
The iPad Pro - tambourine_man
http://daringfireball.net/2015/11/the_ipad_pro
======
jonstokes
"The entire x86 computer architecture is living on borrowed time. It’s a dead
platform walking. The future belongs to ARM, and Apple’s A-series SoC’s are
leading the way."

I can't believe that lines like this are still being written. I devoted the
better part of a career to successfully debunking this idea that ARM has some
sort of magical power efficiency advantages over x86. I can, however, console
myself that such claims are exceedingly rare. Most people who lived through
the "RISC vs. CISC" platform wars and made such claims conceded defeat a long
time ago.

Anyway, I addressed this issue in one of my last CPU articles for Ars back in
2011:

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/02/nvidia-30-and-the-
ri...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/02/nvidia-30-and-the-
riscification-of-x86/)

Quote:

"It's also the case that as ARM moves up the performance ladder, it will
necessarily start to drop in terms of power efficiency. Again, there is no
magic pixie dust here, and the impact of the ISA alone on power consumption in
processors that draw many tens of watts is negligible. A multicore ARM chip
and a multicore Xeon chip that give similar performance on compute-intensive
workloads will have similar power profiles; to believe otherwise is to believe
in magical little ARM performance elves."

Also, I think that benchmarks run in this article for the purpose of comparing
the iPad to the MacBook are pretty worthless. I don't have a good answer for
how to comparatively benchmark them, or even if that makes sense. Meaningful
cross-platform benchmarking is really hard, just ask the SPEC people.

Finally, in the article linked above, I predicted that the only way ARM is a
threat to x86 is because it's cheaper, and that if ARM can get within
something like 2X the performance of Intel's higher end CPUs, it might have a
shot by virtue of being widely and inexpensively licensed.

Anyway, the TL;DR here is that those benchmarks say more about the software
stack (the benchmark software included) than the do about the CPU and GPU
hardware, and the reports of x86's death at the hands of PowerPC^H^H^H ARM
are, as always, greatly exaggerated.

~~~
mrpippy
I don't know if outdated "RISC vs. CISC" thinking is what motivated Gruber's
statement, but I think there are much more convincing ways to justify it.

If I could change Gruber's statement, I would say that "The future belongs to
_custom-designed SoCs_ "

The advantages that Apple derives from the A-series SoCs is not due to any
inherent advantage of ARM vs. x86, but because Apple has full control over the
design and manufacturing.

\- Apple can design an SoC for a specific product given the manufacturing
process available at the time: see last year's one-off 3-core A8X, because
adding a 3rd core was a better tradeoff than increasing clocks. This year, the
A9X is back to 2 cores but much higher clocked than the A9.

\- Apple gains a competitive advantage by building processors only for
themselves, and can catch the rest of the industry off guard (see: ARMv8 A7).
They also get to follow their own principles (two fast, wide cores) rather
than being forced into everyone else's marketing hype (8 heterogeneous, slower
cores)

\- If Apple wants a stronger GPU they can just license it from PowerVR, rather
than having to lobby Intel and hope the resulting silicon is better (or worse,
having to add an external GPU)

\- Apple can even hedge its bets w.r.t fab processes: see the dual-sourced
TSMC/Samsung A9

ARM is a threat to x86 because anyone can design/buy an ARM core, design an
SoC around it, and manufacture it anywhere they want. Intel/AMD can't come
close to that flexibility, and on platforms where Win32/Intel binary
compatibility is irrelevant, x86 will decline/stay irrelevant.

~~~
danudey
The GPU issue is a good one. Every desktop system my friends have has two GPUs
in it: one built into the processor that no one ever uses, and one they add
separately so that they can play any games. AMD at least has half-decent GPUs
built into their CPUs, but their CPUs are only half-decent anyway. Meanwhile,
Intel refuses to license any Thunderbolt external GPU docks or anything of the
sort, despite how popular they would be with laptop-toting would-be gamers,
because they want to promote their own, awful GPUs instead.

Likewise the core count issue. Jeff Atwood's recent blog post[1] about how
Android JS performance has stagnated because Android SoC single-core
performance hasn't improved in years blew me away, but in retrospect it makes
sense; it's presumably more engineering work to design a faster CPU core than
it is to just put more of the onto a die and call it a day.

[1] [https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-
andr...](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-android-
in-2015-is-poor/33889)

~~~
mikhailt
Thunderbolt 3 includes official support for external GPU docks. Intel's
reasoning for not allowing them sooner was due to hot-plugging issues but they
could be spinning it around.

Source: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/9331/intel-announces-
thunderbo...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9331/intel-announces-
thunderbolt-3)

------
pedalpete
This is starting to feel like Apple and Microsoft are really starting to
switch places like some bizarro world. Admittedly, this is Daring Fireball and
not Apple itself, but wasn't Apple supposed to always talk about what their
products do, why it's important, and not what the specs are?

Here, a huge portion of the write-up of the iPad Pro is the performance of the
hardware. Was anybody really complaining that their iPad wasn't fast enough?
Was that holding back developers? (honest question, maybe it was, I'm not
sure).

Then there is this statment "Anyone tying themselves in knots looking for a
specific target audience for the iPad Pro is going about it the wrong way.
There is no single target audience. Is the iPad Pro meant for office workers
in the enterprise? Professional artists creating content? Casual users playing
games, watching movies, and reading? The answer is simply “Yes”."

Isn't this often the kiss of death? Not recognizing a single target audience
for your product? The original iPad had a target, all be it a hugely diverse
one. It was for people who wanted to consume content on a larger screen device
than their phone, but wanted something simpler than a laptop.

~~~
Silhouette
_Was anybody really complaining that their iPad wasn 't fast enough? Was that
holding back developers?_

When combined with Apple's effectively forced upgrade policy with iOS, yes,
many people have complained that their iPad is no longer fast enough, even if
it was just fine before the OS update.

App developers are forced to collaborate in that exercise by Apple deciding
which versions of iOS (and visual styles etc.) apps must support to go into
the App Store.

Probably the most serious example so far was people with 2nd or 3rd generation
iPads, who were effectively forced to update to at least iOS 7 because of app
compatibility issues. Significant numbers of users appear to have experienced
serious performance problems afterwards (just google any plausible complaint
wording) and to have reported varying degrees of success in ever resolving
them.

~~~
pedalpete
That's an interesting perspective, but that is essentially Apple breaking
everything for everybody and forcing obsolescence of their products.

I consider that slightly different from "I can't do task x on my iPad because
it isn't powerful enough".

~~~
Silhouette
_That 's an interesting perspective, but that is essentially Apple breaking
everything for everybody and forcing obsolescence of their products._

In practice, yes, that is very much the result. Sadly this seems to be SOP for
Apple across the board in recent years, but it's particularly bad with the
mobile devices. The thing is, people don't notice the cost of their shiny new
iPhone so much because it's obscured by ongoing contracts with their network.
Tablets and laptops don't enjoy the same luxury, which I suspect is a large
part of the reason tablet sales figures have been less impressive since the
early new-shiny rush for a few years after the first iPad arrived.

 _I consider that slightly different from "I can't do task x on my iPad
because it isn't powerful enough"._

Fair point, but I think it starts to become relevant for much the same reasons
if you want the iPad to be taken seriously as a laptop competitor. At that
point, it doesn't just have to be powerful enough to run toy apps today, it
also has to be powerful enough to run serious productivity applications
tomorrow. Earlier generation iPads -- even ones just a few years old and well
within the normally expected working lifetime of a professional computer --
demonstrably didn't have enough power to do that with the combination of
hardware and software being offered.

------
tolmasky
This reads more like a bad review of the new Macbook than a great review of
the new iPad Pro. Of course, this was already the case before, the new Macbook
has always been kind of a head-scratcher:

1\. Despite the amazing battery advancements it gets worse batter life than
the Macbook Air (9 hrs web vs 12 hrs).

2\. A worse graphics card than the Macbook Air yet MORE pixels.

3\. A higher price point.

Any time I bring this up, I'm told I don't get it and this isn't a computer
for a "pro" like me. But that doesn't really mesh with the fact that its a
super expensive computer. Who is this for?

I guess it makes for a really great comparison to the new iPad Pro.

~~~
potatolicious
> _" But that doesn't really mesh with the fact that its a super expensive
> computer. Who is this for?"_

Early adopters and people who need absolute maximum portability and are not
particularly price-sensitive.

The MacBook is smaller, thinner, and lighter than the MBA, and has a higher
quality screen. If you need a laptop that fits the above description and don't
mind the cost, it's a good bet.

More to the point though - it occupies a similar space as the MacBook Air when
it originally came out (recall that the MBA was ~$1500-2000 when it first came
out). I think it's fairly obvious that Apple's letting early adopters pay the
premium, and once they can get production costs down enough it will simply
take over as the lowest-tier Mac laptop entirely, probably at the same
$900-1000 price point the MBA is at today.

It is the exact same trajectory as the original MacBook Air - introduced as
premium ultra-portable product, eventually replacing the plastic MacBooks as
the base-level product.

~~~
tolmasky
_> The MacBook is smaller, thinner, and lighter than the MBA, and has a higher
quality screen._

I just find it hard to say that its a higher quality screen when you have a
worse graphics card, and thus the stuff that will actually be on the screen
will be worse (more dropped frames, worse effects, etc). What does it mean to
want a higher quality screen? If it had 8x as many pixel but was black and
white, is it higher quality? If you want a retina screen for awesome gaming,
this isn't for you. If you want a retina screen for video editing, this isn't
for you. If you want a retina screen for ... web browsing, as long as there
are no CSS animations because they'll be horrible... then its for you?

 _> it occupies a similar space as the MacBook Air when it originally came
out_

Sure, I get that, but the difference is that when the Macbook Air came out the
Macbook Air didn't already exist. Let's think about it another way, if next
year they announce an EVEN thinner Macbook with even stranger performance
tradeoffs, would we accept 3 computers in this space? Probably not. I suppose
my fear is that the plan here is to replace Macbook Airs with this. What I
wanted out of a Macbook Air was more RAM, that's about it. Instead this huge
detour was taken on compromise features -- which again is fine, except if the
plan is to turn this entire product category into a worse-than-iPad computer,
which is definitely not where the Air sat before. The Air before seemed like
good compromises, and perhaps the Macbook will get there too.

------
davidy123
It really is a loss that Apple enthusiasts are so trapped in their bubble.
Apple makes some fantastic gear, but there's a whole world exploring design
choices. I recognize some of the compromises the author talks about trying to
use a tablet as a computer from time spent with those devices, like the
Samsung Q1 and numerous exotic devices that were more like prototypes than
anything.

It's not clear Apple will care to consider developers on the iPad platform, or
professional users of any requirement, since Apple seems to like to sell users
a device for every purpose.

I just spent time with an Asus Chromebook Flip, which has an excellent
keyboard and trackpad and converts into a tablet or the useful tent mode, has
a quality aluminium body and IPS display, and weighs less than 2lbs. Give that
$300 device a faster CPU, backlit keys, replace the bezel with a full size 4:3
12" screen and it's pretty much the perfect no-compromises browser-centric
device that'd still be less than half the price of the iPad Pro with keyboard.
And ChromeOS acknowledges enough of its Linux base that the user will get
respect when they want to go below the covers.

~~~
ghaff
I really like my Asus Chromebook Flip, but I suspect that by the time you're
done enhancing the design you're getting into the laptop/high-end tablet price
range. And I don't understand the market for the Pixel.

I do think there's going to be a re-convergence between tablets and laptops
even given the track record of convertibles but it's going to require a lot of
thought and engineering and testing around specific use cases. (And I also
understand why Apple might not be incented to drive things too hard in this
direction.)

~~~
davidy123
I've wondered about the price too, but I think with $200 they could upgrade to
a 12" IPS display and something like a Core M chip. Maybe the more square
display would be too exotic, 16:9 is weird in tablet mode but could be
acceptable for the price. I'd expect USB 3.1 charging in that timeframe too.
Backlit keys are a $20 option for Thinkpads so they should be achievable too.

What's there is already so nice and the form factor works so well I'd be
really surprised (and disappointed) if we don't see this in 2016, and it
should be something of an inflection in the market to contrast with Apple's
unrelentingly expensive offerings.

The Pixel is clearly for Chromebook developers, or those with money to burn.

~~~
ghaff
>Apple's unrelentingly expensive offerings

It's really the relative expense of quality laptops more broadly.

Story. I forgot my laptop on a weeklong business trip last week. It actually
made sense to pickup a Chromebook for the week. After all, it was only about
3x what a forgotten laptop charger would have cost.

Chromebooks aren't a laptop replacement but they are very useful. I don't know
enough about component costs to know what a Chromebook+ which isn't a Pixel
would cost. However, I do see them as a complement to a laptop rather than a
replacement. And, by historical standards, a MacBook Pro is very cheap.

~~~
davidy123
I agree by historical standards they are cheap, but by current volume,
simplification (SOC) and process they should continue to drop in price.
[https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/attachments/content/attachmen...](https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/attachments/content/attachments/15150d1440356386-untitled-
jpg?s=d2e192a51882cefee4d114236c37f162)

But the Macbook is a bit of an novelty, really it's the Macbook Air that I
find to be badly overpriced now. I like to project on Apple cause I always
look for some idealism that must exist somewhere past good design and profit
margins since they can't simply be aspiring to smugness. So I find the Asus
Chromebook Flip a good example of what a 2016 Macbook Air could look like
because it has many attributes of excellent design while integrating practical
innovations, yet remans inexpensive. With their own chip they could easily
make a quality lower priced Air and still have profit higher than the rest of
the industry.

However Apple is unlikely to use the flip design, much less put a touchscreen
on a keyboarded device. It would shatter their image.

As well I think Apple has stacked their market, including the Apple resale
market, such that any lower cost product would cause value problems across
their line. So hopefully these factors create a good opening for a reasonably
priced, quality product that is intentionally more open to the hacking mindset
from a company like Asus.

------
cromwellian
All of the claims of ARM vs x86 performance are based on Geekbench and
Javascript benchmarks. This seems woefully thin data to make real comparisons,
especially against platforms with active cooling.

1\. How does an A9x fare with long endurance workloads? Bursty benchmarks are
one thing, but what's performance like after 30 minutes of active use? None of
the A9x benchmarks do any kind of battery rundown throttle tests.

2\. How does A9x fare with large workloads? Loading up small streaming kernels
into the CPU is one thing, but what about workloads that lean more heavily on
the cache, memory architecture, and branch prediction units?

~~~
LASR
I've done benchmarks across mobile devices as my bread & butter job for
several years. All of the benchmarks in this review mean almost nothing. Even
the testing methodology is fundamentally flawed. I'll explain.

Javascript benchmarks are heavily dependent on the browser's javascript
engine(big surprise). With Apple's restriction on the ability to use a custom
Javascript engine on iOS - there really is no way to compare say for example:
Chrome on iOS vs Chrome on Android. They are running very different Javascript
engines. The hardware is not the only variable that is changing.

Running Octane/Kraken on Safari on the iPad vs Chrome on a Surface Pro - again
why even bother running this test?

Also, ever wonder why the companies making the browser have their own browser
benchmark suites? Google with Octane and Mozilla with Kraken, and Microsoft
with their Testdrive? Guess who is the winner in each of the benchmark suites.

It is not that these companies consciously cheat by building the browser and
the test to make it look good. The teams building the benchmarks and the teams
building the browser are not in collusion. It just happens that when you use a
single benchmark as the only metric to optimize for, you will eventually build
a product that is optimized for that metric. No cheating required, it just
looks that way.

Geekbench - I've seen refered to by my coworkers as "Jokebench". Not that the
benchmark itself is bad in some way - it is very useful in comparing one Apple
device generation to another - or one mac to another mac. But cross-platform,
cross-ISA, cross-OS? Joke. The authors of Geekbench know this fact, and yet
they market GeekBench as a "cross-platform" processor benchmark. And your
average tech product reviewer - who has never heard of the terms 'LINPACK' or
'SPECint' will have you believe it is a great benchmark - and loves basing
their product recommendations on these scores rather than the subjective
review of the experience of devices that they're paid to review.

Additionally, all mobile devices throttle quite heavily under sustained load.
2.26GHz processor? Yeah 10 minutes in with 100% CPU load, I will bet real
money that frequency drops below 1GHz. This is not a jab towards the A9 or
Apple specifically. Qualcomm's chips do the exact same thing. Intel's Core
does the same thing. Infact, they've put considerable marketing money behind
this feature - calling it "TurboBoost".

Anyone in the industry knows you absolutely have to measure performance in the
thermal steady state - fancy way of saying when the temperatures across the
device stay the same throughout the test. Try this right now. Download
Geekbench or Antutu on your phone. Run it once. Note the score. Run the same
test immediately again. What? The score is lower the second time? Did your
hardware just get worse all of a sudden? No. The device is warmed up. So it
has to throttle its frequency and power envelope to keep itself from burning
you. Now the problem is that the difference in scores between the cold state
and the warm state is quite dramatic. Which one do you use when you want to
compare it to the iPad? Was the measurement you just did a 'cold' one or a
'hot' one?

Our team has entire rigs built out specifically for keeping devices cool
during benchmarks. It's the only reliable way to ensure thermal throttling
doesn't fog up your benchmark results. The reviews you'll see on the internet
never use such rigs. So the results are mostly non-sense.

ARM vs x86 ISA? Entirely pointless discussion. It is like saying Germany has a
higher GDP than the UK because they speak German rather than English.

So what do you use for comparison? You need to base the benchmarks on real-
world tests. Who cares about kraken or octane? Fire up a 1000 page loads for
some common top sites on Safari, and calculate via image capture and analysis,
the time the device takes to render the page. The time it takes to render the
screen is one of the key psycho-visual cues to device performance. Which is
why iOS has been steadily decreasing their animation intervals every iOS
version - to make it feel faster even though, it might not actually be.

Another key metric is how long things take to copy/move/download/encode - the
wait interval. How fast does the device install apps? Typically, users get a
sense of device performance when they try to download an app. The user wants
to access the app he/she wants to access. All of the things your device must
do - download the app binary, authenticate your user with the app store,
install the downloaded bundle and then launch - all these things are crucial
indicators for device performance.

This article talks almost exclusively about benchmark performance. Not a
single sentence about how fast the iPad Pro actually feels in comparison to
the iPad Air or the Surface Pro. Very little words are devoted to talking
about the capabilities of the platform. The Surface Pro runs Windows desktop
and the Macbook runs Deskop OS X. Radically different capabilities on these
platforms. On a Macbook, I can SSH into a production server, reboot it, while
I write code in XCode. How does it compare with what I can do on an iPad or a
Surface? What is the point of this article even?

~~~
jgruber
OK, let me confirm: browsing the web on iPad Pro feels noticeably faster than
browsing the web on a MacBook (the new 2015 Core-M).

------
mark_l_watson
Good review. I especially appreciated the comments about app support for the
keyboard issues - although I expect most will get resolved in a few months.

I have an iPad mini 4 and I am surprised at how much I use it for work tasks.
I write a lot and having a text editor open for markdown manuscript files in
Dropbox with a generated PDF open for viewing (I use leanpub.com for writing)
is really convenient. Easy to edit markdown files and it just takes a second
to switch the latest PDF file. For situations when I am only adding a few
pages in a writing session, text input speed is not an issue.

In the same spirit, when I need to SSH to a server for something simple, it is
faster to use my iPad. I sometimes use the nitrous.io web IDE, but not often
on my iPad.

With a larger screen, multi Windows, and more processing power of an iPad Pro,
I think that it will make a fine partial laptop replacement. I will always,
probably, need a laptop for running IDEs like IntelliJ however.

My wife also has an iPad mini and we have talked about just traveling with a
mini, not a smartphone. Right now, my Note 4 does everything I need while
traveling (SSH shells, writing using leanpub, calls, and web access) but an
iPad with 4G might also be a replacement for a phone when traveling because I
always have a backpack with me.

I am very keen on the iPad model as being the most used device in the near
future. I think this is Apple's plan.

------
jbandela1
I think this is an Apple me too moment that does not have the right stuff to
succeed.

Apple decided they needed a tablet that was geared for production versus
consumption. Unfortunately, the OS X is not optimized for touch interaction,
so they are forced to go with iOS and ARM.

Microsoft on the other hand went through the pain with Windows 8 of actually
making their main OS touch friendly. They are now on their 4th generation of
tablets that actually run a real desktop OS on Intel x86 processors.

I think for the professional person that is wanting to work on a tablet,
Microsoft Surface Pro is going to be a much better choice. You will have a
real desktop operating system on x86 that actually runs the
productivity/design/development software that is actually out there.

It will be interesting to see how this develops.

~~~
nilkn
Even with Windows 10 and the latest Surface Pro 4, I don't think they're very
usable as actual tablets. Virtually every time I see a Surface Pro, either in
real life or even advertisements, it's being used as a laptop with the
kickstand and keyboard attachment. You almost never see anybody use it as a
tablet. This happens so much that it's actually hard to find a review of the
SP4 that even shows what it's like to use as a tablet.

So while Windows 10 supports touch interaction, it's honestly not that great
at it, and so far as I can tell nobody really uses it outside of content
consumption. But by taking this approach, Microsoft skipped the massive step
of needing to get new versions of all major software developed for a truly
touch-centric interface.

The SP4 is also not nearly as good as a family device. It's much harder to use
and is far more susceptible to user error.

Apple seems to be taking the opposite approach. They're taking a hit early on
by building up everything from scratch for a touch interface, but their bet is
that over the long-term the end result will be better.

I don't know which approach will pan out, of course. I suspect to begin with
the iPad Pro will simply serve a more affluent segment of exactly the same
demographic that the iPad has always served, but over time it might expand to
more professional users as its software develops and begins to rival desktop
software.

~~~
Someone1234
How often do you see people use a Surface in general? I see people using them
as OneNote scratch pads regularly: in business meetings, at conferences, and
for diagramming.

> So while Windows 10 supports touch interaction, it's honestly not that great
> at it, and so far as I can tell nobody really uses it outside of content
> consumption.

That's fine, that is what tablet mode is often for.

You have the kickstand/keyboard/touchpad for actual productivity. You have the
tablet for consumption, and you have the tablet + pen for productivity when
the activity allows it (e.g. drawing, hand-written notes, etc).

I haven't used a Surface Pro 4, but the Surface Pro 3 had issues: It was too
heavy, and the touchpad on the keyboard cover was frankly terrible (and per
this article nobody wants to sit there with their outstretched arm touching
the screen). We'll see if the SP4 solves any of the above.

> The SP4 is also not nearly as good as a family device. It's much harder to
> use and is far more susceptible to user error.

Absolutely. Which is why it was never targeted at that demographic. It is a
professional device, just like the iPad Pro.

------
xlayn
It has been some years since we got the first "iX will kill the pc" and we
know where the story goes. There are several things you have to keep in mind
when referring to ARM and how fast it's been evolving, PC and iX devices:

-Apple is pushing forward at an incredible pace, the new Ax cpus with the pciE based storage solutions are remarkable proofs of it.

-contrary to x86, ARM power is still increasing per release, some day it will hit Moore's law 2: more cores and not speed (MHz) irremediably, this is: it wasn't fast enough. _Moore 's law 2: a side effect of not being able to make cores faster thus taking the path of adding more cores with the well know issues of not being able to spread work across cores efficiently.

-x86 on the other side has been getting better at power usage, I can't do a forecast but I would suggest the race comes to if x86 can get power efficient enough or ARM can get fast enough_.

*as the review mention is already very fast, the question is what's the thermal envelope, how much time it can stay there and the ram in soc package.

-traditional x86 work vs ios ecosystem, another comment here states:"how much I use it for work tasks" referring to the ipad where those tasks are "text editor open for markdown manuscript files in Dropbox with a generated PDF open for viewing" vs what he states is pc work "I will always, probably, need a laptop for running IDEs like IntelliJ however" and again what he feels is the new ipad pro lacking "larger screen, multi Windows, and more processing power" this is: pc capabilities.

-user cliche? is always the argument about being laptop killer that you can write on it? "I write a lot" and from the article "I’ve written this entire review using it"? what does define the ability to be a pc killer? to browse the web?

-ecosystem, unless apple get macosx to run in arm it's a very fast iPhone.

~~~
mmastrac
The ecosystem is a killer. As a developer, it's missing everything I need to
be built-in on a device: a terminal, VMware, SSH, remote access to other
machines. Obviously I'm not the target market, but consider the same thing for
designers: where is Sketch for iOS? Where is the equivalent of desktop
Photoshop?

I still think that iX devices are create for consumption and very basic
creation, but anyone who is doing creation full-time isn't going to able to
switch for some time.

~~~
motdiem
Fwiw most of my iPad dev time I spend in a terminal (I use the one bundled in
coda) working on a remote machine. Being able to have a split screen between a
terminal and safari actually sounds like it could actually be enough for me
most of the time.

------
tdkl
Seems that "desktop class hardware" is needed nowadays to run iOS 9 blur
smoothly, which was fine in iOS 8 :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxtQ8IoiYa4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxtQ8IoiYa4)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agsN6Dxwk7g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agsN6Dxwk7g)

~~~
ics
I held off upgrading to iOS 8 for a long time out of fear that my iPhone 5
would slow to a halt; when it had to be replaced for an expanding battery I
got it back with the upgrade and was pleasantly surprised at how well it
performed. I took the jump with iOS 9 and now experience almost the same as in
your link. I rarely have more than 3 apps open at a time, no media (photos,
music, ...) stored, and all optional effects disabled. I wish they had some
internal incentive for keeping old stuff working like new; it used to be a
source of pride to own an Apple device that was several years old and still
looked and worked like a new product. The iPhone 5 and unibody MacBook Pro are
both examples of products that I've owned for years but continue to impress.

~~~
walterbell
We need a law mandating security updates which are decoupled from new
features. Alternately, an OS vendor who makes this a point of competitive
differentiation.

Unfortunately, MS is forcing new features alongside security fixes, and
Android devices have a poor track record of timely security updates. So we are
left with Apple, whose iOS9 effectively destroyed the performant usability of
older devices.

~~~
danudey
On the other hand, at least you can get those updates on your older iOS
devices. Most Android devices have never seen updates at all, and of the ones
who have, most of them will never see more than a few minor updates above what
they came with.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I'd rather have a machine that works but is no longer receiving updates than
one that is effectively bricked. At the very worst, if you're paranoid, you
can just use the device for non-critical tasks. That's better than not being
able to use it for anything, which is what happens to your iPad if you get
unlucky and upgrade it beyond the point of no return.

~~~
walterbell
iOS9 was a bait-and-switch because it was advertised as the release that would
(a) support older devices, (b) prioritize stability over features, and (c)
receive extensive public beta testing. Then iOS9 delivered ... _much worse_
performance regressions than iOS7->iOS8, regressions so bad that a new device
needed to be purchased.

------
ChuckMcM
That was an interesting read. So in full disclosure I've been an iPad user
since they came out (the company bought everyone an iPad in 2010 when we
launched the search engine, and I upgraded it to the Retina one when that came
out)

I was waiting until I could order and iPad Pro, then saw the video demo of the
Surface Book and ordered the core i7 one right away. It is entirely possible
the Microsoft took money off Apple's plate in my case (we'll know for sure
when I can actually get my hands on an iPad pro to play with). My Surface Book
arrived last week and I've been playing with it ever since.

To understand that my use case is replacing books and notebooks. I want to
have a library of books where ever I go, and the ability to sketch as well. In
1997 I saw a prototype 200 dpi OLED display at IBM's Almaden Research lab, I
ended up buying an Illiad 2 from iREX which was about 157 dpi and a watcom
stylus circuit for about $800. The plan being all docs and notes on docs and
sketches.

Between then and now I've going through several iterations each adding a bit
here or there, cursed the Plastic Logic folks for killing themselves by
reaching too far, and finally found the 10" iPad (retina) to have the screen,
and battery life characteristics I could live with but drawing really sucked.

When I saw the iPad Pro announcement I felt it was the closet thing yet to the
ideal paper notebook and infinite library replacement with a couple of
shortcomings (limited local storage, possibly limited drawing experience) and
then saw the Surface Book announcement which has a different set of short
comings (primarily cellular connectivity).

So while I vastly prefer IOS over Windows 10, I really need the ability to
access my library on my local network, or through SD cards. The drawing
experience on the Surface has been perfect, the display resolution also best
of class. The application selection less than stellar, and the lack of
cellular connectivity means I have to tether it to my phone when I'm out and
about.

So had iPad Pro come out last February I would already own one. Now I'm not so
sure.

The Surface is wicked fast, and yes 50% more expensive than an equivalently
equipped iPad Pro. From a fundamental engineering capability standpoint I
think it holds its own, from an apps standpoint I'm still evaluating various
drawing apps (wish I could find one that created the ruler tool when you put
down two fingers)

I really love the idea of having two compelling solutions available!

~~~
jacobolus
> _The drawing experience on the Surface has been perfect, the display
> resolution also best of class._

How’s the latency, precision, pressure sensitivity, palm rejection (especially
latency)?

Have you compared the generations of the Surface w/ Wacom vs. N-Trig tech?
Have you tried a recent Cintiq? If so, any thoughts?

I’d really love to see some reviews from artists comparing Cintiq vs. Surface
Pro 2 vs. Surface Pro 3 vs. iPad Pro for stylus use.

~~~
ChuckMcM
It has been especially good at palm rejection (I'm left handed). Latency and
precision were better than the Galaxy Note, and way better than the Retina
Ipad with the Jot pro stylus (one of the bluetooth assisted stylii) I played
with the Surface Pro 3 at a Microsoft store based on recommendations from
here, and my recollection was that the pen experience wasn't quite as good
(but it too was better than the iPad) at the time the SP3 did not have the
performance though and so larger drawings would start to bog down.

I too would love to see artists do some analysis of the available
technologies.

~~~
intended
Noah Bradley's review of the SB is up.

------
smcl
"The entire x86 computer architecture is living on borrowed time. It’s a dead
platform walking. The future belongs to ARM, and Apple’s A-series SoC’s are
leading the way."

That is an extremely bold claim. I'd love for it to be true though.

~~~
twblalock
It would not surprise me to see an Apple ARM chip in future Macs. The
improvement to battery life would be huge. As with the Intel transition, I bet
Apple already has OS X running on ARM chips.

The biggest problem would be to get third-party software developers to port to
ARM, especially the major ones like Adobe. Microsoft already does a lot of
work for ARM, so the barrier to getting Office running on OS X on ARM might be
pretty low.

~~~
bryanlarsen
The MacBook has a 4.5W processor. That's less power than a standard iPad's
processor, let alone the iPad Pro.

------
dhatch387
From the OP:

> The entire x86 computer architecture is living on borrowed time. It’s a dead
> platform walking. The future belongs to ARM, and Apple’s A-series SoC’s are
> leading the way.

> The A9X didn’t come out of nowhere. Watching Apple’s A-series chips gain on
> x86 over the past five years, we’ve all been speculating about whether Apple
> might someday start using ARM chips in MacBooks. As of now, it’s only a
> question of whether they want to.

The most interesting point of this review in my opinion. x86 is hampered by
backwards-compatibility. Could anyone comment on some of the more technical
CPU architecture reasons for this? Do A64 CPUs have potential to outpace
x86_64 processors in power consumption and performance simply because of the
architecture?

~~~
klausa
>Could anyone comment on some of the more technical CPU architecture reasons
for this?

>x86 is hampered by backwards-compatibility.

Those two sentences don't belong in a single comment.

~~~
spicyj
I assume the question was about _how_ backwards compatibility is holding x86
back and what features are problematic.

------
walterbell
The Logitech keyboard is available at Apple stores, offering real (19mm) keys,
backlighting and shortcuts for home/lock, spotlight search, brightness, volume
and music (reverse/play/pause/forward). A bit cheaper and heavier than Apple's
keyboard.

Walt Mossberg said, _" Of the three keyboards I used to write this column, I
found that the MacBook Pro was best, the Logitech Create second, and Apple's
iPad Pro Smart Keyboard dead last."_,
[http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/11/9711284/logitech-ipad-
pro...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/11/9711284/logitech-ipad-pro-keyboard-
case-announced)

~~~
motdiem
Also Logitech have Azerty and qwertz keyboard, whereas I think Apple only has
qwerty at the moment

------
Artistry121
If iPads are able to become the defacto portable work/personal device I wonder
how Apple forcing a 30% cut on every digital things sold through apps will
work.

Are there any people here who use an iPad regularly for work? Is it easy to
keep things organized without a file system?

------
hackuser
The question that most interests me is, how does it compare with Microsoft's
Surface Pro?

~~~
PeCaN
Seems to me more like a well-executed Surface RT than a Surface Pro.

------
vaishaksuresh
Over time, I've begun to take daringfireball reviews with a grain of salt.
Despite having bought into the apple ecosphere, I don't think iPad Pro or any
other product deserves as much appreciation as daringfireball reviews give.
Sure they are great pieces of technology, but the difference is not like it
was between a dumbphone and an iPhone. The reviews are much more fanboy like
than objective.

~~~
netnichols
Did you read it? A _large_ section of the review was complaining about bugs
and software shortcomings. That's not being a very good "fanboy".

~~~
vaishaksuresh
I was talking about the general articles/reviews from daringfireball. Not this
one is particular. I don't understand the need to give a build up that starts
from the dawn of civilization to talk about a tablet or a laptop.

~~~
jgruber
Which reviews of mine do you think this applies to?

------
RexRollman
"It brings me no joy to observe this, but the future of mass market portable
computing involves neither a mouse pointer nor an x86 processor."

Or freedom.

------
nextos
I think laptops are becoming irrelevant for many use cases. They are not
sufficiently powerful to do heavy data processing without running into thermal
issues, and they are less mobile than tablets equipped with external
keyboards. This is what Microsoft has realised about when they created the
Surface product line.

Workstations are surprisingly capable for the money. A big NVMe consumer-grade
SSD, some RAM and a good GPU can take you really far. 5 years ago I never
thought I would be able to run my stuff on a workstation instead of a big
server.

Tablets are very interesting, because they fill in the mobility use case much
better than laptops. They are way more ergonomic as long as you have an
external keyboard. The shame with the iPad Pro is not being able to run a full
OS. I'd love to run say Arch Linux ARM.

~~~
mreiland
It almost sounds like you're saying laptops may be on the decline, something
that many people claimed laptops were going to do to desktops.

~~~
BillinghamJ
Desktops did go on the decline. Certainly not eradicated, but the laptop is
now the default choice, and the correct choice for most people.

~~~
mreiland
desktops simply stopped being used in situations where laptops were the better
choice, but they were never in danger of ever being displaced by anything.

Most of those people who have laptops either have desktops at home or have a
docking station with a full blown monitor and keyboard at home.

There's a reason for that.

------
archagon
The iPad Pro mainly interests me for the stylus. I can't wait to read some
reviews by actual artists who've been using Wacom hardware for years. If the
Pencil is as precise and lag-free as early reviews indicate and it comes to
the Mini, it will be my first must-buy iPad in many years.

"The entire x86 computer architecture is living on borrowed time. It’s a dead
platform walking."

This kind of talk makes me sad, though. It almost seems like Apple bloggers
get excited at the prospect of an ARM future. All I see, though, is a future
where the walled garden has won out over open computing, and also a future
where several decades of x86 video game history have been dumped in the trash.
Not in any way acceptable to me.

~~~
intended
Reviews are out, but in general, if your work flow involves photoshop, you'd
be on the wacom/surface lines.

------
pedalpete
Can somebody explain the 'single-core' description in the tests? Doesn't the
number of cores need to be taken into account when considering the actual
performance?

This may be wrong, but the way I'm looking at it is like comparing the power
of a 4 cylinder car vs an 8 cylinder but measuring the power that comes only
out of one cylinder as your comparison measurement. It is possible that a
single cylinder from a 4-banger creates more power than a single cylinder from
an 8, but in the real world, that won't matter.

I'm guessing I'm wrong, but why?

~~~
jacobolus
Typically both single-core and multiple-core benchmarks are reported. Because
some workloads can be effectively multithreaded while others cannot, single-
core performance is often as useful a metric as multi-core performance.

------
walterbell
How can Apple source laptop-sized 4:3 screens for the iPad Pro, when every
laptop vendor has abandoned this high-productivity aspect ratio that offers
more vertical real estate for text?

~~~
wmf
Because Apple is ordering ~25M units of that display panel but PC vendors are
not.

Or because Apple gives customers what they need but PC vendors give customers
what they want.

~~~
walterbell
Laptop customers have begged for 4:3 screens, but were told that display
vendors had all switched to 16:9 because of movies. Yet Apple managed to
find/mandate production of 4:3 high-res screens.

------
motdiem
I really wish they'll upgrade keyboard navigation (whether scrolling or
selecting items, etc) - I've started relying on my iPad more and leaving my
computer at the office, and it's fine for most tasks with a keyboard except
when navigating in an app - having to touch the screen is just too slow. I
wonder how the option-tab combo works when multitasking with two apps on the
screen though

------
mixmastamyk
Hmm, no one seems to be talking about the use case I'm interested in with the
pro, namely watching Netflix/iTunes/VLC, which is currently ~90% of my iPad
use.

I use an ancient iPad 2 on a stand for this now, I'd like the pro for the
bigger, better screen, and speakers. Don't care about the rest, which has been
overkill for several generations. Wish there were a cheaper model. ;)

