
Apple has unveiled the new seventh-gen iPad - artsandsci
https://bgr.com/2019/09/10/ipad-2019-release-date-price-and-specs-10-2-inch-tablet-official/
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arielceja
Bummer that it's only compatible with the first-generation Apple Pencil and
not second-generation Pencil. What's their rationale?

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iaabtpbtpnn
The second-generation Pencil only charges by attaching magnetically to the
flat side of an iPad Pro. It has no ports or any way to plug it in to charge
otherwise. Only the iPad Pro has the physical design to accommodate it.

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the_watcher
Since when has ease of charging stopped Apple? I'd have expected it to only be
compatible with the second-gen Pencil, along with an announcement of an
optional Pencil charger.

NOTE: I'm 95% joking about this. It does seem like a missed opportunity for
them to sell a second gen Pencil charger if it's the only way to use it with a
non-iPad Pro though.

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liamcardenas
You’re totally right but the 2nd gen Apple Pencil can’t hold charge for very
long even when not being used — so that wouldn’t work.

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akerl_
I use an iPad Pro and pencil as my primary computing device, and my experience
is that I’ve forgotten the Apple Pencil has a battery at all. I’ve never had
it run out of charge or even come close.

I use it on-and-off all day, and when I’m not using it I either toss it on the
table or click it back onto the iPad, based on whichever motion is easier.
I’ve never thought “ugh, I need to click it back onto the iPad to recharge”.

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Dylan16807
There's no disagreement between your post and the one you're replying to. You
charge your pencil often, and you have never run out of battery. That says
nothing about whether you'd have lots of issue if you _couldn 't_ snap it to
the side to charge, and had to put intentional effort into charging it.

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rchaud
I hope they're retaining the 4:3 aspect ratio. Samsung IMO shot themselves in
the foot by switching back to 16:10 for their recent tablets after going with
4:3 for the Tab S3.

16:10 on portrait is far too tall and narrow to use comfortably, while in
landscape it's far too wide. 4:3 has a nice balance, and is shaped like a
piece of paper, which is extremely useful when reading PDFs. Websites also
render in their desktop view in portrait, whereas you get a weird semi-mobile
view in 16:10 on portrait due to the breakpoints that have been set on most
sites' CSS.

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Mindwipe
They will retain the current ratio, but both parties are in the wrong - 4:3
isn't the shape of a piece of paper, 1:√2 is.

The most mainstream tablet device to have had that ratio was Google's
discontinued Pixel C, which was a fantastic device to read on because of it
(granted, when the damned hardware worked).

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whereistimbo
Which paper size? Letter? A4?

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jsjohnst
A4, GP’s view of paper is only what’s native to GP apparently.

As already established by sibling comment to yours, 8.5 x 11 is very close to
4:3.

A4 is 297mm x 210mm which is very very close to √2.

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sjwright
A4 is the normal assumed standard office paper size for around 90% of the
people on earth. I tend to see something printed on US Letter around once or
twice a year and it's a weird novelty.

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bitcurious
I would wager most (>50%) of the people on Earth don’t have regular access to
a printer, nor regularly consume A4 printed goods. For them “paper size” would
be whatever is common in the notebooks/journals sold in their country.

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wtmt
Leaving the percentages aside, lots of people use photocopiers without owning
them. In countries like India, there are many photocopying shops that will
make copies of anything for a very small fee. People use them to make copies
of ID cards, certificates, bank statements and what not regularly. Anywhere
some kind of documentation proof is required, photocopies are usually involved
(electronic submission is still not as widespread).

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forgotmyhnacc
I have the iPad Air 2, released in 2014 and looks identical to the new iPad
released today. It has the latest OS updates and it's never had any
performance issues. Why would someone upgrade from this 5 year old device?

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Fnoord
To me the answer seemed obvious, and I wanted to reply "it isn't supported
anymore in iOS". To my surprise, this 5 year old tablet of yours is still
supported in iOS 12.4.1 [1], and it will also be supported in iPadOS 13 [2].

That's impressive. Which Android tablet from 2014 or 2015 is still supported
nowadays?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_Air_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_Air_2)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPadOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPadOS)

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willtim
Is there even an Android tablet market anymore? (Excluding Kindle Fire)

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iamnotacrook
Chromebooks. £500 for a 14" touchscreen Android/Linux/Chrome browser on x86
with a nice lit keyboard... You don't save much getting a decent-ish tablet
but without Linux/keyboard etc etc. Tablets - other than £150 or so ones you
can throw in a bag and take on holiday - don't really make any sense any more.

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sk5t
As owner of an i5 Pixelbook, I was really surprised at how hot and noisy the
thing became after 10 minutes playing Egg Inc. It's an interesting device
(with Crostini) but not a very good tablet.

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Marsymars
How did it get noisy without a fan?

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sk5t
Hmm! Maybe I am mistaken about the noise as I was pretty sleep-deprived at the
time. It sure did get hot, though. I'll attempt to re-enact.

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Marsymars
Oh, I believe that. My fanless MacBook gets unpleasantly hot enough during
gaming that I've never bothered attempting any games on my Pixelbook.

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nailer
Still waiting for xcode for iPad. If iPads are to be taken seriously as a
laptop replacement we have to be able to make software with them. I'm
confident Apple will eventually get there though.

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simonh
I don't think Apple seriously sees them as laptop replacements, not in the
complete sense. For some people yes, but not in general.

I think they'll get there with XCode or something like it eventually, but
there are already several dev environments for the iPad. They are primarily
aimed at people for whom code is a tool, who code to get their job done,
rather than people coding to produce apps for distribution, but they can do
that too.

Codea (Lua) is one, Pythonista and Pyto (Python) are two more. Once you
develop the app on the iPad, once it's ready for release you copy the code
into an XCode template and submit it to the App Store.

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theshrike79
iPads used to be just pure consumption devices (video, web, books). But now
they can actually be used for media production and writing.

The only thing still missing is software development, but that's a bit of a
special case anyway.

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simonh
Apple have never marketed the iPad in that way. Right from their very first
presentation introducing the device, they have promoted productivity and
creative apps for iPads. Pages, Numbers and Keynote were available from day 1
and Garageband came out a few months later. There were already art apps out
for the iPhone and iPad versions were available within weeks of launch.

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nailer
Yes they have. Apple constantly market the iPad pro as a laptop replacement.

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jve
I can't believe Apple made an dense and ugly slide like this:
[https://boygeniusreport.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/apple-
ip...](https://boygeniusreport.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/apple-
iphone-11-event-13.jpg?quality=98&strip=all&w=834)

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nolok
Personally I’ve never used an iPad (nothing against, just more of an android
guy) but I’m more surprised that split view, pop over, custom fonts, external
storage displayed in the storage viewer and all are apparent just new on it.
Phone I can understand but on tablet it seems late.

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Infernal
Based on using a 10.5" iPad Pro since 2017, I believe what this slide is
saying is that all of these things are new to the volume priced iPad, which
after all just got an upgrade to the 3 year old A10.

On my Pro, I've had most of the stuff on this slide from the beginning. Not
sure about custom fonts as I've never looked into it, and I think native
external storage support is new in the upcoming OS (though it was achievable
with third-party apps since iOS 11).

But yeah, bottom line of this slide is that these formerly pro-only features
are now in the $329 product.

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johnnycab
The 7th Gen is still lacking the quad speaker setup, ProMotion 120Hz refresh
rate, True Tone and does not feature a fully laminated screen. At least, it
has retained the 3.5mm audio jack. Although, the 10.5" (2017) iPad Pro will
remain the superior choice for those willing to hunt it down; the new entry
level model has a very attractive price tag.

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akmittal
It has the A10 bionic chip(which is 3 years old), Same as last yeras model. It
is very similar to iPad 6th gen. They should have atleat put A11.

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kalleboo
I would love to see the pricing of their chips to understand the upgrade
cycle. It looks like A10->A11 transitioned them from 16 to 10 nm, I wonder if
the newer process is still appreciably more expensive for them?

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ksec
1\. Yes.

2\. 10nm is a short term node, only as a stepping stone to 7nm.

3\. A-11 would move it too close to Pro.

Since they did not mention EUV in their A13 presentation, I am betting A13 is
actually a 7nm+ design. And all 7nm are long term node, iPad upgrade path
might look more like A10 >> A12 > A13 over the span of next 3 - 4 years.

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sschueller
USB-C or lightning?

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izacus
It's compatible with 1st Gen Apple Pencil which charges through Lightning...
so lightning I guess.

Disappointing though :/

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wang_li
There’s something completely whackadoo about charging an iPad and then
discharging the iPad in order to charge the pencil.

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kalleboo
It also comes with a female to male Lightning adapter so you can charge it off
a USB charger, charging it off the iPad is intented to be a "on-the-go" backup
solution, not the primary way you charge it.

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willtim
Am thinking about picking one of these up for my daughter, 32GB seems a bit
stingy though, will that be enough for apps and games?

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leetcrew
I would say it's pretty rare that younger people store media locally on their
devices these days. I personally would like to but my music collection is >125
GB of mostly mp3 v0 files so I don't bother.

currently I'm using 28 GB of storage on my pixel 2 (including os install). 32
GB would be a bit cramped, but probably sufficient for the next couple years
if she doesn't have tons of games installed.

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iamnotacrook
Hmmm... You say that but my music collection is 3+ tb of flacs so that's not
fitting on any sd card currently. I have a 64gb phone with a 200gig SD card in
and whenever I consider getting a larger one, or a phone with more storage I
realise that there's no point as I'm only thing to get another free percent of
music on there. Given that I routinely copy/listen/delete music to my phone
I'm not sure in practice there's a lot of difference between a 64/128gb phone
with an SD card slot and just a 32/64gb phone without it.

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jsjohnst
> You say that but my music collection is 3+ tb of flacs

Can the DAC on your Android actually benefit from the FLACs? Might make sense
to re-encode the library into a format better suited to the playback hardware
and leave the FLACs at home where the audio hardware benefits from it.

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willtim
At home I use a dragonfly red DAC paired with some open back sennheisers. But
even when I'm out and about I benefit from FLAC. I use some noise cancelling
Sony headphones which use the lossy LDAC codec over Bluetooth. My FLACs
sounded noticeable better over LDAC, I guess because the music is only
compressed once.

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leetcrew
this is actually a great point that didn't occur to me. when you play audio
over Bluetooth, you don't have much control over which codec gets used. if
there's a high probability that your music gets transcoded in flight, you
really don't want to start with a lossy source. lossy-lossy conversions are
one of the only ways to create encoding artifacts that the typical person will
actually notice.

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torgian
Meh?

I dont understand why there are incremental updates to these devices every
year. It doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Do it every two or three years
and it'll probably end up being better products anyway.

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theshrike79
Because they aren't targeting the people who upgrade every year. The current
iPads (and iPhones) are for the people with 4-5 year old devices.

For them it's not an "incremental upgrade", 4-5 yearly incremental upgrades
sums up to one big upgrade.

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airnomad
I still use first gen iPad for occasional Netflix and it's working just fine.
Hopefully Netflix won't drop the support for older clients like YouTube did.

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willio58
I don’t understand the large screen bezels on non-pro versions of the iPad in
late 2019. Once they release a cheap iPad without large bezels, I’ll get one.

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beaner
Don't bezels make it easier to hold without touching the screen?

Thin bezels on a tablet just seem uncomfortable.

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sambe
Yes; I find it strange they have gone down the thin bezels and non-curved edge
route with iPad. It seems much less ergonomic, and a big reason for me to hold
off upgrading.

I read into it that having _some_ specs for announcements has become more
important that the spec itself. I also note the increasing number of specs
that are announced in these events which were already in the previous
model(s).

