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- cross-posted to:
- apple
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
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I have an m2 iPad pro. The last thing it needs is more processing power, what it needs is better software to make use of the power that it has. I’d love to run full OS X on it considering I paid more than some MacBooks.
Same thing with my 2018 iPad Pro honestly. More ram and a better display? Maybe, but other than that it’s completely software limited
As a developer, I find it pretty frustrating having to deal with constant hardware updates. By the time you get something released that takes advantage of the hardware you have, you’re already at least a generation or two behind.
I feel the same way. I feel like we used to buy things and hold onto them for a while, nowadays, everything seems to be designed to have a single year lifecycle. I like AirPods but now that their battery died and I can’t replace them, I’m looking at going back to the cord. But now of course we’re in dongle hell since there’s only one port…
Check out the Fairbuds from Fairphone.
Great repairability. Shit sound quality
Hell, I have an A12Z-based one and I don’t think I’ve ever maxed out the processor outside of playing games. Occasionally moonlight will drop frames and I’ll have to close some background apps or reboot for it to stream perfectly, but I’m also running it with 2388x1668@120hz 150mbps HEVC so I can kind of forgive that. It says quite a lot that my most common use for the thing these days is a very expensive (and very good) wireless monitor.
I was so excited when they announced Logic Pro, and equally as disappointed when it turned out to be Garageband+
I love how microchips look like really well-organized Factorio maps
That’s because that’s exactly what they are.
It’s all
ones and zeroesfactorio once you get to the bottom.
My CPU needs more iron
All must be fed to the god factory!
You’ll be surprised once you’ll see what living beings is consist of on micro and nano level
That M4 and OLED screen is gonna display the SHIT out of some sheet music for me.
I get the sarcasm, but isn’t that exactly what E-Paper tablets are really good at?
isn’t that exactly what E-Paper tablets are really good at?
I would love to use an e-Ink screen, because they play much better with stage lighting.
However, I’ve yet to see one that can do what I want the iPad to do, sheet-music-wise. I don’t only want to see it, I want to be able to make markings, scan scores, act as a pitch pipe and metronome, have an onscreen keyboard to plunk out the part I’m singing if I’m struggling to read it, etc.
Edit: Realistically, I could use my phone for the scanning, pitch, metronome, and keyboard. But I want to be able to quickly make markings and the iPad shines at this, especially with the app forScore.
(That also isn’t the only thing I use my iPad for, just the main excuse I have for owning one. I actually probably will buy the M4 Pro, but mainly because I already have a buyer for my current iPad and because it’s so much lighter.)
There are absolutely devices that can do this already.
We even have Android eink phones now.
Can you recommend some? I’m intrigued!
reMarkable 2
Kindle Scribe
Supernote A6X (Android)
Onyx Boox Note Air 3 (Android)
Onyx Boox Tab Ultra (Android)
Kobo Elipsa
Lenovo Smart Paper (Android)
Bigme (Android)
Huawei MatePad Paper (Android)
Thanks! I remember I didn’t like the Kindle Scribe (though I don’t really remember why). I’ll have to look through the others.
The BOOX Tab Ultra C Pro is probably closest to what you’re looking for. It’s basically a full fledged Android Tablet, just with an eInk screen. It even has a camera you can use for document scanning and such, and a pressure sensitive stylus powered by WACOM tech. Of course, this hinges on if you can find the apps you need on Android. I love Android, but Apple definitely has a leg up when it comes to proprietary productivity and creative apps.
I personally have a BOOX Nova Air C which is a 7.8in model from a couple years ago, which has a color eInk screen, Bluetooth, Mic, Speakers, Stylus, Android 11, and the full Google Play Store. I personally use it mostly for reading, but the stylus works really well for taking notes, and I’ve even played games on it (GameBoy Tetris for the win).
We even have Android eink phones now.
Sure, but I don’t really want to read sheet music off a phone. I need to be able to see the score and the conductor AND look like everyone else in the chorus, so I have to be able to hold it a good distance from my face.
Edit: Same reason I never bothered to try using my Kindle. 😂
the M1 is still overkill for 99% of ends user tasks.
The primary benefit for the average consumer tends to be longer battery life due to the same task using less power, in theory anyway.
Sure but I already charge my iPad about once a week and it’s never flat - 13 hours for video playback if you watch one or two TV episodes a day goes a long way.
I guess they could add a smaller battery, but I don’t think that would reduce the weight by much — it’s pretty small.
What iPads really need is better software. Safari, for example, is vastly inferior to the Mac version. And don’t even get me started with how window management works on an iPad. It’s total garbage.
Maybe with better software, I’d use it for something more computationally demanding than watching TV.
Sure, if you use it for an hour a day, you’re not gonna notice it much. And I’m not disagreeing that a lot of the software sorely needs to be improved. The people who are going to notice aren’t you. They’re the ones using their devices all day for work or similar.
They’re the ones using their devices all day for work or similar.
I spend about 10 hours a day doing “real work” - writing software - on a desktop Mac with an M1 chip. It’s way faster than I need. Having even more power than that in an iPad? Overkill is an understatement.
I get why they’re using an M4 — supply chain / economy of scale works better if you have most of your hardware on the latest chipset and also the M1 is missing some important features. Also the M2 was basically an M1 and the M3 used a particularly expensive manufacturing process that was only really sensible for high margin products like the MacBook Pro… so that leaves M4 as the best choice. But for me the marketing is missing the mark by focusing so much on CPU performance. Just say “it’s really fast” and move on to other things, leave the exact details for the spec sheet.
Well that was apple’s exact argument when they would not release phone cpu specs back in the day. “It’s not relevant” they would say, as the whole experience is faster. It’s really just whatever suites their marketing people. Slowed down your phones, oh, we got caught. But, it’s a FEATURE, and so we don’t get dragged through lawsuites, we’re adding it as an OPTION. Look, the M4 looks great. But any spin they put on anything, I just take it with a grain of salt.
Yes. And instead of taking advantage of that they shrunk the battery to have thinner tablet instead of better battery life.
The 13” version actually has a larger battery than its predecessor.
The primary benefit is they can now include RAM and GPU on die to increase the SKU cost for consumers.
More powerful hardware makes tasks that were previously not considered end-user tasks feasible for end-users, just give it some time.
Agreed! My trusty little M1 air has been my absolute favorite computer I’ve ever owned. It’s just so darned capable and entirely silent. It does everything I need it to do and then some. I’ll upgrade sometime, but for now long live the wedge!
Ah again. One more moving target to chase for the nice AsahiLinux project.
That just means asahi linux not gonna die and will be really long lived project because it have a clear purpose, well, it is if we try to have positive outlook on situation
It isn’t all that different than the M3
I love it on my M2 Mac mini. Useless with macos because it needs more than 8gb of ram just to start without loading anything but Asahi turns it into a fantastic ARM server. I just wish GPU team had more resources to finish the driver. M2 is absolute shit at transcoding on CPU. I mean it’s also terrible on GPU, but I can’t complain considering how little power it consumes.
AsahiLina was at it yesterday, ultimately chasing Vulkan compatibility:
I know, but I don’t care about GUI or gaming. I just need transcoding.
I guess they did a poll and most people want kde on these to replace their desktops so my use case is low priority. That’s why I wish Lina and her team had more resources.
You’re not wrong. That’s why I kept a small macos partition to do the hard crunch when needed, like rendering in kdenlive. Everything else I can just do on Asahi, including Ardour multitrack exports.
The iPad Pro screen looks pretty good, but don’t need all that processing power to just watch videos and browse websites.
Was really hoping they would upgrade the iPad Mini.
ipad pro is specifically marketed for artists and their software actually needs power and speed. Having OLED on mini would be great. It’s one of my most beloved devices.
It’s a really good point though, it is a bit of an odd device with all that power and the significant limitations in software. Yeah it’s marked at artists, but if you’re talking about drawing with pen input, it’s actually pretty overpowered. There’s Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro but they benefit a lot less from a touch screen, and there’s a bunch of workflow issues due to iOS’ lack of a file system.
I really wish Apple would add some kind of “windowed mode” like Samsung Dex or the Surface Tablets. A $2.5k super high-powered device that can’t even open two Excel sheets side by side is quite strange.
There’s procreate which introduced advanced animation and effects thanks to the new chip. I also know people use it heavily for 3D modeling. “Drawing with pen input” is the use case for the rest of the line up, Pro is specifically for computation heavy professions.
ipads have side by side window view and float over view, of course it should be much better but viewing two apps or tabs side by side hasn’t been an issue for me. Maybe excel just doesn’t support opening a second window or a separate tab.
Yeah for sure everything you say makes sense, but at the same time there is a definite lack of software that makes use of all that power for a broader range of professionals.
Personally, I’d love to replace my aging MacBook with a small and light iPad Pro that I can also use for convenient note taking on the go, but the problem is a complete lack of a (viable) software development stack, and that’s despite IDEs like VSCode being web-based and with that theoretically capable of running on iOS. I know some of my friends are in the same situation; one of them relies on Blender, the other on Ableton.
The inability of running two instances of Word / Excel etc. may very well be Microsoft’s fault, but that doesn’t change the fact that as a user you can’t do it.
In theory I guess a Surface is exactly what I’m looking for, but switching to Windows would be a bit of a hard pill to swallow. Which is why I’m left wishing that Apple would offer some kind of hybrid tablet / laptop device like the Surface, capable of running full desktop apps and full desktop-style multitasking. I understand that that’s “not the vision” or whatever, but it creates an awkward situation where the hardware of this lineup is more than adequate but the viability of the device as a whole is limited by software.
yes I completely agree, especially on the development part - doing masters now and basically have to choose if I want to take notes or be able to code, and it’s annoying. The funny thing is I have both macbook and ipad, but I don’t want to carry both because I’m weak af.
It’s just wild that there are literal billions being poured into monkey parrot gpts while we can’t have the simplest issues resolved.
Sounds like they are using it to reduce the size of the battery.
Will the M4 be used in new MacBook Airs, or is that a completely separate SoC? I’m not familiar with Apple’s hardware anymore.
One BILLION dollars for 32 gigs of ram.
Prices have dropped then!
I still can’t run basic ml stuff. I can’t play the vast majority of video games. I have to put up with the same sentiment that Microsoft brings to their products, that you are just renting your computer from Apple. The hardware looks bad ass. Too bad its apple.
looking forward to linux being able to run hard and solid on them
and I do.
I wouldn’t use asahi Linux on a Mac but it would be amazing on a iPad.
Going from 1 TB to 2 TB SSD on this iPad is somehow $400? That is a clown price but it is a 50% discount on going from 512 GB to 1 TB. What the actual fuck?
Going from 512GB to 1TB is also going from 8GB to 16GB RAM.
8GB should like be illegal, lol. Wonder if you can upgrade it (or is it soldered) or if it’s just for the landfill.
All of Apple’s M series chips have the ram right on the same package as the rest of the SoC. Not upgradeable, but also much faster than traditional off-package memory.
Funnily Apple marketed their slower ram as something better in the nineties when memory speed was king. Now when nobody cares about memory speed (I bet most people confound bandwith with speed, forgetting latence too) but we all like to have lots of it because we use lots of programs & apps, Apple is doing the reverse.
Lol.
In this case I was referring to bandwidth and latency, which on-package memory helps with. It does make a difference in memory-intensive applications, but the majority of people would never notice a difference. Also Apple will absolutely give you a ton of memory, you just have to pay for it. They offer 128GB on the MacBook Pro, and it’s unified so the GPU has full access to it, which makes it surprisingly good for running LLMs locally, for example.
Hahaha yeah
That is better but I don’t know if it brings it down to reality.
Yeah it’ll come to the Air’s and the Mac Mini at some point. I suspect it’s actually cheaper to make on the new process node (it’s the second generation of TSMC’s 3nm process), so maybe it won’t be too far off.
Any idea how long it usually takes for a new SoC to reach the Airs? Assuming they follow a pattern with each now generation.
Just wondering whether to buy an M3 Air or wait for the M4 version.
Probably next month or next October
Top sku iPad pros with the keyboard case cost more than some MacBooks and people try and use them like MacBooks, which is crazy to me given the severe limitations of iPadOS compared to macOS.
Sigh… My school forces me to use an iPad
Does M3/M4 support AV1 encoding?
deleted by creator
The “bento box” graphic during the presentation yesterday said AV1. From the press release:
The Media Engine of M4 is the most advanced to come to iPad. In addition to supporting the most popular video codecs, like H.264, HEVC, and ProRes, it brings hardware acceleration for AV1 to iPad for the first time. This provides more power-efficient playback of high-resolution video experiences from streaming services.
Does any one care?
There was so much hype on this generation of silicon and the landing has seemed extremely flat to me, largely because Apple.
I like keeping tabs on it, as they’re really the only ones pushing mainstream high end ARM chips at the moment.
Don’t forget about the new Snapdragon X series. I heard they were pretty good, on par and better than M3s.
Hoping they have success, but to say that their laptop chips are truly mainstream, at least in the same sense that Apple gives, is a bit generous I feel.
Obviously the X series has a decent shot at changing that, which I really hope it does.
I heard they were pretty good, on par and better than M3s.
I only saw that claim in an article where they explained that those chips (Snapdragon) aren’t anything special. Apparently yet another case that a company uses misleading benchmarks.
I would love something like that in a super small form factor, like a minipc (NUC, minisforum) or SBC (like RockPro64 size) so I could build a small home NAS with lots of power for home lab stuff.
Advances in Arm chips make the journey of porting software look better for devs, once a project starts porting it gets easier for other architectures (like riscv).
That and silicon competition is good. Keeps them forced to produce better or cheaper products to compete.
Do you just mean M4? Or all Apple Silicon?
Everything since the M1. Mind blowing hype, graphs that seem shocking at announcement. Data that comes in below these graphs, then owing to the extremely high walls of the garden, a sigh and shoulder shrug at what you can do with the technology, because although cool and seemingly very powerful, you just can’t do much with it because of apples buisness philosophy.
Then buy similar hardware from a competitor that meets your needs. I mean, Apple was never innovative, so you surely can get something better somewhere else?
I mean, Apple was never innovative, so you surely can get something better somewhere else?
That wasn’t stated by this person, no? It is a common fallacy to disprove a claim that wasn’t made.
The user only stated they can’t think of a use-case for the hardware, and therefore innovation is useless. They don’t even have to use it.
I have recently bought older generation 12.9" iPad Pro and an M2 MBP through Backmarket at a fraction of the price. I’m primarily a Linux user but I bought the iPad for the screen and the MBP for music production. Even though they are years old, they still have more processing power than I need.
I just finished the full soundtrack of a theatre play using AsahiLinux on my M2pro mbp. I resorted to macos only to render some heavy video tracks.
Wow is the first time I heard about linux on iPad. Which guide did you use?
mbp = macbook pro , unless you forgot the /s
haha no, I took it as m2 ipad pro. Not sarcastic, just naive with some wishful thinking. Got super excited over the idea
You may have misread. They are using Asahi on their MacBook Pro with the M2 Pro chip.
Mbp sorry, not iPad :(
https://piped.video/watch?v=1iiFhhOkv14
It is now based on fedora not arch, but the install process is the same
So raytracing will be supported in iPad apps now…
So far the M4 seems to only be announced for the iPad.
It’s now seven iPhones in a trenchcoat
How fast will that run an iPod?
About tree fiddy
