I wasn't planning on buying an iPad Air, as I'm still happy with my iPad 2, but that comparison chart on the first page really sold me that the iPad Air is the first real upgrade to the iPad 2.
My only complaint is I want high capacity, and I find it so ridiculous that to go from 16GB to 64GB I have to pay $200 extra. Two hundred dollars for 48GB. I think the last time I paid that much for 48GB was ten years ago.
Edit:
I wish Apple would put a microSD reader on the iPad. Purely for storage expansion. I realize they don't do this because it would basically kill their storage upgrade options and they'd probably lose money. No one would feel compelled to upgrade beyond 16GB.
microSD readers exist on the smallest devices nowadays, so form factor or weight is certainly no excuse.
I think the main reason that Apple doesn't include MicroSD is that they want to control the entire product experience, including data ingress and egress. Not only to protect lucrative margins, but also because they know that if the user screws something up by deleting files off the SD card etc, they'll blame Apple whether that's fair or not.
That assertion of control makes iOS unsuitable for many users, but Apple has consciously chosen a market segment and its proven itself a large one.
They do sell an SD card reader for iPad, don't they? A lot of people use it to offload their large photos and videos from the device.
I agree that Apple's memory upgrades are expensive (and probably account for a fair chunk of their margin). Supporting an SD card would necessitate a huge re-thinking of many parts of iOS, and create another point of failure and support. I dislike the way Android handles SD cards and prefer just to have more internal memory, it's a nicer experience not to explicitly manage that.
I think Apple should just charge less for memory instead.
I'd love to be able to expand my wifes iPad, but I think Apple don't offer it (the ability to expand the capacity) for two reasons, the first of which is price - the retail difference between 16Gb and 128Gb is almost pure profit.
The second resaon though, is that it introduces a level of complexity Apple are unlikely to be comfortable with[1]. Users now have to be aware of where stuff is being saved (flash or sd card), and the OS UI needs to be updated to provide this option.
[1] unfortunately, iCloud seems to wildly disprove my point ...
I was so happy to find a free program to transfer off videos and what-not, but it's still a hassle to have to do so manually ever time it fills up. I wind up using the iPad to capture video so often just because it is what is at hand.
It's not just storage upgrade options that keep Apple from adding external storage, I think. With the way the sandbox works, how would apps be allowed to read/write to an external device? That would allow them to escape the sandbox and do IPC, wouldn't it?
Wow, Apple is still skimping on RAM at the expense of user experience. It would've been a great time to bump the RAM up to 2GB given the switch to 64-bit iOS 7 seems to be causing 20-30% higher memory consumption. It was already kind of bad on previous gen 32-bit iPads.
It's still tempting to upgrade from the brick that the iPad 3 now feels but I'll live with it until the one with finger print reader, more RAM and fully baked iOS 7.1.x are out.
If they ship an ipad with 2GB, developers will start to use 2GB and then apps will run like crap on older models. Then people will complain about forced obsolescence. (Source: the dozens of comments I've read from people complaining their 512MB iOS device has been rendered useless.)
Something's gotta give - after sticking to 1GB on 4 generations users would hardly complain about the newer one having more RAM - that's just technological progress. Macs no longer have 2GB RAM for example. Secondly developers would be stupid to use more RAM just because they can - if their app only runs on the latest iPad, I'd say that would be a big issue.
Maybe, but it's the balance of what you can do rather than any individual item on a specification, particularly when you're comparing devices with other different hardware elements running different operating systems.
Plus developers have got the increased power of the 64-bit A7 and the features of the M7 chip to keep themselves entertained so it's not as if Apple are treading water.
Besides do we really want to recreate the "requires a minimum of X Gb RAM to run" small print world of Windows games?
Android devices switched up to high ram co figs because they had to. A typical Android device runs a ton of stuff in the background such as Facebook uploaders, sync services, location trackers, carrier services, manufacturer UI shells and crapwear, etc you just don't get on iOS devices. To be fair, a lot of these services can do useful stuff and the freedom to run stuff like that is one of the reasons some people like Android, but the result is a much larger overall memory utilisation.
Apples approach to extending background services was to engineer a 'motion coprocessor' to handle one class of background tasks as efficiently as possible. Samsung et al just saw the memory utilisation on their devices go up from the services they're running so they jacked up the installed memory.
The second consideration is battery life. Memory uses battery power all the time, whether that memory is doing anything useful or not. Apple is fanatical about power conservation. You don't get 10 hour battery life as a standard feature on your mobile devices by accident.
Whether to keep background processes and how many to keep is trivially configurable in Android though. So if Samsung wanted to skimp on RAM they could totally do so. My wife's Galaxy Nexus had 1GB RAM and Android 4.3 works fine there but compared to my Note 2 the multi tasking suffers. Anecdotally though I have had much lesser page reloads on Android devices even with 1GB RAM.
So yes Android will use more memory if there is some available but there's no evidence to suggest it needs more than iOS.
So what you're saying is that in your personal experience Android devices with 1GB of RAM suffer in multi-tasking. And yet you also say there's no evidence Android devices need more RAM?
BTW, there's another class of software Android devices run that consume more RAM. UI widgets. Now that's perfectly legitimate. If you like widgets, Android or WP are the way to go. It's just that they have a cost in RAM utilization, and therefore device memory specs and power consumption. If Apple supported UI widgets, they'd have to also increase memory capacity to maintain system performance and stability, so they don't. This is an area where reasonable people can have a difference of opinion. Apple prioritize battery life and lean system design, Android emphasizes features and customization.
> So what you're saying is that in your personal experience Android devices with 1GB of RAM suffer in multi-tasking. And yet you also say there's no evidence Android devices need more RAM?
No. I am talking relative here. Relative to my iPad my 1GB Android devices ( N7 (2012) and GNex) reloaded browser pages or lost background audio/video playback noticeably lesser. However on my Note 2 which has 2GB RAM, I very rarely see browser page reloads and don't remember having lost background audio for example at all (something that happens routinely on iPad and sometimes on the N7.)
So what I am saying is that Android devices don't _need_ more than 1GB - anecdotally they offer slightly better multitasking performance for the same 1GB than the iPad. But both on Android and iOS - the experience will get appreciably better with 2GB RAM given how smoother my Note 2 is and given how many times my iPad reloads/loses stuff. (Just check the diagnostics logs for low memory on iOS devices.)
That's interesting. However I've read that iOS doesn't have built in garbage collector, automatically forcing you to write apps that consume less memory.
That's not quite true. Garbage Collector isn't a developer's magical ticket to write careless memory hogs. Android devices have a per app (process really) limit of how much heap memory they can consume. It can be anything in between 32MB to 256MB depending on the device. So developers still have to be very careful to not consume any more memory than absolutely necessary so that their app continues to work on as many devices as possible. Besides frequent GC will pause the app and ruin the experience - so there's that to worry about too.
Why ? It's not because I'm trying to be a nice citizen in the memory part of my app that I use less or more memory. It's the developer choice that will take care of that, and not the way we clear our path.
I'm not going to hold my breath on the actual RAM number until we see an iFixit teardown. Due to just the shear size, the iPad mini has always had half the ram as the regular sized iPad. I wouldn't be surprised if the Air had 2GB and the Mini had 1 GB.
>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.
I wasn't sure how Retina vs. non-Retina apps behave in memory. Some apps presumably ship both sizes of assets, in which case the OS could load only the smaller ones into memory. But if an app only ships Retina assets, would those go straight into memory, or is the OS clever enough to resize them dynamically and throw that into memory?
Yes, in this case more RAM is arguably the better trade off. Less need to reload apps and browser tabs, better multitasking performance etc. are good things to have over the 15 min or whatever of battery loss it might take to power on additional 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM. It's just a vastly better user experience for the common use cases. (Besides there are other tablets with 2GB RAM and they come very close to iPad in terms of battery life so it shouldn't be that big of an issue.)
Its all about tradeoffs. How many customers would benefit from boosts in multi-tasking and tab re-loading vs. longer battery life? Apple is known for its outstanding battery life, does it make sense to step back from that for the benefits that you describe?
Whatever number of customers use a browser to browse the Internet using their iPad - they would benefit from the RAM increase. Besides it's not known how much exactly another GB would cost in terms of lost minutes of battery. Probably nothing to sweat about.
But I will defend your right to defend Apple at any cost - known or unknown ;)
I got the tradeoff part when you mentioned it the first time - it's just that I am saying more RAM is worth the tradeoff of whatever unknown amount of possibly minuscule loss of battery life. And I don't say this without a reason - several times a day I get annoyed by background audio / airplay getting killed and my browser tabs getting reloaded. So it's not without a valid reason.
Anyway - I think at the very least Apple could shove off power consumption elsewhere in the next round of updates and give us more RAM if that's what it takes.
I don't think you get the 'tradeoff' part. At least I don't seem to be clearly communicating my thoughts on the matter.
You are suggesting that the configuration that is best for you is best for everyone and therefore is the best for Apple. But that isn't necessarily true. I don't doubt that it would be the best for you -- that is what you want. But don't assume that your preference is best for everyone or for Apple itself.
It is the nature of tradeoffs that you can't satisfy everyone 100% with a single configuration or even several configurations.
You think that additional memory is the better tradeoff. OK, some quick googling shows 1GB of DDR3 memory might be about $10 wholesale (I found $16 retail). So if you are going to sell 70 million tablets (that is the number of iPads sold in the past year), going from 1Gb to 2Gb is roughly a $700 million decision (per/year) and that assumes stable memory prices (they aren't) so your decision might cost more than that (or less). And you've now cut into your power budget for all future products.
It was confusing to me that you were thinking from the corporation's viewpoint! That makes it way more complicated than necessary. a) Apple constantly toots their horn about putting user experience ahead of anything else. b) Apple has lot of money. c) There are lot of products on the market - phones, tablets that sell for both premium and no-profit, that have 2GB RAM. d) Apple sells the iPad at premium price points e) I am certainly not the only one that would benefit from more RAM. I bet lot of people will benefit from having more memory for their "post PC" device.
As a user I don't have to care what Apple has to do to get the RAM up - renegotiate with their vendors, improve battery life, sell a different SKU with more RAM and $16 more in price, eat up the cost as a price to pay for user experience etc. You kept explaining why they couldn't do it when others have been there and done that.
Frankly even viewed 100% from Apple's standpoint, none of your arguments are very convincing, especially so if you look at what actually is involved in 1GB of additional RAM and when even lower priced devices have it.
And yet Apple didn't put in the extra memory. I hope you don't think my quick comments here are any sort of serious analysis of the tradeoffs but you should assume that perhaps Apple itself has done that analysis and ended up with a configuration that is different from your expectations for perfectly defensible reasons (from their point of view).
I never said that Apple couldn't put in the extra memory -- I just suggested that there were tradeoffs that suggest why they might not have made that choice. I was trying to add information to the discussion but you seem to want to insist on proving your preference is the right one and that Apple made a mistake (as in the wrong decision for Apple and its customers -- even ones who don't have the same needs as yourself).
Note, I'm not trying to prove that Apple made the right choice -- perhaps it was the wrong one and they could have sold more iPads and had happier customers if they added more memory if they had followed your advice. Maybe they wanted to but couldn't line up sufficient supplies or maybe there wasn't space for the extra memory or maybe they didn't want to eat into their profit margin or …
Right. But it still seems to be an overall increase of 20-30% for lightest of the use cases.
>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.
I've always expected they would start to serialize open tabs to the flash storage to keep from having to reload them from the network. Seems (to me) like that'd be easy to do.
There's no official mention, but a few jailbreak developers have specifically talking about its existence. (MuscleNerd and Steffan Esser if my memory serves)
> It seemed like a foregone conclusion that the 10-inch tablet market was done for, with all interest and excitement shifting to smaller, but equally capable 7 or 8-inch tablets instead.
Did I miss something? I've been happy with my 10" ipad for years and, especially with the 2048x1536 display, have never felt the need to go smaller. I know most of the android tablets are smaller, but I've been completely satisfied. I suppose I've never used the ipad mini, so it might be all that and a bag of chips.
Is this really the trend? It wouldn't be the first to pass me by, but I'm still surprised.
I completely agree. I love my current iPad and don't want a smaller form factor for what I use it for (e.g., reading and small amounts of typing, Duolingo every morning). I already have a smaller form factor device that is wearable but painful to read or type on for bigger jobs (my phone) and a larger device with a full size keyboard for doing lots of typing and serious work (laptop). I welcome the iPad Air because it is the device I enjoy the most but faster and lighter.
Going down to 7" has a drastic effect on portability. You can fit a Nexus 7 into a coat pocket and use it much more comfortably while standing, which is a really big deal for a large part of the market. A 7" tablet isn't much worse than a 10" when used on your sofa, but it is vastly better on a crowded train. I think that the 7" form factor is the sweet spot between a smartphone and a Macbook Air, and that 10" tablets are becoming a niche item.
As usual Anandtech has one of the best reviews. My only complaint is the CPU benchmarks are more or less useless. I understand there aren't any good cross platform benchmarks right now but using JS benchmarks is completely inaccurate. Not only are there major variations between scores on the same device (across different browsers and versions) but the same browser isn't even available on both platforms.
I'd love to see how the A7 really stacks up against the Snapdragon/Tegra but it doesn't seem like we'll be seeing that any time soon.
No one does reviews like Anand—even other reviewers at Anandtech. When I see him as the author, I know I'm in for a treat. I mean, down to the metal, and a full understanding and clear explanation of what it means! Just top quality, every single time, even going back ten or fifteen years to the Pentium and Athlon era. I learned so much from his clear and passionate explanations of CPU structure and design decisions.
I still love that the author name link goes straight to his e-mail address. I think I'll thank him directly.
I'm trying to understand how you would use that information. Other than "product dimensions" and "product weight", why do you need to calculate/know more? It's interesting and all - I just don't guess I see what the value of knowing the g/cm3 is.
No, they are not advertising the ratio. They are advertising reducing both. By your size/weight ratio, the original iPad would be the "ideal", but any one who has used any of these devices knows that's absurd.
Density is far less important than the actual size and weight. High density is a demonstration that they've utilized all the available space (since the density of the components themselves are not changing) for components and need less room for heat. Alternatively, it could be a sign that the internal structure matters less than less and only the exterior components (aluminum and glass) are meaningfully different from one version to another.
What makes the iPad Air attractive is not density, it's that there's less of it all around.
One thing that I think gives the iPad a considerable advantage is its 4:3 aspect ratio. Despite having larger bezels on the ends than the sides, it's an inch shorter than a Nexus 10 in its largest dimension.
The article mentioned 10" tablets and 15" laptops seeming to be on the way out. The difference in largest dimension is even more pronounced with laptops. The last 15" 4:3 Thinkpad was 13.2" wide. The current 15" 16:9 models are 14.7" wide. It's about the same thickness and weight with less depth, but it seems like a much bigger machine because its largest dimension is bigger.
Looks like Apple hit home runs with all of their updates this cycle. Interestingly I haven't seen this universal praise for any other Apple update cycle before. Unfortunately I am not in the market for any device right now.
I would disagree that they hit homeruns on everything. The most obvious "single" would be the iPhone 5C which, by all accounts, is underselling expectations significantly. As a consumer, Apple "lost the game" by not introducing an iPhone with a larger screen size. Why are HTC and Samsung doing so well in the phone market? Because they offer what clearly millions of people want: a 5" screen. If Apple had introduced a 5" screen iPhone this cycle, how many would they have sold? I can't tell you how many people who have, this year, switched from long time iPhones to Samsung/HTC for this reason (my family included).
That said, I'm buying the iPad Air as an upgrade to my iPad 2 and I'll be updating my 2011 MBP as well because I think they've really hit homeruns for those two.
> The most obvious "single" would be the iPhone 5C which, by all accounts, is underselling expectations significantly.
Hrm? Apple's first-week iPhone sales significantly beat analyst estimates and their own records. It doesn't seem plausible that those were all 5Ses.
> Why are HTC and Samsung doing so well in the phone market? Because they offer what clearly millions of people want: a 5" screen.
HTC are not doing well in the phone market. As for Samsung, the Note 3 managed 5 million channel sales in one month, with total sales of the series over a couple of years of only 40 million. 40 million sales over two years is a drop in the bucket for Samsung's sales; the bulk of their sales are of low-end devices (with small screens).
> If Apple had introduced a 5" screen iPhone this cycle, how many would they have sold?
Well, I know I wouldn't have bought one, whereas I did buy a 5S. Not everyone wants giant phones.
> Why are HTC and Samsung doing so well in the phone market? Because they
> offer what clearly millions of people want: a 5" screen.
Not sure that's supported by the data. Do you have a specific reason for assuming that and not one of the countless other differences is the reason why people pick, say, an HTC or Samsung over an iPhone? (As in: preference for Android; availability; etc.)
"The most obvious "single" would be the iPhone 5C which, by all accounts, is underselling expectations significantly."
No one has proven this, it's just a rumour circling the internet. Anecdotally I've seen plenty 'in the wild', but potentially not as many as the 5S (hard to tell aside from the gold), so it's unclear whether it's been a sales disappointment.
The device I really wish exists is an iPad Air minus the computing power. Just a screen to stream videos to from a iPhone, a laptop or a cable box. A portable screen that's a lot less powerful than an iPad but a bit more powerful than a digital picture frame.
Surprisingly this is for my parents. They watch videos all the time and watching videos on an iPhone is too small, on a laptop is too bulky and on an iPad is too expensive.
You're out of luck, the processor costs something like $10, taking it it out would hardly nudge the price. Get a cheap android tablet or a mini LED projector instead.
The processor alone would barely nudge the price, but removing the NAND, RAM, and camera modules along with it definitely would make huge difference. Even more if you can kill the touchscreen.
Unfortunately, the resulting product is also an incredibly limited niche.
This is where I'm leaning right now. A sub $200 Android tablet. But there's something to be said about not having to learn a whole new interview for my parents.
Apple TV doesn't suit their needs? Sit down on couch, take phone out of pocket, Air Play to TV. Do they watch videos a lot away from the room where the TV is located?
(I don't have an Apple TV, so maybe Air Play is not as convenient as I have been led to believe.)
This is basically why I bought an Apple TV for my parents. There's a good chance if a video loads on an apple device that it can be streamed to an Apple TV. They were watching videos all the time on iPads and the TV in the living room wasn't being used anymore.
"The iPad Air is the most significant upgrade to the 9.7-inch iPad in its history." I would actually say the iPad to iPad 2 transition was a bigger jump, but maybe just because it's so easy to forget how much bigger and bulkier the original iPad was.
The iPad came out what 3 and a half years ago and it's faster, lighter, better resolution, and has gone from a "who would ever buy that" to one of the most popular computers in the world. It has completely upended PC sales and forced a radically different Windows experience on millions of users (for better or worse).
In all honesty, what is most remarkable about Apple is that they can take a industry leading (or defining) product like the iPad and make pretty significant improvements every year or two like clockwork and have those changes not just be superficial, but meaningful changes that make a difference to the end user.
Have you tried/used the iPad Air? How can you pass a judgment on something based on reviews when the reviewer himself is asserting something opposite to you?
"How can you pass judgement on anything you haven't experienced yourself?"
People do this all the time. Have you no opinions on rape, child abuse, or murder? I realize judging a physical device is different than moral, ethical and legal issues - but people will have varying levels of experience on almost everything in this world - and the person with the most experience isn't always the most-qualified to pass judgement.
That's my (apparently missed / poorly made) point, in broadening what they did to literally everything in life. People pass judgement by collecting info from multiple sources, from related things they've done, etc. So calling someone out for doing so without having experienced something is pretty naive / willfully ignorant of how they live their life.
Absolutely, argue, you might inform them of something new and swing their decision. But dismissing their opinion entirely is wrong in many ways.
Do you able to venture an opinion on whether it would be enjoyable or not to have your testicles slammed in the door of a car?
You can question the validity of the opinion but we all extrapolate on what we do know and fill the gaps in with views and information borrowed from others and reasonable assumptions.
I would actually say the iPad to iPad 2 transition was a bigger jump, but maybe just because it's so easy to forget how much bigger and bulkier the original iPad was.
Are you trolling or are you simply a moron?
The dimensions and weight comparison table ( right smack on the first page [1] ) shows the iPad Air is a good 181 grams lighter than the previous version, the iPad 4.
The second generation iPad at 601 grams is only lighter by 79 grams over the first generation, which stood at 680 grams.
Considering only the dimensions, the second generation iPad managed a meager trimmings of 4 mm, 2 mm and 4.6 mm in length, width and thickness for a total of 10.6 mm.
That pales in comparison to a total of 18.9 mm in combined length + width + thickness savings, in the current iPad Air.
So your elusive measure of "perceived bulkiness" falls short of explaining how iPad Air is not the greatest leap in terms of portability over its previous version, over all of the other deltas of iPad generations.
The "combined length+width+height" metric you've invented is highly dubious. A 1mm reduction in a dimension means much more if it's the shortest dimension than if it's the longest.
I'm waiting for the iPad Pro. Assuming "Air" and "Mini" are hints of a mac to tablet replacement (coalescence?) strategy, an iPad that challenges the Microsoft Surface's role as a hybrid device would be spectacular.
With MacOS 10.9? That sounds pretty awful, really. Apple has shown little indication of going remotely as far as Microsoft on trying to merge desktop and tablet interfaces.
My only complaint is I want high capacity, and I find it so ridiculous that to go from 16GB to 64GB I have to pay $200 extra. Two hundred dollars for 48GB. I think the last time I paid that much for 48GB was ten years ago.
Edit:
I wish Apple would put a microSD reader on the iPad. Purely for storage expansion. I realize they don't do this because it would basically kill their storage upgrade options and they'd probably lose money. No one would feel compelled to upgrade beyond 16GB.
microSD readers exist on the smallest devices nowadays, so form factor or weight is certainly no excuse.