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.
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.
There's probably some correlation between simple(r) products and good customer service.
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.
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 ...
http://www.digidna.net/diskaid/features/iphone-photos-transf...
Otherwise, I have an iPad 3 and played with the iPad 2. The difference in the retina display is enough for me.
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 Apple doesn't let its apps get more intricated, competitors will do it first...
Also, Apple has the power to mandate that all apps have to run well on whatever old hardware Apple wants to keep supported. There's no good excuse.
I've not read about this. Can you cite a source?
>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.
Might that not have also been due to the iPad mini having a non-Retina display? Or does system RAM not matter much for that?
>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.
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'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.
Also agree that any benchmarks are useless. We need to code for the lowest common platform, in order to get the best sales.
iPad : 680 g / 6186 cm3 = 0.1099 g / cm3
iPad 2 : 601 g / 3944 cm3 = 0.1523 g / cm3
iPad Air: 469 g / 3060 cm3 = 0.1532 g / cm3
iPad 3 : 650 g / 4213 cm3 = 0.1542 g / cm3
iPad 4 : 650 g / 4213 cm3 = 0.1542 g / cm3The 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, the resulting product is also an incredibly limited niche.
(I don't have an Apple TV, so maybe Air Play is not as convenient as I have been led to believe.)
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.
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.
If you don't learn to make your point in a more civilised manner, you'll end up hellbanned...
If I remember right the original iPad 1 had no front camera (or was it no cameras at all?).
To me that's a huge upgrade.
