Apple Introduces Redesigned iPad Air With A14 Chip, All-Screen Design, TouchID and USB-C (macrumors.com) 64
Apple today introduced a redesigned iPad Air that looks more like an iPad Pro, as well as an updated 8th-generation, entry-level iPad. MacRumors reports on the new iPad Air: Apple today introduced a redesigned iPad Air with slimmer bezels, paving the way for an all-screen design similar to recent iPad Pro models. In addition, the new iPad Air is the first Apple device with Touch ID built into the power button. The new iPad Air is powered by the new 5nm-based, six-core A14 Bionic chip for up to 40 percent faster performance and up to 30 percent faster graphics than the previous-generation iPad Air.
The device features a fully laminated 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display with True Tone, P3 wide color support, and an anti-reflective coating. Following in the footsteps of the iPad Pro, the new iPad Air features a USB-C port instead of a Lightning connector. The device also features the same 12-megapixel rear camera used in the iPad Pro for higher-resolution photos and 4K video recording. The new iPad Air will be available starting in October on Apple.com and the Apple Store app in 30 countries and regions. Wi-Fi models will start at $599, while cellular models will start at $729, with 64GB and 256GB storage capacities available. There will be five colors to choose from, including silver, space gray, rose gold, green, and sky blue. 9to5Mac reports on the 8th-generation iPad: Apple today announced the 8th-generation iPad, featuring an A12 chip compared to the previous-generation's A10 processor. The design of the new entry-level iPad is largely the same as its predecessor. The jump from A10 to A12 means Apple's cheapest iPad will feature the Neural Engine for the first time. Apple says the A12 chip offers more than twice the performance of the top selling Windows laptop, 6x faster than the top-selling Android tablet and 6x faster than the best-selling Chromebook. The 8th-generation iPad keeps the same price as the 7th-gen: that's $329 for general sale and $299 for education.
The device features a fully laminated 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display with True Tone, P3 wide color support, and an anti-reflective coating. Following in the footsteps of the iPad Pro, the new iPad Air features a USB-C port instead of a Lightning connector. The device also features the same 12-megapixel rear camera used in the iPad Pro for higher-resolution photos and 4K video recording. The new iPad Air will be available starting in October on Apple.com and the Apple Store app in 30 countries and regions. Wi-Fi models will start at $599, while cellular models will start at $729, with 64GB and 256GB storage capacities available. There will be five colors to choose from, including silver, space gray, rose gold, green, and sky blue. 9to5Mac reports on the 8th-generation iPad: Apple today announced the 8th-generation iPad, featuring an A12 chip compared to the previous-generation's A10 processor. The design of the new entry-level iPad is largely the same as its predecessor. The jump from A10 to A12 means Apple's cheapest iPad will feature the Neural Engine for the first time. Apple says the A12 chip offers more than twice the performance of the top selling Windows laptop, 6x faster than the top-selling Android tablet and 6x faster than the best-selling Chromebook. The 8th-generation iPad keeps the same price as the 7th-gen: that's $329 for general sale and $299 for education.
Too bad it's not an *iPhone* with USB-C (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sticking with my 6s until I can get an iPhone that lets me use the same pair of wired headphones as my Mac and the same cord to charge them both, and lets me sync content to it at a usable speed.
I find it kind of irritating that the one Apple product I actually want to buy right now (and have been wanting to buy for about three years) STILL uses a dog-slow USB 2.0 interface with a nonstandard cable.
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Apple isn't bringing back the 3.5mm socket, so you'll never be able to use the same headphones with both wired. Mac with 3.5mm, iPhone with lightning. Even with USB-C, you'll still need a dongle to use 3.5mm headphones with the iPhone. Or even this iPad.
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I expect he was hoping to use wired USB-C headphones. However a 3.5mm socket would always be preferable.
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You have USB-C headphones? Not many of them in the wild. I understand why you want what you want, I'm the same at heart but I have embraced the lightning. I also have a pair of AirPods Pro which I find finicky to use and only 'meh' in the audio department - a tad lower quality that lighting-attached Apple EarPods. They are better to use with my Mac.
Good luck with holding on to your 6s - I updated from a 6 to an 11 when the 11 was released and it was well worth everything I paid in time, money and loss of 3.
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Yeah. They came with my Pixel 3 from work. But actually, I'll probably buy several cheap USB-C to 1/8" adapters. The key, though, is that I could leave the adapter on.
Yeah, I can't use wireless headphones because of latency. Even the current versions are an order of magnitude higher th
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However, Apple really needs to go all-in on USB-C. How confusing is it now that iPad Air has one adapte
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Lossy codecs are a problem, but not the problem. When I'm doing actual mixing, yeah, I care about that, but then again, I'm also typically using an external audio interface, not built-in audio; Bluetooth wouldn't even be within a hundred miles of being an option.
But, most of what I'm doing right now involves music notation. The sound is entirely synthesized; the quality is what it is. But an eighth of a second delay between when I click or key-press a note onto the staff and when I hear it would be enou
Re: Too bad it's not an *iPhone* with USB-C (Score:1)
You have USB-C headphones? Not many of them in the wild.
Yeah, they're rare for sure - they've just come with every Samsung, Google and other android flagship phone for the last few years, so probably only several hundred million of them around.
Re: Too bad it's not an *iPhone* with USB-C (Score:1)
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Why the limit? (Score:1)
I'm sticking with my 6s until I can get an iPhone that lets me use the same pair of wired headphones as my Mac
Why would you want to limit yourself like that?
I have portable headphones for my iPhone, and nicer ones for the desktop.
And that's with them all being wireless, even tough I could connect the same headphones to either...
You could get a USB to Lightning adaptor today that you could leave attached to the desktop and let you use the same wired headphones for both...
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Quite the opposite; it's liberating. I have a dozen sets of cheap wired earbuds in various places so that there's always one handy when I need it. And they're wired, which means I don't ever have to worry about keeping them charged. When I need a pair, I just reach over and grab one. The best headphones are the ones that are physically nearby.
You could get a USB to Lightning adaptor today that you could leave attached to the desktop and let you use the same wired headphones for both...
Desktop? People still use desktops?
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People still use headphones?
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Computer speakers are crap. Yes, we still use headphones.
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The better ones still start falling off rapidly below 200 Hz or so. You can't really get around physics.
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The satellites do, the subs take over from there and those typically start falling off at 40Hz, same as normal bigger speakers. And it's true that there's no getting around physics, just one woofer makes it even more critical to EQ the bass to get room modes under control and relatively pure tones like you might get when playing soft synths will easily overwhelm an on-paper powerful 2.1 set if all that power is concentrated around 200Hz, the weak point of the satellites. Still, if you want decent sound it's
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By computer speaker, I'm talking about the speakers built into a computer (e.g. laptops). But when you're talking about satellite speakers with subwoofers, that's a sound system, not a computer speaker, even by the broadest use of the term "computer speaker".
Re: Why the limit? (Score:2)
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It's about losing/forgetting adapters. When I managed a conference center, we specifically kept spare mini-Displayport to VGA (and later HDMI) adapters. For all the Macbook users who needed to hook up to a projector to make their presentation, but forgot to bring their adapter. Interoperability is just better when everyone is using the same same standard.
The f
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/It's about losing/forgetting adapters.
That's why I said, the adaptor stays on your desktop and the headphones plug directly into your phone.
Re: Why the limit? (Score:2)
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I'm sticking with my 6s until I can get an iPhone that lets me use the same pair of wired headphones as my Mac
I have heard that Google is going to introduce an Android phone that not only has a wired earbud port but lets you record data onto external vinyl disks.
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Just dump apple. Get a Pixel 4a. All yours for 350USD. Great camera, three years of OS and security updates, USB-c and headphone jack. Sideload apps and unlock the bootloader if you wish.
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iPhone 6+ here. Apple can't even do USB3? :(
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I was going to order the new Air but then I saw there was no headphone jack, so I ordered the basic iPad. I'm sure Apple won't miss the $300 less in revenue but there are consequences to removing things...
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Not yet, but eventually it should be possible [projectsandcastle.org]. :-D
Incremental (Score:2)
This was pretty incremental. No major battery life change, no advanced LIDAR. No 120 Hz display (apparently). Still has a bezel, no under-display selfie camera. Lame overall.
Re:Incremental (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, bezels are necessary on tablets because touching the bezels is how you hold them.
Under-display cameras are still only on the way to being introduced, and so far, no such display hides the camera entirely: there need to be gaps in the screen for the camera to see through, either by having lower pixel density or by having smaller pixels.
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But if you know that the touchscreen needs to ignore any presses at the edge there is no reason to use it as screen and just not put any touch points there. In practice manufacturers just filter out most touches in those areas unless they are part of a longer gesture like a swipe into the area away from the border.
"Twice the performance" (Score:1)
A14 performance (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, that statement is meaningless. But if you look at Geekbench numbers you see that the A12 in the previous iPad Air has a score of 1112. Add 40% and you have the new A14 scoring around 1557 (single core only). Now the fastest (single core) CPU benchmarked by Geekbench is the i9-10900K at 1416.
If Apple builds a die with sufficient cores then these numbers suggest that the A14 could be the fastest chip on the market. Once Intel gets their 7nm process going or AMD has their 5nm chips out then this could change. (FYI, Intel 7nm and TSMC 5nm both have the same transistor density.) But for the time being, Apple appears to have a great CPU.
I just wish Apple CPUs were sold to third parties so we could see ARM based, non-Apple devices capable of running Linux. Apple devices are not a good fit for everyone but their CPUs just might be. Can't wait to see what happens when their power budget increases to 65W.
Raspberry Pi are ARM and run Linux (Score:2)
I just wish Apple CPUs were sold to third parties so we could see ARM based, non-Apple devices capable of running Linux.
So something like the 4GB Raspberry Pi with a case for $60?
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Geekbench is not a good performance indicator. It consistently rates certain chips very highly, yet in real-world benchmarks using actual apps they fall some way behind.
The classic example is the A13 vs the Snapdragon 865. In Geekbench the A13 is faster, in real-world benchmarking like AnTuTu it's considerably slower. It's funny you should mention Intel because they are currently whining about Cinebench not being real-world enough, mostly because Ryzen is beating them in it. Sadly the number of real-world b
Re: A14 performance (Score:2)
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It will be interesting to see what their desktop ARM based systems are like. I think some people may be in for a shock.
Re:A14 performance (Score:4, Interesting)
I've tried to find out exactly what AnTuTu tests and how, but their page is pretty opaque on the matter (like, what's the UX score? I have no clue what they could objectively be measuring). But I think it's notable that they specifically mention that the results probably aren't comparable—Geekbench has tried to make a test that's comparable across platforms, which is why it's still used.
But even if we say that the results are comparable and AnTuTu is just covering it's ass, there are 2 things to note:
1. The fastest chip in the test is still an A12Z, and it's fastest by a wide margin. (ROG Phone 3: 615289, iPad Pro 12.9": 751593)—this is relevant because the A12Z has 8 cores, just like the Snapdragon 865, showing that the speed of the A-series chip scales with number of cores better than the Snapdragon does. The A12 is 2 years old at this point, and the 865+ is 10 months newer than the A13.
2. The A13 is being used in phones because of its considerably lower power draw. With 2 fewer cores and a lower clock, it fits Apple's design philosophy better; the battery in iPhones is always smaller than in comparable Android phones.
And as you point out, memory is a major factor; Apple phones ship with considerably less memory. For most things, this makes no difference at all because iOS generally needs less memory for its performance. But sometimes there's no substitute for keeping an entire webpage rendered and not having to re-render it because the browser was swapped out.
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You can't compare phones and tablets, they have very different power profiles. For example if you look at the demo units for the Snapdragon 865 that Qualcomm produced they perform significantly better than phones fitted with the same chip simply because they have more power and cooling available.
The efficiency of the A13 has nothing to do with battery life. Quad core chips can shut down the unused cores to basically zero power draw (single digit microamp levels). The difference is iOS and how aggressively i
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Geekbench is not a good performance indicator.
That is what people says about every benchmark. You might be correct but it does not matter. The reason why I quoted Geekbench benchmarks is because they at least attempt to be cross platform. Real-world benchmarks are always going to be dependent on the workload which will be different for different users. It is impossible to have an accurate master benchmark for all users.
It's funny you should mention Intel because they are currently whining about Cinebench not being real-world enough, mostly because Ryzen is beating them in it.
Well Intel does have a point. Most people are not running Cinebench all the time. Most people are not stressing all CPU cores
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Anyway, twice the performance of a slow dual core CPU isn't too shabby.
Can I play Fortnite on it? (Score:1)
Plenty of apps Apple makes no money from (Score:2)
It's hard to get excited about a device I can only install whatever makes Apple the most money on. Pass.
There are tons of free app. And many of them are key apps like the office productivity software from Apple, Microsoft and Google.
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And what if none of them does something that I need to do? What if it were technically possible for me to make such a program for an iDevice, except not in practice because of stupid Apple reasons?
How can one even defend such idiotic practices as the Apple ones is beyond me.
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And what if none of them does something that I need to do? What if it were technically possible for me to make such a program for an iDevice, except not in practice because of stupid Apple reasons? How can one even defend such idiotic practices as the Apple ones is beyond me.
Perhaps if you were better informed (see other poster, i.e. requisite membership and tools are free) you could imagine how such practices are defendable.
Sounds like an LG... (Score:2)
With the same UI that Grandma can no longer use (Score:2)
It's pretty sad that I can't configure the UI on my new IPad to turn off the newer UI features that need a manual to learn to use. Touch the screen the wrong way and you are off to la la land! I guess you can always just keep hitting the home button when you get into trouble, but that won't save you from Safari's "vanishing" tab syndrome, which only gestures can recover from.
Done With Apple (Score:2)
In general I kind of like them. But they are anger inducing at times, and it's getting more and more often.
The "this song can't be played" nonsense for music I've ripped from my collection of CDs. If I resync it a few times, if I clear the cache...
The Video app changing so I can't upload videos I've ripped from my DVDs and Bluray disks. I had to get a third party app just so I can watch my own moves.
The wonkiness of the iPad and iPhone when I plug in my charger (so you can't use it while it's charging).
The
TouchID instead of FaceID? (Score:2)
I wonder why the latest iteration of the product doesn't use FaceID. Starting at $599 it's not exactly a budget device. In the current climate of face coverings FaceID has become a whole lot less convenient, so maybe this is acknowledgment that TouchID is preferable in some contexts?
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Christmas villiage (Score:3)
Should be called iPad Pro SE (Score:2)