Indeed, exactly the reason I just bought a Nexus 9. That and not needing to install iTunes. However, I'm still annoyed I can't yet buy the cover for the Nexus 9. When I bought the iPad 2, it came with the cover I bought at the same time. I can see why some people like the Apple experience...
And with iOS, you can fix on a Mac, Windows PC OR Linux! & you're coreect. A pair of buttons doesn't (un)brick a phone of any make, model, manufacturer or OS
Lol, you hit the nail on the head there. You can't even install OTA updates on rooted Android devices with custom recoveries without restoring the stock one and most banking apps don't work on them either. To do either you need a PC opr a mac and you need to use the command line. How user friendly is that?
The last time I took off the custom recovery and put stock back onto my HTC One M8 and then tried to update, it wiped all the data off of the phone. After that, I bought an iPhone 6 Plus and am much happier and more secure in the knowledge that my phone backs up automatically overnight (every night) to iCloud. Having used iPhones since 2007, iTunes hasn't been required for mnost things since the iPhone 4 launched in 2010
Exactly, if you are like in tens of thousands in a pool of hundreds of millions, over the history of 7 years, you may get that...
That's the problem, you get updates on iOS, while on Android... unless you buy the "right device" you may have something like 18 months of updates.
And what's the problem with iTunes then? I've it running on my Windows box, and for the monster of multipurpose App it is, it consumes next to nothing of RAM.
At least is a easy to use and stable program...
Contrary to the Nexus "fastboot" command line tools...
And most of software that Android vendors make you install, like Samsung KIES, that's great software, isn't it?
I'm not sure I've read such a backward comment in my life. As an owner of bit iOS and Android devices (latest hard/software), your experience is undoubtedly 180° different than mine My nine year old is still enjoying the iPad 2, even with the current version of iOS he's enjoying ten to twelve hours of better life Same can't be said for the 'Xoom' ...or the nexus 7 ('12) ...I'm not sure when I pulled out the 2013 ?Nexus 7 That said, when it comes to 'tablet apps' and 'choice' ...in the Hundreds of THOUSANDS ...the Android tablet experience is an absolute, utter and catastrophic Joke! I love my Note3. Looking forward to possibly updating to a Note 4 --- but four years of getting butnt by the tablet development community and its lack of interest in 'developing' for the Android tablet community, I'm done Though a bit curious. iPad Air 2 drops (have one btw and its everything the reviews cracked it up to be, plus! -- & I'm coming from the original Air, my wife the iPad 4 she didn't want to give up. Case thing). And so does the price of the new Nexus 9? Why? Wasn't it a 50% drop? Maybe I dreamt it....not sure, and not knocking the Nex9. That said, there's only so much you can do with the UI of your springboard. At some point its time to use your tablet to do something When that time comes, you'll be glad you chose iOS, regardless of your interest, hobbies, media you enjoy ...games to play, media to manipulste or create. Music, video/still and artistic creation on the iPad ...its apps and its options are second to none ... In HISTORY Thanks for the write up. What a slab
I reject the very foundation of that article. Treating a phone like a computer misses the point. It is absolutely NOT important to pick a phone based on the resolution, camera or power. Battery...ok yes.
What's more important are the apps it runs, how easy is the UI, stability, speaker & mic quality, etc. The things that matter in a smart phone. The ±10% speed or rez differences in various phones is irrelevant.
Huh. Amazing that year in, year out they contine breaking sales records from the previous launch customer satisfaction has remained in slot #1 for damn near every quarter since 2007 and as far as 'better' phones, even the connotation being subjective ....ultimately and objectively there isn't a "better phone". Just different now 2007/08 and the introduction of the SDK & the App Store completely changed a massive, easily one of the top five, maybe three 'growing' areas of our world today. Wireless comms first for voice first (remember 'Can you hear me now?' And the days of Nextel, Blackberry corporate dominance and shitty analog coverage?) ...we've moved into 'texting' in a signficantly easier way than the Nokia flip phone with 12, standard 'phone' buttons and their associated three letters. Apple introduced in '07 a game changing, corporate smashing product that continues to better iteseld with each iteration. I've owned em each and because of how our company is run...we also provide employees with iPhones/iPads while I carry both. 6+ and Note 4. They've voth got their places and the sizes of their displays is a life saver to this mid 40s guy I can't see anything anymore when it comes to reading. Cheaters or Else... (Wal mart reading glasses;)) BUT, today's HiDPI dispays at 5-6" in these svelte profiles and 'weight' (lack of) with their Power, speed, efficiency and reliability --- ultimately make it 'that time' in history. Telecommunications changed the world early in the 20th century. An extension of Moorse code. Voice to voice. Operators and analog switch boards and Mama Bells reign/monopoly on America's 'booming' new technology. All analog. All switched on site. Patch cords that my grandmother ran for almost forty years and plenty of advancements ...all the way until 'digital" phone lines were installed and the history of the 'switcher' is just that. History
Which two birds one stone BS, valnar underneath is tells is the 'very foundation of (sic) article....' And I quote, "Treating a phone like a computer MISSES the point". They're VERY MUCH a computer, that fits in your pocket and performs much faster than computer we were building and drafting, coding and editing, emailing and surfing, playing games and 'communicating' with not JUST voice but video, text 'artistic creation!' To dismiss a smartphone as inferior to a computer in ANY way shows a significant generational gap When your mobike, wireless provider allows for the speeds of LTE (I'm routinely between 35/40Mb/s down and 40150 UP! That's ubelievable when I think back to my IIe, Ultima I, II, III ...Booting to the promot 'BRUN ..xxxxx' To 33!& 54 baud modems, the handshake noise like yesterday and was floored with the performance of SSD va HDD. Bluetooth's progression and the idea of an IPU, MPU....gyros and accelerometers ...if you'd sit back five minutes and think about their sheer 'abilities', other than 'Us, and these that frequent Anand's site ...and enjoy technology, the mass population is easily taken care of with 95-98% of all comouter tasking they were doing in 2010 on 110/220 (plugged in) ... ...Today being done on a gram measured in grams, a few hundred at that and fit in your pocket. They're reliable. They aggregate, integrate and oranizate;) everything about my life and 27 year business As a pilot I can't begin to describe the differences between gettin my pilots license in 1987 and today. From GPS to LTE, TCAS to ADSB ...planning my trip and checking real time weather, calculating fuel and picking my diversions if needed. Jep charts n plates and app/dep up to the minute changes to your approach or arrival ...hell, even with an app, Flight 24 I bekeive...if you've got it you can follow a loved one all the way through to landing and gate release. Leave your house with perfect timing lol Honestly, there just AREN'T 'way better phones'. Apple, HTC, LG, & of course samsung have helped each other For me, I wouldn't be caught without both. I want to know the differences, what going to help me and be the most compelling reason to choose that platform, OS or Eco system They ARE computers. Possibly you didn't ride DOS, the intro to 8086 and 8/16/32/64 bit programming and hardware but the amazing Moore's law has taken over. I, for one, couldn't. E happier.
"And I quote, "Treating a phone like a computer MISSES the point". They're VERY MUCH a computer, that fits in your pocket and performs much faster than ThE computer(s) we were building with and drafting (the initial CAD, paint,motion and still editing), coding and emailing surfing or producing a song, video (or both) in Los Angeles at a studio or your home swimming pool , playing games and 'communicating' with not JUST voice but video, text 'artistic creation' and SOOO much easier than a 'computer' in SO many cases, situations and emergencies and for the vast majority of our population today than yesterday IF ALL you need is a phone, I'm with you. There's a better flip phone with those dozen digits, # & * as well as the 'green' & 'red' buttons on top and middle 'select' If you're going to use your phone for more than calls, indeed, you'll find your iPhone,mS5 G3 or the latest Lumia to be a HELLUVA lot closer to a comouter than you're implying. That said, if this is an extremely rare circumstance and you're working opposite me with my 4k conversions and encoding, I concur;) There afain though ...our last two docs have used footage from iPhones and Androids (not a WinPhone yet unfortunately ...but I'm one of nine peeps that I think enjoy Win8.1. I'm OS X based and only own two Windows machines now...but I digress, my point was even my iPhone works perefectly on Win 8.1 ...as does iTunes! I'm pretty floored how quick it (now is, I left to OS X personally and with the business after a really bad crash in Vista in 2007---& hadn't looked back until earlier this year when I needed a Win rig. Bought an HP 2/1 slab or attachable and all aluminum body core i5. It's pretty cool having CS6 suite on a (albeit extremely large and unwieldy) tablet ... I am rooting for all of them. That said, Mt View and Cupertino have vertical and horizontal aggregation and integration. Google doesn't. The former two's run deep and have history, trust ... Obviously fans with zest but IF a phone isn't s computer, Android/Google better spens some serious time on Chrome;)
I thought native audio/video file transfer were still restricted to iTunes. Can I put music and Blu-Ray rips on an iOS device and open them with more than one audio/video player?
What about apps that used to require iTunes to load data in them, can I now just use regular USB?
I've had an iPhone 4S for over a year, my first Apple product...and it replaced my technically superior but buggy as hell Galaxy S3.
Still haven't installed iTunes and I've upgraded from IOS 6 through IOS 7 and IOS 8.
I *almost* installed iTunes to downgrade back to IOS 7 while Apple was still permitting it, but I got used to the...lets just say, lack of smoothness my phone once had.
I had an HTC Dream (G1) years ago so I'm accustomed to jerky UI's by now.
The reason I like the iPhone comes down to the app store, the camera, battery life and size. It's really hard to find a <4" phone anymore and the GS3 was just too big for me.
Google Music Play All Access or whatever mouth full of words its called works fine for audio. I've been wifi transferring video files from any computer on the same network to the VLC app on my iOS device for a couple of years now and haven't had a problem.
No USBing it over to the device however, but most things use either a cloud back end or wifi transferring for files. I've never had to plug my iPhone or iPad into a computer except to charge it for years now.
Play music. Play video. Play magazines. Play books, tones, podcasts, an app tray in alphabetical order, Google Ringtones? (I'm a Note 4 & iPhone owner and enjoy both, honestly!). Your TV shows? Actual app 'layout' on a far superior and quicker rig is quite useful if you're interested in changing your UI. Wifi, no need. NFC is here now and Airdrop destroy NFC when it comes to transferring files from computer to phone, tab or vice versa. No need for a separate wifi zone No LTE or data charges apply. It seems as though about a ½ billion people understand it, I'm not sure who you're talkng to that doesn't get it. One of the overlooked and most desirable ios feature and strength is it's optimization of hard and software, lack of carrier bloat and the MOST active development community in history. The cool thing, when compared to its counterpart is this Eco system isn't limited to a certain, average sized phone Developers take the time to optimize the app for larger dispalys...including the tablet form factor unlike Android (5.0 from the Nexus reviews I've seen) As a business owner if 27 years, husband, father and pilot... iOS has literally revolutionized our business's in the past five years Mini 2 is my kneeboard, flight planner, fuel calculator, Jep charts and up to date plates, real time weather and traffic, the flight manual for each plane, and it's shaved off 47 of the 48 pounds my flight bag was consistently consuming. One of my son's grades have come up from C+/B- to all As! Due solely to the iPad...it's learning software and compelling nature and new idea of 'learning'. A tutor for the year wouldn't have improved his grades as much and would've doubled the price The iPhone 6+ is hand's down the best iPhone to date. I'm not familiar with the 6, as we've been using Notes and the earlier 3.5" & 4" iPhones. It's balance and weight, slim form factor and incredible speed is unparalleled ...my Note 4 screams and looks great. I'm using adaptive screen for adjustments to the saturation but for me, it's the tool we need on site as we produce audio, video and still shots from all over Alaska. We've been lucky enough to work with Nat Geo, Smithsonian and Discovery (several of their subs) and in Alaska, without a plane you're not going to get 99% of her. We also provide mobile production and have hosted many hundreds of parties over the past three decades in villages from St George and Paul NW AK and Montague where you CAN see, not Just See Russia, but ice fish if you're crazy enough on their territory. Cool thing ...our snow machines (Alaskan for snowmobile;)) --- to Juneau, Ketchikan, Wrangle, Hoonah, Eek in the southeast. & up and down the Aleutian chain None of this would be possible without today's technology. From the Beechcraft and Otter's nav aids and instrumentation for inclement weather to setting a three song ceremony up outdoors and amplifying the official! Ten years ago, burn a CD with the processional, bride's march and recessional we were humping a couple hundred pounds for that fifteen minutes of ceremony Today, an iPad, three lavaliere mics and the 45 pound, suitcase Fender 500 ...three minutes TJ break down, maybe ten to put together and we're able to double our bookings as the bigger rigs can now solely be used for the reception ....again, whether 'Play Music' or iTunes on a phone or tablet is an incredible backup to have on hand in these situations --- computer goes down, you're instant on. dJay2, Pinnacle and I can't start the list of incredible DAWS we routineky work with make editing and playlist building a breeze. dJay with a controller is flat amazing as is Traktor, vJay, and the ability to wirelessly control AirPlay to projectors and the GoPro cams with music video mix has landed contracts for our business at five of the seven local high schools and a dozen junior highs. And it's a HELLUVA lot cheaper than buying a smart, moving head, laser system (we've got a both, and plenty of LED ParCans, effects, etc....but video is another level of 'cool' to the younger generation... ....Which I think leads me to my point. To those of you 20 something's that grew up connected, with a cell phone and computer...DON'T limit yourself. The Note4 &. Stylus allow me to sketch with structural engineers rigging positions, sign their credit cards with a 'pen' instead of a finger and they're incredibky fast. Wicked fast and a night and day difference between N1&2 That said, limitarions imposed by Google on 'external' (internal microSD) storage is a JOKE! Always makes me laugh when the Android camp points Apple's pricing on NAND as a 'ripoff' ...IMHO, a ripoff or bargain as I see it, no matter how YOU see it, the 'option' is there. My 'flagship' Noten4 comes in a single size. 32GB, about a third of which isn't available due to the OS Then, there's a very arbitrary system of which apps can and can't be moved to the card. Bizarre and getting worse. Note 3 I had if I moved the app, it moved the WHOLE app. Now, with 4.4 I'm able to move 'some' third party apps, no AT&T or Samsung bloat to the microSD card. Slower NAND, less storage options and a terrible development community, for me...make the decision easy, especially with the new iOS releases; 6, 6+ and Air2 (WOW, this is another level of badass!)---a second and a ½ generation 64bit SoC, battery/efficiency monsters and mind blowing objective measurements And it doesn't end there. There's not a single solitary laptop on the market that can come close to the again, 2 ½ generation rMBP. The 15" I bought in 2012 changed comouting to me. HiDPI display is beyond awesome, the SSD speeds were phenomenal, power was incredible and at 4 pounds and seven hours of usage away from 110 was an absolute JOY! I just picked up the recently updated Haswell model witht the PCIe SSDs, the bigger 2GB 750 and Iris Pro (5200---& if you've yet to see the IP5200 in action, go to an Apple Store, Best Buy, wherever and play with it. Again, and as expected an iGPU from Intel that is unreal! MSI, Alienware, Clevo....9-12 pound 52 minute gamer monstrosities are a dying breed. Home built desktops for the enthusiast will stick for a while but when the power from a four pound laptop as a 15" 2014 rMBP demonstrates with a TB PCIe storage system, I'm reading and writing right at or just over a Gb/s! The new MP replaced (finally ,in March after waiting a bit) my 2010 octocore and runs circles around it! And I had put the 830s in for SSD, better GPU, didn't matter) What Apple's doing today in phones, tabs, lap & desktops is incredible and with iOS 8/OS X 10.10, you're immediately set up with a 'hot spot' for your laptop. Metal, elimanting the thick mud of OpenGL ES and allowing developers to work 'right on the metal'. No middle man. Shared cache for the memory so it can simultaneously be accessed but the CPU and GPU as well as continutiy, handoff....and SWIFT! They wrote an entirely new code from scratch, it's incredible and free to learn! Once you've played a bit, grab XCode for free and play around with building your own app, for your use. Don't limit yourself to a single choice. No company is worth that type of 'fandom'. It's not football (American or 'real' everywhere else in the world, AKA soccer). It's a phone. A computer. A tablet. Buy wait works for YOU. Not what some DBag online says, your peers are using or based on reviews from sites other than here, ARS....maybe a couple others. Once you buy, don't read the comments!
No need for USB. We've got AirPlay. No need for iTunes for years. But it's still a killer piece of media management software and runs well, fluently and keeps your crap in a 'third' and physical location If you're looking to save pics, vids, drawings ...projects, whatever, sure there's a lighting to USB adaptor. I don't think I remember Ever having to use iTunes to 'load data on them' ...or are you talking about the early days of syncing music and media, etc? Regardless, no need. Myself...I orefer DropBox. It's in my finder, toolbar (both on 10.10 and 8.1) and iOS as well as Android. It's an amazing app with excellent reliability and a bill a year to ensure the safety of a TB of data is invaluable. Office 365 as well, ten bucks and five TBs Of storage, one formal, three kids, as well, my wife and I! Oh, yeah...it comes with this word editor/text editor, a 'spread sheet' thingy and this pretty slick, not quite keynote wannabe;) --- no, I'm being sarcastic. Five tabs, five computers. XPlatform Just Incredible! $20/year per TB of storage. Unfortunately it's Windows and therefore not nearly as 'open' or able to be baked into OS X. SkyDrive kicks was on 8.1 though.
Except every ios device has to contact apple to work initially, and either itunes or itunes on the web does this. It's a stupid requirement that apple will never ever let go of.
You don't have to connect any apple device to iTunes. At all. Ever. You take it out of the box, you turn it on, it asks you a few simple questions and you're on the homescreen.
What you're talking about is recovery mode. That's the only time I've seen that.
Really? That "iTunes on the interwebs" is the most retarded thing I haver have read here... But two pages from this, and anyone can see the real problem of this user...
And "iTunes on the interwebs" is welcome, makes a stolen iPhone or iPad worthless, wich if cool, unless you plan to stole one.
As does Samsung (& Google/AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/Carrier) As does HTC (& Google/AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/Carrier) As does LG (& Google/AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/Carrier) As does {insert OEM here} (& Google/AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/Carrier) ....and this DOES include the 'Nexus' lineup. While 'stock Android', it's built by and distributed the largest 'data miners' AND exploiters on the Internet, today. Google. Period At least with Apple, sure, you definitely 'register' with them ONCE ...From then on, your communication with them is limited by your choices in settings. If title doing nothing wrong, I don't see a reason to help with 'traffic' or a developer improve his app, etc If I'm doing something wrong, I suppose I would shit those options off. No need to 'phone home' as EVERY Android device does, including my Note3 I enjoy so much At least Apple's a one shot, you choose deal In the world of Android, it's a gamble unless you're using Nexus. Then you're 'only' sharing with Google. Everyone else you're dealing with the OEM and the carrier's bloat ...and constant background, unavoidable and incessantly running 'processes' Anyway, yeah...TL/DR What did you mean with your quotes? A) you don't need iTunes EVEN in the beginning to activate your phone. Use a gmail account as your iPhone check in acct B)‘Most Android users have no idea' This I disagree with. If argue most ARE aware of this lack of necessity for some time now. Bad thing is you don't ..yet you quoted something you clearly don't understsnd, didn't realize and failed to respond with a 'back up' to your complaint(s) It's neither a 'stupid requirement' And Apple only held on to it so it could sync your phone in an expeditious manner! Wireless, broadbamd and 'clouds' have t been here forever. That said, iTunes eats KIES alive. It's definitely the first thing replaced on my Note updates. Music and media management. Unfortunately, one still has to deal with it for OTA updates I'll take the iOS 'update' approach (to both apps and full on OS upgrades all day in comparison) As akways, ymmv J
Except every Google device has to contact Google to work initially, and all the time thereafter, feeding them yopur usage metrics to make them money. It's a stupid requirement that Google will never ever let go of.
Actually you can use an Android device without ever even having a google account. Obviously things like gmail and the play store wont work, but the option is there if you really wanted.
No different than Android devices using your Gmail information for 'initial contact' There's NO NEED to use iTunes. iTunes on the web. iTunes on your iPhone! There's hundreds of programs to play your media from And the 'need' to contact Apple, use iTunes or any of the other BS you've been told a couple dozen times now hasn't been the case since 5.0, right? This is 8.1. So over three years have passed
In all fairness you do need iTunes still. How will you put all your music in an iPad? Maybe you'll say there are other programs out there you can use, but the fact is you still have to sync it and use some sort of program to put your music.
You have 3,000 songs in your computer. You get an iPad. How are you going to put all that music in your iPad?
With Android you can just plug it in and drag and drop your music like the tablet is an external drive.
That being said, Android sucks because it has no tablet apps.
Android tablets are for the very basics. Documents, email, videos. But for anything else, you need an iPad.
AirDrop Sync via home sharing (playlists) Dropbox GDrive OneDrive iTunes match up to 25,000 songs with ya, everywhere you go ...just $20/year There's Sooo many options to list, no need to 'sync' your media any longer with your computer physically connected. If you're on you're gime network, feel free to send me a line and I'll walk you through. All3,00 songs;)
I'm blown away by the ignorance here Wow. You'd think half these comments are being made by someone who's never used an iPhone, an iPad. iOS period. Much less a Mac or iTunes ITSELF, no, you do NOT need to 'plug in' to get yiur music. If you've got a hundred thousand, yes. Because a TB or two won't fit. Then, it's as easy as plug in to .mac or PC, sync managment and check the boxes to sync (playlists, artists, all...whatever). A signficantly better media managment system in aggregate than ANY other in the world I use Plex. I use Traktor, I edit audio in Audition, video in premier...but like anything else, organization is key. And iTunes has it nailed. Kies. Sucks ...,and it's the other AIO organizer forced upon you by the biggest (by a HUGE margin) OEM making Android phones. Samsung. As well, since you know so little about iOS, I assume the same is true with iTunes. It's come a VERY long way since you had to 'connect' your iPhone
Ya, your choices will be very limited with the nexus 9. The iPad is supported by every case maker/screen protector maker, so the infrastructure around it just blows the competition away.
I agree that iOs is not perfect and i don't actually like it, but unfortunately some apps are only on it. In my case it's DJ software. I'd love to save money and buy an android tablet, i'll do is soon as Traktor is released for Android.
I doubt a DJ worth his salt would utilize the DAC and headphone stage within a tablet, in Android's case they'd employ USB OTG and a higher quality external DAC/amp/etc... The same thing can be accomplished with an iPad no?
Yes and plenty more options coming as they've released for 2015 the protocol The camera connect kit is a Lightining to USB standard 6" $20 peripheral. Good to go
Plenty of options exist both with 30pin-out and lightning to send digital audio to an external DAC. Most systems are employing other storage methods (lossless, FLAC, WAV, et al) including thumb drives, externals and wireless transfers. It's changed (DJ'ing) a tremendous amount in a ¼ decade ;) It's crazy to me, even with USB2, zero latency mixing digital music with an external DAC talking to an analog board with an analog output ...all in 'real time' and literally ZERO latency It's awesome
That's because you're a technical person. Android aims these things at people who want the simplest interface, less options and a holistic management approach. Android is much more flexible and that's why almost all technical people prefer Android.
I'm with you here. I really like the flexibility of android, but I get tired of always having to do something to make it work. I feel like any android device I get is about 90% finished and Its up to me to hit XDA and do the rest of the work.
If you want to tinker and fix something that keeps breaking (some people like to do that, that's why there is a used car market), then android is for you. This is changing every day and the two are converging as google makes android (the one you use) more and more closed source to leave aosp behind :)
"If you want to tinker and fix something that keeps breaking.." So, are you that disappointed with your ipad? And what will you do with a device that never breaks but can't do anything with it;even this little thing, that is, proper communication between the user and the machine is out of the question with the ipad. I remember trying to be patient when testing an ipad for a whole week(god I have such a big patience) and trying to avoid the spontaneous urge to bang my head on the wall every five minutes or so. So, I didn't reply reasonably to you because you made a ridiculous comment, but it is true that I still try to forget the traumatic experience I had with the ipad. The only good thing about buying one is that raises the value of your Apple stocks.
iOS 8 on the newest devices is amazing. With full Microsoft support and further enterprise support, the device is becoming more and more of a productivity device. If you have an iPad 3 or below, I feel your pain.
I don't know what kind of traumatic experience you can have with an iPad... unless you'Re a very big tech newbie. I'm with everyone here that I don't want to fix anything that's broken. I had to constantly work around bugs and problems on my Asus Transformer TF201. I bought an iPad 4 about 2 years ago, never plugged it in a computer and does everything I need from a tablet plus the screen, camera, OS responsiveness, stability and so on beats any android devices I've owned.
My girlfriend has 2 ipod touch that still work wonders, she bought an android phone, and as good as it is and she likes it, there's a virus on it and as soon as it uses the home network, my upload goes crazy. Now I have to buy an antivirus or restore the thing. Never it has happened on her iPods touch.
I've had one problem with an iPod touch it was under warranty, made a request to have it repaired, received a bos in which the iPod did fit like a glove didn'T cost me a penny back and forth one week later I had a brand new iPod touch. Not much to say, best experience I've had to deal with any piece of technology I've owned.
If you want to get deep, you won't be arguing about iOS or android, both are toys for kids, you would be instead arguing for tektronix vs Agilent for your next oscilloscope.
Screw Tektronics, they haven't been innovating in the last 10 years or so. All of their scopes are SO SLOW!! It's either Agilent or LeCroy :) Also Rigol is a great choice for lower budgets.
"almost all technical people prefer Android." citation needed. There are tons of technical people who prefer iOS, hell, look how many iOS app developers there are. The other side of the coin is, the vast majority of customers of any computing device are not technical anyway.
Makes sense People buy, come back and buy again ...and continue to use one of their hundreds of thousands of tablet optimized iOS apps Ever look at the dismal 'app selection' in the Play Store for your tablet? Maybe I should say 'lack of selection' Sad, but yeah...I'd consider pilots, surgeons, Boeing and 95% of the Fortune 500 'customers of any computing device aren't technical anyway.' Ridiculous Ignorant Try one. I enjoy both. But Android for very specific needs. iOS covers literally EVERY base
And because iOS is where the technical userbase is.
Professional applications flourish on iOS. Android apps are categorically limited and low end. The ones that aren't are ports from iOS that took months or years to come over.
Also, people talking about Android usage being "technical" is hilarious. There is nothing technical about tinkering with your tablet. Next you'll be saying that messing around with your game console is "technical".
That's a rather ignorant assumption. Many highly technical people prefer iOS. There are many legitimate reasons for this choice including the hardware, the software, the overall ecosystem, etc. Claiming technical people prefer Android is just as ignorant as claiming you prefer Android because you're poor. Though stereotypes do exist, these generalized claims never hold up.
I don't know what you mean by file system and attachments.
Are you having issues finding documents in your iPad?
I have Documents 5 installed. It is a complete file browser for iPad. Works like Explorer on windows. And you can add Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.
What can't you attach to an email? Usually directly from the app you can email, post, tweet, message or FB Hold your finger down while composing an email and you can insert what you need (native iOS mail app, but I like Mailbox for other reasons, and that's the cool thing, if the ios native app doesn't do want you want there's doxens, hundred or thousands of choices from developers ...not the case in the Play Store). It's been an option for a while and continues to get better If you need different results look around The App Store for a third party option. They're abundant
I'm technical, I develop in SharePoint and Drupal and support Applications and I use a Macbook Pro and an iPhone 6 Plus, as do most people in my team, so no, you are way wrong there. I also own an HTC One M8 which is fun to play around with and customise, but for a day to day phone I rely on for business, it has to be the iPhone and by extension the iPad.
Yes. Actually just the apps that come with iPad for free from Apple there's nothing like it on Android.
Then you actually open the App Store and it is game over for Android.
Like I said. Some games. Email, video, web browsing and light work you can do on an Android tablet, but for anything heavier forget it. The iPad is still the very best.
Considering the Nexus 9's reviews (pretty much every review I've seen is negative), you'd probably be better off with a tablet from Samsung or something.
The Nexus 9 could be a third of the price of the iPad and I'd still pick it because: -My data isn't being mined by the world's largest advertising company -iPad app ecosystem is *still* >>>>>>> Android tablet ecosystem -Resale value through the roof -After sale support in person. Imagine that!
Well you almost get your wish, the Nexus 9 seems fine in benchmarks but it lags as if it offers half the performance... Count me in the list of people who use software on a device other than the "OS".
Poor hughlle knows nothing about iOS and probably not much about Android. The Nexus 9 has been trashed in one review after another including Android sites like Android Police. What do you like about Android? The malware? The inferior app quality? I know, Google monitoring and selling to advertisers all your activity! Awsum! Maybe fragmentation? How about terrible build quality and support? So much to like....
Yes, because Android is so optimized for tablets. I'm an android fanboy too when it comes to phones (N5 is my daily driver), but you'd have to be a blind and dumb fanboy to think android offers a better tablet experience.
You choose an OS with substandard apps, weak developer support, and almost no tablet optimized apps over a platform with faster hardware and better apps in every single category?
I played around with a Nexus 9 recently and found it disappointing. You couldn't pay me to take that over an iPad Air 2. Browsing a graphics heavy website like The Verge was almost impossible, the lag and stutter was unacceptable and made it unusable. With so much power, something is dramatically wrong with either Android or Chrome that it can't handle a website that an old iPad 4 handled with ease. Also, stock Android Lollipop has zero tablet features so it has no benefits over iOS. At least Samsung adds things to make use of the larger screen like split screen multitasking or windowed multitasking. But then their tablets are terrible in terms of performance and battery life. Can't win. The iPad remains king because it gets so much so right.
I've been on the S upgrade cycle since the 3GS and I'm hoping they stick to that 2GB of RAM for the iPhone 6S. It's too noticeable on the previous generations now just how limiting the 1GB is. Barely any apps remain in memory with 1GB and constant tab refreshes in browsers if you are heavily multi-tabbing.
Indeed. I just replaced my iPad 2 with an Air 2/16GB for the 2GB RAM and the impressive single thread performance. I use it mainly for browsing and it's a very nice upgrade indeed.
The Retina iMac review will be next week. However it's the base model, so you're looking at a 1TB Fusion drive setup rather than a pure SSD, and the GPU is basically just Radeon HD 7870.
Bumping up the GPU is only "more important" for people who play high-end games. For most iMac users it is unnecessary. For example, if I were to buy the 5k iMac I would use it mainly for programming, and not for programming high-end games, so the GPU upgrade wouldn't be necessary for me.
“Enhanced Cyclone” is still at the top of its class for both IPC and overall single-threaded performance" ... the Apple bias is strong. I like how you guys cite Geekbench scores while failing to note that the Nexus 9 with its Tegra K1 running **32 bit** Geekbench still outscores the A8X. Granted, the K1 is running at 2.3 GHz, so its IPC might be a bit lower than the A8X's 1.5 GHz, but overall single-threaded goes to the K1 no sweat. When 64-bit GB is ready I expect the K1 to blow the A8X out of the water.
I'm not sure exactly what your issue is. The statement about the A8X having the highest IPC is a fact. This is not in dispute. You even acknowledge the clock speed difference in your post. How exactly do you interpret this as a bias?
When I read about the A8, it make me wonder about the A7. With the A8 Apple claims to have improved energy efficiency over the A7 by 50%. Now a iPhone 6 Plus driving a 1920x1020 screen has the same 10 hour battery life as a Galaxy Note 3 which also has a 1920 x 1080 screen. But that means that if Apple had tried to build a phablet with the A7, they would have ended up with a battery life of around 6.5 hours, clearly not competitive with Samsung’s offerings. So to me it looks like Apple didn’t build a bigger screen phone before not because they didn’t feel there was demand but because they simply wouldn’t have been able to compete on battery life and that is why the whole focus with the A8 was improving efficiency rather than simply performance. So was the A7 just very uncompetitive to other ARM designs or is iOS inefficient compared to Android. I would love to see someone do some digging on this – Anandtech?
I don't think this has anything to do with either the A7 design or iOS -- there are too many variables in the equation to definitively say. Plus unlike other ARM designs and Android, there is only one source for the A7 and iOS -- Apple. So you can't just take iOS and install it on the same hardware as another Android device and compare.
The A7 was also used in the iPad and iPad mini last year where it got an advertised 10 hour battery life. If Apple had made a Plus sized iPhone last year, they probably would've had to make it thicker to get to their target battery life, which is probably similar to what Samsung has done with their designs. Apple never likes to go thicker if they can avoid it.
You can see how Apple values size over battery life because with the move to the A8X, the Air 2 got thinner with the same battery life vs staying the same size but with more battery life. Not saying that valuing battery live over size is better than what Apple chose, but they are clearly making it known what they are optimizing for here.
As an Android fan, I'd love to see Apple stop chasing thinness and actually improve battery life by a large degree... They could've done so with the iPhone 6 and chased the claim of "2 day battery life", but they chose thinness instead.
Having Apple claiming two day battery life on a phone and destroying everything else by a large margin would definitely light a fire under everyone... Over engineering for 7mm thickness vs 8.5 mm seems quite pointless to me, anything under 9 is quite enough on a phone.
It seems structurally speaking they're better off to, e.g. bendgate...
Be state came and went in ten minutes. It's a non issue Might check those up times on the 6+ again. They reflect almost identical performance as mine. I could go two days, easily.
You "analysis" fails to consider the size of the battery in existing devices as part of the equation. Likewise, your conclusion regarding the A7 design not being competitive is completely baseless. What's more, you also fail to consider the manufacturing process as a variable as well. The primary efficiency difference between the A8 and A7 has much more to do with the manufacturing process moving from 28nm to 20nm. Finally, if you wish to compare Apple's chips with the competition or iOS vs. Android in terms of efficiency, you should ask yourself why Android phones require more memory to perform the same tasks and why Android devices need such a bigger battery in order to get the same level of usage and/or performance.
Battery size is almost identical. Manufacturing process has absolutey nothing to do with it. Or the efficiency difference between A8 and A7. It is a fairly simply equation - at same battery size, A8 equipe diPhone 6+ gives smae battery life as Note 3/4. Swap out A8 for A7 and you would get 1/3 less battery life based on Apple's 50% A8 over A7 efficiency claim. Hence why no big iPhone before.
Yup, when I saw the teardown with two RAM banks rather than the usual one, I was expecting 25.6GB/sec, with double the pins/bits going into the SoC. And it also makes sense with the huge GPU gains, something has to feed that beast. Crazy, that's now in laptop bandwidth range.
Question, don't you have to divide the final FPS of the performance degradation test with the first run, to see how much it actually went down? Otherwise you're not looking at degradation so much as total performance still. Performance may have degraded, but if it's higher to start with it's probably still higher in the end relatively.
ie, if one device starts with 100FPS and degrades 40%, and the other starts at 50 and degrades 10%, the degradation on the second one is lower but the first one will still show higher on that graph.
This is definitely true, and it's taken into account when writing the review. In this case the degradation wasn't large enough to change any conclusions on the matter.
Any plans to update these graphs with Nexus 9 results? Sorry if this is mentioned in the piece somewhere, I tend to skip around before sitting down to read them in their entirety, thanks!
"The fact that Apple used A7 in the previous iPad Air means that on top of already being a serious step up in transistor count versus A8, compared to the iPad Air 1 the gap is even larger. A7 occupied 102mm2 and more than 1 billion transistors, so compared to Apple’s previous tablet Apple has come very close to doubling their transistor count within 1 generation. "
Did you mean triple? As 3 Billion is well over doubling of 1 Billion.
You should mention in the design segment, that there is a consequence with the thinness. I was playing some media (TV show, the 100, gotham), and due to the thinness, with the volume turned up, the iPad would reverberate/vibrate due to the audio output.
In my opinion, the loss of a few millimetres was not worth this trade off, as my iPad 2 never shook when playing music or movies from its speakers at full blast.
My old HP touchpad used to do that, but the sound quality was really good (and loud) for a tablet (like comparable to your average bluetooth speaker box things).
I noticed you added it in the misc section. It is still a design consideration IMO. Tomato tomato. It's my only gripe with the iPad Air 2. That and maybe ios8 - it's still a little buggy for me.
Another thorough review by AT. I think software should be the next major focus for Apple with the iPad. The CPU and GPU power are getting to the point where the iPad could replace a laptop, provided the software were there. Maybe we'll see true multitasking and split window displays if and when the iPad Pro comes out with a 12+" screen. That third CPU core must be there for more than just games.
I think they are heading this way. -iPad Pro rumors -IBM deal -MS Office (iWork since 2011, but still) -iCloud Drive and support for third party cloud storage in the native file picker.
And now beefed up hardware that makes more sense for laptop-type usage.
But I still think that multitasking is great on a desktop/laptop not so much because of the windows, but because of the control scheme: using the dominant hand for the pointer (like on touch) and the other for focus switching (like between programs) is just so insanely efficient. Bringing in the second hand for doing something simply does not work that fluidly on a touch device. And that would ultimately hamper the direction you're describing.
It's amusing to me when people talk about needing to multitask on tablets. 90% of the people I see using 24" desktops zoom every window they use to full-screen. It's actually HARDER to read the long lines of text or mouse around large expanses of blank space this way, but people like to focus on one thing at a time I guess. I tend to be more of the "use virtual space to organize the workflow" type when I've got that kind of real estate, but I rarely have the desire to do more than switch between fullscreen apps on a tablet.
Still, we may see Apple add some kind of split-screen mode if only because people think they want it, like they gave us the comically unwieldy iPhone 6+.
I have the samsung 10.1 2014 edition and I never split screen. I like to focus on one screen so it seems. Apple seem to know this is reason it hasn't adopted the split screen my opinion. It just negates you the choice
Uhm, what planet do you live on where Apple cares about anything but the consumer market? Hmm, instead of giving developers incentives to write on OSX/iOS, let's give U2 $100 million dollars instead. Yeah, that's what will advance them as a company.
Josh, don't you think it is a bit misleading to show a chart with a long-term fps of 46fps for Shield tablet in the GFXBench T-Rex Onscreen test when it was able to maintain an fps of ~ 55fps for the first 100 (!) continuously looped runs of the test (which represents nearly two hours of continuous use!)? I don't see how the 46fps is a realistic number for comparison. Even the GFXBench website lists a long-term median performance result of ~ 55fps for Shield tablet.
Also note that Tegra K1 has higher render quality in GFXBench than A8X and any other ultra mobile SoC, so it is doing more work in that test.
A8X is a fantastic SoC and iPad Air 2 is an awesome tablet, but do note that iPad Air 2 has some significant performance-reducing throttling in both Geekbench 3 and 3dmark Ice Storm Unlimited. With long-term testing, the performance of A8X drops by ~ 30% in Geekbench 3 and drops by ~ 15% in 3dmark Ice Storm Unlimited: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-iPad-Air-2-A156...
(It is my understanding that Shield tablet has virtually no CPU/GPU throttling due to use of the internal magnesium plate to dissipate heat).
On a side note, here is what OlegSH had to say about the GFXBench 3.0 T-Rex Onscreen test: "It's strange to see GLBenchmark 2.7 test as battery life test in GFXBench 3.0 Kishonti uses low precision FP16 shaders for T-Rex by default, that has quite noticeable impact on picture quality, just look at MP(medium precision) PSNR, hence the perfect MP PSNR for K1, looks like K1 doesn't support FP16. This combined with small amount of geometry, very simple shaders, lots of blending make this test perfect fit for tiled architectures. I don't believe lifetime results will stay the same once they move to Manhattan as power test".
We have had an ongoing internal debate over how to best represent performance in thermally-limited scenarios. However, the goal of our specific test is to try and show the lower bound for performance although we will include the full FPS graph from here on out.
It's certain that the CPU is fully capable of throttling on the iPad Air 2 much more easily, but as far as we can tell GPU-bound workloads are unlikely to throttle on the iPad Air 2 and performs better than Tegra K1 in this area.
I noticed the following on all current and previous generations iPad air and iPad mini. On a white screen (for example blank document/note), pushing with one or more finger(s) on the back of the ipad or on the screen itself, displays a dark shadow in the area being pushed. I have not observed this effect on the iPhone 6, my iPhone 4s and iPad 4. Did you or anybody else notice this as well? If yes, how do you feel about it since this without any doubt the result of design compromises for making the device thin and light?
I can notice this only if i strongly and deliberately press on the device. But I haven't figured out why anyone would or could do that in normal use by mistake. Why would anyone grip the device that hard?
I’ve tried to reproduce this effect on a least 8 devices in 2 different stores and it was present on all of them. On some devices you really didn't have to push very hard and on some the only thing you had to do is to pick it up.Typical applications were one would push “harder” on the screen: Ipad used as a music instrument, games, artists using ipad with pressure-sensitive pens, … The question is not why one would press this hard but why do we accept this while iphones, older Ipads and most, but not all, premium tablets of the competition clearly show that touch screen devices can be designed without showing such behaviour.
Is the Nexus 9 one of your premium tablets of the competition? I hope not... I also doubt you will generate much pressure on the *back* of the device by pushing harder on the screen. Isn't that on the other side? :) I notice you've "tried" to reproduce this effect. I still don't think this is something that's going to happen in normal use. I bet you'll be outraged over the fact you can break one by putting it on your knee and pressing both sides.
The Nexus 9 happens to be a device with a similar behaviour as the iPad Air 1/2 … great OS but, in my opinion, not a "premium" device. Sushisamurai (link) also commented on this review. He mentions “ … with the volume turned up, the iPad would reverberate/vibrate due to the audio output …” I have also noticed this annoying behaviour and wouldn’t be surprised that this is another consequence of making the iPad Air 2 a little too thin and light.
I know right? It's actually really annoying, it's practically forced me to prop it up when using it for TV/movies because holding a vibrating tablet for 40 minutes was a huge pain the in the ass. I'd rather they keep the same size as the iPad Air 1, and just give me 2-4 more hours of use time (by keeping the battery size the same, increased efficiency of A8X) and NO VIBRATING tablet.
No, my iPad Air 2 does not reproduce this issue, even with full strength one finger push (erred on the side of not bending my iPad). However, I do have a hard plastic back case (thin) on it - applying pressure to the screen also does not produce any issues.
I recall it was said that Nvidia was not going to use the TSMC 20nm because it's only really ready for SoC production, perhaps because the yield is not good enough for large dies yet? But if the 20nm process can already produce chips with 3 billion transistors at presumably acceptable yield, that is well into the GPU transistor count territory. I just wonder if this holds any indication/promise that Nvidia and AMD could move to 20nm in a relatively quick time frame, say within the next year. 28nm is really getting long in the tooth. Well, at least I imagine Nvidia's next SoC should be on 20nm...
I was a little disappointed that there was no comparison against the Surface Pro 3. I am not interested in any OS/fanboy wars by any means - purely a hardware comparison. The Geekbench scores for the iPad Air 2 are (1798/4468) as shown in your article. The Geekbench scores for the entry level 1.5Ghz Core i3 Surface Pro 3 are (1569/3137) on a $280 CPU! But that's only one benchmark of course. GPU is certainly a very different beast all together as well.
I would love to see some comprehensive testing to compare ARM (especially the A8X, and 64bit K1) against Intel's offerings. The slower clocked Celerons and Core i3s are the most comparable as those laptops are closer to tablet pricing. The Core M series is coming and its clocked even slower (but has turbo) -it's fanless performance remains to be seen. Ultimately the question is... how close is ARM to truly competing with Intel in the laptop space?
And some food for thought... If a 1.5Ghz A8X is already in striking distance of Intel's low end 1.5Ghz... what would happen if Apple added turbo/higher clocks and a fan?
It's all very interesting from a technical curiosity standpoint, but until mobile OS evolve a lot more there aren't gonna be very many people cross shopping anything running iOS (or Android) vs a Surface Pro... And no one wants a Windows system running ARM hardware cause it defeats the point of running Windows.
I guess the one exception to all that would be if Apple were working on OS X ARM edition...
Agreed. Very much an intellectual curiosity. Windows on ARM defeats the purpose of running Windows. Mobile OSes are not capable of fully replacing a desktop environment for productivity.
Apple *could* push out an OSX ARM edition. It would be very interesting to see if they have the clout to get devs on board such a port. Maybe? Maybe it just pushes Intel to improve.
The only ARM product likely to matter in the short term for laptop compete is the Chromebook. Still not feature competitive, but if performance really is encroaching on Intel and price is cheaper, it will at least force Intel to compete on price/perf on the low end.
Aside: I also remembered AT's Surface Pro 3 review with the Core i3. Google Octane 11,600 vs 9,400 gives Intel the edge but the gap is closing fast.
Roughly Haswell IPC is equal to Apple IPC. There are lots of caveats to this --- Apple does better on Geekbench, Intel does better on SPEC (probably because they have a superior memory system). Intel also have, to be fair, a much more mature compiler, while Apple can probably squeeze another 10% out of LLVM for ARM64 over the next year or two, along with some improvements to the SPEC numbers when their long awaited polyhedral optimizations finally go mainstream.
I used to think Apple would ramp to higher frequencies, now I think a different trajectory is more likely. An Intel CPU is a bundle of many capabilities, and the CPU part is only one of these. There's also, for example, the turboing subsystem, and the profiling/debugging subsystem. My guess is that they are (even though they have said nothing about it) headed for the same sort of HSA future that AMD talks about.
I expect over the next few years, much Apple work will go into this sort of less than sexy infrastructure, stuff that Apple won't talk about much (if at all) and it will only make its appearance in things like better XCode tools and much less overhead to transfer code and data between CPU and GPU. Looking at the competitive landscape, Apple look like they could get away with an A9 improvement that's to the A8 as the A8 is to the A7 --- a steady 25%, one third from compiler, one third from another 100 or 150MHz boost, and one third from more tweaking of the CPU. It's possible that this is indeed what we should expect because I'd guess that Apple's A-team for CPU design is hard at work on the AWatch project, and probably following the same strategy as we saw with CPUs --- the S1 will probably be a good but not spectacular SoC, something reliable to get the project rolling, the equivalent of A5. S2 will presumably be a substantial jump, with all the less risky optimizations they couldn't fit into S1, while S3 will knock it out of the park, taking the risk of project slippage to make use of every good idea the team has.
If this theory is correct, It may not be until A10 or so, as the team has hired more people and the watch project becomes more stable, that we get a rethinking of the phone/tablet CPU.
[Of course by then, who knows, maybe Apple will have announced iDust and mote CPUs will be what their CPU A-team are working on?]
This. Most people when comparing ARM64 SoC to Intel often fail to count the difference between the software ecosystem. Intel had much more engineers and years of optimization in libraries, and compiler. There are still quite lot of work to do on ARM64 and LLVM.
While we haven't included the Surface Pro 3 in comparisons as it's a much more expensive device, all of the tests in this review and more have been released to Bench where you can compare the two SoCs.
Just got back from checking the iPad Air at a store, and the performance was disappointing to say the least. I've got an iPad 2, and I keep reading about these leaps and bounds in the SOCs each year, but when it comes to a real-world task like opening the Mail app or paginating a novel in iBooks, this supposedly mind-blowingly smoking device is only incrementally faster than my 2nd gen clunker. What gives?
I thought maybe everything was being bottlenecked by the flash access, but Josh tested that too and of course it looked way ahead of earlier hardware in that area too. iOS slowdowns? I'm running 7 instead of 8 on the Air 2, but that's only one generation behind.
I guess you're saying maybe there's a floor effect with Mail opening given by the animation timers if nothing else, but how do you explain iBook pagination? That takes several seconds and seems to be computatin limited.
If u can't tell a difference, then maybe u should hold onto your iPad 2. I sold my iPad2-32GB wifi model for $200, just to upgrade to this Air 2. My iPad2 was stuttering and dropping frames for the apps I was using (also on iOS8). This Air 2 is absolutely amazing compared to the iPad2 - some of my daily apps can load, and reload (after downloading a minor update), before my other iPad2 finishes loading LOL
Maybe it's iOS 8 then. Good way to sell hardware. The big performance drop going to 7 is one of the reasons I'm not going any further yet. I'd get the Air 2 for the weight, retina, and fingerprint, not the SOC, but the way it runs hot is a big downgrade.
FYI, I was doing some financial analysis on Apple and the iPad Air 2 cost structure and I'm estimating that the "Apple Tax" on these is probably only a little more than $100 per unit on the 16gb wifi model.
Just received mine. Previous was an Ipad 4th gens. One word ! Wow !! This is really magical. Its thin piece of glass with a processing power of a computer. I doubt there is a better tablet experience than this.
" While tablet applications that haven’t been properly scaled on the iPhone line are likely to look horrible due to the scaling factor used. While the same can and does happen with Android apps, it isn’t nearly as obvious because most of the scaling done is far more seamless and simply leaves a great deal of white space in the application that can’t necessarily be used."
Please tidy that up by using actual sentences, because it is difficult to understand what you are saying here.
"As a result of all this work, it seems pretty obvious that the iPad Air 2 continues to deliver some of the best tablet software on the market. For the most part, every application available seems to effectively deliver a tablet-specific experience that helps to set the iPad lineup apart from other tablets. Unfortunately, it seems that due to a lack of competition there isn’t much in the way of attempts to dramatically improve the software experience, and as a result it’s a bit difficult for me to justify carrying a tablet around all the time as its size is relatively massive compared to even a 6 inch phablet"
You are saying the iPad Air 2 has some of the best tablet software, but tablets in general are not worth carrying around because they are too big relative to phablets. You attribute this to a lack of competition for the iPad, which means Apple has failed to make dramatic improvements to tablet software, improvements that would be necessary to make it worthwhile to carry tablets. OK. What about just having one for use at home? I think you are trying to say too many unrelated things in this paragraph.
"Overall, the iPad Air 2 is likely to be one of the only tablets worth buying on the market today."
I think this is rather too sweeping a statement for a review focused on one tablet, not very helpful when you omit to mention the other tablets worth buying, and anyway the statement isn't well supported in the article itself.
"The glass is flat, which makes it seem noticeably different from the iPhone 6 line in that regard as it meets the chamfered edge of the back cover rather than making a seamless curve."
iPad manufacturing has always lagged iPhone, I imagine because the volumes are lower. I wouldn't read any "statement of direction" into this.
For example my iPad Retina came out at the same time as the iPhone 4/4S. The 4/4S was incredibly slick for its time, while the iPad Retina used a sort of lacquer or something to form the bezel around the screen, and there was noticeable unevenness in this lacquer. (Uneven meaning not visible, but you could feel it if you ran your fingers over the bezel.)
Of course the iPhone 5 ramped up slickness of manufacturing to a new level with the really tight tolerances, the feel of a single block of material; the 6 retained that while now converting straight edges to curves. I'd say the iPad Air 2, in terms of manufacturing slickness lives halfway between the 4/4S and the 5/5S. It doesn't QUITE reach that feeling of a single uninterrupted block of material, probably because it's striving for curves --- they might have been able to make it if they'd gone for a look exactly like the 5/5S.
The larger pattern, I think, is that the manufacturing/fit-and-finish is improving for iPads every year; they just suffer in comparison with the absolute perfection of the phone manufacturing.
In agreement with you here. I'm really not a fan of how the TouchID is integrated into the iPad Air 2. I'm not sure if it's just lower tolerances than the iPhone 5s, or perhaps my unit is weird. But if my fingernails are long enough that they contact the ring at all (not that long, I swear!), they catch on the sharp outer edge. It feels icky. On the iPhone 5s this is totally not an issue.
Hey, Josh, the data doesn't really match your conclusions about efficiency too much. I can see that performance degraded slightly more on the shield tablet, but only at the very end, before the last ten minutes. Up until then, performance stays at a steady 57fps (http://www.anandtech.com/show/8329/revisiting-shie... However, considering that this is an onscreen test, I'll assume the 5-7 fps advantage compensates for the lighter workload given by the lower resolution screen. So, assuming the workload is even, then we must consider the battery size difference. Ignoring the screen power usage for now, the Shield Tablet has a 19.75 Wh battery, the Air 2 a 27.62 Wh battery. Ratio the battery numbers with the battery life difference, and we end up looking at a 23% efficiency win for the Air 2, maybe up to 25-28% because of the larger screen. That's a little less than I would actually expect (but pretty close to expectations) considering the A8X is 20nm and the K1 28nm. So if anything, praise the efficiency of 20nm; because considering the gap in architecture, the efficiency is maybe worse than the K1's GPU.
Sidenote: (Of course, that's a somewhat invalid argument, because the A8X has 20nm, K1 doesn't, and we can't just say that the K1 is more efficient - it's not. But still, the difference is due to 20nm. Kudos to Imagination, though, for making a GPU that has similar hypothetical efficiency to the juggernaut Nvidia. Can't wait for Maxwell SoC's though. One SMX on a phone?)
"Ignoring the screen power usage for now" Huh? Once you do that, the rest of your question is meaningless. The screen is the largest power consuming component by a large margin. What's more, you're comparing a device with a 5" screen to a device with a 10" screen and attempting to guess at the efficiency of the chip components based the the respective battery sizes for these devices. That's an exercise in futility as you're not able to draw any meaningful conclusions based on the data you have.
What a disaapointing review. After all of this waiting I was expecting some deep chip architecture dive, something we havent read in other reviews ,but NOTHING here came across as new and interesting. Also, it was written rather poorly ,with a lot of grammar mistakes and bad, half hearted sentence structure.
And this was supposed to be the review highlight of the year on AT.
1. Extended use of "aforementioned" when refering to stuff you dont know and already mentioned, like some magic "arhitectural" benefits.
2. There is no need to inflate the article by saying the same thing over and over again.
3. "In the basic definition of a tablet, the iPad Air 2 definitely fits." - No shit sherlock the ipad is a tablet - what is this, retard bingo?
4. You randomly switch sorting order of the graphs so the better is no longer on top, conveniently when Apple performs weaker.
5. On every set of tests that Ipad Air 2 performed mid to low compared to competition, you still present a missleading summary that Ipad was the best.
6. For every weakness of the iPad Air 2, you try to find excuses.
Yes the iPad has both advantages and disadtantages. Try to maintain some reasonable level of objectivity, there are way too many fanboi "reviews" out there.
Since when AnandTech does asskissing "reviews"? Bring back Anand before the site dies!
A lot of people at the mac rumors forum are complaining about a) distortion on screen when pushing on back and b) excessive vibration due to speakers when watching movies or playing games. Bad enough many are returning them again.
Can you comment on that? Could you compare the cellular and Wi-Fi versions and see if they behave differently with respect to a) or b)?
I can confirm that both of those are present on the cellular version that we were sampled, but distortion from pressing on the back is something that I've noticed on multiple devices this year. The vibration effects are definitely strong but this really isn't an issue.
sorry, but that was the first thing i noticed when i picked up the device. Swapping or even moving my hands positions caused distortions on the screen. I checked both units in the store and both suffered this issue. i dont know about the vibration, because there were too many people to test the sound quality. the distortion was enough for me and didnt buy it. ill check later if apple has fixed it (secrectly as they do). but now, its only place is on a table at a store...
the lack of info makes me wonder, if anandtech site is just another bitch in apples stall nowadays. no mention the strong vibration... no mention screen distortions which is visible and terrible when keeping it on your hands. it is time to remove anandtech site from the serious reviewers list... seems to be too much connection with apple nowadays to be able to do trusted reviews? :/
Oh the strained logic of a sterdroid user. One employee of a news site goes and works somewhere else, everyone left behind still works for that employee. lol
I consider myself an apple fan girl for life. I bought my MacBook Pro in 09 and no issues. My finacee has a HP desktop that does. I fear the blue screen of death soon. I want to convert him to the apple side. He has the newest macbook pro 2012 I want him to get an iphone he has a Motorola phone. Most Android and Window's are not as flexible as the Apple. Yes, IOS has issues like other platforms. However, Apple's products are designed to last longer than it's competitors. I had bad taste of both Windows & Android now. I owned a Samsung Galaxy S and Windows Nokia Lumia the problem is their software & battery life. Yes, apple's products are expensive but in the long run it is worth every penny spent on a beautiful product that is going to last. I am off to buy an Ipad Air 2 something I have been waiting on for a while. I'll do a combo pack and give it to myself as a birthday present. I'm a tech junkie and a student. Did you know you can use Window's office mobile on all devices? You no longer need those giant desktop thing's. I don't need a USB to find mystuff when I have airdrop and icloud if you need extra storage use that as your backup for files. I also use Google Drive to do my school work. Good luck with all your apple needs.
Sound vibrates through the screen even at low volume levels to such an extent that people's fingertips are going numb and they're returning the Air 2s for refunds... yet no mention of that??? Welcome to Apple Corporation, Anandtech. And goodbye.
Maybe because it's not as much of an issue as you think it is? If you'd believed the Antennagate sky-is-falling types, Apple was going to have to recall the iPhone 4 and face disastrous financial results... turned out that the problem, while real, was seriously overblown.
I've felt it, and it's slightly weird, but I don't think I'd call it a dealbreaker.
People's fingernails are literally getting stuck in the gap of the note 4 and people are having to amputate fingers. It's horrible. Goodbye corporate Samsung!!#@$
I got the iPad Air 2 yesterday. I can do more with it I could ever do with a Nexus. I have an Android phone but I wouldn't take a Nexus tablet if you have it to me for free.
I still have an iPad 2 and I do not plan on upgrading my iPad until there is add on space. Put in a usable SD slot and I' ll upgrade. Adding & deleting apps will not change w a new iPad w the same amt of space.
See the iStick... You see. everything is going wireless. They have wireless HDs from toshiba that are for the iPad now. You don't need a random dust collecting/battery dwindling port to get done what you want to get done.
The line "I’m not necessarily sold on TouchID on a tablet as an ergonomic ideal as the sheer width of the device makes it a bit harder than usual to properly place my finger for scanning" in the Final Words section doesn't make sense. The TouchID sensor works with multiple fingers at any any orientation which makes it easy to use no matter how you're holding it. This review makes it sound like Apple uses the old style vertical swipe sensor like the Galaxy S5 uses
Just picked up an Air 2 over the weekend. I'm no Apple fan boy (PC gamer, Note 3 phone and don't think I'll ever go back to an iphone, and I generally despise itunes) , I just wanted what I thought would work best for me. After agonizing for months over every tablet out there including the Nexus 9, I just liked the Air 2.
The cons (since that's what everybody seems interested in); 1. It's almost too thin. It feels delicate to me. I'd much rather have a bit thicker tablet with a more substantial feel. Stop with the thin thin thinner crap. Of course I have a case on the way but still.
2. The vibration. Yep it's definitely there. However, I can't think of any situation that this would bother me in the least bit. I wouldn't have thought to mention it but I saw so many comments here saying it's worse then ebola. There is no way somebodies fingers are going numb when holding it. People are starting to make up things to enforce their argument. The vibration certainly goes back to problem 1. Too thin, too light, too delicate in the hand.
3. Speakers. Not that I'm expecting anything great on a tablet but I sure like the thought of the Nexus front facing speakers. It's just a better solution. The ipad speakers aren't bad at all. They're just typical tablet speakers.
All in all, it's been a great addition. Fast, smooth, great apps (just tried Hearthstone for the first time, and as a PC gamer, I'd say it makes a great tablet game which I generally can't stand), display is gorgeous, battery life is longer then expected though gaming will eat it up quickly. The fingerprint ID thing IS nice, which surprises me as I wouldn't have thought I would care.
One other thing. There is absolutely NO distortion just holding the tablet. Another instance of over dramatization. I've put a little pressure into the back and didn't notice any distortion in that case either, but as I've said above, I do feel it's too thin/delicate and I'm afraid I'll damage it if I were to squeeze it too much. By "too much" I mean actively trying to bend it to see if the screen will distort, but not under normal use.
It's worth mentioning that this is the first handheld device (apart from full-fledged Windows tablets) truly close to last-gen gaming consoles in terms of performance - 25.6 GB/s memory bandwidth and a powerful triple-core CPU. It'd be interesting to see how the 1.5 GHz enhanced Cyclone stacks against the 3.2 GHz PowerPC in the Xbox 360.
Do you see any Intel Core based tablets here? The Surface Pro 3 is a PC that just happens to be a tablet so it's not really comparable in terms of performance. You might compare other statistics such as battery, display etc. but it's otherwise a completely different animal.
Why is the Galaxy Tab S in all display comparisons besides black levels and contrast ratio? IMO the most important metrics that the tab s blows the ipad out of the water in?
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
226 Comments
Back to Article
hughlle - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
iOS may not be perfect..Damned right. The nexus 9 could offer half the performance of this and i'd still pick that due to no other reason than iOS.
Desusenam - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Indeed, exactly the reason I just bought a Nexus 9. That and not needing to install iTunes.However, I'm still annoyed I can't yet buy the cover for the Nexus 9. When I bought the iPad 2, it came with the cover I bought at the same time. I can see why some people like the Apple experience...
dmunsie - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
You do know that you don't need iTunes to setup and use an iOS device anymore, right? Been that way since iOS 5 (2011).Desusenam - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Cheers, I had no idea, I must be someone companies really like, they get a bad experience, go somewhere else and never look back...darwinosx - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Most Android users have no idea.ITunes hasn't been required in years.
Tikcus9666 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
until you install an update that bricks the device, then you need a pc or mac with itunes to fix it....iOS 8.0.1 update anyone
svan1971 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
um other than just itunes and a pc to fix a bricked apple device, how about listing the items required to fix an android device thats been bricked?StevoLincolnite - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
On WIndows Phone, I just press two buttons and it un-bricks itself.sprockkets - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
"On WIndows Phone, I just press two buttons and it un-bricks itself."Then your phone wasn't bricked.
Nokia has tools just like everyone else that runs on a pc to fix a phone. Except Google's can be fixed with macs and Linux.
akdj - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
And with iOS, you can fix on a Mac, Windows PC OR Linux!& you're coreect. A pair of buttons doesn't (un)brick a phone of any make, model, manufacturer or OS
robinthakur - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
Lol, you hit the nail on the head there. You can't even install OTA updates on rooted Android devices with custom recoveries without restoring the stock one and most banking apps don't work on them either. To do either you need a PC opr a mac and you need to use the command line. How user friendly is that?The last time I took off the custom recovery and put stock back onto my HTC One M8 and then tried to update, it wiped all the data off of the phone. After that, I bought an iPhone 6 Plus and am much happier and more secure in the knowledge that my phone backs up automatically overnight (every night) to iCloud. Having used iPhones since 2007, iTunes hasn't been required for mnost things since the iPhone 4 launched in 2010
craighamilton - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
Truly amazing, one of the high rated tablet. You should take a close look at the guide at http://www.topreport.org/tablets/NEDM64 - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Exactly, if you are like in tens of thousands in a pool of hundreds of millions, over the history of 7 years, you may get that...That's the problem, you get updates on iOS, while on Android... unless you buy the "right device" you may have something like 18 months of updates.
And what's the problem with iTunes then? I've it running on my Windows box, and for the monster of multipurpose App it is, it consumes next to nothing of RAM.
At least is a easy to use and stable program...
Contrary to the Nexus "fastboot" command line tools...
And most of software that Android vendors make you install, like Samsung KIES, that's great software, isn't it?
carloshehe - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
OS updates aren't too necessary on Android. You can still run all the latest apps. U like iOS, apps have no OS version requirements.akdj - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
I'm not sure I've read such a backward comment in my life.As an owner of bit iOS and Android devices (latest hard/software), your experience is undoubtedly 180° different than mine
My nine year old is still enjoying the iPad 2, even with the current version of iOS he's enjoying ten to twelve hours of better life
Same can't be said for the 'Xoom' ...or the nexus 7 ('12) ...I'm not sure when I pulled out the 2013 ?Nexus 7
That said, when it comes to 'tablet apps' and 'choice' ...in the Hundreds of THOUSANDS ...the Android tablet experience is an absolute, utter and catastrophic Joke!
I love my Note3. Looking forward to possibly updating to a Note 4 --- but four years of getting butnt by the tablet development community and its lack of interest in 'developing' for the Android tablet community, I'm done
Though a bit curious. iPad Air 2 drops (have one btw and its everything the reviews cracked it up to be, plus! -- & I'm coming from the original Air, my wife the iPad 4 she didn't want to give up. Case thing). And so does the price of the new Nexus 9?
Why? Wasn't it a 50% drop? Maybe I dreamt it....not sure, and not knocking the Nex9. That said, there's only so much you can do with the UI of your springboard. At some point its time to use your tablet to do something
When that time comes, you'll be glad you chose iOS, regardless of your interest, hobbies, media you enjoy ...games to play, media to manipulste or create. Music, video/still and artistic creation on the iPad ...its apps and its options are second to none ...
In HISTORY
Thanks for the write up.
What a slab
Michael Bay - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Your shilling is beyond pathetic.noelbonner - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
There are way better phones according to CONSUMER BASED rankings, just see http://tinyurl.com/p7dujj9valnar - Sunday, November 16, 2014 - link
I reject the very foundation of that article. Treating a phone like a computer misses the point. It is absolutely NOT important to pick a phone based on the resolution, camera or power. Battery...ok yes.What's more important are the apps it runs, how easy is the UI, stability, speaker & mic quality, etc. The things that matter in a smart phone. The ±10% speed or rez differences in various phones is irrelevant.
akdj - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
Huh. Amazing that year in, year out they contine breaking sales records from the previous launch customer satisfaction has remained in slot #1 for damn near every quarter since 2007 and as far as 'better' phones, even the connotation being subjective ....ultimately and objectively there isn't a "better phone". Just different now2007/08 and the introduction of the SDK & the App Store completely changed a massive, easily one of the top five, maybe three 'growing' areas of our world today. Wireless comms first for voice first (remember 'Can you hear me now?' And the days of Nextel, Blackberry corporate dominance and shitty analog coverage?)
...we've moved into 'texting' in a signficantly easier way than the Nokia flip phone with 12, standard 'phone' buttons and their associated three letters. Apple introduced in '07 a game changing, corporate smashing product that continues to better iteseld with each iteration. I've owned em each and because of how our company is run...we also provide employees with iPhones/iPads while I carry both. 6+ and Note 4. They've voth got their places and the sizes of their displays is a life saver to this mid 40s guy
I can't see anything anymore when it comes to reading. Cheaters or Else...
(Wal mart reading glasses;))
BUT, today's HiDPI dispays at 5-6" in these svelte profiles and 'weight' (lack of) with their Power, speed, efficiency and reliability --- ultimately make it 'that time' in history.
Telecommunications changed the world early in the 20th century. An extension of Moorse code. Voice to voice. Operators and analog switch boards and Mama Bells reign/monopoly on America's 'booming' new technology. All analog. All switched on site. Patch cords that my grandmother ran for almost forty years and plenty of advancements ...all the way until 'digital" phone lines were installed and the history of the 'switcher' is just that. History
Which two birds one stone BS, valnar underneath is tells is the 'very foundation of (sic) article....'
And I quote, "Treating a phone like a computer MISSES the point". They're VERY MUCH a computer, that fits in your pocket and performs much faster than computer we were building and drafting, coding and editing, emailing and surfing, playing games and 'communicating' with not JUST voice but video, text 'artistic creation!'
To dismiss a smartphone as inferior to a computer in ANY way shows a significant generational gap
When your mobike, wireless provider allows for the speeds of LTE (I'm routinely between 35/40Mb/s down and 40150 UP!
That's ubelievable when I think back to my IIe, Ultima I, II, III ...Booting to the promot 'BRUN ..xxxxx'
To 33!& 54 baud modems, the handshake noise like yesterday and was floored with the performance of SSD va HDD. Bluetooth's progression and the idea of an IPU, MPU....gyros and accelerometers ...if you'd sit back five minutes and think about their sheer 'abilities', other than 'Us, and these that frequent Anand's site ...and enjoy technology, the mass population is easily taken care of with 95-98% of all comouter tasking they were doing in 2010 on 110/220 (plugged in) ...
...Today being done on a gram measured in grams, a few hundred at that and fit in your pocket. They're reliable. They aggregate, integrate and oranizate;) everything about my life and 27 year business
As a pilot I can't begin to describe the differences between gettin my pilots license in 1987 and today. From GPS to LTE, TCAS to ADSB ...planning my trip and checking real time weather, calculating fuel and picking my diversions if needed. Jep charts n plates and app/dep up to the minute changes to your approach or arrival ...hell, even with an app, Flight 24 I bekeive...if you've got it you can follow a loved one all the way through to landing and gate release. Leave your house with perfect timing lol
Honestly, there just AREN'T 'way better phones'. Apple, HTC, LG, & of course samsung have helped each other
For me, I wouldn't be caught without both. I want to know the differences, what going to help me and be the most compelling reason to choose that platform, OS or Eco system
They ARE computers. Possibly you didn't ride DOS, the intro to 8086 and 8/16/32/64 bit programming and hardware but the amazing Moore's law has taken over. I, for one, couldn't. E happier.
akdj - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
"And I quote, "Treating a phone like a computer MISSES the point". They're VERY MUCH a computer, that fits in your pocket and performs much faster than ThE computer(s) we were building with and drafting (the initial CAD, paint,motion and still editing), coding and emailing surfing or producing a song, video (or both) in Los Angeles at a studio or your home swimming pool , playing games and 'communicating' with not JUST voice but video, text 'artistic creation' and SOOO much easier than a 'computer' in SO many cases, situations and emergencies and for the vast majority of our population today than yesterdayIF ALL you need is a phone, I'm with you. There's a better flip phone with those dozen digits, # & * as well as the 'green' & 'red' buttons on top and middle 'select'
If you're going to use your phone for more than calls, indeed, you'll find your iPhone,mS5 G3 or the latest Lumia to be a HELLUVA lot closer to a comouter than you're implying.
That said, if this is an extremely rare circumstance and you're working opposite me with my 4k conversions and encoding, I concur;)
There afain though ...our last two docs have used footage from iPhones and Androids (not a WinPhone yet unfortunately ...but I'm one of nine peeps that I think enjoy Win8.1. I'm OS X based and only own two Windows machines now...but I digress, my point was even my iPhone works perefectly on Win 8.1 ...as does iTunes! I'm pretty floored how quick it (now is, I left to OS X personally and with the business after a really bad crash in Vista in 2007---& hadn't looked back until earlier this year when I needed a Win rig. Bought an HP 2/1 slab or attachable and all aluminum body core i5. It's pretty cool having CS6 suite on a (albeit extremely large and unwieldy) tablet ...
I am rooting for all of them. That said, Mt View and Cupertino have vertical and horizontal aggregation and integration. Google doesn't. The former two's run deep and have history, trust ... Obviously fans with zest but IF a phone isn't s computer, Android/Google better spens some serious time on Chrome;)
JRX16 - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Yeah, that happened once and will likely never ever happen again... nice cherry pick there.drunkbananas - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I thought native audio/video file transfer were still restricted to iTunes. Can I put music and Blu-Ray rips on an iOS device and open them with more than one audio/video player?What about apps that used to require iTunes to load data in them, can I now just use regular USB?
Samus - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I've had an iPhone 4S for over a year, my first Apple product...and it replaced my technically superior but buggy as hell Galaxy S3.Still haven't installed iTunes and I've upgraded from IOS 6 through IOS 7 and IOS 8.
I *almost* installed iTunes to downgrade back to IOS 7 while Apple was still permitting it, but I got used to the...lets just say, lack of smoothness my phone once had.
I had an HTC Dream (G1) years ago so I'm accustomed to jerky UI's by now.
The reason I like the iPhone comes down to the app store, the camera, battery life and size. It's really hard to find a <4" phone anymore and the GS3 was just too big for me.
blacks329 - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Google Music Play All Access or whatever mouth full of words its called works fine for audio. I've been wifi transferring video files from any computer on the same network to the VLC app on my iOS device for a couple of years now and haven't had a problem.No USBing it over to the device however, but most things use either a cloud back end or wifi transferring for files. I've never had to plug my iPhone or iPad into a computer except to charge it for years now.
carloshehe - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
That requires a WiFi set up that people may not have or understand how to do it.Its just called Play Music.
akdj - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
Play music. Play video. Play magazines. Play books, tones, podcasts, an app tray in alphabetical order, Google Ringtones? (I'm a Note 4 & iPhone owner and enjoy both, honestly!). Your TV shows? Actual app 'layout' on a far superior and quicker rig is quite useful if you're interested in changing your UI. Wifi, no need. NFC is here now and Airdrop destroy NFC when it comes to transferring files from computer to phone, tab or vice versa. No need for a separate wifi zoneNo LTE or data charges apply.
It seems as though about a ½ billion people understand it, I'm not sure who you're talkng to that doesn't get it. One of the overlooked and most desirable ios feature and strength is it's optimization of hard and software, lack of carrier bloat and the MOST active development community in history. The cool thing, when compared to its counterpart is this Eco system isn't limited to a certain, average sized phone
Developers take the time to optimize the app for larger dispalys...including the tablet form factor unlike Android (5.0 from the Nexus reviews I've seen)
As a business owner if 27 years, husband, father and pilot... iOS has literally revolutionized our business's in the past five years
Mini 2 is my kneeboard, flight planner, fuel calculator, Jep charts and up to date plates, real time weather and traffic, the flight manual for each plane, and it's shaved off 47 of the 48 pounds my flight bag was consistently consuming. One of my son's grades have come up from C+/B- to all As! Due solely to the iPad...it's learning software and compelling nature and new idea of 'learning'. A tutor for the year wouldn't have improved his grades as much and would've doubled the price
The iPhone 6+ is hand's down the best iPhone to date. I'm not familiar with the 6, as we've been using Notes and the earlier 3.5" & 4" iPhones. It's balance and weight, slim form factor and incredible speed is unparalleled ...my Note 4 screams and looks great. I'm using adaptive screen for adjustments to the saturation but for me, it's the tool we need on site as we produce audio, video and still shots from all over Alaska. We've been lucky enough to work with Nat Geo, Smithsonian and Discovery (several of their subs) and in Alaska, without a plane you're not going to get 99% of her.
We also provide mobile production and have hosted many hundreds of parties over the past three decades in villages from St George and Paul NW AK and Montague where you CAN see, not Just See Russia, but ice fish if you're crazy enough on their territory. Cool thing ...our snow machines (Alaskan for snowmobile;)) --- to Juneau, Ketchikan, Wrangle, Hoonah, Eek in the southeast. & up and down the Aleutian chain
None of this would be possible without today's technology. From the Beechcraft and Otter's nav aids and instrumentation for inclement weather to setting a three song ceremony up outdoors and amplifying the official! Ten years ago, burn a CD with the processional, bride's march and recessional we were humping a couple hundred pounds for that fifteen minutes of ceremony
Today, an iPad, three lavaliere mics and the 45 pound, suitcase Fender 500 ...three minutes TJ break down, maybe ten to put together and we're able to double our bookings as the bigger rigs can now solely be used for the reception ....again, whether 'Play Music' or iTunes on a phone or tablet is an incredible backup to have on hand in these situations --- computer goes down, you're instant on. dJay2, Pinnacle and I can't start the list of incredible DAWS we routineky work with make editing and playlist building a breeze. dJay with a controller is flat amazing as is Traktor, vJay, and the ability to wirelessly control AirPlay to projectors and the GoPro cams with music video mix has landed contracts for our business at five of the seven local high schools and a dozen junior highs. And it's a HELLUVA lot cheaper than buying a smart, moving head, laser system (we've got a both, and plenty of LED ParCans, effects, etc....but video is another level of 'cool' to the younger generation...
....Which I think leads me to my point. To those of you 20 something's that grew up connected, with a cell phone and computer...DON'T limit yourself. The Note4 &. Stylus allow me to sketch with structural engineers rigging positions, sign their credit cards with a 'pen' instead of a finger and they're incredibky fast. Wicked fast and a night and day difference between N1&2
That said, limitarions imposed by Google on 'external' (internal microSD) storage is a JOKE! Always makes me laugh when the Android camp points Apple's pricing on NAND as a 'ripoff' ...IMHO, a ripoff or bargain as I see it, no matter how YOU see it, the 'option' is there. My 'flagship' Noten4 comes in a single size. 32GB, about a third of which isn't available due to the OS
Then, there's a very arbitrary system of which apps can and can't be moved to the card. Bizarre and getting worse. Note 3 I had if I moved the app, it moved the WHOLE app.
Now, with 4.4 I'm able to move 'some' third party apps, no AT&T or Samsung bloat to the microSD card. Slower NAND, less storage options and a terrible development community, for me...make the decision easy, especially with the new iOS releases; 6, 6+ and Air2 (WOW, this is another level of badass!)---a second and a ½ generation 64bit SoC, battery/efficiency monsters and mind blowing objective measurements
And it doesn't end there. There's not a single solitary laptop on the market that can come close to the again, 2 ½ generation rMBP. The 15" I bought in 2012 changed comouting to me. HiDPI display is beyond awesome, the SSD speeds were phenomenal, power was incredible and at 4 pounds and seven hours of usage away from 110 was an absolute JOY!
I just picked up the recently updated Haswell model witht the PCIe SSDs, the bigger 2GB 750 and Iris Pro (5200---& if you've yet to see the IP5200 in action, go to an Apple Store, Best Buy, wherever and play with it. Again, and as expected an iGPU from Intel that is unreal!
MSI, Alienware, Clevo....9-12 pound 52 minute gamer monstrosities are a dying breed. Home built desktops for the enthusiast will stick for a while but when the power from a four pound laptop as a 15" 2014 rMBP demonstrates with a TB PCIe storage system, I'm reading and writing right at or just over a Gb/s! The new MP replaced (finally ,in March after waiting a bit) my 2010 octocore and runs circles around it! And I had put the 830s in for SSD, better GPU, didn't matter)
What Apple's doing today in phones, tabs, lap & desktops is incredible and with iOS 8/OS X 10.10, you're immediately set up with a 'hot spot' for your laptop.
Metal, elimanting the thick mud of OpenGL ES and allowing developers to work 'right on the metal'. No middle man. Shared cache for the memory so it can simultaneously be accessed but the CPU and GPU as well as continutiy, handoff....and SWIFT! They wrote an entirely new code from scratch, it's incredible and free to learn! Once you've played a bit, grab XCode for free and play around with building your own app, for your use.
Don't limit yourself to a single choice. No company is worth that type of 'fandom'. It's not football (American or 'real' everywhere else in the world, AKA soccer). It's a phone. A computer. A tablet. Buy wait works for YOU. Not what some DBag online says, your peers are using or based on reviews from sites other than here, ARS....maybe a couple others.
Once you buy, don't read the comments!
NEDM64 - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Yes, you can.Most App's you upload files via HTTP, FTP, almost all support AirDrop.
What about USB syncing?
Can you only sync a playlist with your android, that you update in your PC, and then auto-syncs the playlist, and the music?
Can you sync your entire library (or some albums, or some playlist), but transcode your music to a specific bitrate?
carloshehe - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
The only way to get music to play in your iPad without plugging it into anything is to use a cloud storage app that plays media.nyastra - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
1) Dropbox, OneDrive, GoogleDrive2) Yes - VLC,etc
Spotify, Amazon
akdj - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
No need for USB. We've got AirPlay. No need for iTunes for years. But it's still a killer piece of media management software and runs well, fluently and keeps your crap in a 'third' and physical location If you're looking to save pics, vids, drawings ...projects, whatever, sure there's a lighting to USB adaptor.I don't think I remember Ever having to use iTunes to 'load data on them' ...or are you talking about the early days of syncing music and media, etc?
Regardless, no need. Myself...I orefer DropBox. It's in my finder, toolbar (both on 10.10 and 8.1) and iOS as well as Android. It's an amazing app with excellent reliability and a bill a year to ensure the safety of a TB of data is invaluable.
Office 365 as well, ten bucks and five TBs Of storage, one formal, three kids, as well, my wife and I! Oh, yeah...it comes with this word editor/text editor, a 'spread sheet' thingy and this pretty slick, not quite keynote wannabe;) --- no, I'm being sarcastic. Five tabs, five computers. XPlatform
Just Incredible! $20/year per TB of storage.
Unfortunately it's Windows and therefore not nearly as 'open' or able to be baked into OS X. SkyDrive kicks was on 8.1 though.
sprockkets - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
"Most Android users have no idea.ITunes hasn't been required in years."
Except every ios device has to contact apple to work initially, and either itunes or itunes on the web does this. It's a stupid requirement that apple will never ever let go of.
carloshehe - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
You don't have to connect any apple device to iTunes. At all. Ever. You take it out of the box, you turn it on, it asks you a few simple questions and you're on the homescreen.What you're talking about is recovery mode. That's the only time I've seen that.
NEDM64 - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
Google Play Services is what?Google's version of "iTunes on the web"...
Really? That "iTunes on the interwebs" is the most retarded thing I haver have read here... But two pages from this, and anyone can see the real problem of this user...
And "iTunes on the interwebs" is welcome, makes a stolen iPhone or iPad worthless, wich if cool, unless you plan to stole one.
akdj - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
As does Samsung (& Google/AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/Carrier)As does HTC (& Google/AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/Carrier)
As does LG (& Google/AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/Carrier)
As does {insert OEM here} (& Google/AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/Carrier)
....and this DOES include the 'Nexus' lineup. While 'stock Android', it's built by and distributed the largest 'data miners' AND exploiters on the Internet, today. Google. Period
At least with Apple, sure, you definitely 'register' with them ONCE ...From then on, your communication with them is limited by your choices in settings. If title doing nothing wrong, I don't see a reason to help with 'traffic' or a developer improve his app, etc
If I'm doing something wrong, I suppose I would shit those options off. No need to 'phone home' as EVERY Android device does, including my Note3 I enjoy so much
At least Apple's a one shot, you choose deal
In the world of Android, it's a gamble unless you're using Nexus. Then you're 'only' sharing with Google. Everyone else you're dealing with the OEM and the carrier's bloat ...and constant background, unavoidable and incessantly running 'processes'
Anyway, yeah...TL/DR
What did you mean with your quotes?
A) you don't need iTunes EVEN in the beginning to activate your phone. Use a gmail account as your iPhone check in acct
B)‘Most Android users have no idea'
This I disagree with. If argue most ARE aware of this lack of necessity for some time now. Bad thing is you don't ..yet you quoted something you clearly don't understsnd, didn't realize and failed to respond with a 'back up' to your complaint(s)
It's neither a 'stupid requirement'
And Apple only held on to it so it could sync your phone in an expeditious manner! Wireless, broadbamd and 'clouds' have t been here forever.
That said, iTunes eats KIES alive. It's definitely the first thing replaced on my Note updates. Music and media management. Unfortunately, one still has to deal with it for OTA updates
I'll take the iOS 'update' approach (to both apps and full on OS upgrades all day in comparison)
As akways, ymmv
J
robinthakur - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
Except every Google device has to contact Google to work initially, and all the time thereafter, feeding them yopur usage metrics to make them money. It's a stupid requirement that Google will never ever let go of.There we go, fixed that right up.
extide - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
Actually you can use an Android device without ever even having a google account. Obviously things like gmail and the play store wont work, but the option is there if you really wanted.akdj - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
No different than Android devices using your Gmail information for 'initial contact'There's NO NEED to use iTunes. iTunes on the web. iTunes on your iPhone! There's hundreds of programs to play your media from
And the 'need' to contact Apple, use iTunes or any of the other BS you've been told a couple dozen times now hasn't been the case since 5.0, right?
This is 8.1. So over three years have passed
carloshehe - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
In all fairness you do need iTunes still. How will you put all your music in an iPad? Maybe you'll say there are other programs out there you can use, but the fact is you still have to sync it and use some sort of program to put your music.You have 3,000 songs in your computer. You get an iPad. How are you going to put all that music in your iPad?
With Android you can just plug it in and drag and drop your music like the tablet is an external drive.
That being said, Android sucks because it has no tablet apps.
Android tablets are for the very basics. Documents, email, videos. But for anything else, you need an iPad.
akdj - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
AirDropSync via home sharing (playlists)
Dropbox GDrive OneDrive
iTunes match up to 25,000 songs with ya, everywhere you go ...just $20/year
There's Sooo many options to list, no need to 'sync' your media any longer with your computer physically connected. If you're on you're gime network, feel free to send me a line and I'll walk you through.
All3,00 songs;)
akdj - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
I'm blown away by the ignorance hereWow. You'd think half these comments are being made by someone who's never used an iPhone, an iPad. iOS period. Much less a Mac or iTunes ITSELF, no, you do NOT need to 'plug in' to get yiur music. If you've got a hundred thousand, yes. Because a TB or two won't fit. Then, it's as easy as plug in to .mac or PC, sync managment and check the boxes to sync (playlists, artists, all...whatever).
A signficantly better media managment system in aggregate than ANY other in the world
I use Plex. I use Traktor, I edit audio in Audition, video in premier...but like anything else, organization is key. And iTunes has it nailed.
Kies. Sucks ...,and it's the other AIO organizer forced upon you by the biggest (by a HUGE margin) OEM making Android phones. Samsung.
As well, since you know so little about iOS, I assume the same is true with iTunes. It's come a VERY long way since you had to 'connect' your iPhone
cygnus1 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Luddites...tralalalalalala40 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Ya, your choices will be very limited with the nexus 9. The iPad is supported by every case maker/screen protector maker, so the infrastructure around it just blows the competition away.Desusenam - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I really like the covers they advertise, I just want to buy one of those...NEDM64 - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
But on the nexus 9 you can't plug it to a pic and just use it as an external hard drive...DEAL BRAKER.
vFunct - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Yah, but then you'd be stuck with an Android device, instead of an iOS device.Most people would much rather have iOS, because the apps are so much better than in Android.
Android apps are terrible, if they even exist at all.
asendra - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I feel the same way.About Android.
nicolapeluchetti - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I agree that iOs is not perfect and i don't actually like it, but unfortunately some apps are only on it. In my case it's DJ software. I'd love to save money and buy an android tablet, i'll do is soon as Traktor is released for Android.Guspaz - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
As a DJ, you'd care about the quality of the DACs used in the tablet, which would probably rule out cheaper Android tablets anyhow.Impulses - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I doubt a DJ worth his salt would utilize the DAC and headphone stage within a tablet, in Android's case they'd employ USB OTG and a higher quality external DAC/amp/etc... The same thing can be accomplished with an iPad no?p_giguere1 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Yup, Traktor sell their own line of iOS hardware with integrated DACs. See for instance: http://www.native-instruments.com/fr/products/trak...nicolapeluchetti - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
I have a Kontrol S2 to play sound obviously :Dakdj - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
Yes and plenty more options coming as they've released for 2015 the protocolThe camera connect kit is a Lightining to USB standard 6" $20 peripheral. Good to go
akdj - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
Plenty of options exist both with 30pin-out and lightning to send digital audio to an external DAC. Most systems are employing other storage methods (lossless, FLAC, WAV, et al) including thumb drives, externals and wireless transfers.It's changed (DJ'ing) a tremendous amount in a ¼ decade ;)
It's crazy to me, even with USB2, zero latency mixing digital music with an external DAC talking to an analog board with an analog output ...all in 'real time' and literally ZERO latency
It's awesome
darwinosx - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Hah, good luck with that. Seriously. You'll need it.sprockkets - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Seriously, go fuck yourself appletard.KoolAidMan1 - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Look who's madFlunk - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
That's because you're a technical person. Android aims these things at people who want the simplest interface, less options and a holistic management approach. Android is much more flexible and that's why almost all technical people prefer Android.I've got a Nexus 10 and a Nexus 5.
Mayuyu - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
After I problem solve all day at work, I just want to unwind and use my tablet without messing with it.Midwayman - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I'm with you here. I really like the flexibility of android, but I get tired of always having to do something to make it work. I feel like any android device I get is about 90% finished and Its up to me to hit XDA and do the rest of the work.blacks329 - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Both of these statements sound very reminiscent of my own sentiments I had towards Windows back in the day.Android is fantastically flexible, but at the end of the day, I don't want to think about dealing with it after work.
tralalalalalala40 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
If you want to tinker and fix something that keeps breaking (some people like to do that, that's why there is a used car market), then android is for you. This is changing every day and the two are converging as google makes android (the one you use) more and more closed source to leave aosp behind :)IUU - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
"If you want to tinker and fix something that keeps breaking.."So, are you that disappointed with your ipad?
And what will you do with a device that never breaks but can't do anything with it;even this little thing, that is, proper communication between the user and the machine is out of the question with the ipad. I remember trying to be patient when testing an ipad for a whole week(god I have such a big patience) and trying to avoid the spontaneous urge to bang my head on the wall every five minutes or so.
So, I didn't reply reasonably to you because you made a ridiculous comment, but it is true that I still try to forget the traumatic experience I had with the ipad. The only good thing about buying one is that raises the value of your Apple stocks.
tralalalalalala40 - Thursday, November 13, 2014 - link
iOS 8 on the newest devices is amazing. With full Microsoft support and further enterprise support, the device is becoming more and more of a productivity device. If you have an iPad 3 or below, I feel your pain.Galidou - Friday, November 14, 2014 - link
I don't know what kind of traumatic experience you can have with an iPad... unless you'Re a very big tech newbie. I'm with everyone here that I don't want to fix anything that's broken. I had to constantly work around bugs and problems on my Asus Transformer TF201. I bought an iPad 4 about 2 years ago, never plugged it in a computer and does everything I need from a tablet plus the screen, camera, OS responsiveness, stability and so on beats any android devices I've owned.My girlfriend has 2 ipod touch that still work wonders, she bought an android phone, and as good as it is and she likes it, there's a virus on it and as soon as it uses the home network, my upload goes crazy. Now I have to buy an antivirus or restore the thing. Never it has happened on her iPods touch.
I've had one problem with an iPod touch it was under warranty, made a request to have it repaired, received a bos in which the iPod did fit like a glove didn'T cost me a penny back and forth one week later I had a brand new iPod touch. Not much to say, best experience I've had to deal with any piece of technology I've owned.
akdj - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
My two year old son uses an iPad. I'm sorry u weren't able to figure it outNEDM64 - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
Boys trying to look like men.If you want to get deep, you won't be arguing about iOS or android, both are toys for kids, you would be instead arguing for tektronix vs Agilent for your next oscilloscope.
extide - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
Screw Tektronics, they haven't been innovating in the last 10 years or so. All of their scopes are SO SLOW!! It's either Agilent or LeCroy :) Also Rigol is a great choice for lower budgets.blackcrayon - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
"almost all technical people prefer Android."citation needed.
There are tons of technical people who prefer iOS, hell, look how many iOS app developers there are. The other side of the coin is, the vast majority of customers of any computing device are not technical anyway.
Jumangi - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
How many iOS developers there are has nothing to do with them "liking it more". They go there because of the money.akdj - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
Makes sensePeople buy, come back and buy again ...and continue to use one of their hundreds of thousands of tablet optimized iOS apps
Ever look at the dismal 'app selection' in the Play Store for your tablet?
Maybe I should say 'lack of selection'
Sad, but yeah...I'd consider pilots, surgeons, Boeing and 95% of the Fortune 500 'customers of any computing device aren't technical anyway.'
Ridiculous
Ignorant
Try one. I enjoy both. But Android for very specific needs. iOS covers literally EVERY base
KoolAidMan1 - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
And because iOS is where the technical userbase is.Professional applications flourish on iOS. Android apps are categorically limited and low end. The ones that aren't are ports from iOS that took months or years to come over.
Also, people talking about Android usage being "technical" is hilarious. There is nothing technical about tinkering with your tablet. Next you'll be saying that messing around with your game console is "technical".
techconc - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
That's a rather ignorant assumption. Many highly technical people prefer iOS. There are many legitimate reasons for this choice including the hardware, the software, the overall ecosystem, etc. Claiming technical people prefer Android is just as ignorant as claiming you prefer Android because you're poor. Though stereotypes do exist, these generalized claims never hold up.sonicmerlin - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
To be fair iOS's lack of a file system makes something as simple as e-mail attachments a headache.ws3 - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Of course iOS has a file system, it's just not available to the user.carloshehe - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
I don't know what you mean by file system and attachments.Are you having issues finding documents in your iPad?
I have Documents 5 installed. It is a complete file browser for iPad. Works like Explorer on windows. And you can add Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.
NEDM64 - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
Ftp, sftp, and with now with iOS 8 additions, is unstoppable...akdj - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
What can't you attach to an email?Usually directly from the app you can email, post, tweet, message or FB
Hold your finger down while composing an email and you can insert what you need (native iOS mail app, but I like Mailbox for other reasons, and that's the cool thing, if the ios native app doesn't do want you want there's doxens, hundred or thousands of choices from developers ...not the case in the Play Store). It's been an option for a while and continues to get better
If you need different results look around The App Store for a third party option. They're abundant
tralalalalalala40 - Thursday, November 13, 2014 - link
Any file can be emailed. Dropbox/onedrive/box etc. you just email a link to a file. It's all very easy, takes 5 min to learn.robinthakur - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
I'm technical, I develop in SharePoint and Drupal and support Applications and I use a Macbook Pro and an iPhone 6 Plus, as do most people in my team, so no, you are way wrong there. I also own an HTC One M8 which is fun to play around with and customise, but for a day to day phone I rely on for business, it has to be the iPhone and by extension the iPad.melgross - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Too bad you can't get any really good serious apps for Android.IUU - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Like what?lucastbosa - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Like Paper, by 53. Or iMovie, Garage Band, and many others.carloshehe - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
Yes. Actually just the apps that come with iPad for free from Apple there's nothing like it on Android.Then you actually open the App Store and it is game over for Android.
Like I said. Some games. Email, video, web browsing and light work you can do on an Android tablet, but for anything heavier forget it. The iPad is still the very best.
carloshehe - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
Like iDraw (vector design program like illustrator)Pixelmator
There are so many I could go on forever.
Android tablet apps are exactly 0. It sucks for tablets.
NEDM64 - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
My favorite latex editor: TexPad.Mendley, etc...
tralalalalalala40 - Thursday, November 13, 2014 - link
Check out pythonista, grafio, and get console :)tralalalalalala40 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Android isn't perfect either. It's more closed source every day.In the tablet space, you have to be a hardcore fanboy to get the nexus 9. There is an order of magnitude more apps custom built for the iPad.
But if you just want a portable TV, get android tablets, they are much cheaper.
Guspaz - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Considering the Nexus 9's reviews (pretty much every review I've seen is negative), you'd probably be better off with a tablet from Samsung or something.steven75 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
The Nexus 9 could be a third of the price of the iPad and I'd still pick it because:-My data isn't being mined by the world's largest advertising company
-iPad app ecosystem is *still* >>>>>>> Android tablet ecosystem
-Resale value through the roof
-After sale support in person. Imagine that!
steven75 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Pick the ipad, obviously.Reckoning - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
That's cool. Enjoy having a slower device because of your prejudice and ignorance.blackcrayon - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Well you almost get your wish, the Nexus 9 seems fine in benchmarks but it lags as if it offers half the performance... Count me in the list of people who use software on a device other than the "OS".darwinosx - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Poor hughlle knows nothing about iOS and probably not much about Android. The Nexus 9 has been trashed in one review after another including Android sites like Android Police.What do you like about Android? The malware? The inferior app quality? I know, Google monitoring and selling to advertisers all your activity! Awsum! Maybe fragmentation? How about terrible build quality and support? So much to like....
sonicmerlin - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I'm curious if lollipop finally got rid of android's lag and garbage collection stuttering. Otherwise I'll stick to iOS.NEDM64 - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
Lollipop can't get rid of garbage collection alone, all apps would have to be rewritten.rdjg22 - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Yes, because Android is so optimized for tablets. I'm an android fanboy too when it comes to phones (N5 is my daily driver), but you'd have to be a blind and dumb fanboy to think android offers a better tablet experience.KoolAidMan1 - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
You choose an OS with substandard apps, weak developer support, and almost no tablet optimized apps over a platform with faster hardware and better apps in every single category?Weird.
TechShark - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
amazon has the iPad Air 2 for $50 off. http://bit.ly/13dl0ssJRX16 - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
I played around with a Nexus 9 recently and found it disappointing. You couldn't pay me to take that over an iPad Air 2. Browsing a graphics heavy website like The Verge was almost impossible, the lag and stutter was unacceptable and made it unusable. With so much power, something is dramatically wrong with either Android or Chrome that it can't handle a website that an old iPad 4 handled with ease. Also, stock Android Lollipop has zero tablet features so it has no benefits over iOS. At least Samsung adds things to make use of the larger screen like split screen multitasking or windowed multitasking. But then their tablets are terrible in terms of performance and battery life. Can't win. The iPad remains king because it gets so much so right.bmbw2010 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I'd love to see what performance they could get out of an A8X in Apple TV hardware, with some higher clock speeds and better cooling.blackcrayon - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Me too, disappointed Apple didn't release a new Apple TV this year- but the A8X seems perfect for it.Tigran - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Very strange not to see Nexus 9 in the benchmarks to compare.ajangada - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Anandtech had a Nexus 9 with older version of firmware. They're yet to conduct a full review with latest shipping firmware.Tigran - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Great, I look forward to see it.JoshHo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I can confirm that we have received a unit with final hardware and software.techcrazy - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Finally 2 gb ram now it's worth buying.cygnus1 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I've been on the S upgrade cycle since the 3GS and I'm hoping they stick to that 2GB of RAM for the iPhone 6S. It's too noticeable on the previous generations now just how limiting the 1GB is. Barely any apps remain in memory with 1GB and constant tab refreshes in browsers if you are heavily multi-tabbing.Midwayman - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
They really should have gone 2gb on the phones and 3gb on the ipad. I know it was a huge game changer getting 2gb on my android devices.danbob999 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Next year 2GB won't be enough. High end 64-bit phones will need 4GB.Hyper72 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Indeed. I just replaced my iPad 2 with an Air 2/16GB for the 2GB RAM and the impressive single thread performance. I use it mainly for browsing and it's a very nice upgrade indeed.deontologist - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
About time this review went up.odedia - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Will you review the iMac 5k? I'm waiting for the review before purchasing. Mainly ssd&gpu performance.Ryan Smith - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
The Retina iMac review will be next week. However it's the base model, so you're looking at a 1TB Fusion drive setup rather than a pure SSD, and the GPU is basically just Radeon HD 7870.odedia - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
That's too bad... I would expect the majority of those buying this aching to at least bump up the Cpu and more importantly -the GPU.ws3 - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Bumping up the GPU is only "more important" for people who play high-end games. For most iMac users it is unnecessary. For example, if I were to buy the 5k iMac I would use it mainly for programming, and not for programming high-end games, so the GPU upgrade wouldn't be necessary for me.deontologist - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
“Enhanced Cyclone” is still at the top of its class for both IPC and overall single-threaded performance" ... the Apple bias is strong. I like how you guys cite Geekbench scores while failing to note that the Nexus 9 with its Tegra K1 running **32 bit** Geekbench still outscores the A8X. Granted, the K1 is running at 2.3 GHz, so its IPC might be a bit lower than the A8X's 1.5 GHz, but overall single-threaded goes to the K1 no sweat. When 64-bit GB is ready I expect the K1 to blow the A8X out of the water.tipoo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
They waited on newer firmware before making conclusions on the Nexus 9. If anything you should be thankful for that, so relax.steven75 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Speaking of bias... The Geekbench score I saw were not at all clearly for the K1.blackcrayon - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
The single core performance of both seems to be similar, so perhaps they're both at the top of their class. The Apple whining is strong (with you).techconc - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I'm not sure exactly what your issue is. The statement about the A8X having the highest IPC is a fact. This is not in dispute. You even acknowledge the clock speed difference in your post. How exactly do you interpret this as a bias?Speedfriend - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
When I read about the A8, it make me wonder about the A7. With the A8 Apple claims to have improved energy efficiency over the A7 by 50%. Now a iPhone 6 Plus driving a 1920x1020 screen has the same 10 hour battery life as a Galaxy Note 3 which also has a 1920 x 1080 screen. But that means that if Apple had tried to build a phablet with the A7, they would have ended up with a battery life of around 6.5 hours, clearly not competitive with Samsung’s offerings.So to me it looks like Apple didn’t build a bigger screen phone before not because they didn’t feel there was demand but because they simply wouldn’t have been able to compete on battery life and that is why the whole focus with the A8 was improving efficiency rather than simply performance.
So was the A7 just very uncompetitive to other ARM designs or is iOS inefficient compared to Android.
I would love to see someone do some digging on this – Anandtech?
dmunsie - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I don't think this has anything to do with either the A7 design or iOS -- there are too many variables in the equation to definitively say. Plus unlike other ARM designs and Android, there is only one source for the A7 and iOS -- Apple. So you can't just take iOS and install it on the same hardware as another Android device and compare.The A7 was also used in the iPad and iPad mini last year where it got an advertised 10 hour battery life. If Apple had made a Plus sized iPhone last year, they probably would've had to make it thicker to get to their target battery life, which is probably similar to what Samsung has done with their designs. Apple never likes to go thicker if they can avoid it.
You can see how Apple values size over battery life because with the move to the A8X, the Air 2 got thinner with the same battery life vs staying the same size but with more battery life. Not saying that valuing battery live over size is better than what Apple chose, but they are clearly making it known what they are optimizing for here.
Impulses - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
As an Android fan, I'd love to see Apple stop chasing thinness and actually improve battery life by a large degree... They could've done so with the iPhone 6 and chased the claim of "2 day battery life", but they chose thinness instead.Having Apple claiming two day battery life on a phone and destroying everything else by a large margin would definitely light a fire under everyone... Over engineering for 7mm thickness vs 8.5 mm seems quite pointless to me, anything under 9 is quite enough on a phone.
It seems structurally speaking they're better off to, e.g. bendgate...
sonicmerlin - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Personally I'd like my phone to be as thin as a credit card.akdj - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
Be state came and went in ten minutes. It's a non issueMight check those up times on the 6+ again. They reflect almost identical performance as mine. I could go two days, easily.
Speedfriend - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
Except the note and the iPhone 6+ have the same size battery, so samsung hasn't had to use a bigger battery to get the same battery life.techconc - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
You "analysis" fails to consider the size of the battery in existing devices as part of the equation. Likewise, your conclusion regarding the A7 design not being competitive is completely baseless. What's more, you also fail to consider the manufacturing process as a variable as well. The primary efficiency difference between the A8 and A7 has much more to do with the manufacturing process moving from 28nm to 20nm.Finally, if you wish to compare Apple's chips with the competition or iOS vs. Android in terms of efficiency, you should ask yourself why Android phones require more memory to perform the same tasks and why Android devices need such a bigger battery in order to get the same level of usage and/or performance.
Speedfriend - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
At techconcBattery size is almost identical. Manufacturing process has absolutey nothing to do with it. Or the efficiency difference between A8 and A7. It is a fairly simply equation - at same battery size, A8 equipe diPhone 6+ gives smae battery life as Note 3/4. Swap out A8 for A7 and you would get 1/3 less battery life based on Apple's 50% A8 over A7 efficiency claim. Hence why no big iPhone before.
tipoo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Yup, when I saw the teardown with two RAM banks rather than the usual one, I was expecting 25.6GB/sec, with double the pins/bits going into the SoC. And it also makes sense with the huge GPU gains, something has to feed that beast. Crazy, that's now in laptop bandwidth range.cynic783 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
and we made it about 10 comments before the "Anand is an Apple shill" accusation lol. so much Android butt hurt.tipoo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Question, don't you have to divide the final FPS of the performance degradation test with the first run, to see how much it actually went down? Otherwise you're not looking at degradation so much as total performance still. Performance may have degraded, but if it's higher to start with it's probably still higher in the end relatively.tipoo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
ie, if one device starts with 100FPS and degrades 40%, and the other starts at 50 and degrades 10%, the degradation on the second one is lower but the first one will still show higher on that graph.JoshHo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
This is definitely true, and it's taken into account when writing the review. In this case the degradation wasn't large enough to change any conclusions on the matter.kenansadhu - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
That NVIDIA Shield tablet is looking more and more interesting for me. I hope it will get a discount this holiday seasonphoenix_rizzen - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Yeah, it certainly is. This looks like the proper upgrade for a 2012 Nexus 7 running Tegra3.lucam - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
What's up to Tegra 4..:)chizow - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Any plans to update these graphs with Nexus 9 results? Sorry if this is mentioned in the piece somewhere, I tend to skip around before sitting down to read them in their entirety, thanks!tipoo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
They waited for the newer firmware on the Nexus 9 before finalizing results I believe.coldpower27 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
"The fact that Apple used A7 in the previous iPad Air means that on top of already being a serious step up in transistor count versus A8, compared to the iPad Air 1 the gap is even larger. A7 occupied 102mm2 and more than 1 billion transistors, so compared to Apple’s previous tablet Apple has come very close to doubling their transistor count within 1 generation. "Did you mean triple? As 3 Billion is well over doubling of 1 Billion.
Ryan Smith - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Doubling is correct. A7 is over 1B. I suspect it's close to 1.5B.Sushisamurai - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
You should mention in the design segment, that there is a consequence with the thinness. I was playing some media (TV show, the 100, gotham), and due to the thinness, with the volume turned up, the iPad would reverberate/vibrate due to the audio output.In my opinion, the loss of a few millimetres was not worth this trade off, as my iPad 2 never shook when playing music or movies from its speakers at full blast.
chaosbloodterfly - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
My old HP touchpad used to do that, but the sound quality was really good (and loud) for a tablet (like comparable to your average bluetooth speaker box things).Sushisamurai - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I noticed you added it in the misc section. It is still a design consideration IMO. Tomato tomato. It's my only gripe with the iPad Air 2. That and maybe ios8 - it's still a little buggy for me.KPOM - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Another thorough review by AT. I think software should be the next major focus for Apple with the iPad. The CPU and GPU power are getting to the point where the iPad could replace a laptop, provided the software were there. Maybe we'll see true multitasking and split window displays if and when the iPad Pro comes out with a 12+" screen. That third CPU core must be there for more than just games.steven75 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I think they are heading this way.-iPad Pro rumors
-IBM deal
-MS Office (iWork since 2011, but still)
-iCloud Drive and support for third party cloud storage in the native file picker.
And now beefed up hardware that makes more sense for laptop-type usage.
esterhasz - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Good points and you're probably right.But I still think that multitasking is great on a desktop/laptop not so much because of the windows, but because of the control scheme: using the dominant hand for the pointer (like on touch) and the other for focus switching (like between programs) is just so insanely efficient. Bringing in the second hand for doing something simply does not work that fluidly on a touch device. And that would ultimately hamper the direction you're describing.
Or I may simply suck at touching.
ABR - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
It's amusing to me when people talk about needing to multitask on tablets. 90% of the people I see using 24" desktops zoom every window they use to full-screen. It's actually HARDER to read the long lines of text or mouse around large expanses of blank space this way, but people like to focus on one thing at a time I guess. I tend to be more of the "use virtual space to organize the workflow" type when I've got that kind of real estate, but I rarely have the desire to do more than switch between fullscreen apps on a tablet.Still, we may see Apple add some kind of split-screen mode if only because people think they want it, like they gave us the comically unwieldy iPhone 6+.
Crackhour - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
I have the samsung 10.1 2014 edition and I never split screen. I like to focus on one screen so it seems. Apple seem to know this is reason it hasn't adopted the split screen my opinion. It just negates you the choiceStealthX32 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Uhm, what planet do you live on where Apple cares about anything but the consumer market? Hmm, instead of giving developers incentives to write on OSX/iOS, let's give U2 $100 million dollars instead. Yeah, that's what will advance them as a company.ams23 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Josh, don't you think it is a bit misleading to show a chart with a long-term fps of 46fps for Shield tablet in the GFXBench T-Rex Onscreen test when it was able to maintain an fps of ~ 55fps for the first 100 (!) continuously looped runs of the test (which represents nearly two hours of continuous use!)? I don't see how the 46fps is a realistic number for comparison. Even the GFXBench website lists a long-term median performance result of ~ 55fps for Shield tablet.Also note that Tegra K1 has higher render quality in GFXBench than A8X and any other ultra mobile SoC, so it is doing more work in that test.
A8X is a fantastic SoC and iPad Air 2 is an awesome tablet, but do note that iPad Air 2 has some significant performance-reducing throttling in both Geekbench 3 and 3dmark Ice Storm Unlimited. With long-term testing, the performance of A8X drops by ~ 30% in Geekbench 3 and drops by ~ 15% in 3dmark Ice Storm Unlimited: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-iPad-Air-2-A156...
(It is my understanding that Shield tablet has virtually no CPU/GPU throttling due to use of the internal magnesium plate to dissipate heat).
On a side note, here is what OlegSH had to say about the GFXBench 3.0 T-Rex Onscreen test: "It's strange to see GLBenchmark 2.7 test as battery life test in GFXBench 3.0
Kishonti uses low precision FP16 shaders for T-Rex by default, that has quite noticeable impact on picture quality, just look at MP(medium precision) PSNR, hence the perfect MP PSNR for K1, looks like K1 doesn't support FP16. This combined with small amount of geometry, very simple shaders, lots of blending make this test perfect fit for tiled architectures. I don't believe lifetime results will stay the same once they move to Manhattan as power test".
kron123456789 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
"looks like K1 doesn't support FP16." — well, it really doesn't. K1 has no FP16 ALUs. But it does have a few FP64 ALUs. It's Kepler after all.JoshHo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
We have had an ongoing internal debate over how to best represent performance in thermally-limited scenarios. However, the goal of our specific test is to try and show the lower bound for performance although we will include the full FPS graph from here on out.It's certain that the CPU is fully capable of throttling on the iPad Air 2 much more easily, but as far as we can tell GPU-bound workloads are unlikely to throttle on the iPad Air 2 and performs better than Tegra K1 in this area.
lucam - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
See the Xiami MIpad..and then comment please..tralalalalalala40 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
TouchID is for enterprise. No more 10 digit pins every 5 min!KPOM - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
True. I acquired the Air 2 primarily for this reason. The added performance and updated design are gravy.Georges003 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I noticed the following on all current and previous generations iPad air and iPad mini.On a white screen (for example blank document/note), pushing with one or more finger(s) on the back of the ipad or on the screen itself, displays a dark shadow in the area being pushed.
I have not observed this effect on the iPhone 6, my iPhone 4s and iPad 4.
Did you or anybody else notice this as well?
If yes, how do you feel about it since this without any doubt the result of design compromises for making the device thin and light?
blackcrayon - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I can notice this only if i strongly and deliberately press on the device. But I haven't figured out why anyone would or could do that in normal use by mistake. Why would anyone grip the device that hard?Georges003 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I’ve tried to reproduce this effect on a least 8 devices in 2 different stores and it was present on all of them. On some devices you really didn't have to push very hard and on some the only thing you had to do is to pick it up.Typical applications were one would push “harder” on the screen: Ipad used as a music instrument, games, artists using ipad with pressure-sensitive pens, …The question is not why one would press this hard but why do we accept this while iphones, older Ipads and most, but not all, premium tablets of the competition clearly show that touch screen devices can be designed without showing such behaviour.
blackcrayon - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Is the Nexus 9 one of your premium tablets of the competition? I hope not...I also doubt you will generate much pressure on the *back* of the device by pushing harder on the screen. Isn't that on the other side? :) I notice you've "tried" to reproduce this effect. I still don't think this is something that's going to happen in normal use. I bet you'll be outraged over the fact you can break one by putting it on your knee and pressing both sides.
Georges003 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
The Nexus 9 happens to be a device with a similar behaviour as the iPad Air 1/2 … great OS but, in my opinion, not a "premium" device.Sushisamurai (link) also commented on this review. He mentions “ … with the volume turned up, the iPad would reverberate/vibrate due to the audio output …” I have also noticed this annoying behaviour and wouldn’t be surprised that this is another consequence of making the iPad Air 2 a little too thin and light.
Sushisamurai - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I know right? It's actually really annoying, it's practically forced me to prop it up when using it for TV/movies because holding a vibrating tablet for 40 minutes was a huge pain the in the ass. I'd rather they keep the same size as the iPad Air 1, and just give me 2-4 more hours of use time (by keeping the battery size the same, increased efficiency of A8X) and NO VIBRATING tablet.Sushisamurai - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
No, my iPad Air 2 does not reproduce this issue, even with full strength one finger push (erred on the side of not bending my iPad). However, I do have a hard plastic back case (thin) on it - applying pressure to the screen also does not produce any issues.Georges003 - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
I am apparently not the only one who has noticed this effect on the Air 2. See:http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/10/ha...
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=18089...
hammer256 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I recall it was said that Nvidia was not going to use the TSMC 20nm because it's only really ready for SoC production, perhaps because the yield is not good enough for large dies yet? But if the 20nm process can already produce chips with 3 billion transistors at presumably acceptable yield, that is well into the GPU transistor count territory.I just wonder if this holds any indication/promise that Nvidia and AMD could move to 20nm in a relatively quick time frame, say within the next year. 28nm is really getting long in the tooth. Well, at least I imagine Nvidia's next SoC should be on 20nm...
rUmX - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
It's about volume and Apple bought most if not all of it.kron123456789 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
We'll see in 2 months, at CES 2015))It should be the beast)mabellon - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Great article Joshua,I was a little disappointed that there was no comparison against the Surface Pro 3. I am not interested in any OS/fanboy wars by any means - purely a hardware comparison. The Geekbench scores for the iPad Air 2 are (1798/4468) as shown in your article. The Geekbench scores for the entry level 1.5Ghz Core i3 Surface Pro 3 are (1569/3137) on a $280 CPU! But that's only one benchmark of course. GPU is certainly a very different beast all together as well.
I would love to see some comprehensive testing to compare ARM (especially the A8X, and 64bit K1) against Intel's offerings. The slower clocked Celerons and Core i3s are the most comparable as those laptops are closer to tablet pricing. The Core M series is coming and its clocked even slower (but has turbo) -it's fanless performance remains to be seen. Ultimately the question is... how close is ARM to truly competing with Intel in the laptop space?
And some food for thought... If a 1.5Ghz A8X is already in striking distance of Intel's low end 1.5Ghz... what would happen if Apple added turbo/higher clocks and a fan?
Impulses - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
It's all very interesting from a technical curiosity standpoint, but until mobile OS evolve a lot more there aren't gonna be very many people cross shopping anything running iOS (or Android) vs a Surface Pro... And no one wants a Windows system running ARM hardware cause it defeats the point of running Windows.I guess the one exception to all that would be if Apple were working on OS X ARM edition...
mabellon - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Agreed. Very much an intellectual curiosity. Windows on ARM defeats the purpose of running Windows. Mobile OSes are not capable of fully replacing a desktop environment for productivity.Apple *could* push out an OSX ARM edition. It would be very interesting to see if they have the clout to get devs on board such a port. Maybe? Maybe it just pushes Intel to improve.
The only ARM product likely to matter in the short term for laptop compete is the Chromebook. Still not feature competitive, but if performance really is encroaching on Intel and price is cheaper, it will at least force Intel to compete on price/perf on the low end.
Aside: I also remembered AT's Surface Pro 3 review with the Core i3. Google Octane 11,600 vs 9,400 gives Intel the edge but the gap is closing fast.
kron123456789 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
iOS is OS X ARM ediition, lol.name99 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Roughly Haswell IPC is equal to Apple IPC. There are lots of caveats to this --- Apple does better on Geekbench, Intel does better on SPEC (probably because they have a superior memory system). Intel also have, to be fair, a much more mature compiler, while Apple can probably squeeze another 10% out of LLVM for ARM64 over the next year or two, along with some improvements to the SPEC numbers when their long awaited polyhedral optimizations finally go mainstream.I used to think Apple would ramp to higher frequencies, now I think a different trajectory is more likely. An Intel CPU is a bundle of many capabilities, and the CPU part is only one of these. There's also, for example, the turboing subsystem, and the profiling/debugging subsystem. My guess is that they are (even though they have said nothing about it) headed for the same sort of HSA future that AMD talks about.
I expect over the next few years, much Apple work will go into this sort of less than sexy infrastructure, stuff that Apple won't talk about much (if at all) and it will only make its appearance in things like better XCode tools and much less overhead to transfer code and data between CPU and GPU. Looking at the competitive landscape, Apple look like they could get away with an A9 improvement that's to the A8 as the A8 is to the A7 --- a steady 25%, one third from compiler, one third from another 100 or 150MHz boost, and one third from more tweaking of the CPU.
It's possible that this is indeed what we should expect because I'd guess that Apple's A-team for CPU design is hard at work on the AWatch project, and probably following the same strategy as we saw with CPUs --- the S1 will probably be a good but not spectacular SoC, something reliable to get the project rolling, the equivalent of A5. S2 will presumably be a substantial jump, with all the less risky optimizations they couldn't fit into S1, while S3 will knock it out of the park, taking the risk of project slippage to make use of every good idea the team has.
If this theory is correct, It may not be until A10 or so, as the team has hired more people and the watch project becomes more stable, that we get a rethinking of the phone/tablet CPU.
[Of course by then, who knows, maybe Apple will have announced iDust and mote CPUs will be what their CPU A-team are working on?]
anquietas - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Good perspective! This sounds lIke exactly how Apple would operate.iwod - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
This. Most people when comparing ARM64 SoC to Intel often fail to count the difference between the software ecosystem. Intel had much more engineers and years of optimization in libraries, and compiler. There are still quite lot of work to do on ARM64 and LLVM.JoshHo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
While we haven't included the Surface Pro 3 in comparisons as it's a much more expensive device, all of the tests in this review and more have been released to Bench where you can compare the two SoCs.ABR - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Just got back from checking the iPad Air at a store, and the performance was disappointing to say the least. I've got an iPad 2, and I keep reading about these leaps and bounds in the SOCs each year, but when it comes to a real-world task like opening the Mail app or paginating a novel in iBooks, this supposedly mind-blowingly smoking device is only incrementally faster than my 2nd gen clunker. What gives?I thought maybe everything was being bottlenecked by the flash access, but Josh tested that too and of course it looked way ahead of earlier hardware in that area too. iOS slowdowns? I'm running 7 instead of 8 on the Air 2, but that's only one generation behind.
Anyone have any idea what the deal is?
rUmX - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
You need to be performing more intensive tasks to see the huge peperformance differences, as benchmarks show. Opening mail is not very demanding.ABR - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I guess you're saying maybe there's a floor effect with Mail opening given by the animation timers if nothing else, but how do you explain iBook pagination? That takes several seconds and seems to be computatin limited.Sushisamurai - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
If u can't tell a difference, then maybe u should hold onto your iPad 2. I sold my iPad2-32GB wifi model for $200, just to upgrade to this Air 2. My iPad2 was stuttering and dropping frames for the apps I was using (also on iOS8). This Air 2 is absolutely amazing compared to the iPad2 - some of my daily apps can load, and reload (after downloading a minor update), before my other iPad2 finishes loading LOLABR - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Maybe it's iOS 8 then. Good way to sell hardware. The big performance drop going to 7 is one of the reasons I'm not going any further yet. I'd get the Air 2 for the weight, retina, and fingerprint, not the SOC, but the way it runs hot is a big downgrade.Streamlined - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
FYI, I was doing some financial analysis on Apple and the iPad Air 2 cost structure and I'm estimating that the "Apple Tax" on these is probably only a little more than $100 per unit on the 16gb wifi model.Read the details at www.perezonomics.com
wewewe - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Just received mine. Previous was an Ipad 4th gens. One word ! Wow !! This is really magical. Its thin piece of glass with a processing power of a computer. I doubt there is a better tablet experience than this.Hyper72 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
I replaced an iPad 2 (512MB RAM) with Air 2, imagine my wow experience...Yes I also enjoy the thinness more than I thought I would. Only using it ~ two hours a day means it has more than plenty juice in any case.
Klug4Pres - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
" While tablet applications that haven’t been properly scaled on the iPhone line are likely to look horrible due to the scaling factor used. While the same can and does happen with Android apps, it isn’t nearly as obvious because most of the scaling done is far more seamless and simply leaves a great deal of white space in the application that can’t necessarily be used."Please tidy that up by using actual sentences, because it is difficult to understand what you are saying here.
"As a result of all this work, it seems pretty obvious that the iPad Air 2 continues to deliver some of the best tablet software on the market. For the most part, every application available seems to effectively deliver a tablet-specific experience that helps to set the iPad lineup apart from other tablets. Unfortunately, it seems that due to a lack of competition there isn’t much in the way of attempts to dramatically improve the software experience, and as a result it’s a bit difficult for me to justify carrying a tablet around all the time as its size is relatively massive compared to even a 6 inch phablet"
You are saying the iPad Air 2 has some of the best tablet software, but tablets in general are not worth carrying around because they are too big relative to phablets. You attribute this to a lack of competition for the iPad, which means Apple has failed to make dramatic improvements to tablet software, improvements that would be necessary to make it worthwhile to carry tablets. OK. What about just having one for use at home? I think you are trying to say too many unrelated things in this paragraph.
"Overall, the iPad Air 2 is likely to be one of the only tablets worth buying on the market today."
I think this is rather too sweeping a statement for a review focused on one tablet, not very helpful when you omit to mention the other tablets worth buying, and anyway the statement isn't well supported in the article itself.
name99 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
"The glass is flat, which makes it seem noticeably different from the iPhone 6 line in that regard as it meets the chamfered edge of the back cover rather than making a seamless curve."iPad manufacturing has always lagged iPhone, I imagine because the volumes are lower.
I wouldn't read any "statement of direction" into this.
For example my iPad Retina came out at the same time as the iPhone 4/4S. The 4/4S was incredibly slick for its time, while the iPad Retina used a sort of lacquer or something to form the bezel around the screen, and there was noticeable unevenness in this lacquer. (Uneven meaning not visible, but you could feel it if you ran your fingers over the bezel.)
Of course the iPhone 5 ramped up slickness of manufacturing to a new level with the really tight tolerances, the feel of a single block of material; the 6 retained that while now converting straight edges to curves. I'd say the iPad Air 2, in terms of manufacturing slickness lives halfway between the 4/4S and the 5/5S. It doesn't QUITE reach that feeling of a single uninterrupted block of material, probably because it's striving for curves --- they might have been able to make it if they'd gone for a look exactly like the 5/5S.
The larger pattern, I think, is that the manufacturing/fit-and-finish is improving for iPads every year; they just suffer in comparison with the absolute perfection of the phone manufacturing.
sporkfan - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
In agreement with you here. I'm really not a fan of how the TouchID is integrated into the iPad Air 2. I'm not sure if it's just lower tolerances than the iPhone 5s, or perhaps my unit is weird. But if my fingernails are long enough that they contact the ring at all (not that long, I swear!), they catch on the sharp outer edge. It feels icky. On the iPhone 5s this is totally not an issue.feeblegoat - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Hey, Josh, the data doesn't really match your conclusions about efficiency too much. I can see that performance degraded slightly more on the shield tablet, but only at the very end, before the last ten minutes. Up until then, performance stays at a steady 57fps (http://www.anandtech.com/show/8329/revisiting-shie... However, considering that this is an onscreen test, I'll assume the 5-7 fps advantage compensates for the lighter workload given by the lower resolution screen. So, assuming the workload is even, then we must consider the battery size difference. Ignoring the screen power usage for now, the Shield Tablet has a 19.75 Wh battery, the Air 2 a 27.62 Wh battery. Ratio the battery numbers with the battery life difference, and we end up looking at a 23% efficiency win for the Air 2, maybe up to 25-28% because of the larger screen. That's a little less than I would actually expect (but pretty close to expectations) considering the A8X is 20nm and the K1 28nm. So if anything, praise the efficiency of 20nm; because considering the gap in architecture, the efficiency is maybe worse than the K1's GPU.Sidenote: (Of course, that's a somewhat invalid argument, because the A8X has 20nm, K1 doesn't, and we can't just say that the K1 is more efficient - it's not. But still, the difference is due to 20nm. Kudos to Imagination, though, for making a GPU that has similar hypothetical efficiency to the juggernaut Nvidia. Can't wait for Maxwell SoC's though. One SMX on a phone?)
techconc - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
"Ignoring the screen power usage for now"Huh? Once you do that, the rest of your question is meaningless. The screen is the largest power consuming component by a large margin. What's more, you're comparing a device with a 5" screen to a device with a 10" screen and attempting to guess at the efficiency of the chip components based the the respective battery sizes for these devices. That's an exercise in futility as you're not able to draw any meaningful conclusions based on the data you have.
lucam - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
He doesn't get..so be it..dwade123 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Lol Android devices are nowhere close to the iphone 6 let alone Air 2 in raw power and app library.Morawka - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Thanks for the review! finally ! hahadarkich - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
What a disaapointing review.After all of this waiting I was expecting some deep chip architecture dive, something we havent read in other reviews ,but NOTHING here came across as new and interesting.
Also, it was written rather poorly ,with a lot of grammar mistakes and bad, half hearted sentence structure.
And this was supposed to be the review highlight of the year on AT.
wyewye - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Joshua, this article is horrible:1. Extended use of "aforementioned" when refering to stuff you dont know and already mentioned, like some magic "arhitectural" benefits.
2. There is no need to inflate the article by saying the same thing over and over again.
3. "In the basic definition of a tablet, the iPad Air 2 definitely fits." - No shit sherlock the ipad is a tablet - what is this, retard bingo?
4. You randomly switch sorting order of the graphs so the better is no longer on top, conveniently when Apple performs weaker.
5. On every set of tests that Ipad Air 2 performed mid to low compared to competition, you still present a missleading summary that Ipad was the best.
6. For every weakness of the iPad Air 2, you try to find excuses.
Yes the iPad has both advantages and disadtantages. Try to maintain some reasonable level of objectivity, there are way too many fanboi "reviews" out there.
Since when AnandTech does asskissing "reviews"? Bring back Anand before the site dies!
konradsa - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Disgruntled Nexus 9 owner? :-)konradsa - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
A lot of people at the mac rumors forum are complaining about a) distortion on screen when pushing on back and b) excessive vibration due to speakers when watching movies or playing games. Bad enough many are returning them again.Can you comment on that? Could you compare the cellular and Wi-Fi versions and see if they behave differently with respect to a) or b)?
JoshHo - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
I can confirm that both of those are present on the cellular version that we were sampled, but distortion from pressing on the back is something that I've noticed on multiple devices this year. The vibration effects are definitely strong but this really isn't an issue.Morawka - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
in order to create distortion from pushing on the back, you have to put significant force on my ipad air 2 wifi 64gbYour not going to see distortion just holding it and moving it around, or swapping hands. You have to actually try and push hard.
mrex - Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - link
sorry, but that was the first thing i noticed when i picked up the device. Swapping or even moving my hands positions caused distortions on the screen. I checked both units in the store and both suffered this issue. i dont know about the vibration, because there were too many people to test the sound quality. the distortion was enough for me and didnt buy it. ill check later if apple has fixed it (secrectly as they do). but now, its only place is on a table at a store...tralalalalalala40 - Thursday, November 13, 2014 - link
Any case will dampen that. You use cases to keep the ridiculously high resale value...mrex - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
the lack of info makes me wonder, if anandtech site is just another bitch in apples stall nowadays. no mention the strong vibration... no mention screen distortions which is visible and terrible when keeping it on your hands. it is time to remove anandtech site from the serious reviewers list... seems to be too much connection with apple nowadays to be able to do trusted reviews? :/Ilias78 - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Anand became an Apple employee - what did you expect, negative reviews from Anandtech? No waytralalalalalala40 - Thursday, November 13, 2014 - link
Oh the strained logic of a sterdroid user. One employee of a news site goes and works somewhere else, everyone left behind still works for that employee. lolapplelover2885 - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
I consider myself an apple fan girl for life. I bought my MacBook Pro in 09 and no issues. My finacee has a HP desktop that does. I fear the blue screen of death soon. I want to convert him to the apple side. He has the newest macbook pro 2012 I want him to get an iphone he has a Motorola phone. Most Android and Window's are not as flexible as the Apple. Yes, IOS has issues like other platforms. However, Apple's products are designed to last longer than it's competitors. I had bad taste of both Windows & Android now. I owned a Samsung Galaxy S and Windows Nokia Lumia the problem is their software & battery life. Yes, apple's products are expensive but in the long run it is worth every penny spent on a beautiful product that is going to last. I am off to buy an Ipad Air 2 something I have been waiting on for a while. I'll do a combo pack and give it to myself as a birthday present. I'm a tech junkie and a student. Did you know you can use Window's office mobile on all devices? You no longer need those giant desktop thing's. I don't need a USB to find mystuff when I have airdrop and icloud if you need extra storage use that as your backup for files. I also use Google Drive to do my school work. Good luck with all your apple needs.Ilias78 - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Lol women... go back to your kitchen.Commodus - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to call out this sexism -- criticize the issues, not the gender, please.zodiacsoulmate - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
lolmaximumGPU - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
"giant desktop things" are not used just for office you know..asleepy - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Sound vibrates through the screen even at low volume levels to such an extent that people's fingertips are going numb and they're returning the Air 2s for refunds... yet no mention of that??? Welcome to Apple Corporation, Anandtech. And goodbye.Commodus - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
Maybe because it's not as much of an issue as you think it is? If you'd believed the Antennagate sky-is-falling types, Apple was going to have to recall the iPhone 4 and face disastrous financial results... turned out that the problem, while real, was seriously overblown.I've felt it, and it's slightly weird, but I don't think I'd call it a dealbreaker.
tralalalalalala40 - Thursday, November 13, 2014 - link
People's fingernails are literally getting stuck in the gap of the note 4 and people are having to amputate fingers. It's horrible. Goodbye corporate Samsung!!#@$carloshehe - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
I got the iPad Air 2 yesterday. I can do more with it I could ever do with a Nexus. I have an Android phone but I wouldn't take a Nexus tablet if you have it to me for free.DosOldie - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
I still have an iPad 2 and I do not plan on upgrading my iPad until there is add on space. Put in a usable SD slot and I' ll upgrade. Adding & deleting apps will not change w a new iPad w the same amt of space.ws3 - Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - link
So you will never be upgrading...tralalalalalala40 - Thursday, November 13, 2014 - link
See the iStick... You see. everything is going wireless. They have wireless HDs from toshiba that are for the iPad now. You don't need a random dust collecting/battery dwindling port to get done what you want to get done.sdagley - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
The line "I’m not necessarily sold on TouchID on a tablet as an ergonomic ideal as the sheer width of the device makes it a bit harder than usual to properly place my finger for scanning" in the Final Words section doesn't make sense. The TouchID sensor works with multiple fingers at any any orientation which makes it easy to use no matter how you're holding it. This review makes it sound like Apple uses the old style vertical swipe sensor like the Galaxy S5 usesLgFriess - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
Just picked up an Air 2 over the weekend. I'm no Apple fan boy (PC gamer, Note 3 phone and don't think I'll ever go back to an iphone, and I generally despise itunes) , I just wanted what I thought would work best for me. After agonizing for months over every tablet out there including the Nexus 9, I just liked the Air 2.The cons (since that's what everybody seems interested in);
1. It's almost too thin. It feels delicate to me. I'd much rather have a bit thicker tablet with a more substantial feel. Stop with the thin thin thinner crap. Of course I have a case on the way but still.
2. The vibration. Yep it's definitely there. However, I can't think of any situation that this would bother me in the least bit. I wouldn't have thought to mention it but I saw so many comments here saying it's worse then ebola. There is no way somebodies fingers are going numb when holding it. People are starting to make up things to enforce their argument. The vibration certainly goes back to problem 1. Too thin, too light, too delicate in the hand.
3. Speakers. Not that I'm expecting anything great on a tablet but I sure like the thought of the Nexus front facing speakers. It's just a better solution. The ipad speakers aren't bad at all. They're just typical tablet speakers.
All in all, it's been a great addition. Fast, smooth, great apps (just tried Hearthstone for the first time, and as a PC gamer, I'd say it makes a great tablet game which I generally can't stand), display is gorgeous, battery life is longer then expected though gaming will eat it up quickly. The fingerprint ID thing IS nice, which surprises me as I wouldn't have thought I would care.
Very happy with my purchase.
LgFriess - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
One other thing. There is absolutely NO distortion just holding the tablet. Another instance of over dramatization. I've put a little pressure into the back and didn't notice any distortion in that case either, but as I've said above, I do feel it's too thin/delicate and I'm afraid I'll damage it if I were to squeeze it too much. By "too much" I mean actively trying to bend it to see if the screen will distort, but not under normal use.tralalalalalala40 - Thursday, November 13, 2014 - link
When I pile-drive my LCD monitors at work they distort so I took them back.yhselp - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
It's worth mentioning that this is the first handheld device (apart from full-fledged Windows tablets) truly close to last-gen gaming consoles in terms of performance - 25.6 GB/s memory bandwidth and a powerful triple-core CPU. It'd be interesting to see how the 1.5 GHz enhanced Cyclone stacks against the 3.2 GHz PowerPC in the Xbox 360.spammy39 - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Is there any reason why Anandtech does not include the Surface Pro 3 on the benchmark list?Fairshare - Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - link
Do you see any Intel Core based tablets here? The Surface Pro 3 is a PC that just happens to be a tablet so it's not really comparable in terms of performance. You might compare other statistics such as battery, display etc. but it's otherwise a completely different animal.tralalalalalala40 - Thursday, November 13, 2014 - link
Surface pro isn't a tablet. It has a fan, and is too bulky to be used one handed. The surface pro competes with the mac air.drchimrichalds - Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - link
I love the new screen on the Air 2. Thanks for the review!MarkieGcolor - Friday, November 14, 2014 - link
Why is the Galaxy Tab S in all display comparisons besides black levels and contrast ratio? IMO the most important metrics that the tab s blows the ipad out of the water in?tralalalalalala40 - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
Best tablet in the world at the moment. Great BF buy!Kankerhoer - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
*Circlejerks* so many...TechShark - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
amazon has the iPad Air 2 for $50 off plus Free Shipping. http://bit.ly/13dl0ss