> 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?
x86 is hampered by backwards-compatibility. Could anyone comment on some of the more technical CPU architecture reasons for this?
The reasons are mostly (1) x86 has strong memory ordering which is slower than weak ordering and (2) x86 needs a "complex" decoder to parse all the prefixes and crack instructions into uops (but ARMv8 cores require two decoders and may crack shifts) and (3) x86 is so hairy that it requires a massive test suite and dozens of errata still slip through, but the overhead of these is really small compared to Intel's advantages in money, manpower, and accumulated expertise.
Do A64 CPUs have potential to outpace x86_64 processors in power consumption and performance simply because of the architecture?
IMO no. It's cheaper to reach parity (Apple's processor R&D is much lower than Intel's), but I don't see why they'd outpace.
ARM's 64 bit is pretty much always [1] dragging just as much legacy baggage as Intel's 64 bit. However, that's fairly irrelevant once you get everything decoded into micro-ops and sent into the pipeline. There, branch prediction, pipeline depth, number of pipelines, etc all matter a lot more than the opcodes the CPU sees.
Also, you have to keep in mind that Gruber's been banging the single core benchmark drum pretty heavily, and rather loudly ignoring that Apple's ARM chips are very inefficient in multiple core benchmarks. In Geekbench's tests, Intel chips scale at nearly 1:1 with additional cores [2], while dual core performance of the ipad is only 70% better [3]. So, any sort of operations where you're wanting multiple intensive threads going on, the A9X falls on its face. So when you start looking at the hardware in the light of a heavier workload, Apple's not gaining that much ground on Intel, who has a lot more experience going broad than Apple does.
[1] AArch32 is optional, but pretty much on every ARM chip for compatibility
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use the Prompt SSH/terminal and find it very useful. The custom virtual keyboard with large tab, etc. characters along the top helps a lot for Emacs, etc.
I think it is just a matter of taste what devices we choose to use and it is fantastic having so many competing devices. I am also enthusiastic about Microsoft's one OS on all platforms approach and I look forward to seeing where that leads.
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?
If anyone is cheating in "burst performance", that would be Intel with its "Turbo Boost" feature. Unfortunately, most benchmark only reveal the performance of Intel's chips with Turbo Boost, not without.
Allowing your computer to run faster within a given power/thermal envelope is hardly cheating. Everyone should be using turbo and Intel shouldn't be penalized if some others aren't smart enough to implement it.
The Ars review [0] did run the new iPad 10 + 30 minutes and compared it to a 6s iPhone, at least for heat overload. (It would be more interesting with a 6s Plus).
"... but it’s roughly on the same level as a Core i5 from 2013 or so and it’s well ahead of Core M. And despite the fact that it lacks a fan, the A9X shows little sign of throttling in the Geekbench thermal test, which bodes well for the iPad Pro’s ability to run professional-caliber apps for extended periods of time."
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 r...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My suspicion is that it has to do something with Metal being used instead of OpenGL for system apps in iOS 9 [1]. The result is severe framedrops when scrolling lists in apps and rendering overlays as on video.
The behaviour seen on linked videos have been the same since first Beta 1 in June 2015, but wasn't taken seriously in online discussions as "being a beta" and was thought it will be taken care of in the future.
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?
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.
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.
Keeping an eye on university campuses will probably help to determine whether laptops will go away or not. Workplaces move slow and tend to stick with whatever is currently working, but each freshman year at uni gives an opportunity to see where trends are going. Laptops have been pretty much a requirement for all incoming freshmen over the past 15 years, if more students are switching exclusively to tablets, that might reflect into the general population as well over time.
"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.
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.
I wouldn't put it past Apple to release a hybrid ARM/Intel system and figure out how to run the right binaries on the right processors. Much like the Rosetta environment, your system would get more and more performant the more of your software switched over, and for a lot of native Mac apps it would be a switch in Xcode and a recompile.
It would be a lot like the discrete GPU switching; running a program that needs more power, run it on the x86 processor; when it's not in use, put it to sleep.
That is an extremely bold claim. I'd love for it to be true though.
I'm interested to know why you think this – it's a common enough belief. What difference does the ISA make, practically speaking, to the utility or performance of a device?
"It’s a dead platform walking" sounds awfully like it's on the precipice ready to collapse in the coming years. I can see more ARM devices encroaching on x86 territory, but completely taking over seems a little far fetched.
The problem with this claim is that it only looks at a narrow range of technical merits. For example:
ARM is capable in the data centre but there's nothing that comes close to Intel's Xeons without having to build a cluster of independent machines. Sometimes it's nice to throw two 18 core processors into a motherboard along with 512 GB of RAM to do your data processing.
ARM is more than capable of running most desktop tasks that offices, call centres, etc. use; can you imagine an entire office of thousands of awful Dell boxes replaced with tiny AppleTV-sized, A9X-powered workstations? I sure can. But I can also imagine them being unable to run the apps the call centre uses, or run Quicken, or whatever the next app is that the corporation next decides it needs from some consultant.
The reason that ARM is being so successful lately is that it's being used to create new markets, and not to usurp old ones. There's no legacy holding it back, and there's no performance crown to compete against. There was no Intel smartphone processor to match for performance, and there was no existing smartphone software that had to run on our new devices unmodified. ARM is a great technology and Apple is using it to the fullest extent of its capability, but one of the biggest reasons it's succeeding is because there are no pre-existing demands holding it back.
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
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...
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.
> "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.
> 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.
What about display? I guess, Macbook Air has terrible TN matrix with bad view angles and iPad Pro has good IPS matrix. That's an important difference for many users.
It would be fascinating to see a MacBook powered by the A9X rather than Core-M.
Based on the benchmarks, point 2 would be solved.
Point 1 is an unknown but the iPad Pro battery is barely smaller than the MacBook's, it'll be interesting to compare battery life.
And I'm sure Apple would have more leeway on point 3--it's just a question of profit margins.
Wait a year or two? Maybe a little less? Not the A9X specifically, but I think it's pretty clear that Apple will be sticking its ARM processors into its laptops soon enough.
"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:
"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.
What if there's an upper limit in performance, where gains get smaller and smaller with each generation? What if Intel is already hitting that ceiling and ARM isn't? What if in the next few years this will help ARM catch-up with Intel, while still having its chips cost much less? That would be a problem for Intel, no?
Intel's competitor to Apple A9 is Atom. Core i7 is not a competitor. If the A9 is within 2x of the latest Core i7, then that's great for ARM/Apple, but the real point is the A9 is probably at least 50% faster than the latest Atom.
Intel's Atom has never really caught up with ARM chips despite its process advantage (even now, although much smaller than before, and Intel process generations are also growing further apart). It had a very brief moment in which Atom was more or less equal to the high-end chips in benchmarks - but only because Intel had a generation and a half process advantage at the time being on 22nm FinFET vs 28nm planar for the ARM chips.
Atom is so hopeless in mobile, that Intel has started licensing its design to Chinese chip makers - which will build it on 28nm planar for next year anyway, making it a very pointless exercise, indeed.
The only way it got some foothold in some mobile devices this year is because it baited and switched Asus with a heavily discounted high-end Atom that cost Asus as much as a mid-range Qualcomm chip (which I still think should be highly illegal and worthy of an anti-trust suit). I'm talking about the Zenfone 2 - and even then, the phone got popular mainly because it was the first with 4GB of RAM, and Intel Atom happened to be there for the ride.
If Intel didn't lie when it said it will stop subsidizing Atom in mobile, then that kind of tactic will end and Intel won't be able to trick any other OEM anymore. But I suspect it did lie, because at the same time it said that, it merged the mobile and PC chip groups together to hide the financials of the mobile group. It also started selling $150 Atom chips as "Pentiums", where they probably have a profit margin of 500%, and Intel will use that profit to once again subsidize its mobile chips to drive competition out of the mobile market (which again - should be very illegal).
The problem for Intel is that this will still be a very slow process, and by the time it gets a serious foothold in the mobile market, ARM chips will start to become a threat to it in the PC market.
> What if there's an upper limit in performance, where gains get smaller and smaller with each generation? What if Intel is already hitting that ceiling and ARM isn't? What if in the next few years this will help ARM catch-up with Intel, while still having its chips cost much less? That would be a problem for Intel, no?
There's no polite way to put this, but you don't know much about the problem domain so speculating like this is entirely a waste of time.
The problem isn't the fairly minute differences between ARM and x86, the problem is that your transistor budget (and thus power budget) is largely spent trying to keep alive the myth that there exists a single thread of execution and that one instruction executes until it's done and that's when the next one starts.
I say that there are minor differences between x86 and ARM because compared to something like the Mill or a grid processor out of UT Austin (your data pipeline was physically routed between functional units on the die by a reconfigurable fabric) the differences seem minor. They both have the same underlying microcodes, the x86 front-end is just more complicated in some ways and simpler in others.
You raise an interesting question. For the most part, CMOS scaling has dominated for the past 25 years or so--which has meant that investments related to carrying a specific volume design forward (e.g. x86) has dominated. Lower-volume and lower-capitalized designs just weren't able to ride the same curve. But in a world where CMOS process scaling doesn't dominate, it raised the possibility that more specialized designs may play a larger role.
I think Gruber demonstrates wisdom about Apple almost all of the time. The trouble is, he is SO biased, that he tends to really go overboard from time-to-time which diminishes my overall faith in what he has to say. It's like he literally will never acknowledge someone else might be able to do anything at all better than Apple.
When are you going to write us more amazing CPU explanations, Jon? :-) Thanks for all your great work over the years.
Gruber is clearly exaggerating a bit (x86 may not be on borrowed time, etc.), but there is something notable happening, which is that Apple’s (and everyone’s) ARM CPUs are getting fast enough to push into many applications where Intel previously had a big advantage.
Benchmarks aside, people can now edit video, render complex 3d scenes, analyze huge amounts of data, etc. on pocket computers with tiny power-efficient SOCs.
For consumer use, desktop workstations – and now even beefy laptops – are becoming a niche/specialist tool
Yes, even if the Apple ARM cpus are ready to displace Intel at the low end, no one besides Apple is going to be using them. So the issue is moot for the greater PC industry really.
Heh, I appreciate the encouragement :) However, good explanatory writing about tech is extremely difficult and time-intensive. If I were working full-time on writing about CPUs (or other tech) and trying to do the kind of stuff I used to do for Ars, I might be able to manage two articles a month... maybe realistically it might be like 1.5 articles a month. And that would be going at it full time.
I'm just not really sure that at this point in my life (I just turned 40), that I want to trade, say, three years of my 40's for about sixty or so CPU (or other tech) explainer articles. I dunno... I might... I'm not saying that I /don't/ want to do it. In fact, I think about it sometimes, because there's a whole lot to be said for doing something that you're really good it and that people appreciate, even if it's sort of niche and random like writing about CPUs. So maybe I could be talked into it. But I also think, maybe I'd rather try and write a zombie novel, or a graphic novel, or something else random. Who knows... First-world problems and all that...
I think the 'death of x86' issue is that currently, CPUs are 'fast enough' for most people; for that matter, they're faster than a lot of people need. Apple's iPad processors are fast enough for what most non-professionals need to do, and looking at these benchmarks I'm wondering how many e.g. students, even when they do need a laptop, even need one with as much power as the iPad Air line has right now.
Putting it another way: if Dell started offering ARM desktops with half the performance of the iPad Pro and the size and price of an AppleTV, AND they could run typical Office apps, would businesses (which were not bound by legacy software) start buying those instead?
I think the sense, in 2011, that ARM was the Intel-killing super robot from the future wasn't about ARM's ability to scale up, but about Intel's ability to scale down. Intel has held the performance crown for quite a while, but there's always seemed to be a minimum level of requirement involved; to buy a modern Intel system is to buy a system with a certain minimum power draw, weight, functionality, etc. ARM is appealing in the sense that it can start very small (see: RPi) and scale upwards from there (see: iPad Pro). Intel, is more than capable of reaching the high end, but the sentiment was always that they couldn't reach the low end, whether that was strictly true or not.
It's not a question of will x86 die; it won't, really. It's a question of does Intel bring something to the table with x86 that is necessary for the mass market? What's dying isn't Intel or x86, it's the assumption that we're stuck with Intel and x86 for doing any real work.
Edit: I sure hope I don't sound like an idiot in this post because I've been a big fan of your writing and insights so I'm hoping I'm not showing off how dumb I am.
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.
I think this is a really important point that is overlooked. Other solutions get what Intel offers, sure they can suggest but they can't tell Intel "Hey don't waste transistors on that feature, make the cache bigger." Or other things that Intel does to widen the appeal of its machines.
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.
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.
My take here is not about magic ARM dust. I do remember the magic RISC dust days -- and I, as a lover of the elegant -- was on the losing side of that one. I think the basic threat to Intel and x86 is this:
- Intel operates as a high-margin business. Their CPUs aren't $10 components, and they don't really have any serious competition. The whole point of the word "Wintel" was that all the value in a PC was going to Microsoft (for the OS) and Intel (for the CPU). These mobile ARM chips aren't like that at all. They're just another component in the device, like the camera and the display.
"And fourth, the broader scale advantage - the ARM/iOS/Android ecosystem is moving towards selling 10x more devices each year than the Wintel ecosystem. That's a similar disparity to that between PowerPC/Mac and Wintel 20 years ago."
I realize too that running a benchmark like GeekBench on iOS is not apples-to-apples running it on Mac OS X. But even if it's not the case that the iPad Pro is a faster computer than a MacBook, it's close. But I really do think it's faster -- it shows in browser-based benchmarks, which I think are a fair comparison even across iOS and OS X.
But in short: Intel doesn't want to (and possibly can't) compete on price, and they can't compete on scale. Neither of those things are magic.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s approach doesn’t come without tradeoffs, however. The OS itself may be touch friendly, but the overwhelming majority of third-party Windows applications are not, and I sincerely believe that unless Microsoft does something to change this fact, it will have immense ramifications for the proliferation of production-focused touch-based Windows devices. In short, Microsoft has nailed the creation of a touch OS built for productivity, but those developing for the platform have yet to follow their lead, and it’s unclear what would need to happen to make that change.
On the other hand, Apple already has an immense library of touch-first apps to draw from, meaning that all they have to do now is get the OS component right — something that’s entirely feasible since it’s under their direct control. Even if Apple decided to make future iPad Pro models run a touch-friendly OS X variant, they’d still be at an advantage here since iOS and OS X apps are extremely similar and easily ported back and forth.
Time and time again I see people make this point about a "real desktop operating system" like that actually means anything. What is more "real" about Windows 10 or OSX than iOS or Android? The former OSes expose more of the lower level internals such as access to the filesystem, but I'd take some convincing that not having that access would be a barrier to a video producer or a graphic artist or pretty much anyone other than a hardcore superuser or developer.
Right now, we have two highly contrasting approaches. Microsoft is championing one OS that attempts to do very different things on different hardware, alongside hardware that attempts to be relevant in many different contexts. And Apple is choosing to persist with two forks (I believe there is an amount of common code), each trying to do a smaller job, better. Plus hardware that is optimised for specific scenarios. I think the jury's still out on who's going to win this one; as a unix fan, though, I tend to favour the 'do less, better' approach.
I can't really disagree with your list, but I feel most of it demonstrates power user features rather than typical needs of a professional. I repeat my earlier point: I don't see much there that, for example, a graphic artist would demand. Very few people in the wider populace use multiple displays. Most people wouldn't know what boot control, background processes, or even filesystems are. Tab-order is screwed even on a 'real' OS like OSX.
My main gripe is this belief that the iPad is somehow less capable because it doesn't run a 'real' OS when, in fact, it is usable precisely because it runs an OS tailored towards its purpose as a device for consumption, primarily, but also for specialised professional niches that don't involve tinkering under the bonnet for the sake of it — not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
Apple decided they needed a tablet that was geared for production versus consumption.
And don't seem to have noticed that this is a requirement that will be all but impossible to satisfy no matter what they do. Almost everything that has made tablets successful in recent years has been because they were devices all about casual consumption and trivial interactions, from the good quality screens and tidy form factors, to the simple interfaces and useful but usually extremely simple and limited apps, via the similarly useful but extremely simple and limited models for installing new software, storing data, and communicating externally.
There is a way to convert from such a device to one more suitable for serious use but still very portable, and that is to add proper input devices, more flexible connectivity, and more powerful, more flexible, but inevitably also more complicated software. We call those alternative devices "laptops", and they are what the grown-ups use when they have real work to do. I'm genuinely not sure, based purely on the content of this article, whether Gruber actually understands the difference, but I'm fairly sure the people making purchasing decisions for hundred-person departments do.
I think for the professional person that is wanting to work on a tablet
I suspect I've never met that person. Certainly in my entire professional career I have never seen anyone using an iPad at work for the kind of task you would use a general purpose computer for, not even once. Handy touchscreen control panel? Sure. Quick reporting from staff in the field? Maybe. Serious logistics, marketing, accounts, R&D, customer support...? Never.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] thread> 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?
>x86 is hampered by backwards-compatibility.
Those two sentences don't belong in a single comment.
The reasons are mostly (1) x86 has strong memory ordering which is slower than weak ordering and (2) x86 needs a "complex" decoder to parse all the prefixes and crack instructions into uops (but ARMv8 cores require two decoders and may crack shifts) and (3) x86 is so hairy that it requires a massive test suite and dozens of errata still slip through, but the overhead of these is really small compared to Intel's advantages in money, manpower, and accumulated expertise.
Do A64 CPUs have potential to outpace x86_64 processors in power consumption and performance simply because of the architecture?
IMO no. It's cheaper to reach parity (Apple's processor R&D is much lower than Intel's), but I don't see why they'd outpace.
Also, you have to keep in mind that Gruber's been banging the single core benchmark drum pretty heavily, and rather loudly ignoring that Apple's ARM chips are very inefficient in multiple core benchmarks. In Geekbench's tests, Intel chips scale at nearly 1:1 with additional cores [2], while dual core performance of the ipad is only 70% better [3]. So, any sort of operations where you're wanting multiple intensive threads going on, the A9X falls on its face. So when you start looking at the hardware in the light of a heavier workload, Apple's not gaining that much ground on Intel, who has a lot more experience going broad than Apple does.
[1] AArch32 is optional, but pretty much on every ARM chip for compatibility
[2] http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?q=6600u
[3] http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?q=iPad6%2C8...
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.
-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.
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.
I think it is just a matter of taste what devices we choose to use and it is fantastic having so many competing devices. I am also enthusiastic about Microsoft's one OS on all platforms approach and I look forward to seeing where that leads.
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?
[0] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/11/ipad-pro-review-mac-lik...
"... but it’s roughly on the same level as a Core i5 from 2013 or so and it’s well ahead of Core M. And despite the fact that it lacks a fan, the A9X shows little sign of throttling in the Geekbench thermal test, which bodes well for the iPad Pro’s ability to run professional-caliber apps for extended periods of time."
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 r...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxtQ8IoiYa4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agsN6Dxwk7g
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.
[1] http://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/
The behaviour seen on linked videos have been the same since first Beta 1 in June 2015, but wasn't taken seriously in online discussions as "being a beta" and was thought it will be taken care of in the future.
Are there any people here who use an iPad regularly for work? Is it easy to keep things organized without a file system?
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.
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.
That is an extremely bold claim. I'd love for it to be true though.
You'll notice that this particular journalist is seen as very polarizing (you love him, or you hate him).
That's shows he's doing his job well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V
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.
It would be a lot like the discrete GPU switching; running a program that needs more power, run it on the x86 processor; when it's not in use, put it to sleep.
I'm interested to know why you think this – it's a common enough belief. What difference does the ISA make, practically speaking, to the utility or performance of a device?
ARM is capable in the data centre but there's nothing that comes close to Intel's Xeons without having to build a cluster of independent machines. Sometimes it's nice to throw two 18 core processors into a motherboard along with 512 GB of RAM to do your data processing.
ARM is more than capable of running most desktop tasks that offices, call centres, etc. use; can you imagine an entire office of thousands of awful Dell boxes replaced with tiny AppleTV-sized, A9X-powered workstations? I sure can. But I can also imagine them being unable to run the apps the call centre uses, or run Quicken, or whatever the next app is that the corporation next decides it needs from some consultant.
The reason that ARM is being so successful lately is that it's being used to create new markets, and not to usurp old ones. There's no legacy holding it back, and there's no performance crown to compete against. There was no Intel smartphone processor to match for performance, and there was no existing smartphone software that had to run on our new devices unmodified. ARM is a great technology and Apple is using it to the fullest extent of its capability, but one of the biggest reasons it's succeeding is because there are no pre-existing demands holding it back.
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...
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.
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.
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.
HS and college kids who don't need a gaming station and stream everything. If mom & dad can't afford it, the grandparents can.
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...
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.
Intel's competitor to Apple A9 is Atom. Core i7 is not a competitor. If the A9 is within 2x of the latest Core i7, then that's great for ARM/Apple, but the real point is the A9 is probably at least 50% faster than the latest Atom.
Intel's Atom has never really caught up with ARM chips despite its process advantage (even now, although much smaller than before, and Intel process generations are also growing further apart). It had a very brief moment in which Atom was more or less equal to the high-end chips in benchmarks - but only because Intel had a generation and a half process advantage at the time being on 22nm FinFET vs 28nm planar for the ARM chips.
Atom is so hopeless in mobile, that Intel has started licensing its design to Chinese chip makers - which will build it on 28nm planar for next year anyway, making it a very pointless exercise, indeed.
The only way it got some foothold in some mobile devices this year is because it baited and switched Asus with a heavily discounted high-end Atom that cost Asus as much as a mid-range Qualcomm chip (which I still think should be highly illegal and worthy of an anti-trust suit). I'm talking about the Zenfone 2 - and even then, the phone got popular mainly because it was the first with 4GB of RAM, and Intel Atom happened to be there for the ride.
If Intel didn't lie when it said it will stop subsidizing Atom in mobile, then that kind of tactic will end and Intel won't be able to trick any other OEM anymore. But I suspect it did lie, because at the same time it said that, it merged the mobile and PC chip groups together to hide the financials of the mobile group. It also started selling $150 Atom chips as "Pentiums", where they probably have a profit margin of 500%, and Intel will use that profit to once again subsidize its mobile chips to drive competition out of the mobile market (which again - should be very illegal).
The problem for Intel is that this will still be a very slow process, and by the time it gets a serious foothold in the mobile market, ARM chips will start to become a threat to it in the PC market.
There's no polite way to put this, but you don't know much about the problem domain so speculating like this is entirely a waste of time.
The problem isn't the fairly minute differences between ARM and x86, the problem is that your transistor budget (and thus power budget) is largely spent trying to keep alive the myth that there exists a single thread of execution and that one instruction executes until it's done and that's when the next one starts.
I say that there are minor differences between x86 and ARM because compared to something like the Mill or a grid processor out of UT Austin (your data pipeline was physically routed between functional units on the die by a reconfigurable fabric) the differences seem minor. They both have the same underlying microcodes, the x86 front-end is just more complicated in some ways and simpler in others.
Gruber is an unpaid Apple PR flack.
Gruber is clearly exaggerating a bit (x86 may not be on borrowed time, etc.), but there is something notable happening, which is that Apple’s (and everyone’s) ARM CPUs are getting fast enough to push into many applications where Intel previously had a big advantage.
Benchmarks aside, people can now edit video, render complex 3d scenes, analyze huge amounts of data, etc. on pocket computers with tiny power-efficient SOCs.
For consumer use, desktop workstations – and now even beefy laptops – are becoming a niche/specialist tool
Yes, even if the Apple ARM cpus are ready to displace Intel at the low end, no one besides Apple is going to be using them. So the issue is moot for the greater PC industry really.
I'm just not really sure that at this point in my life (I just turned 40), that I want to trade, say, three years of my 40's for about sixty or so CPU (or other tech) explainer articles. I dunno... I might... I'm not saying that I /don't/ want to do it. In fact, I think about it sometimes, because there's a whole lot to be said for doing something that you're really good it and that people appreciate, even if it's sort of niche and random like writing about CPUs. So maybe I could be talked into it. But I also think, maybe I'd rather try and write a zombie novel, or a graphic novel, or something else random. Who knows... First-world problems and all that...
Putting it another way: if Dell started offering ARM desktops with half the performance of the iPad Pro and the size and price of an AppleTV, AND they could run typical Office apps, would businesses (which were not bound by legacy software) start buying those instead?
I think the sense, in 2011, that ARM was the Intel-killing super robot from the future wasn't about ARM's ability to scale up, but about Intel's ability to scale down. Intel has held the performance crown for quite a while, but there's always seemed to be a minimum level of requirement involved; to buy a modern Intel system is to buy a system with a certain minimum power draw, weight, functionality, etc. ARM is appealing in the sense that it can start very small (see: RPi) and scale upwards from there (see: iPad Pro). Intel, is more than capable of reaching the high end, but the sentiment was always that they couldn't reach the low end, whether that was strictly true or not.
It's not a question of will x86 die; it won't, really. It's a question of does Intel bring something to the table with x86 that is necessary for the mass market? What's dying isn't Intel or x86, it's the assumption that we're stuck with Intel and x86 for doing any real work.
Edit: I sure hope I don't sound like an idiot in this post because I've been a big fan of your writing and insights so I'm hoping I'm not showing off how dumb I am.
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.
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...
Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9331/intel-announces-thunderbo...
- Intel operates as a high-margin business. Their CPUs aren't $10 components, and they don't really have any serious competition. The whole point of the word "Wintel" was that all the value in a PC was going to Microsoft (for the OS) and Intel (for the CPU). These mobile ARM chips aren't like that at all. They're just another component in the device, like the camera and the display.
- Scale. Ben Evans makes the case well here: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosyste... . He writes:
"And fourth, the broader scale advantage - the ARM/iOS/Android ecosystem is moving towards selling 10x more devices each year than the Wintel ecosystem. That's a similar disparity to that between PowerPC/Mac and Wintel 20 years ago."
I realize too that running a benchmark like GeekBench on iOS is not apples-to-apples running it on Mac OS X. But even if it's not the case that the iPad Pro is a faster computer than a MacBook, it's close. But I really do think it's faster -- it shows in browser-based benchmarks, which I think are a fair comparison even across iOS and OS X.
But in short: Intel doesn't want to (and possibly can't) compete on price, and they can't compete on scale. Neither of those things are magic.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
On the other hand, Apple already has an immense library of touch-first apps to draw from, meaning that all they have to do now is get the OS component right — something that’s entirely feasible since it’s under their direct control. Even if Apple decided to make future iPad Pro models run a touch-friendly OS X variant, they’d still be at an advantage here since iOS and OS X apps are extremely similar and easily ported back and forth.
Right now, we have two highly contrasting approaches. Microsoft is championing one OS that attempts to do very different things on different hardware, alongside hardware that attempts to be relevant in many different contexts. And Apple is choosing to persist with two forks (I believe there is an amount of common code), each trying to do a smaller job, better. Plus hardware that is optimised for specific scenarios. I think the jury's still out on who's going to win this one; as a unix fan, though, I tend to favour the 'do less, better' approach.
Mouse support
File system access with permissions / access control
Boot control
Background non gui processes
Custom Drivers
Ability to change OS behavior given enough permissions
Multiple display support
Default tab-order behavior for the input boxes, and tons of other input box behaviors
Apps that can be resized and can set their own size.
Ability to mount drives, including remote SSH.
My main gripe is this belief that the iPad is somehow less capable because it doesn't run a 'real' OS when, in fact, it is usable precisely because it runs an OS tailored towards its purpose as a device for consumption, primarily, but also for specialised professional niches that don't involve tinkering under the bonnet for the sake of it — not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
And don't seem to have noticed that this is a requirement that will be all but impossible to satisfy no matter what they do. Almost everything that has made tablets successful in recent years has been because they were devices all about casual consumption and trivial interactions, from the good quality screens and tidy form factors, to the simple interfaces and useful but usually extremely simple and limited apps, via the similarly useful but extremely simple and limited models for installing new software, storing data, and communicating externally.
There is a way to convert from such a device to one more suitable for serious use but still very portable, and that is to add proper input devices, more flexible connectivity, and more powerful, more flexible, but inevitably also more complicated software. We call those alternative devices "laptops", and they are what the grown-ups use when they have real work to do. I'm genuinely not sure, based purely on the content of this article, whether Gruber actually understands the difference, but I'm fairly sure the people making purchasing decisions for hundred-person departments do.
I think for the professional person that is wanting to work on a tablet
I suspect I've never met that person. Certainly in my entire professional career I have never seen anyone using an iPad at work for the kind of task you would use a general purpose computer for, not even once. Handy touchscreen control panel? Sure. Quick reporting from staff in the field? Maybe. Serious logistics, marketing, accounts, R&D, customer support...? Never.
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.
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.
I consider that slightly different from "I can't do task x on my iPad because it isn't powerful enough".
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.
Or because Apple gives customers what they need but PC vendors give customers what they want.
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!
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.
I too would love to see artists do some analysis of the available technologies.
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. ;)
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?
Or freedom.