The new iPAD Pro

[sof006]

We have this demo unit in our store, its very fast not going to lie. I'd never own one though due to iOS/s restrictive nature.

[The Owl]

I'm a long time Android user and honestly never liked any Apple mobile hardware/software, it always felt it was lacking something. But this new iPad is something I couldn't resist, so I've caved in and bought one.

 

My experience with iOS products is very limited so the move from Android was a bit scary at first, but after a bit of fiddling and some "androidification" I got it to a point where it feels normal. The tablet is ridiculous fast, excellent for multitasking, battery life has been quite good with heavy usage (gaming/YouTube/surfing web) lasting 2 days, speakers are really good and even thou the screen is not a AMOLED, is good enough for you to be happy with.

 

Only complaint, beyond price, is the size of the charging cable that came with it which is very short.

[LAwLz]

This seems like a great tablet but I got two major complaints.

1) It is running iOS and I would much prefer Android.

2) The aspect ratio is awful for basically everything people want to use on tablets. I really don't understand how people allow Apple to get away with 4:3. It's awful. Give me 16:10 or at the very least 3:2 dammit!

 

 

Also, lol at people saying Windows 10 is decent on a tablet. It's awful.

 

 

On 2017-06-11 at 2:40 PM, Sniperfox47 said:

Eh. Compared to an Nvidia Parker? I'd take a Parker in a heartbeat over a 10X.

 

Don't get me wrong it's better than anything Qualcomm has, but Qualcomm shouldn't really be our quality standard for high end tablets.

Do we even know what performance, thermals and power consumption of Parker is like?

It might be terrible for tablets for all I know.

 

 

On 2017-06-12 at 8:56 PM, Commodus said:

I look at it this way: Apple is the company you know will likely have a replacement model for your device when you're ready to upgrade in a few years.  Just ask Sony tablet buyers about their upgrade options!

I still think the Sony Z4 Tablet is the best tablet ever made. I just wish they would release an updated version...

[Valentyn]

On 2017-6-16 at 0:32 AM, The Owl said:

I'm a long time Android user and honestly never liked any Apple mobile hardware/software, it always felt it was lacking something. But this new iPad is something I couldn't resist, so I've caved in and bought one.

 

My experience with iOS products is very limited so the move from Android was a bit scary at first, but after a bit of fiddling and some "androidification" I got it to a point where it feels normal. The tablet is ridiculous fast, excellent for multitasking, battery life has been quite good with heavy usage (gaming/YouTube/surfing web) lasting 2 days, speakers are really good and even thou the screen is not a AMOLED, is good enough for you to be happy with.

 

Only complaint, beyond price, is the size of the charging cable that came with it which is very short.

I got the large version for my mother, and she's loving it. With Pages and the like on it she's doing anything she needed. 

 

Now it just needs iOS 11 to bring in much needed upgrades and features. 

It's essentially  her first "laptop" thanks to the keyboard, and she's rarely touching the desktop downstairs for anything bar using the scanner. 

 

Although with the better ios document scanning done through the camera she might not need that anymore either. 

 

What I did have to do is buy a huge matte anti glare screen protector for the iPad. It's drastically helped her at least. The screen is extremely glossy, and the refresh rate and ips panel has helped her with eye strain as well. 

 

I'm an android user myself,  and if I needed a tablet, I'd get the iPad Pro. Apple just need to get iOS 11 out ASAP

 

Have to agree about that charging cable though, had to buy a much longer one. It's bloody tiny. 

 

I'm sure the iPad Pro will last her a long time. The ipad two only recently became unbearable to use because the hardware is so old now. 

[Sniperfox47]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Do we even know what performance, thermals and power consumption of Parker is like?

It might be terrible for tablets for all I know.

I have a Jetson TX2 and the thermals and power draw are exactly the same at full load running side by side with my TX1 for a full utilization stress test. At idle it actually sips less power than the TX1.

 

GPU performance at full load is theoretically 1.5x for both fp16 and fp32 but I've seen 1.4xish out of it in benchmarks.

 

CPU performance per watt is about the same on the 2 Denver 2 cores compared to the 4 a53 cores, but total performance is considerably better.

 

And with 8GB of ram the memory performs considerably better too, especially for graphics tests.

 

Benchmarks of the TX2 vs TX1 if you want, including power draw and temps: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=jetson-tegra-x2&num=1

[kuddlesworth9419]

This is the first time I've actually seen Apple do something interesting. Still not interested though because I have a PC.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Sniperfox47 said:

CPU performance per watt is about the same on the 2 Denver 2 cores compared to the 4 a53 cores, but total performance is considerably better.

Wait, are you saying that overall power consumption is up? I can't find any comparisons between the X1 and X2 in terms of power consumption. Performance going up is nice, but if performance per watt is the same then that extra performance comes at an equally large increase in power consumption.

[Sniperfox47]

46 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Wait, are you saying that overall power consumption is up? I can't find any comparisons between the X1 and X2 in terms of power consumption. Performance going up is nice, but if performance per watt is the same then that extra performance comes at an equally large increase in power consumption.

No. The P1 is both faster and more power efficient than the X1.

 

The a53 cores were the little cores in the X1, The X1 had 4 high power A57 cores, and 4 high efficiency A53 cores.

 

Each of the Denver2 cores are as power efficient as an a53 core but can scale to get better performance than even an A57 core did on the X1. Plus it still has 4 more A57 cores on the side for high performance applications.

 

Maxed power use and thermals for the P1 are straight lower than the X1 in an actively cooled scenario, and are about the same in a passively cooled scenario, but at that same maxed performance the GPU performance is roughly 150% and the CPU performance is between 130% and 200% of the X1 depending on the task.

[NickTheMajin]

11 hours ago, LAwLz said:

This seems like a great tablet but I got two major complaints.

1) It is running iOS and I would much prefer Android.

2) The aspect ratio is awful for basically everything people want to use on tablets. I really don't understand how people allow Apple to get away with 4:3. It's awful. Give me 16:10 or at the very least 3:2 dammit!

 

 

Also, lol at people saying Windows 10 is decent on a tablet. It's awful.

 

 

 

Do we even know what performance, thermals and power consumption of Parker is like?

It might be terrible for tablets for all I know.

 

 

 

I still think the Sony Z4 Tablet is the best tablet ever made. I just wish they would release an updated version...

 

I don't know about most people, but I think apples screen ratio is the best for book reading and surfing the net. I have a nexus 10 as well that's 16:10 and the iPads screen ratio is way better for what I use a tablet for. 

[Butterhörnchen]

On 6/12/2017 at 9:07 PM, BingoFishy said:

I feel like the 120Hz display might use more power, decreasing battery life. But it's a tablet, so the battery is big and it might not affect it too much. Still I think it's a valid concern.

It is an adaptive refreshrate so it is actually using less power.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, NickTheMajin said:

I don't know about most people, but I think apples screen ratio is the best for book reading and surfing the net. I have a nexus 10 as well that's 16:10 and the iPads screen ratio is way better for what I use a tablet for. 

Funny that you'd mention the Nexus 10. I used to love that tablet and absolutely hated the Nexus 9 which replaced it. I talked a lot about how terrible the Nexus 9 was when it was released because I was so disappointed by the idiotic 4:3 aspect ratio.

Here is one out of many threads I was in, talking about it . It has a bunch of pictures showing how different aspect ratios stack up for things, and some percentages for how much wasted space each aspect ratio has for movies.

 

Here is one of my posts about it:

Quote

Here are some scenarios where 3:2 and 16:10 is BETTER than 4:3. I can't think of a single one where 4:3 is superior to 3:2, except for 4:3 video. Other than that, 0.

 

Watching movies/video - Most modern videos are 16:9 or 21:9. If you want to watch 16:9 on your Nexus 9 then about 25% of your screen will be black bars. If you want to watch 21:9 then about 43% of your screen will be black bars. Yes, almost half of the screen will be black.

For comparison, if you are going to watch a 16:9 video then the image on the Nexus 9 will be as big as on an 8.4" 16:10 tablet. For people who watch a lot of video, Google has just replaced their 10.1" tablet with an 8.4" tablet. That's an enormous downgrade.

 

Web browsing - Most websites are narrow and tall. If you don't know what I mean by that then just look at it this way. How often to do you scroll sideways on a website relative to how often you scroll up/down? I am willing to bet that most people scroll up and down more than they scroll left and right. This applies to popular apps such as Twitter and Facebook as well. There is far more vertical scrolling going on than horizontal. Putting your 3:2 or 16:10 tablet in portrait mode seems like a far better idea than having a 4:3 tablet for web browsing, RSS feeds, social media and so on.

 

Gaming - Most of the Android games I have seen are designed for 16:9 or 16:10 screens. It's not really hard to explain why either. Phones and tablets have been 16:9 and 16:10 for ages so it's obvious that most apps will be designed for that. This point will become less and less important if more tablets start going for the 4:3 aspect ratio, but I don't see any indication than Asus, Samsung or Sony are going in that direction with their lineups.

 

Reading books and comics - This is one area where I will admit that 4:3 is better than 16:10. It is not better than 3:2 though. Most books where I live have the same aspect ratio as the A series of paper, the square root of 2. That puts it pretty much bang in the middle between 3:2 and 4:3. 3:2 being slightly too tall, and 4:3 being slightly too wide. However, there are 2 reasons why I think 3:2 is still better.

 

1) On books some of the paper becomes unusable because of the binding. That means that the actual text in books are usually slightly more narrow than the actual book itself (and thus making it closer to 3:2).

2) Android has a notification bar as well as a navigation bar. These two eats up some of the vertical resolution.

When you take these two into consideration I think 3:2 becomes the best option for reading things such as books on a screen.

 

Also, it's a shame that this statement from me is still true:

Quote

There are no good tablets on the market. Every single one of them are shit.

 

[Zodiark1593]

I would be willing to wager that if Apple's developer license agreement wasn't so damn restrictive on running unsigned code, this thing would excel in emulation, perhaps even running most PS2/GC games at full speed.