. This allows android to be more of a traditional computer. You can store ISO's on your phone, EXE's, etc, and use your phone as a mini-laptop for working with other machines. Your goodreader just lets you view the files, so your solution is to email it or dropbox it everytime you need it on a different device? that's what we call a "work-around".
...and wrong again!
Good Reader can do many things, among them using DropBox. But I can also simply tap a button and Good Reader appears in my local WiFi network (including in the one my iPhone has just provided) as a bog-standard WebDAV network drive which I can directly mount on my Mac, on a PC or on any other mobile device (including on a Good Reader instance running there if I want).
GoodReader can also mount locally available shares and download from these (or upload to them).
I can also throw files to another Apple device purely locally via AirDrop, or I can exchange files locally via Weafo (which appears as a web-server from which anybody else can download the file). And that's only scratching the surface (ahem) of what I could do with iOS since I have simply stopped exploring further for the time being because I haven't needed more than that personally.
You know very little about what's actually possible under iOS.
3: again, the pencil is not comparable to a mouse or trackpad. the ipad has no cursor, Your fingers are large compared to a mouse selecting a single pixel on a screen.
...and that is why there is the Pencil for those rare events where I actually need to address specific pixels. Finger-based UIs can actually be quite precise otherwise, so these needs are actually relatively rare.
Main actions, and contextual actions are done via tap, long press, etc.. selecting text on a touch screen should be a good enough example to understand what i'm getting at.
You can't have actually used iOS devices if you still believe that. Text selection – to take your example – works very well and very precisely by finger touch alone because it is designed for exactly that.
4: did you know apple will not even let you update apps you already own, if your credit card expires, or does not have any money on it?
I've never used a credit card for iTunes in all those years and never had a single problem.
the fact that you are trying to argue this point, only shows that you have not been following public out cry on this subject. No Paid upgrades, No demo's (very important for expensive pro like apps), no way for developers to respond to bad reviews, at any given time apple can replicate your app, and since apple apps are not sandboxed, they have a inherit advantage. everyone else must be sandboxed,
"Outcries" about Apple are the norm rather than the exception. And of course there are valid points to be made in multiple directions. But the measure of the App Store is where there is one that actually works better for a) the users and b) the developers.
There isn't one.
So Apple may not actually have made all the wrong compromises there, as inconvenient as some of them may be for some people. Perfection sounds nice, but actually achieving an actually workable solution is much harder than just clamouring for one.
and pay a 30% royalty.
Ouch. Again with the cluelessness!
First up, these 30% are no "royalty" as pure profit for Apple as you appear to believe, they cover all the costs of distribution including minimum payment transaction charges which are quite substantial as a ratio at the very low item prices in the App Store (no, the percentages you've heard of don't apply there – the minimum charges are much higher than that!). They also cover all other fees and expenses, also including cross-subsidies for the large number of distribution of free apps.
That all the other app stores have never been able to undercut Apple here should have given you a hint or two: It's pretty much run at cost, at Apple as much as anywhere else.
look man, if your ok with apple making all the choices for you, then by all means, keep on doing what your doing. but some people have different ideas and want to customize the device to their needs.
You don't even know what can or can't be done with iOS as it is, and yet you're all about sweeping generalizations.
i can tell your a fanboy because you started insulting me there at the end, and that only shows your having a hard time justifying what you say to be true. These are not my habits, they are established work-loads that people have been doing on their computers for decades.
I'm simply fed up with always the exactly same ignorant cow manure being shoveled all over the place by people who are full of prejudices but empty on actual knowledge of the topic, let alone actual, practical experience.
you really do need a filesystem to be called a comptuer.
Rubbish. I could just as arbitrarily claim that if you didn't have a HiDPI screen your machine was a mere toy and "completely unusable" for any serious uses just because that's what I fancied most.
In real life with real use I need solutions which are appropriate to my actual needs. Stomping your foot and throwing tantrums when you can't replicate exactly the same workflow you happened to have earlier is silly and shortsighted.
Successfully working with IT has always meant adapting what was actually available to what one actually needed and being creative at getting both together for as much pragmatic efficency as feasible.
Crybabies whining about their bygone habits and preferences have always been left behind in the process when new opportunities appeared on the scene.
and you need a cloud service that is compatible with all platforms and file types. Your solutions to a lot of my arguments is used a bunch of third party programs. a file system is fundamental to computing. there should be a 1st party file explorer (even a restricted one with the option to run root). To deny that access is basically saying "we are apple and we know better, you don't need that option"
It is as if you haven't paid any attention for the past nine years.
iOS is a safe, stable and still extensible mobile platform which can run third-party software. This was extremly hard to achieve, and Apple forced a lot of compromises regarding "hackability" because of it. I get how that rubs many people the wrong way (not least as a developer myself, even if not for iOS so far), but as someone who has developed and handled substantially complex, extensible systems (some from the ground up) I am very much aware of where crucial decisions have to be made for something like that, and between which alternatives these decisions have been in major cases.
And the very real stability and safety (including privacy protection!) which actually results from Apple's decisions is hard to deny.
I'm not at all denigrating your preference for completely different kinds of systems where many decisions have been made completely differently, but your problem here is that you don't seem to be aware what these criteria and these options even are when it's about the creation of a major platform.
One can easily disagree with many of Apple's decisions and rules, and that aplies to myself as well in various cases, but actually being aware of why Apple is handling many things the way they do is actually relevant here, and in most cases it's actually knowable.
You'd be much better off if you started at least questioning some of your evident prejudices and preconceived notions at the very least for some broader perspective – which is valuable even if your conclusions for your own system preferences end up in exactly the same place as they do now, just not out of sheer ignorance any more.
Morawka - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
Good reader requires you to be on the same network as the machine you want to share files with. Some networks do not even have wifi ap's so your sol in that regard. The only workaround I've found is to pack around a nano wifi router that can run off a battery pack, and physically hook it into the network (if you even have access to the ports). ita really just a file viewer with a few nifty features, but it does not excuse the lack of a native solution. Micro usb otg thumb sticks are the shit. No worrying about sensitive files over the network.MaxIT - Saturday, February 13, 2016 - link
You are becoming ridiculous... Are you really complaining because a smartphone from 2010 isn't supported anymore in 2016 ? Lol at you ...Tell me about HTD Evo or Google Nexus One, both android flagships from 2010 .... They were death and buried by 2012 .....
FunBunny2 - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
-- bumped into the end of Moore's Law with their ridiculously outdated x86 architecture.not true, strictly speaking. years ago Intel stopped executing the ISA in silicon, and went with an emulator which ran "micro-code" on a "micro-architecture". the real processor (ALU, etc.) in a X86 chip is some RISC machine; which gets changes each tock. whether this is really more efficient than using those billions and billions of transistors to do all of X86 in silicon is a question I've never seen answered.
Constructor - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
Exactly: They have been forced to build a real-time hardware cross-assembler into their CPUs because that was the absolute last resort to get ahead at all any more. Absolute madness, and close to a miracle that they've pulled that off at all, even with the substantial penalties that entails.The ARM64 ISA, by comparison, is completely new, legacy-free and was designed from scratch for optimal execution efficiency. It's not even backward compatible to ARM32. The two are completely different, much more different than x86 and AMD64.
ARM CPUs generally don't need any microcode – they can decode and execute the instruction stream directly, and complications are kept to a minimum (just consider, by comparison, what an Intel CPU needs to take care of internally when processing asynchronous high-priority interrupts, for instance!).
Intel has always completely botched their basic ISA designs. Remember the original x86? What a horrendous, incompetently conceived turd! The painful iterations after that were hardly any better, and If AMD hadn't helped them out with AMD64 (which given what they had to start from was actually somewhat decent), if they hadn't put everything in chip design and manufacturing and if the Microsoft monopoly hadn't afforded them a perfect base for their own monopoly, they would have been toast a long time ago already.
The declining Windows PC market, however, is not a good portent at all for Intel specifically, especially when looking at the continuous profit erosion of the dwindling number of PC manufacturers.
The era of the ascent of the Windows PC is over. The rollercoaster car has just passed the top of its climb.