Pfft, i see Joshua Ho has his nice grey carpet background out in full force to promote yet another apple product to the max....hey Joshua. Why do ONLY apple products only get this special treatment/photoshopping/product arranging.... Also you forgot the nice picture of the product held niceely in front of the clean leafy tree?
20 bucks says that will be the review's opener image.
Dsu(data service unit?)manic, I'm not sure we're reading/viewing the same website. While the pencil shot looks cool in my opinion too (you've seem to had your mind blown!) ...its no different than any product line I've seen reviewed over the last decade. It's simple, easy implementation of some basic rules of photography ...like direction of flow, attention on subject ...and when not overtaking the subject, a killer background that makes said subject pop off the page. You're not very familiar with this century's version of Photoshop --- if you believe this '(sic) apple (notice, without a capital A) product only gets this special treatment/photoshopping(again)/product arranging'. That's delusional. Most great shots --- certainly historical, but even current well known and respected pictures made have little to zero done with PS. And everything to do with the photographer. Zero to do with the lens. Body. Even subject. ALL to do with the photog
Case in point. Lay pencil on trippy, same line flow, multi colored Berber? Burber? Too lazy to look carpet. Snap shot with any camera phone laying around. Crop in cam. Email me-self. Done. And you think it deserves a Pulitzer? Josh, my sincere apologies ...as I love your site, the way you write and enjoy visiting throughout the week. But apparently this Data Service Unit Manic (just draws a funny picture, like the poster thinks he ((not she, ladies are too smart for some of us here!)) is the singular gatekeeper of knowledge between the 'Matrix' (en/transcoding - hence the only "one" with 100%, true knowledge and ability to manipulate either side to their own favor) and the real world. ...or he/she went to Delaware State University. Hmmmm. Ponderous ...but one must as oneself, how much more relevant a review of the latest NAS, motherboard, or PCIe storage systems using nVMe would be with 'specially treated/photoshopped/arrangement of said PCIe controller or storage array Really!?!? That's. Just. Dumb. A nitpicking, no life comment that should be ignored but being on top the stack, I've wanted to poke you in the eye all week. It's a F'ing pencil on the carpet. I'm too lazy to strip Josh's metadata. Even if he left the hardware and shot info intact, it's these buffoon type comments that have destroyed the 'comment section' here at Anand. I bet I read 225 comments without ANYTHING to do with the iPhone 6s6s+ review before coming across anything interesting.
Apple is pushing the boundaries in real ways with the very few, focused and aggregating/integration systems of continuity and Handoff. Horizontal and vertical support to your like. Personally, professionally from your health to your wealth to your physical being. No one saw 'This' coming in 2015. I used 'tablets' (I'm a pilot, have been for 27 years) in 2005. I used 'smartphones' in '05. Sounds like such an oxymoron now as those tablets were monochrome, specific to certain tasks, bulky and boring. Smartphones, that's what they were. We've long since past this even being considered a 'phone' first any longer. It's a tertiary ability amongst an entire sea change of computing, unlplugging from 110v and enjoying connectivity faster than broadband, speeds faster than yesterday's full - 2/4/8 core lappies with storage subsystems and speeds that massacre what most use 'on the desk'. They're our window to the world. News. Email/messaging/comms. Social and sports, lifestyle and calculator, dayplanner and Rolodex! Lol. I'm dating myself. They're displays smoke what we paid $5k for a short decade for, packing twice the pixels into a few ounces and lasting a full day! Smart wearables. Look at the industry. Catch wind 'Apple's gonna do it'. Rush to get half assed, overpriced underperforming wannabes out the door before Cupertino. Apple, being Apple intelligently bides their time. Gets the Apple Watch right in so many ways - opens the doors and outsells the competition in aggregate and in a weekend (vs. 500-1,000 days/3 years)!!!
That's what I dig about Apple. Their products. Both soft and hardware as well as their services. I did spend two decades on PCs. I started on a IIe in '83 playing MS's Flight simulator. Ten years ago, +/- I was smart enough to listen to my wife. Buy her a MacBook as a graduation gift, she'd finished her doctorate. Haven't looked back
..the guy that sold me the machine's name was Earnest. I called him a couple days later ...frustrated to no end after two days searching for the add/remove control center populater. And with that, the ability to uninstall a piece of software I didn't want. He got on the phone. Told me to click, drag to the garbage can (not recycle or trash, he said its garbage if you're done with it), empty garbage. That was the second time he told me he'd see me in a week to sell me mine. He was right. Apple is building real tools ...maybe, and sometimes arguably existing technologies that no one uses but niche or proprietary OEMs. Then they re-form, re-build, tool, and release completely disprupto get world economies. See cell phone sales pre 2007/08/09 and today. See computer sales a decade ago, compare to iPad and increased quarter after quarter computer sales growth (rest of industry down), and a 'phone' (pocket computer) that blows through every previous tech sales record each year it's released! They're 'hobby' is capable of sustaining a position on the Firbes 500 (Apple TV) itself, while iTunes would alone be in the top 50!!
iTunes, the bloated pig it was when I ripped 2800 songs in 20p02 to my monochrome 20GB iPod from Costco was a PITA. Maybe it's the speed of my rMBP today, or the deconstruction and rebuild of iTunes both iOS (separated between each; music, video, podcasts) or AiO --- there's nothing on the planet that comes anywhere close to such exceptional media management. I use PLEX server at home for a ripped/streaming video server but it's fed through Apple TV. I can pause my show from my watch or phone or tab, finish the email I'm writing while my morning 'rest stop with coffee' and if not, too into an article... It's automatically on my desk when I'm 'done'.
Apple is somewhat a victim of their own doing. I own every iPad with exception of the 'new' iPad 3. Had it. Sold it. Bought the iPad 4 when it dropped. We use Mini, now 4s in all three cockpits and started with the mini 2. For me, my colleagues it's a game changer. Replacing 55 pins flight bags that are constantly updating charts, plates, obviously weather an traffic and NOTAMs, restrictions and flight patterns. Fuggedaboutit. Flight planning to fuel loads. Diversion strips to Jep charts, up to date plates weather - real time traffic and terrain and every manual checklist and procedure at my fingertips. True. Game changing. Technology
And now the 'Pro'. An unprecedented decide for the creative. Crushing it's 'competition' with the weight of another way of thinking. Wacom was selling their tabs for thousands of dollars just two years ago. Still needed a PC to use it too! The surface pro is finally getting there, though much to be desired for tablet use and battery life. Where iOS is already ripe and rich with apps software and tools to take advantage out of the gate. Autodesk Adobe, even Microsoft are dedicated MORE resources today than ever in history to mobile development of the their software --- in some rumors, more than ½ of the development teams efforts have shifted ... ....with the sea change Apple began in 2007 with an iPhone I've still got. Looking at v1 iPhone and iPad along side the 6s/6s+ and iPad 1 v iPad Air 2/pro v1 it's amazing to see what a ½ decade and eight years have allowed
...we've benefited in our lives everywhere you can name. Including the most significant decade of change in automotive in a hundred years (before we had cars!) and the amazing inter connectivity, GPS, comms and computing, thanks to Apple, Google, Samsung and companies like TSMC. Our braking systems are light years ahead of the first anti lock systems. Traction control and sensors like accelerometers, barometers and proximity sensors, same as phones and tabs. HiDPI and visible in sunlight displays --- even our vehicles have transformed 2005-2015!!! And in no small way
Yet you're up in arms about a cool shot (excellent photo Josh) of a pencil that's on carpet? Hmmm. Happen to 'read', not just look? Low enough latency, it's a non issue on a v1 device? Awesome resolution, phenomenal, laptop --- current generation compute power and class tripling graphic and NAND performance, this very well COULD be a laptop replacement for a huge section of society
Remember --- Adobe, MS, AutoDesk, IBM ...Mari for crying out loud! The one and final reason we've had to maintain a fast Win rig. No. More. Developers alike are flocking to the very lucrative business model for iOS and OS X development to continue refining complete and pure workflow. Whether our watch, our phone, tablet or home computer, the seamless integration and continuity is unrivaled --- without end in site! Android, they don't have a prayer. Tabs are years behind with an eco system and they're without anything but connection dependent chrome books Windows, if they get this Win10 'thing' right, I see being the only true competition to what Apple's managed to create. And that's a 5-10 year plan as its playing out
Sheesh. Didn't think I could write a novel about a pencil on the carpet
....it was all in the manic Matrix gatekeeper and his goofy response. Sorry.
Boo hoo akdj! My original post was not intended to bash apple, it was to highlight the significant, and PAID FOR APPLE BIAS Mr. Ho continues to spew forth onto this formerly great online publication. All his apple articles read the same way:
- positive without fail, zero negatives - attractively laid out marketing photos, which he claims aren't manipulated - exif info tagged by Lightroom, which means they WERE processed
If the journalists around here stop posting stupid paid for advertisements disguised as fake reviews, ill gladly stop posting stupid comments calling BS on it.
No need to Boo Hoo me dsu, it's you, the one that should be wasting away - blubbering in your closet. Unreal, complete and utter ignorance There's "No pay to advertise for Apple!" Apple doesn't pay journalists, especially smaller, more direct/geek sites like Anandtech, my apologies to the crew ...as I don't mean to demean the value of your site. It's special and has been over the years in a sorta way others aren't.
So, your dumbass 'reason one' it's not a formerly great site. It continues to be the best
As for #2 --- I certainly didn't read this 'preview' without fail or zero negatives. He couldn't keep up with mathematic equations and other 'note taking' tasks with the unit, didn't like the grime that formed on the pencil after a while and shading while acceptable isn't an exact science with digital pencils. As far as marketing photos, of course they're processed. EVERY photo posted, even in my copy of LR shows manipulation. Of course, shooting with a 18, 20, 24 or whatever megapixel cam allows for extensive cropping. One manipulation you're seeing in the metadata. Size change. It's not like they're applying some sort of brilliant light leak to make it look like its sent from the heavens dude. It's. Gray. Carpet.
Then I look back on reviews, extensive reviews like the SP4 or the MS Book --- both highly praised, both well received and extremely well 'dressed up' for their photoshoot! :rolleyes: Exit tagged by LR means nothing more than a quick crop and easy straightening or lens correction. It wasn't extensively manipulated by LR, How would I know? I own one and my carpet is damn near the same carpet in my studio. I laid it on the floor and shot it with a Canon S95 (older P&S), Canon 5d mkIII & Sony RX v4 (another small but 1" sensor P&S with an extensively brighter lens than the the older S95) Every. Image. Looked. Identical! This is a tablet man. Take your panties outta the bunch, drop your conspiracy theories or, better yet, find a new site that's not "paid by Cupertino" --- and we'll see ya back in a couple of weeks
There's a common denominator though -- iPhones and iPads are the highest grossing, largest selling electronic units in history. And each time the former drops, a new record is set. While iPads have dropped a couple million a quarter, they're still quadrupling the competition in three months compared to the other OEMs yearly results! The iPad and iPhone are backed by the best app selection, curated App Store and apps that are automatically optimized (nearly, some work in Xcode, though very simple) for each and every display sold by Apple's iOS range. In other words, they're absolutely king of the hill and there's a very good reason. And it's not that there's nearly 100,000,000 dumb people yearly buying one or both products. iPads tend to last a LONG time. My original still works perfectly and maintains 8-10 hours of battery life. My iPad 2, same thing. No problems and relegated to the kids I use them for business so I've got more than the normal civilian, but I can honestly say they're the most durable. Dependable and longest lasting tablets without the need for redundancy because you can TRUST their performance ALL the time! Whether I'm flying into Katmai, hosting a wedding or running front of house for Mötley Crüe, there's few tasks I've found the iPad doesn't have an extremely good use(s) for.
The iPad Pro is different. Not for everyone but I've had mine for two months nearly six weeks with pencil and keyboard. While my Air 2 isn't going anywhere, nor are the personal mini iPads for the family, the new iPad Pro WILL replace a dozen working iPad 4s and iPad Air1s in the field. They're definitely THAT GOOD, without the gray carpet photo manipulation (I'm not sure you realize how ridiculous your comments make you sound. Seriously. Paid by Apple 'cause you used LightRoom to crop, maybe brighten, than 'publish' your product shot. Lol!)
Good luck with the spiders in Mom's basement. Save some cash, you don't have to admit how much you love it, but plenty give you a 30 day window to exchange. Seriously, no need to come back and tell us how much you're enjoying it. Or, that mom said "No" ....'you absolutely cannot have one til you graduate middle school!' One. Or the other.
Who in the hell is consumerrunnerup.com? That was a helluva reach! Please realize the iPP, it's a different animal and more like the hybrid, 2 in 1 and whatever you want to call the PC versions of tablet/laptop portables. It'll never sell en masse like the iPad Air, iPhone or even the iMac. ....Yet My mother played with mine over Christmas and told my dad she'd prefer the iPad Pro to their new 5K iMac (27") as it "does everything I need it to, Joe! And it's got a pencil! Look what I can do with the photos!!!" IMHO, the world will look a lot different in the next couple of years computationally. Many are finding their iPhone 6s, Galaxy S6 Edge, Note 5, G4 or their iPhone 5s, S5 ---- older flagship phones are nearly ALL they need for a computer! Most folks aren't subscribers like many of us to the CC Adobe suite, nor are they using PS or LR for picture processing. Try Snapseed and Pixelmator. Their social, email, productivity apps (MS suite fully available and functional --- even more so on the iPP imho --- as well, if you don't need MS, Apple's suite kicks ass!) Their games, pictures and videos - in fact it's a repository for ALL media these days. Don't go looking for tertiary blogs rating tablets. Especially those without experience with said tablets (iPP isn't yet available in mass order, nor the pencils or keyboards), as reading your link it makes me wonder if he's used ANY of them or using a selection of his/her favorite sites in aggregate to make his own holiday list for 2015!
I'm with you gw74. In fact, it's the reason I came to comments.
Simply to ask Ryan and crew when their 'full review' of the iPP will be available. I know with mine daily I find a new use, and I've not put mine down since purchase. I love it, starting to feel bad for my MacBook Pro, as it's getting less and less usage :(
Hey, Ryan, do you think your team can do a review on the Meizu Pro 5? Just like your MX4 Pro review, I truly believe this device needs to be notice for using Samsung hardware + Apple Aesthetics.
The hardware is almost same as s6 so it would be more or less similar. Meizu mx5 would be more interesting since there has been no in depth review of Mediatek x10.
True...but it still surprises me though how an underrated brand in China can make such beastly phones (not forgetting the AMAZING Audio chipsets inside) and make the user experience nothing short of impeccable.
Thanks. It's only two benches though (geekbench and GFXBench). Nethertheless it's interesting to see how it outperforms the rMB, and trades punches with the SP4 and the 13" rMBP.
I'm basically ready for an ARM Mac. There's no reason to keep Intel around anymore.
The first place Apple could target for ARM Macs would be the Mac Mini. Maybe use 4 CPU cores and a smaller GPU. Work on transferring server-level software to ARM first. They might even be able to convert the Airport Extreme to a server-level Mac Mini product.
Once we have the base OS X converted to ARM, other vendors could start to port their own apps, and the broader consumer market could open up for ARM OS X, and Apple could start selling laptops with ARM in them.
An ARM OS X Laptop would be far cheaper yet much faster than something like a Surface Book.
Geekbench is always skewed to ARM processors due to the 2x-3x performance in SHA1 multicore calculations compared to x86 (Core M, Core i) processors. When you remove the SHA1 benchmark speeds, the ARM results are significantly lower.
A few months ago, the criticism against ARM was that it had native AES instructions and that's why it is competitive to Intel x86. Now that people actually looked at the GB subscores and see that lo and behold, Intel has awesome AES scores relative to ARM, the criticism has moved on to SHA subscores.
Give it a break. There's like 13 integer sub-benches. Removing one won't change the scores much. Plus, it's a tautological criticism: this CPU won't be that fast if remove the things that it is good at from the benchmarks. Next thing you're going to tell me is that ARM is cheating by have large caches?
That big cache criticism has been making the rounds too.
That sort of thing is the downside of the lack of multiplatform benchmarks. It makes it really tricky to determine which things are quirks of the benchmark and which are really indicative of greater trends in performance.
That's no such thing as a blackbox benchmark, where you run it and show the results. You won't find "good" multi-platform benchmarks unless it tests simpler things, like graphics ops. Testing of the applications you most use is always the best benchmark because compilers have such a big effect, but that apparently takes too much work and time.
The big issue with mobile and handset testing is the vast mass of tech media that review products have zero understating of the benchmarks they use, have no desire to learn what they mean, and thusly lead them to say stupid shit because all they want to do is the simple blackbox comparison of device A has a better score than device B, therefore better.
I've basically stopped reading reviews as 99% of them have no value.
Somewhat true and we aa HW enthusiasts want to compare the hardware regardless of real-world usage. However for a consumer stuff like Geekbench is irrelevant. In a mobile I buy the whole platform and hence I compare an Samsung Phone with Samsung SOC and Android to an IPhone with an Apple SOC and iOS.
Hypothetically: If the Apple SOC is faster but say sucks in browser benchmarks because Safari (or iOS) sucks, too bad. I don't care that the apple SOC is theoretically much faster. I buy the platform that as a whole is faster.
It actually seems to have gotten worse with version 3, which you should be aware of. On ARM64, that SHA1 performance is hardware-assisted. I don't know if SHA2 is too, but Aarch64 does apparently do SHA256 in the crypto unit, so it might be fully or partially so.
And on both ARM and x86, the AES numbers are similarly just about the crypto unit.
So basically a quarter to a third of the "integer" workloads are just utter BS. They are not comparable across architectures due to the crypto units, and even within one architecture the numbers just don't mean much of anything.
And quite frankly, it's not even just the crypto ones. Looking at the other GB3 "benchmarks", they are mainly small kernels: not really much different from dhrystone. I suspect most of them have a code footprint that basically fits in a L1I cache.
I see it as an indication that the test is too simple(workload/data sets etc.) to be meaningful in the sense that it's the definitive bench that decided which ISA is faster/better. That's before getting into score calculation.
Linpack is another crossplatform bench that favors x86 more. Why aren't we using that?
A four times advantage in one test will give a 4^(1/13) = 11% advantage in the integer test and about 4% overall so it isn't inconsequential. At least it isn't quite as bad as the difference libquantum makes in SPECint2006 where a compiler noticing the trick to optimize it can easily make the overall result a third higher.
Hey look id4andrei, I can do argumentum ad auctoritatem like you too. I found a contemporary Linus Torvalds quote, written today about the very topic:
"By: Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org), November 11, 2015 3:02 pmRoom: Moderated Discussions ... I don't think there is any question whether the performance is there.
The real issue is how much Apple ends up caring about old applications. Could they do a Macbook with Twister and have it perform well with native apps? No question. I agree that they already almost certainly outperform the current Core M in the Macbook. But what about legacy apps?
In the Macbook form factor, I suspect they don't care a lot. It's not like people buy those as workhorse computers anyway, and emulating x86 apps (slowly) takes care of compatibility. But is it fast enough to run x86-emulated MS Office? And some photoshop, even if not necessarily a lot?
I personally think a Macbook form factor would have made more sense than the iPod Pro. Maybe it's some flaw in me, where I don't see the point of a mediocre keyboard and a bad "not-hinge" balancing act.
But yes, I'd expect that we'll see an ARM Macbook to test the waters. In the not-too-distant future. It will take much longer to move off Intel in the bigger machines, but I think Apple does want to try it, and it makes sense to start at the low end where people already went for form over performance.
That has nothing to do with what I said. You're using one benchmark, Geekbench, which this site does not use for x-platform comparisons, to say that A9x is absolutely better than skylake. Anandtech found inconsistencies with GB within the ARM platform before even considering x86.
Take Linpack, another x-platform benchmark. This inflates the x86 camp more. CoreM was 8 times faster ipad air2. This leaves room for Core M to be 4 times faster than the ipad pro. Again, Linpack has been removed from Anandtech testing.
Ah, no. These are completely different chip families, and need to be tested as such. Software will utilize these chips the way they are designed, and so the testing is correct. Besides in the relevant tests dine at Arstechnica, we can see that the chip is very fast. Look at Kraken and the others.
Why would you ignore a benchmark that performs better one one platform over another?
The whole point of the benchmark is to measure speeds.
Do people not think that SHA1 or AES speeds not matter at all? Those are legitimate uses of CPU, and if ARM does better on them than Intel, then that just means ARM is faster.
Using a tablet with a pen depends on several factors obviously. The Pen is a key tool and without it it's almost worthless. I love the Samsung Note devices for the pen and capability. Note taking, sketching, drawing are pretty awesome. And as with any device the more you use them the more you get accustom to them.
"At the same time these FinFET processes are still new and yields won’t be great, so there is a strong incentive to keep die sizes down to keep die sizes down to keep yields up, and adding a third core would only make that harder."
You repeated "keep die sizes down to keep die sizes down to keep yields up" a bit there.
That is not entirely correct. Dies size down does not necessarily means yield goes up; sometimes it is quite the opposite. On the other than, you can use conservative design rules and increase width of metal traces or increase spacing between metal traces to make it less affected by manufacturing variation. This makes the die bigger, but also more manufacturable and this can improve yield.
OneNote for iPad has support for the Apple Pencil, does it not? I use the OneNote Windows 10 (universal app) for taking notes (engineering, math, physics) in class on my Surface Pro 3. As such I would be very interested in such a comparison.
i'd love to see a pen latency/pressure/friction comparison to the surface 4pro/book. actually i find it's the only difference really interesting, because everything else (hardware spec/quality, ios vs win10, ...) is widely known or of minor interest
"With the iPad Air 2, for example, I felt quite strongly that while in some ways the larger display was useful, it was difficult for me to justify the cost of the tablet due to the lack of some productivity-focused tools". In ipad air2 review, Joshua wrote "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".
This is something I don't like in anandtech reviews. We have to wait for the next version of the product to find out current draw backs, especially if its an iDevice! I admire the quality of reviews though.
How's good is a review when the reviewer only tells tout the down sides when a new "better" version comes out? A review like that stinks of basis and fanboyism
I felt that this was a problem with the iPad Air 2 but that for people that wanted a conventional tablet it was one of the few choices worth considering on the market.
In some respects my feelings haven't changed on this matter. I still feel like touch only tablets tend to be a little bit short on value even though such tablets remain quite popular.
That's how the scores with only 50GB/s memory bandwidth for the whole chip together (not just GPU alone) are so high I guess, doesn't need as much bandwidth at half precision. Are these still tile based renderers? That saves bandwidth too. That's how you have this chip getting close to the Iris Pro/650M, if you don't take into account it's using half precision.
Precisely. Also from Anandtech, in a past article analyzing PowerVR, the tiling arch is especially adept at FP16 workloads.
Macrumors are going insane with the Ars GFX benches. They actually think that A9x GPU(great as it may be) is faster than the one in the 13" rMBP(28W SoC).
I'm I'd group Macrumors 'as one', nor the conversation you're referring to without spirited debate (about Iris Pro and Imagination's 10 core implementation in the iPP) They're certainly not 'going insane' ...but there's certainly something to the raw bench speeds on graphic oriented applications, their usage of the resources and most importantly, the software or as we call it now, the apps developed specific to that SoC versus a Skylake 6xxx with an iGPU attempting to run X86 software that is a lot better off with discrete GPU(s). IMHO, that's where the 'win' for ARM comes in, versus Intel It's not ALL about benchmarking but weird enough; sites have been using the same comparisons since the earliest days of Android and iOS --- not a single complaint! Apple drops the A7, the first 'mobile' SoC with 64bit capability sucking the wind out of Qualcomm execs and kicking Intel in the rear when it comes to better iGPU integration with their mobile bound laptop or tablet chips. The A8's increase overall in computing and graphic power ...a marked improvement in a single year, a year Qualcomm and others STILL had a helluva time getting a working 64bit processor to market and the A8x, along with Swift and Metal as well as the continuity or "Handoff" to OS X and doubling the RAM in Air 2 TRULY shows off the capabilities of the second gen A-series processor/SoC with IT's graphic set --- then. 2015 Apple's third revision of the 64bit A9 processor sporting different IT GPU options across devices (iPhone --> iPad Pro) and it's near doubling in both compute and graphics, doubling of RAM across the board and the real and perceived speed differences on this generation's iOS devices compared to last is truly incomparable! I owned the 6+, I upgraded to the 6s+. The difference is extreme. I upgraded a year ago from Air 1 to 2. The differences are incredible --- including the current gotta have features of the new devices with slide over, dual app and video overlay without latency or delay is phenomenal and a feature set that may work in some capacity on the older devices but limitations are in place so as joy to kill the device. One thing Apple maybe too good at, keeping the older devices working and with most updates the latest OS allows. I've got a ½ dozen iPad 4s we use in the field and not a single one has needed to be fixed --- & they've been through hell and back. I'm replacing them with the Air2s x4 and a pair of iPPs as the ONE thing the iPad does have over the rMBP's - constant connectivity. Always online and lighter, more durable with longer life than the rMBP (my favorite computer BTW, I bought the original 15" 2012 model, still going as strong today as the day I bought it. Wife needed an update to her laptop and just got her the 2.8/16/1TB CTO & I'm jealous! Amazing the speed difference between the older SSD ('12) models vs. the PCIe SSD solutions of today, I couldn't believe how quickly the Adobe CC suite downloaded (we're blessed with local gigabit ISP service) and then installed. Transferring larger files is mesmerizing. Using Thunderbolt or usb 3, it's nearly instantaneous! The new rMBP (not so new anymore, but they're definitely building out the HiDPI displays and knocking them outta the park) is a revelation in my 30 years of computing. Starting on the IIe and transitioning to s 286 in corporate world, back to Mac in 2006 for my business haven't looked back. We keep a Windows machine for a Quickbooks machine and a few older games my son enjoys as well as the Xbox integration ...but OS X is certainly a phenomenal operating system in conjunction with iOS, it's mobile counterpart along with Handoff creates the perfect vertical and horizontally integrated and aggregated system we've ever had, without the need for a four year computer programming and networking degree --- Apple has designed a total system of work and play that simply keeps everything. Without the need to even 'think' about what you're doing While still retaining the power of Terminal, Automator and Xcode free for all to simulate or build their own iOS or OS X apps themselves! I believe MS is poised to challenge Apple and dethrone Samsung, as well as Android (no one goes home to their Chromebook to finalize the rendering of their motion captured that day, manipulate their photos in batch or finish their 3D composites they started with Adobe on their tablet earlier in the day. Windows 10 is a decent OS and its ability to integrate and aggregate with its mobile platforms will eventually topple Android as the #2 mobile option challenging OS X for the top spot. Time will tell but Apple has a tough time releasing shitty products these days. I wasn't sure about the Apple .watch my wife got me for my birthday. Today I can't imagine life without it as there's a couple dozen times a day my phone can stay in pocket, on desk or away from my immediate access while the watch tells me what I need to know.
Back to Macrumors, the debate(s) as there's several are spirited and with merit. Plenty of very informational material and links with the back and forth, very interesting debate to be sure as who'd have thought the debate itself would be happening this early? Apple has money. Apple poached plenty of chip experts many years ago, as well as low level programmers and SoC designers and fabricators --- it's been quick but Intel has rested on its laurels a long time with AMD's woes and complimentary discrete GPU OEMs. It's only been since the X86 architecture replaced PPC on OS X seemingly that Intel has developed an interest in building up the integration of GPU on their CPU builds. And only the last couple years, since the Intel 3000 has IrisPro made the leap that DOES challenge Imagination Tech's formidable and mobile graphic solutions
...again, JUST to be having this debate says plenty about the job Apple is doing with their silicon
"With the iPad Air 2, for example, I felt quite strongly that while in some ways the larger display was useful, it was difficult for me to justify the cost of the tablet due to the lack of some productivity-focused tools".
This didn't make sense to me... The iPad Air2 has a bigger display?!? This is certainly news to me.
As is the lack of productivity tools. Not only is the full Office out on iOS, you can even get Autocad these days...
Last I checked the mobile office apps aren't even close to the desktop windows apps in functionality. I'm not talking about minor things, I'm talking about massive use case defining things like OneNote on desktop being able to record audio in parallel with written notes and tying the two together so you can go to a line in writing and play back the audio from that point in time, or Excel being able to set up a gradient fill on a data range for use as a visualization tool, or being able to set up a data range and order by the values in any column according to a variety of rules.
Mobile office is only full featured for values of full that include Google docs.
Oh absolutely. Docs is taking forever to add essential functionality, and there's still a bunch missing. That's why I used it as a point of reference for mobile Office's feature set because it's missing a ton of features that make certain workflows literally impossible.
It doesn't seem to be similar to the other active digitizers in tech, the way it's described - there appears to be more tech in the Pencil itself than in other stylii (as well as the screen boosting to 240 Hz while drawing). But yes a direct comparison to how well they actually work would be welcome.
And since Im here before the usual army of raging, frothing at the mouth, fifteen year old fanboys has arrived:
(After all: How dare you say something positive about an Apple stylus?!? Since you dont share our mindless hate of a particular electronics manufacturer, clearly you must be paid off!!!)
Don't let the comments get to you... Good work so far, and can't wait to see the final result!
"in retrospect I’m starting to think that A8X was an anomaly and Apple didn’t really want a tri-core CPU in the first place"
The A9X looks absolutely brilliant, and is another winner from Apple, however I wish we didn't have to find retroactive justifications for everything Apple does, or why every decision they make is intrinsically correct.
Apple has a given die size and a given power consumption profile. They design their SoC accordingly. I doubt they "want" 2 or 3 (or 4 or 8 or 16) cores intrinsically, but it ends up being decided by the preceding restrictions, and in this case it was 2 fast cores with a very large, very powerful GPU. I have no doubt they'll move to 3 cores next year, as optimizations and restructuring presents itself, and again we'll hear why 3 cores is really what they wanted.
What workloads will benefit or require 3 cores or 4 cores. If they want to support workstation workloads, moving to 4 core might be the right way to go. If you have smartphone workloads, 2-core. Tablet workloads, hmm.
Waiting on FCPX, Logic, Xcode, etc for iOS to drop. If Apple intends on that happening, odds are pretty durn good that iOS laptop, like a MBP, will also come.
These are two sides of the same coin really, but I'm sure Apple would have avoided scaling to three cores if they could have had that performance in two at the die size. Even with automatic management of loads the third core won't scale nearly as well as the second one (nor the fourth, etc), Amdahl's law and all that.
20 years from new Joshua, you are going to be looking at your notes and thinking, "WTF!" The rosetta stone in your head that makes that scribble legible is going to be long lost to make room for all the more advanced stuff you have to learn. ;)
One of the holy grails of pen computing I've been waiting for is seamless conversion of analog drawing input into vector graphics and fonts so all that cursive becomes legible in the future. Might give handwritten note taking another shot if there was an app that can do this. Sort of like an iWork app mashup where hand-input tables, drawings, notes, spreadsheets, images, etc are all first class citizens.
-- One of the holy grails of pen computing I've been waiting for is seamless conversion of analog drawing input into vector graphics and fonts so all that cursive becomes legible in the future. Might give handwritten note taking another shot if there was an app that can do this. Sort of like an iWork app mashup where hand-input tables, drawings, notes, spreadsheets, images, etc are all first class citizens.
If you visit any R textbook, there you'll find "simple" examples of doing just that.
I'm really glad to see note-taking capability that's actually superior to pencil and paper is finally coming to iOS, it's been a badly needed bit of functionality for a long time, and should help make their tablets more than souped-up big phones. I feel that by the time you're carrying around a device that doesn't fit in your pocket, and definitely one in the 10+ inch range, you should be getting the ability to do more things than with something that fits in your pocket, rather than the ability to do things a bit better. Hopefully Apple will eventually make something that doesn't mandate carrying a tablet and a laptop if you want a tablet but have to get a bit of serious work done, it makes a mockery of the effort they put into making their devices thin and light, since currently there's no contest between a Surface (Pro) and an iPad Air (with an MBP stuffed in there too).
Hmm I'm in a conundrum as I read this article on the cracked screen of my ipad3 and at the same time pondering the replacement of my aging Lenovo X220. Yes I know I'm behind the times. However spending another grand on a tablet with the limitations of iOS and the the lack of even basic IO is not attractive. A convertible laptop or the like with a real OS geared toward productivity seems way more appealing, since that is what the Pro is starting to compete with. Help me out folks, what am I missing.
It's a use case. If you need to do something beyond what the system can manage, then it's not for you.
I'm seeing complaints that a numher of apps aren't as full as their Desktop versions. But what limitation is that, really? Even on a Surface Pro 4 the size is a limitation for many things. So what? Adobe, Autodesk, and others, allow you to store your work in their cloud, where it appears in their Desktop software for more sophisticated work. That works well, if you need to do more sophisticated work.
So I think you need to look carefully at what you really need to do, and see if the apps available will allow that. It will take some effort to do that exploration, but that's nothing new. In addition, these devices will continue to get better with time. Now that the hardware is there, it's a matter of software, both on the OS and app end. I've been beta testing iOS 9.2, and it adds some features that the Pro, with 9.1 don't yet have. Next year's iOS 10 will do more. That's just the nature of things.
If someone wants to use Surface as one's main work machine, there is hardly an excuse why it wouldn't be with Surface's docking station... which will allow for 2 desktop screens, USB3.0-attached storage (or anything USB/NAS/SAN over lan), wired network. We barely have laptop users who don't use docking stations in the office, save for handful of very small setups - essentially on-man bands... recommendation does transfer to Surface users, and it does work well.
Our Surface users are not suffering any handicap over desktop users, for huge majority of cases. I mean, we will not recommend Surface (docked or not) for graphics designers, but for anyone who does common office tasks on their machines, there is no handicap. There is, however, benefit of having machine more portable than average laptop, and also capable to replace tablet. Sure, it does come with higher price than desktop, but actually competes quite well with laptops nowadays. Here in NZ, we pay for base Elitebook i5/4GB/120GB SSD around NZ$1,500. Surface Pro 3 i5/4GB/128GB SSD with keyboard and extended 3 years warranty (to match Elitebook) is NZ$1,420.
You don't say what you do on your laptop. If it's serious content creation -- be if CAD, Adobe Creative Suite, or even Office, I think it will be quite a while, if ever, before the iPad Pro can match the level of productivity that you get with a full desktop OS.
If you haven't looked at a Surface yet, you should get yourself someplace where you can examine the whole product line (the 3, 4 Pro, and Book). A comparably equipped Surface Pro 4 is actually cheaper than an iPad Pro once you include the stylus & keyboard.
Yes, thanks, you are supporting my thinking. At what point does a tablet try to be something it's not, at least from a price perspective. The iPad Pro is something very few people asked for. The Notes application should run on any newer iPad. Of course if money is no object then spend away on a large, overpriced, limited functionality tablet. Otherwise I think a Surface or the like makes far more sense. My own needs will be Office and the occasional Lightroom use while traveling, and of course email and surfing.
The Tablet and Laptop concepts have merged, but they forgot to tell Apple. Instead they just gave us a larger more expensive iPad. Generous and genius at the same time.
> To do this, I took the iPad Pro to class and simply relied on the built-in Notes application to try and see how well I could follow along in lectures and discussions.
What? They let you take the unreleased iPad Pro still under embargo to class???
Once they show it do us in the introduction, it's not as much of a concern. They're in the stores already, so people have been playing with them there.
TIL: Joshua Ho is very popular in his classes and probably has to deal with a lot of new-found "friends" who are all of a sudden extremely interested in befriending him(and getting to see new, unreleased Apple hardware in the process).
Good preview, Josh, looking forward to reading the full one.
On a sidenote, the pace on this website has truly picked up after being in the doldrums for a while. KUTGW!
UCLA is a big place. If no one is next to you then it's pretty hard for anyone to see anything, especially when iPads and Surface Pros are common sights in classrooms. :)
I went to UCLA for my engineering B.S. and M.S. degrees. I still don't see what is wrong with using a pen and multi-subject notepad. You can write as fast as you want, and it's easy to make amendments, etc... At least it worked for me (still does, in fact). It just seems like taking notes has gotten more complicated than it needs to be.
That's interesting haha. If I was there I would walk out to Josh and say: "Hey man, love your reviews. But uh, can you give me a little shoutout on your next article?" haha.
Guys, guys, Why bother? Cube i7 stylus costs less than $400 , it is well made and comes with CoreM, HD5300, SSD, Wacom (!) digitizer+pen and runs heavy desktop apps like Maya , ZBrush and Photoshop. Now, try that with this..erm 'Pro'..
This is not for you. This is for artists music production, app development? and media consumption on the side. Also I could see this being applied in to a video editors workflow. Plus windows tablet apps aren't that good, yet.
The lack of apps on windows 10 is appalling. All the developers offer at full fledge productivity suites, when all I want are watered down apps with limited functions but fanciful and smooth interface.
What's the L3 cache size on the A9X? Any upgrade there to help out the GPU? Other than that question, it seems largely similar to the A9 with added bandwidth/GPU grunt to deal with the higher res screen. For on-screen tests it's not terribly ahead of the Air 2, but for offscreen it is. Most of the added power just nullifies the added resolution.
Our initial Chipworks die shot shows six GPU pairs, so 12 cores, and a similar twin-CPU to the A9. The odd thing is that the L3 cache seems to have disappeared! As far as I can see it has not been distributed around the die, it is just no there..
Like others, I'm curious what your thoughts are on the Surface Pro + pen. You say that the lag is virtually unnoticeable on the iPad Pro, but yet you see up to a 5mm difference in pencil tip vs screen display. To me, that's a huge latency and would make precise work difficult. I haven't yet played with the SP4 or SurfaceBook, so I don't know how they compare in that regard.
The lag is only apparent on extremely fast strokes. The actual lag in inking is something I need to quantify properly and something I'm hoping to do for the full review.
Can you please compare the Intel Core M7 (top bin) vs Apple A9X. That piece should be very interesting. I believe Apple will trump Intel on GPU but Intel might have a lead on CPU. Don't forget to include power numbers. Nothing makes sense without discussing the perf/watt.
For now we only have geekbench results, with all the limitations of cross-platform benchmarks. However, according to Geekbench, Core M7, A9X and the i5 in the SP3 are very close, virtually on par. Looking forward to see more tests. Anyway, both Intel and Apple have done a great job with these fanless processors (Skylake m7 and A9X)
What about some gaming benchmarks? I do some light gaming every now and then, e.g. L4D2, Dota 2. Can you run some gaming benchmarks to compare the iPad Pro with the surface pro 3? Comparing it to the 4 or surface book would be unfair.
So this thing utterly destroys a Surface Pro 4 i5 in graphics? And is basically just as fast as a Core i7 with GT 940M? Haha bye bye intel. It now makes zero sense for the next macbook to contain an intel chip.
I'd be surprised if it's 100% FP16. Normally we use a mix of 16 + 32 as needed (no point wasting power on 32 bit precision when you don't need it at all!)
If it's using FP16 at the expense of quality it's not an equal benchmark, but if it's using FP16 purely for greater efficiency, that's nothing but an architectural advantage over platforms limited to FP32.
Where do you see it coming close to the 940M? It comes close to the Iris Pro, if you don't take into account it uses half precision, but the 940M, especially with GDDR5 as the SB has, is still decently ahead.
Would love to see a more fully-fledged review of note-taking for the full review, perhaps with a comparison to OneNote. I have found the latter's text conversion and diagram recognition technologies to be powerful, if not flawless, in practice.
Apple ARM processor performance is nothing short of incredible in just a few short years.
I can remember when everyone had 2 core processors. Apple stuck with 2 cores and improved their performance. Everyone else made smaller improvements to the cores and just added more. First quad-core and now otca-core. And yet Apple still performs better.
What are Samsung and Qualcomm going to do next year? Apple could make an ARM based laptop (for example) using a quad-core A10 and have a serious challenger to Intel in mobile. Are Samsung/Qualcomm going to start making 12-16 core processors just to keep up?
They should have invested in making custom cores earlier instead of taking the easy way out by using ARM designs (like the A53/57).
How much wider can Apple make their cores and still get good improvements? Their arch is starting to look more and more like core which we all know is years deep in extracting blood from a stone, they've cashed in on FinFET gains and are looking at a node that wasn't a big improvement for Intel, where's their next big improvement coming from?
I'm curious as well. For a while with ARM there were lots of easy pickings to be had as it's performance was way behind x86, but as process nodes shrunk and they were able to add more and more they were able to catch up to an impressive degree, even trading blows with Core M.
I wonder how much longer Apple can pull these gains out of their hat, or if they're going to hit the wall Intel did and just give us 10-25% improvements each year, more like the 5S-6 than the 6-6S.
Maybe then they will start to introduce 4 core designs to their products. A 4 core a9x design on a laptop form factor, with perhaps active cooling and a higher tpd could probably be faster than most of the Intel SoCs by a margin with tasks that use multiple cores. I think the real question here is how they compare cost wise. If the arm soc is cheaper, in a meaningful way, then the only real question is when, not why, we will see them in our laptops.
Maybe....but Imagination has a various list of PowerVr Gpus nowadays...all series 6xt and series 7xt...can't believe that Android market stuck with G6200 or G6430 (basically the same of the iPhone 5s..Ipad Air...almost A 3 years ago GPU...)...:(
An answer for why Apple uses PowerVR GPUs? That's a million dollar question I'm sure that ARM asks themselves every year. From the outside it's hard to say anything for sure. Certainly momentum plays a part, and there's nothing to indicate that Apple and Imagination have anything less than a solid working relationship. Apple's technical criteria is a greater mystery, though between the options of rolling their own GPU, using Mali, and using PowerVR, clearly they find PowerVR to be the best choice.
My question was more why only Apple uses high specs PowerVr by the way. The best you can get in the Android market is the G6430 at this stage...an almost 3 years old GPU.
My guess is that Apple has some sort of exclusive use of Imagination GPUs...but who really knows..
I don't think it's that, I think it's the same reason why Apple is the only one spending die size on an 8MB l3 in the A9. They know what their total product margins will be, they know they'll sell in the millions, so they can afford to be more risky with die size since it's barely any risk to them at all.
Android players are working off lower margins, and lower sales per model to boot. Samsung did pretty good with the GS6 Exynos, but other than them, everyone is going for smaller SoC dies.
I think the answer is quite simple. I believe the leading SOC manufacturers for Android devices (Samsung and Qualcomm) do not use PowerVR period. So the question why nobody (but Apple) uses high spec PowerVR is kind of irrelevant. And if I remember correctly PowerVR produces good results but Mali and Adreno are not bad too. Very often iDevices have advantage in on-screen benchmarks only because they have lower resolution. Then of course Anantech reviews of Apple devices are always special with rather peculiar selection of benchmarks emphasizing the strong features of Apple SOCs. For example, multi-core performance is always de-emphasized even though in most cases when performance really matters (gaming, image processing etc.) the algorithms are perfectly multi-threadable and single core performance is becoming less and less relevant (browsing is probably the last hold-out).
BTW, did you notice that AT now are getting iDevies directly from Apple for early reviews? This was not the case before. Couple of years of glowing iDevice reviews and voilà...
Yes Qualcomm use their own house solution Adreno Gpu and Samsung uses Mali - ARM GPUs.
There are some other products around that uses Powervr such as Intel, Mediatek, LG and somebody else that I can't remember. Low-middle range PowerVR specs as i said anyway.
I remember Samsung used to license PowerVr in their Exynos socs, but then they moved on licensing ARM - Mali only.
In my opinion we will need to focus more in GPUs performance degradation/ throttling rather than only fps in the future.
Maybe AT get Apple products earlier for early review, but they take ages to come up with a full review. See for example iPhone 6S...:)
I don't know if Anandtech is getting review devices due to "glowing reviews", but I do know that "glowing reviews" are always followed by several of your whines in the comment section and thinly veiled attacks on the integrity of the site. Nice job.
I noticed you left out the embarrassing throttling of the other SoC GPUs noted in the iPhone 6 review. I'm sure that was another one of your biased unfair tests - simply running a benchmark several times and seeing which devices slow way down...
Feel free to show some examples where multi-threaded games or image processing apps show an advantage with something like the Exynos 7420 vs. the A9, would be an interesting comparison. I've yet to see any real world situation that shows this but would be happy to look at examples that I'm sure you have :)
What a stupid post! Are you implying that muti-threading does not improve performance of image processing? A lot of image processing is done in GPUs. Obviously I do not refer to this use case but image processing done in CPU (also a very common case for more specialized image processing like the one often done in Photoshop and, probably, Instagram etc.) can and will use multi-threading. Besides my post was not about GPUs at all. And speaking about the integrity of this site... the fact that two previous iDevice reviewers from this site are now employed by Apple could be a coincidence but I have a more cynical view. I am not saying that the new reviewers are intentionally misinterpreting the benchmarks or anything like this. They guys are actually really good. It's just that we are all humans and so are they and maybe deep in their mind they also want to follow the path of their predecessors...
Multi-core performance is getting much more important. All social media apps utilize the cores to compress shared images and videos.
Anandtech seriously needs to stop using browser benchmarks and other increasingly irrelevant "compute" benchmarks in favor of real world usage; - audio and video encoding - complex website loading from a local server (NOT the internet) - signal quality - MICROPHONE and speaker (the audio in videos recorded with an iPhone stinks, but no mention of that in their review)
etc, etc, etc............................
Sometimes I believe that tech reviewers have WAYYYYYYYY different needs and usage habits than other users.
Apple is Imagination's ONLY big customer. This means they can work closely with Imagination to get everything they want in a GPU, while ensuring that no-one else gets the exact models they use. All the advantages of in-house design, BUT with lower cost because the design (eventually) also gets sold to other buyers. This matches, eg, Apple manufacturing. And the manufacturing at TSMC or Samsung. But they can't do it with CPU design because the possible partner design houses (eg ARM or QC) have large enough other customers that they wouldn't wrap their world around Apple's needs.
The A9X chip seems to be a beast as per the Ars benchmarks. It is incredible what Apple has been able to achieve in the last 3-4 years with their in-house chip design. It staggers me that even with the kind of IP intel has because of manufacturing the x86 chips for all these years, Apple suddenly comes up and beats them at their own game. Is Apple the new technology God?
Apple is God now? I though it was just a cult. Did not you notice that Apple and Samsung SOCs leapfrog each other in performance every year? Qualcomm did this too until they stumbled for one or two years. Most of the performance improvements in the last two years came from the improvements in semiconductor process and PowerVR design. I am not saying that Apple is not doing a good job too but claiming that they are the sole innovators not is just childish.
Single core performance is the measure of better design. Throwing in more cores is what you do when you can't improve your design. Most of Apple's competitors are using ARM reference designs.
Single core performance might be a measure of the better design if that is the goal but it might not be. Anandtech authors do pay a lot of attention to it and there are valid reasons but this is just one of the approaches. I see it differently. There are very few tasks on the phone/tablet that require high performance in a first place and those that do in most cases can be parallelized. With that in mind, having four smaller cores could be advantageous because you get:
* better performance for the tasks that do require it (four smaller cores will do better than two large cores in most cases) * better power consumption on typical phone/tablet tasks
Use of ARM reference design in itself is not an issue. Apple not using reference design does not automatically mean that their design is better. It just means that it is different. (it also happens to be good indeed).
"Did not you notice that Apple and Samsung SOCs leapfrog each other in performance every year?"
I haven't seen that at all when equalizing for the same number of cores, same clock rate, and the same TDP. Apple seems to not only be ahead, but increasing that lead.
PS: Apple has a large stake in Imagination Technologies so one could argue that the direction of PowerVR is on their behest.
Why don't you also normalize to the color of the sky and temperature of the sun? What matters is performance and perf/W. Not frequency, not IPC, not number of cores, not anything else. Talking about any other metric than these meaningful ones is a sign of either mental instability or agenda, unless in an extremely few exceptions.
And in performance, single threaded tasks are hugely in Apple favor. Which tasks are relevant here? Some low threaded games and browsing. Multithreaded tasks are very slightly in Android camp favor when Apple releases new parts and go back to somewhat higher advantage when QC/Samsung/... release their new chips. Which tasks are relevant here? Most games and mostly just games. But... games require GPU way more they need CPU, so whoever has the best GPU will do the best. Apple therefore has a very smart approach - good ST performance to have great web benchmarks, with great GPU to have great games performance, covering almost all bases.
"And in performance, single threaded tasks are hugely in Apple favor. Which tasks are relevant here? Some low threaded games and browsing." You're implying that only a minority of tasks benefit from having fewer, faster cores, when it appears to be the majority. And it isn't just "web benchmarks", it's real world web browsing. Anything that relies heavily on javascript is going to be much faster with an equivalent iOS device (probably a combination of hardware and software here).
Ars uses Geekbench across platforms ARM vs. Intel. Anandtech doesn't use Geekbench to compare differences between platform because it has certain issues with SHA-1 testing, which the ARM will decimate x86.
iFixit shows that it contains a Fresco Logic FL1100 4-port USB 3.0 Host Controller. Hopefully we'll see some data transfer tests that can confirm whether the USB is better than 2.0 speeds.
The real deal, is in 2017, when Apple moves to TSMC 10nm. Next year it will be TSMC 16nm FFC, that is 10 - 15% better performance / watt basis. 2017 we will see Apple moves to 10nm, That will likely double the performance of the current A9X with Quad Core. And double the GPU performance again.
I'll wait for goodnotesapp to support iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. I hope you will compare iPad Pro and Apple Pencil with iPad Air 2 and Adonit Jot Script 2 Stylus. Which one will do better taking notes.
Cool first impressions on the stylus/pencil. Not sure if you noticed, but instead of using an actual ruler you can apparently use two fingers to bring up a virtual one to draw straight lines. I know you were testing how straight the thing can actually draw, but the multitouch ruler thing seems pretty cool and was wondering if you tried it out.
Oh no no no, you don't get it. The apple pencil is meant to take notes. It replicates the experience of using a pencil on paper. No one takes notes with a Microsoft surface. It's not realistic. Which pen comes with an eraser?
I've never seen a product as revolutionary as the iPad pro! It supports pen input and multitasking, and the ingenious keyboard cover. I would gladly pay $99 for a pen and $169 for a keyboard without backlit or a touchpad. And the iPad Pro is the ultimate productivity machine! It has got all the ports anyone ever needs - a headphone out and a lightning port! The battery life is so good, I can choose to charge the iPad or plug in something to use as a mouse.
This is the 5th apple pencil I've misplaced though. I kept trying to attach it to the iPad Pro but there doesn't seem to be anywhere for me to secure the pencil.
The original high resolution winxp based tablets actually had pen input perfected a decade ago. It had no lag and awesome pressure sensitivity. No battery was needed in the pen and the pen had a button on it as well as a eraser that functioned as you would expect in a real pencil.
Funny, we have a bunch of those at work. Also some Win 7 tablets with pen support.
They all suck. Terrible response/latency. And they constantly lose calibration such that you have to run the calibration software and touch a bunch of points on the screen so it works again.
Perhaps you can provide a link to some of these devices that shows how good they work? Because I haven't seen one yet.
I think I will rather GRAB piece of paper to scratch som random child drawing.. and NOT spending RETARDED BLACK HOLE or I rather say BIG BANG price !!! black hole word is not enough!! This piece of useless device is for MOST retarded ppl in the world who will buy it ..
You say there's no real way to turn the note content into a word document.. Wait..does that mean that the iPad pro doesn't have handwriting recognition?!?
Of true, rhattsthat's utterlutterly laughable, esleespecially compared to Samsung’s Note devices.
Lol, you got that right. :D But seriously, I think it had to do with the browser used which had some issues with the word input within the reply window.
Besides, it's irrelevant to my point - a lack of handwriting recognition on such a device is beyond belief and a total insult to the user.
Any ETA for the full review? I would really appreciate a side by side comparison of note taking in onenote (iPad Pro vs Surface Pro 4). I'm looking for the best stylus onenote experience. Thanks!
My needs would include handwriting recognition, with search functionality. I would also like to embed audio recordings and videos into my notes. As far as I can tell, both iOS and windows versions support this functionality (with the exception of embedding video in onenote on iOS - although this feature is coming according to microsoft). Are there other significant differences between the latest onenote for iOS and the onenote for Windows? If not, it seems like a decision should be made based on the best stylus experience.
From some other quick reviews it seems that A9X is quite powerful in per core. May I suggest trying some more unusual tests like a Skylake CPU against A9X in single thread scenarios?. This would imply finding some more tests other than the standard web ones that can run on both machines. It could be some Java benchmarks, Java based transcoders or C/C++ code that can be ported on both machines. Tests should be done with all optimizations possible on both systems and then results normalized per GHz. It would be an apple to oranges test, but it will show how efficient ARM can be these days compared with plain old x86.
Going to be difficult getting Java code running on an iOS device, it's not supported by Apple in any way. There are JVMs for jailbroken devices but that obviously wouldn't be a good test for a number of reasons (not that you can JB an iPad Pro yet).
There are at least some real world tests that could be done as well- there are some cross Mac OS X and iOS apps to make some comparisons. Microsoft Office, Pixelmator, iMovie... These would be tests of the OS & code as much as the CPU, but still of practical usefulness when wondering just how quickly an iPad Pro does something compared to a MacBook.
I tried the smart keyboard in a local Apple Store yesterday. It is awful and an ergonomic nightmare. I have no idea why anyone would want to use this to do any sort of productive work. It's just completely bizarre.
Any guesses as to whether the storage is PCIe NVMe like the iPhone 6S? For the other internals (LTE baseband, Touch ID, etc.) the iPad Pro is closer to last year's iPhone 6 than this year's iPhone 6S. But PCIe NVMe would make sense.
I tried out the pencil at the Apple store today. It worked fairly well but definitely shows input lag on quick movements. The pixel trail would lag the pencil by up to 7-8mm if I flicked the pencil across the screen. For more deliberative work the lag was not noticeable. The accuracy (where the pixels landed relative to where the tip touched) was very good regardless of speed of movement. I haven't used the Wacom or Surface tablets to compare. Overall, very pen-like. The keyboard was about what I expected, okay for short messages but nothing to write a thesis on. The touch screen is simply the best I have experienced, tied with the iPhone 6s (again, I haven't tried the Surface yet).
Notes or Pages, can't remember which, one worked with the pen and the other didn't plus Zen Brush and Something 53. We were trying different apps that the Apple store already had loaded on the iPad.
PC World has some benchmarks against a Core i7-equipped Surface Pro 4 and a Broadwell Core M-equipped Dell Venue 11. There are several other PCs including an Atom-based tablet.
If it wasn't for the page swapping to http://ads.pubmatic.com/AdServer/js/showad.js every 30seconds while I'm trying to read I think this would be a good thing! Edge browser on Win10. Hope this helps!
Hi guys, I am still awaiting the full review. I hope you didn't drop and break your iPencil. If so we will likely be waiting for another 4-6 weeks......
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witeken - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
The manufacturing process of the A9 is wrong.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
And this is what I get for copying tables at 3am in the morning. Thanks!tempestglen - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Thanks for your quick preview!Der2 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
This review going to be awesome!!!close - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
How were the 4 SoCs in the table on page 2 chosen? A9X, A9, A8X, A6X. Basically iPad Pro, iPhone6s(Plus), iPad Air2, iPad4.Maybe I'm missing something but what were the criteria when these 4 were chosen for the Apple SoC Comparison? Why not A7 for example?
extide - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
A9X -- obviousA9 -- phone version of above
A8X - previous tablet/x series soc
A6X - next previous X series soc
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
The above is basically correct. I purposely picked the two previous X-series SoCs, and then the phone version of the A9 family.dsumanik - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Pfft, i see Joshua Ho has his nice grey carpet background out in full force to promote yet another apple product to the max....hey Joshua. Why do ONLY apple products only get this special treatment/photoshopping/product arranging.... Also you forgot the nice picture of the product held niceely in front of the clean leafy tree?20 bucks says that will be the review's opener image.
akdj - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link
Dsu(data service unit?)manic,I'm not sure we're reading/viewing the same website. While the pencil shot looks cool in my opinion too (you've seem to had your mind blown!) ...its no different than any product line I've seen reviewed over the last decade. It's simple, easy implementation of some basic rules of photography ...like direction of flow, attention on subject ...and when not overtaking the subject, a killer background that makes said subject pop off the page.
You're not very familiar with this century's version of Photoshop --- if you believe this '(sic) apple (notice, without a capital A) product only gets this special treatment/photoshopping(again)/product arranging'. That's delusional. Most great shots --- certainly historical, but even current well known and respected pictures made have little to zero done with PS. And everything to do with the photographer. Zero to do with the lens. Body. Even subject. ALL to do with the photog
Case in point. Lay pencil on trippy, same line flow, multi colored Berber? Burber? Too lazy to look carpet. Snap shot with any camera phone laying around. Crop in cam. Email me-self. Done. And you think it deserves a Pulitzer?
Josh, my sincere apologies ...as I love your site, the way you write and enjoy visiting throughout the week. But apparently this Data Service Unit Manic (just draws a funny picture, like the poster thinks he ((not she, ladies are too smart for some of us here!)) is the singular gatekeeper of knowledge between the 'Matrix' (en/transcoding - hence the only "one" with 100%, true knowledge and ability to manipulate either side to their own favor) and the real world.
...or he/she went to Delaware State University. Hmmmm. Ponderous ...but one must as oneself, how much more relevant a review of the latest NAS, motherboard, or PCIe storage systems using nVMe would be with 'specially treated/photoshopped/arrangement of said PCIe controller or storage array
Really!?!?
That's. Just. Dumb. A nitpicking, no life comment that should be ignored but being on top the stack, I've wanted to poke you in the eye all week. It's a F'ing pencil on the carpet. I'm too lazy to strip Josh's metadata. Even if he left the hardware and shot info intact, it's these buffoon type comments that have destroyed the 'comment section' here at Anand. I bet I read 225 comments without ANYTHING to do with the iPhone 6s6s+ review before coming across anything interesting.
Apple is pushing the boundaries in real ways with the very few, focused and aggregating/integration systems of continuity and Handoff. Horizontal and vertical support to your like. Personally, professionally from your health to your wealth to your physical being. No one saw 'This' coming in 2015. I used 'tablets' (I'm a pilot, have been for 27 years) in 2005. I used 'smartphones' in '05. Sounds like such an oxymoron now as those tablets were monochrome, specific to certain tasks, bulky and boring. Smartphones, that's what they were. We've long since past this even being considered a 'phone' first any longer. It's a tertiary ability amongst an entire sea change of computing, unlplugging from 110v and enjoying connectivity faster than broadband, speeds faster than yesterday's full - 2/4/8 core lappies with storage subsystems and speeds that massacre what most use 'on the desk'. They're our window to the world. News. Email/messaging/comms. Social and sports, lifestyle and calculator, dayplanner and Rolodex! Lol. I'm dating myself. They're displays smoke what we paid $5k for a short decade for, packing twice the pixels into a few ounces and lasting a full day!
Smart wearables. Look at the industry. Catch wind 'Apple's gonna do it'. Rush to get half assed, overpriced underperforming wannabes out the door before Cupertino. Apple, being Apple intelligently bides their time. Gets the Apple Watch right in so many ways - opens the doors and outsells the competition in aggregate and in a weekend (vs. 500-1,000 days/3 years)!!!
That's what I dig about Apple. Their products. Both soft and hardware as well as their services. I did spend two decades on PCs. I started on a IIe in '83 playing MS's Flight simulator. Ten years ago, +/- I was smart enough to listen to my wife. Buy her a MacBook as a graduation gift, she'd finished her doctorate. Haven't looked back
..the guy that sold me the machine's name was Earnest. I called him a couple days later ...frustrated to no end after two days searching for the add/remove control center populater. And with that, the ability to uninstall a piece of software I didn't want. He got on the phone. Told me to click, drag to the garbage can (not recycle or trash, he said its garbage if you're done with it), empty garbage.
That was the second time he told me he'd see me in a week to sell me mine. He was right. Apple is building real tools ...maybe, and sometimes arguably existing technologies that no one uses but niche or proprietary OEMs. Then they re-form, re-build, tool, and release completely disprupto get world economies. See cell phone sales pre 2007/08/09 and today. See computer sales a decade ago, compare to iPad and increased quarter after quarter computer sales growth (rest of industry down), and a 'phone' (pocket computer) that blows through every previous tech sales record each year it's released! They're 'hobby' is capable of sustaining a position on the Firbes 500 (Apple TV) itself, while iTunes would alone be in the top 50!!
iTunes, the bloated pig it was when I ripped 2800 songs in 20p02 to my monochrome 20GB iPod from Costco was a PITA. Maybe it's the speed of my rMBP today, or the deconstruction and rebuild of iTunes both iOS (separated between each; music, video, podcasts) or AiO --- there's nothing on the planet that comes anywhere close to such exceptional media management. I use PLEX server at home for a ripped/streaming video server but it's fed through Apple TV. I can pause my show from my watch or phone or tab, finish the email I'm writing while my morning 'rest stop with coffee' and if not, too into an article... It's automatically on my desk when I'm 'done'.
Apple is somewhat a victim of their own doing. I own every iPad with exception of the 'new' iPad 3. Had it. Sold it. Bought the iPad 4 when it dropped. We use Mini, now 4s in all three cockpits and started with the mini 2. For me, my colleagues it's a game changer. Replacing 55 pins flight bags that are constantly updating charts, plates, obviously weather an traffic and NOTAMs, restrictions and flight patterns.
Fuggedaboutit. Flight planning to fuel loads. Diversion strips to Jep charts, up to date plates weather - real time traffic and terrain and every manual checklist and procedure at my fingertips. True. Game changing. Technology
And now the 'Pro'. An unprecedented decide for the creative. Crushing it's 'competition' with the weight of another way of thinking. Wacom was selling their tabs for thousands of dollars just two years ago. Still needed a PC to use it too! The surface pro is finally getting there, though much to be desired for tablet use and battery life.
Where iOS is already ripe and rich with apps software and tools to take advantage out of the gate. Autodesk Adobe, even Microsoft are dedicated MORE resources today than ever in history to mobile development of the their software --- in some rumors, more than ½ of the development teams efforts have shifted ...
....with the sea change Apple began in 2007 with an iPhone I've still got. Looking at v1 iPhone and iPad along side the 6s/6s+ and iPad 1 v iPad Air 2/pro v1 it's amazing to see what a ½ decade and eight years have allowed
...we've benefited in our lives everywhere you can name. Including the most significant decade of change in automotive in a hundred years (before we had cars!) and the amazing inter connectivity, GPS, comms and computing, thanks to Apple, Google, Samsung and companies like TSMC. Our braking systems are light years ahead of the first anti lock systems. Traction control and sensors like accelerometers, barometers and proximity sensors, same as phones and tabs. HiDPI and visible in sunlight displays --- even our vehicles have transformed 2005-2015!!! And in no small way
Yet you're up in arms about a cool shot (excellent photo Josh) of a pencil that's on carpet? Hmmm. Happen to 'read', not just look? Low enough latency, it's a non issue on a v1 device? Awesome resolution, phenomenal, laptop --- current generation compute power and class tripling graphic and NAND performance, this very well COULD be a laptop replacement for a huge section of society
Remember --- Adobe, MS, AutoDesk, IBM ...Mari for crying out loud! The one and final reason we've had to maintain a fast Win rig. No. More. Developers alike are flocking to the very lucrative business model for iOS and OS X development to continue refining complete and pure workflow. Whether our watch, our phone, tablet or home computer, the seamless integration and continuity is unrivaled --- without end in site!
Android, they don't have a prayer. Tabs are years behind with an eco system and they're without anything but connection dependent chrome books
Windows, if they get this Win10 'thing' right, I see being the only true competition to what Apple's managed to create. And that's a 5-10 year plan as its playing out
Sheesh. Didn't think I could write a novel about a pencil on the carpet
....it was all in the manic Matrix gatekeeper and his goofy response. Sorry.
Too long? Don't read
casperes1996 - Sunday, November 22, 2015 - link
Thank you for not being a cunt. I agree with 80% of what you said, maybe more. And you did it in a fine way.Jukens - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
Great read, thanks. Some excellent points.dsumanik - Sunday, December 27, 2015 - link
Boo hoo akdj! My original post was not intended to bash apple, it was to highlight the significant, and PAID FOR APPLE BIAS Mr. Ho continues to spew forth onto this formerly great online publication. All his apple articles read the same way:- positive without fail, zero negatives
- attractively laid out marketing photos, which he claims aren't manipulated
- exif info tagged by Lightroom, which means they WERE processed
If the journalists around here stop posting stupid paid for advertisements disguised as fake reviews, ill gladly stop posting stupid comments calling BS on it.
akdj - Tuesday, December 29, 2015 - link
No need to Boo Hoo me dsu, it's you, the one that should be wasting away - blubbering in your closet. Unreal, complete and utter ignoranceThere's "No pay to advertise for Apple!" Apple doesn't pay journalists, especially smaller, more direct/geek sites like Anandtech, my apologies to the crew ...as I don't mean to demean the value of your site. It's special and has been over the years in a sorta way others aren't.
So, your dumbass 'reason one' it's not a formerly great site. It continues to be the best
As for #2 --- I certainly didn't read this 'preview' without fail or zero negatives. He couldn't keep up with mathematic equations and other 'note taking' tasks with the unit, didn't like the grime that formed on the pencil after a while and shading while acceptable isn't an exact science with digital pencils.
As far as marketing photos, of course they're processed. EVERY photo posted, even in my copy of LR shows manipulation. Of course, shooting with a 18, 20, 24 or whatever megapixel cam allows for extensive cropping. One manipulation you're seeing in the metadata. Size change. It's not like they're applying some sort of brilliant light leak to make it look like its sent from the heavens dude. It's. Gray. Carpet.
Then I look back on reviews, extensive reviews like the SP4 or the MS Book --- both highly praised, both well received and extremely well 'dressed up' for their photoshoot! :rolleyes:
Exit tagged by LR means nothing more than a quick crop and easy straightening or lens correction. It wasn't extensively manipulated by LR, How would I know? I own one and my carpet is damn near the same carpet in my studio. I laid it on the floor and shot it with a Canon S95 (older P&S), Canon 5d mkIII & Sony RX v4 (another small but 1" sensor P&S with an extensively brighter lens than the the older S95)
Every. Image. Looked. Identical!
This is a tablet man. Take your panties outta the bunch, drop your conspiracy theories or, better yet, find a new site that's not "paid by Cupertino" --- and we'll see ya back in a couple of weeks
There's a common denominator though -- iPhones and iPads are the highest grossing, largest selling electronic units in history. And each time the former drops, a new record is set. While iPads have dropped a couple million a quarter, they're still quadrupling the competition in three months compared to the other OEMs yearly results!
The iPad and iPhone are backed by the best app selection, curated App Store and apps that are automatically optimized (nearly, some work in Xcode, though very simple) for each and every display sold by Apple's iOS range. In other words, they're absolutely king of the hill and there's a very good reason. And it's not that there's nearly 100,000,000 dumb people yearly buying one or both products. iPads tend to last a LONG time. My original still works perfectly and maintains 8-10 hours of battery life. My iPad 2, same thing. No problems and relegated to the kids
I use them for business so I've got more than the normal civilian, but I can honestly say they're the most durable. Dependable and longest lasting tablets without the need for redundancy because you can TRUST their performance ALL the time!
Whether I'm flying into Katmai, hosting a wedding or running front of house for Mötley Crüe, there's few tasks I've found the iPad doesn't have an extremely good use(s) for.
The iPad Pro is different. Not for everyone but I've had mine for two months nearly six weeks with pencil and keyboard. While my Air 2 isn't going anywhere, nor are the personal mini iPads for the family, the new iPad Pro WILL replace a dozen working iPad 4s and iPad Air1s in the field.
They're definitely THAT GOOD, without the gray carpet photo manipulation (I'm not sure you realize how ridiculous your comments make you sound. Seriously. Paid by Apple 'cause you used LightRoom to crop, maybe brighten, than 'publish' your product shot. Lol!)
Good luck with the spiders in Mom's basement. Save some cash, you don't have to admit how much you love it, but plenty give you a 30 day window to exchange. Seriously, no need to come back and tell us how much you're enjoying it. Or, that mom said "No" ....'you absolutely cannot have one til you graduate middle school!'
One. Or the other.
Billie Boyd - Friday, November 27, 2015 - link
The iPad Pro is nowhere close to the top tablets in my opinion, and just see rankings like http://www.consumerrunner.com/top-10-best-tablets/ - they don't rank it well eitherakdj - Tuesday, December 29, 2015 - link
Who in the hell is consumerrunnerup.com?That was a helluva reach!
Please realize the iPP, it's a different animal and more like the hybrid, 2 in 1 and whatever you want to call the PC versions of tablet/laptop portables. It'll never sell en masse like the iPad Air, iPhone or even the iMac. ....Yet
My mother played with mine over Christmas and told my dad she'd prefer the iPad Pro to their new 5K iMac (27") as it "does everything I need it to, Joe! And it's got a pencil! Look what I can do with the photos!!!"
IMHO, the world will look a lot different in the next couple of years computationally. Many are finding their iPhone 6s, Galaxy S6 Edge, Note 5, G4 or their iPhone 5s, S5 ---- older flagship phones are nearly ALL they need for a computer! Most folks aren't subscribers like many of us to the CC Adobe suite, nor are they using PS or LR for picture processing. Try Snapseed and Pixelmator. Their social, email, productivity apps (MS suite fully available and functional --- even more so on the iPP imho --- as well, if you don't need MS, Apple's suite kicks ass!)
Their games, pictures and videos - in fact it's a repository for ALL media these days.
Don't go looking for tertiary blogs rating tablets. Especially those without experience with said tablets (iPP isn't yet available in mass order, nor the pencils or keyboards), as reading your link it makes me wonder if he's used ANY of them or using a selection of his/her favorite sites in aggregate to make his own holiday list for 2015!
gw74 - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
I'm more hyped about the review than the thing!akdj - Tuesday, December 29, 2015 - link
I'm with you gw74. In fact, it's the reason I came to comments.Simply to ask Ryan and crew when their 'full review' of the iPP will be available. I know with mine daily I find a new use, and I've not put mine down since purchase. I love it, starting to feel bad for my MacBook Pro, as it's getting less and less usage :(
zeeBomb - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Hey, Ryan, do you think your team can do a review on the Meizu Pro 5? Just like your MX4 Pro review, I truly believe this device needs to be notice for using Samsung hardware + Apple Aesthetics.leo_sk - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
The hardware is almost same as s6 so it would be more or less similar. Meizu mx5 would be more interesting since there has been no in depth review of Mediatek x10.zeeBomb - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
True...but it still surprises me though how an underrated brand in China can make such beastly phones (not forgetting the AMAZING Audio chipsets inside) and make the user experience nothing short of impeccable.TBH, its all up to Andrei for this one.
hemedans - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
mx5 pro has twice battery endurance compare to mx5 (according to gsmarena). so expect poor battery life with helio x10WinterCharm - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
That's some dedication! Get some sleep when you can! :)Boissez - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I'd love to see some performance numbers from the Surface Pro 4 (and Surface Book) for comparisons sake.mmrezaie - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
You can check out arstechnica for it. It is amazing how strong performer is A9X.Boissez - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Thanks. It's only two benches though (geekbench and GFXBench). Nethertheless it's interesting to see how it outperforms the rMB, and trades punches with the SP4 and the 13" rMBP.osxandwindows - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
wake up call to intel?vFunct - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I'm basically ready for an ARM Mac. There's no reason to keep Intel around anymore.The first place Apple could target for ARM Macs would be the Mac Mini. Maybe use 4 CPU cores and a smaller GPU. Work on transferring server-level software to ARM first. They might even be able to convert the Airport Extreme to a server-level Mac Mini product.
Once we have the base OS X converted to ARM, other vendors could start to port their own apps, and the broader consumer market could open up for ARM OS X, and Apple could start selling laptops with ARM in them.
An ARM OS X Laptop would be far cheaper yet much faster than something like a Surface Book.
pSupaNova - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link
Don't be silly it does not trade punches with the Intel chips the benchmarks are not comparable.lilmoe - Monday, November 16, 2015 - link
good luck trying to explain that to everyone...elindalyne - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Geekbench is always skewed to ARM processors due to the 2x-3x performance in SHA1 multicore calculations compared to x86 (Core M, Core i) processors. When you remove the SHA1 benchmark speeds, the ARM results are significantly lower.https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/compare...
Aenean144 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
A few months ago, the criticism against ARM was that it had native AES instructions and that's why it is competitive to Intel x86. Now that people actually looked at the GB subscores and see that lo and behold, Intel has awesome AES scores relative to ARM, the criticism has moved on to SHA subscores.Give it a break. There's like 13 integer sub-benches. Removing one won't change the scores much. Plus, it's a tautological criticism: this CPU won't be that fast if remove the things that it is good at from the benchmarks. Next thing you're going to tell me is that ARM is cheating by have large caches?
That big cache criticism has been making the rounds too.
xthetenth - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
That sort of thing is the downside of the lack of multiplatform benchmarks. It makes it really tricky to determine which things are quirks of the benchmark and which are really indicative of greater trends in performance.Aenean144 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
That's no such thing as a blackbox benchmark, where you run it and show the results. You won't find "good" multi-platform benchmarks unless it tests simpler things, like graphics ops. Testing of the applications you most use is always the best benchmark because compilers have such a big effect, but that apparently takes too much work and time.The big issue with mobile and handset testing is the vast mass of tech media that review products have zero understating of the benchmarks they use, have no desire to learn what they mean, and thusly lead them to say stupid shit because all they want to do is the simple blackbox comparison of device A has a better score than device B, therefore better.
I've basically stopped reading reviews as 99% of them have no value.
Morawka - Tuesday, November 17, 2015 - link
Prime Numbers and Memory Bandwidth should be all we need to see how good a CPU/SOC isbeginner99 - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Somewhat true and we aa HW enthusiasts want to compare the hardware regardless of real-world usage. However for a consumer stuff like Geekbench is irrelevant. In a mobile I buy the whole platform and hence I compare an Samsung Phone with Samsung SOC and Android to an IPhone with an Apple SOC and iOS.Hypothetically: If the Apple SOC is faster but say sucks in browser benchmarks because Safari (or iOS) sucks, too bad. I don't care that the apple SOC is theoretically much faster. I buy the platform that as a whole is faster.
id4andrei - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Linus Torvalds would like a word with you."Geekbench is SH*T.
It actually seems to have gotten worse with version 3, which you should be aware of. On ARM64, that SHA1 performance is hardware-assisted. I don't know if SHA2 is too, but Aarch64 does apparently do SHA256 in the crypto unit, so it might be fully or partially so.
And on both ARM and x86, the AES numbers are similarly just about the crypto unit.
So basically a quarter to a third of the "integer" workloads are just utter BS. They are not comparable across architectures due to the crypto units, and even within one architecture the numbers just don't mean much of anything.
And quite frankly, it's not even just the crypto ones. Looking at the other GB3 "benchmarks", they are mainly small kernels: not really much different from dhrystone. I suspect most of them have a code footprint that basically fits in a L1I cache.
Linus"
tipoo - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Linus's statement confused me, for surely he must know Geekbench uses a geometric mean, so singular high scores don't skew the overall score much.id4andrei - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I see it as an indication that the test is too simple(workload/data sets etc.) to be meaningful in the sense that it's the definitive bench that decided which ISA is faster/better. That's before getting into score calculation.Linpack is another crossplatform bench that favors x86 more. Why aren't we using that?
Dmcq - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
A four times advantage in one test will give a 4^(1/13) = 11% advantage in the integer test and about 4% overall so it isn't inconsequential. At least it isn't quite as bad as the difference libquantum makes in SPECint2006 where a compiler noticing the trick to optimize it can easily make the overall result a third higher.Aenean144 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Yes, Linus calls a lot of things shit, most of the time for dramatic effect.He will admit that Apple's ARM architecture is competitive.
id4andrei - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Yes it is competitive, but I don't trust it's as competitive as the bench shows; to the point that it exceeds skylake.Aenean144 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Why?Is it impossible for a processor to be faster in IPC than Skylake? Only Intel is capable of designing such a thing?
Aenean144 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Hey look id4andrei, I can do argumentum ad auctoritatem like you too. I found a contemporary Linus Torvalds quote, written today about the very topic:"By: Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org), November 11, 2015 3:02 pmRoom: Moderated Discussions
...
I don't think there is any question whether the performance is there.
The real issue is how much Apple ends up caring about old applications. Could they do a Macbook with Twister and have it perform well with native apps? No question. I agree that they already almost certainly outperform the current Core M in the Macbook. But what about legacy apps?
In the Macbook form factor, I suspect they don't care a lot. It's not like people buy those as workhorse computers anyway, and emulating x86 apps (slowly) takes care of compatibility. But is it fast enough to run x86-emulated MS Office? And some photoshop, even if not necessarily a lot?
I personally think a Macbook form factor would have made more sense than the iPod Pro. Maybe it's some flaw in me, where I don't see the point of a mediocre keyboard and a bad "not-hinge" balancing act.
But yes, I'd expect that we'll see an ARM Macbook to test the waters. In the not-too-distant future. It will take much longer to move off Intel in the bigger machines, but I think Apple does want to try it, and it makes sense to start at the low end where people already went for form over performance.
Linus"
id4andrei - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
That has nothing to do with what I said. You're using one benchmark, Geekbench, which this site does not use for x-platform comparisons, to say that A9x is absolutely better than skylake. Anandtech found inconsistencies with GB within the ARM platform before even considering x86.Take Linpack, another x-platform benchmark. This inflates the x86 camp more. CoreM was 8 times faster ipad air2. This leaves room for Core M to be 4 times faster than the ipad pro. Again, Linpack has been removed from Anandtech testing.
Aenean144 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
"I agree that [Apple Twister cores] already almost certainly outperform the current Core M in the Macbook."id4andrei - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Outperforms at playing Geekbench. We don't have other metrics. It underperforms at playing Linpack.Ppietra - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
And what is the excuse for Floating Point performance and Memory performance.melgross - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Ah, no. These are completely different chip families, and need to be tested as such. Software will utilize these chips the way they are designed, and so the testing is correct. Besides in the relevant tests dine at Arstechnica, we can see that the chip is very fast. Look at Kraken and the others.vFunct - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I don't understand this complaint.Why would you ignore a benchmark that performs better one one platform over another?
The whole point of the benchmark is to measure speeds.
Do people not think that SHA1 or AES speeds not matter at all? Those are legitimate uses of CPU, and if ARM does better on them than Intel, then that just means ARM is faster.
The0ne - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Using a tablet with a pen depends on several factors obviously. The Pen is a key tool and without it it's almost worthless. I love the Samsung Note devices for the pen and capability. Note taking, sketching, drawing are pretty awesome. And as with any device the more you use them the more you get accustom to them.xthetenth - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Yeah, after using a Surface Pro, tablets without a decent stylus feel like hamstrung phones.Gunde - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
"At the same time these FinFET processes are still new and yields won’t be great, so there is a strong incentive to keep die sizes down to keep die sizes down to keep yields up, and adding a third core would only make that harder."You repeated "keep die sizes down to keep die sizes down to keep yields up" a bit there.
astroboy888 - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
That is not entirely correct. Dies size down does not necessarily means yield goes up; sometimes it is quite the opposite. On the other than, you can use conservative design rules and increase width of metal traces or increase spacing between metal traces to make it less affected by manufacturing variation. This makes the die bigger, but also more manufacturable and this can improve yield.Tigran - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Thanks a lot guys, especially for specs and benchmarks! Looking forward to big review.NecessarySmile - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
OneNote for iPad has support for the Apple Pencil, does it not? I use the OneNote Windows 10 (universal app) for taking notes (engineering, math, physics) in class on my Surface Pro 3. As such I would be very interested in such a comparison.bernstein - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
i'd love to see a pen latency/pressure/friction comparison to the surface 4pro/book. actually i find it's the only difference really interesting, because everything else (hardware spec/quality, ios vs win10, ...) is widely known or of minor interestnh.nghia711 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
That's about the only thing I'm looking for in these reviews.sseemaku - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
"With the iPad Air 2, for example, I felt quite strongly that while in some ways the larger display was useful, it was difficult for me to justify the cost of the tablet due to the lack of some productivity-focused tools".In ipad air2 review, Joshua wrote "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".
This is something I don't like in anandtech reviews. We have to wait for the next version of the product to find out current draw backs, especially if its an iDevice! I admire the quality of reviews though.
michal1980 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
How's good is a review when the reviewer only tells tout the down sides when a new "better" version comes out? A review like that stinks of basis and fanboyismJoshHo - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8666/the-apple-ipad-...I felt that this was a problem with the iPad Air 2 but that for people that wanted a conventional tablet it was one of the few choices worth considering on the market.
In some respects my feelings haven't changed on this matter. I still feel like touch only tablets tend to be a little bit short on value even though such tablets remain quite popular.
Spunjji - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
100% agreed with that sentiment... always pushing the new.HollyDOL - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Ouch, that equation brings back memories...SaolDan - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I would like to see what that GPU could do in a x86 game. I guess we will never know:(id4andrei - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Not much. All rendering in mobile devices is done at half precision. Imagination's GPU is by design excellent for it.tipoo - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
That's how the scores with only 50GB/s memory bandwidth for the whole chip together (not just GPU alone) are so high I guess, doesn't need as much bandwidth at half precision. Are these still tile based renderers? That saves bandwidth too. That's how you have this chip getting close to the Iris Pro/650M, if you don't take into account it's using half precision.id4andrei - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Precisely. Also from Anandtech, in a past article analyzing PowerVR, the tiling arch is especially adept at FP16 workloads.Macrumors are going insane with the Ars GFX benches. They actually think that A9x GPU(great as it may be) is faster than the one in the 13" rMBP(28W SoC).
akdj - Tuesday, December 29, 2015 - link
I'm I'd group Macrumors 'as one', nor the conversation you're referring to without spirited debate (about Iris Pro and Imagination's 10 core implementation in the iPP)They're certainly not 'going insane' ...but there's certainly something to the raw bench speeds on graphic oriented applications, their usage of the resources and most importantly, the software or as we call it now, the apps developed specific to that SoC versus a Skylake 6xxx with an iGPU attempting to run X86 software that is a lot better off with discrete GPU(s). IMHO, that's where the 'win' for ARM comes in, versus Intel
It's not ALL about benchmarking but weird enough; sites have been using the same comparisons since the earliest days of Android and iOS --- not a single complaint!
Apple drops the A7, the first 'mobile' SoC with 64bit capability sucking the wind out of Qualcomm execs and kicking Intel in the rear when it comes to better iGPU integration with their mobile bound laptop or tablet chips.
The A8's increase overall in computing and graphic power ...a marked improvement in a single year, a year Qualcomm and others STILL had a helluva time getting a working 64bit processor to market and the A8x, along with Swift and Metal as well as the continuity or "Handoff" to OS X and doubling the RAM in Air 2 TRULY shows off the capabilities of the second gen A-series processor/SoC with IT's graphic set --- then. 2015 Apple's third revision of the 64bit A9 processor sporting different IT GPU options across devices (iPhone --> iPad Pro) and it's near doubling in both compute and graphics, doubling of RAM across the board and the real and perceived speed differences on this generation's iOS devices compared to last is truly incomparable!
I owned the 6+, I upgraded to the 6s+. The difference is extreme.
I upgraded a year ago from Air 1 to 2. The differences are incredible --- including the current gotta have features of the new devices with slide over, dual app and video overlay without latency or delay is phenomenal and a feature set that may work in some capacity on the older devices but limitations are in place so as joy to kill the device.
One thing Apple maybe too good at, keeping the older devices working and with most updates the latest OS allows. I've got a ½ dozen iPad 4s we use in the field and not a single one has needed to be fixed --- & they've been through hell and back. I'm replacing them with the Air2s x4 and a pair of iPPs as the ONE thing the iPad does have over the rMBP's - constant connectivity. Always online and lighter, more durable with longer life than the rMBP (my favorite computer BTW, I bought the original 15" 2012 model, still going as strong today as the day I bought it. Wife needed an update to her laptop and just got her the 2.8/16/1TB CTO & I'm jealous! Amazing the speed difference between the older SSD ('12) models vs. the PCIe SSD solutions of today, I couldn't believe how quickly the Adobe CC suite downloaded (we're blessed with local gigabit ISP service) and then installed. Transferring larger files is mesmerizing. Using Thunderbolt or usb 3, it's nearly instantaneous!
The new rMBP (not so new anymore, but they're definitely building out the HiDPI displays and knocking them outta the park) is a revelation in my 30 years of computing. Starting on the IIe and transitioning to s 286 in corporate world, back to Mac in 2006 for my business haven't looked back. We keep a Windows machine for a Quickbooks machine and a few older games my son enjoys as well as the Xbox integration ...but OS X is certainly a phenomenal operating system in conjunction with iOS, it's mobile counterpart along with Handoff creates the perfect vertical and horizontally integrated and aggregated system we've ever had, without the need for a four year computer programming and networking degree --- Apple has designed a total system of work and play that simply keeps everything. Without the need to even 'think' about what you're doing
While still retaining the power of Terminal, Automator and Xcode free for all to simulate or build their own iOS or OS X apps themselves!
I believe MS is poised to challenge Apple and dethrone Samsung, as well as Android (no one goes home to their Chromebook to finalize the rendering of their motion captured that day, manipulate their photos in batch or finish their 3D composites they started with Adobe on their tablet earlier in the day.
Windows 10 is a decent OS and its ability to integrate and aggregate with its mobile platforms will eventually topple Android as the #2 mobile option challenging OS X for the top spot.
Time will tell but Apple has a tough time releasing shitty products these days. I wasn't sure about the Apple .watch my wife got me for my birthday. Today I can't imagine life without it as there's a couple dozen times a day my phone can stay in pocket, on desk or away from my immediate access while the watch tells me what I need to know.
Back to Macrumors, the debate(s) as there's several are spirited and with merit. Plenty of very informational material and links with the back and forth, very interesting debate to be sure as who'd have thought the debate itself would be happening this early? Apple has money. Apple poached plenty of chip experts many years ago, as well as low level programmers and SoC designers and fabricators --- it's been quick but Intel has rested on its laurels a long time with AMD's woes and complimentary discrete GPU OEMs. It's only been since the X86 architecture replaced PPC on OS X seemingly that Intel has developed an interest in building up the integration of GPU on their CPU builds.
And only the last couple years, since the Intel 3000 has IrisPro made the leap that DOES challenge Imagination Tech's formidable and mobile graphic solutions
...again, JUST to be having this debate says plenty about the job Apple is doing with their silicon
zeeBomb - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Well this came earlier than I expected. My moneys on they're using a 10 cluster gpu as well, or the GT900.dnzk - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
My money on they're using customize GPU 12 cluster 2xGT7600, like on A8X with 8 cluster 2xGX6450.V900 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
"With the iPad Air 2, for example, I felt quite strongly that while in some ways the larger display was useful, it was difficult for me to justify the cost of the tablet due to the lack of some productivity-focused tools".
This didn't make sense to me... The iPad Air2 has a bigger display?!? This is certainly news to me.
As is the lack of productivity tools. Not only is the full Office out on iOS, you can even get Autocad these days...
theduckofdeath - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
"Full" and "AutoCAD". They're both still mobile apps work mobile app limitations.theduckofdeath - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
*With.Another effing mobile limitation. The perpetual autocorrect error...
xthetenth - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Last I checked the mobile office apps aren't even close to the desktop windows apps in functionality. I'm not talking about minor things, I'm talking about massive use case defining things like OneNote on desktop being able to record audio in parallel with written notes and tying the two together so you can go to a line in writing and play back the audio from that point in time, or Excel being able to set up a gradient fill on a data range for use as a visualization tool, or being able to set up a data range and order by the values in any column according to a variety of rules.Mobile office is only full featured for values of full that include Google docs.
melgross - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
No, actually both Office and iWork easily beat Google Docs. You can see that in every review of the three.xthetenth - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Oh absolutely. Docs is taking forever to add essential functionality, and there's still a bunch missing. That's why I used it as a point of reference for mobile Office's feature set because it's missing a ton of features that make certain workflows literally impossible.nerd1 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I bet this is the same active capacitive tech (ntrig, wacome aes, synaptics) so i wonder how the pen compares against them.blackcrayon - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
It doesn't seem to be similar to the other active digitizers in tech, the way it's described - there appears to be more tech in the Pencil itself than in other stylii (as well as the screen boosting to 240 Hz while drawing). But yes a direct comparison to how well they actually work would be welcome.V900 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Good preview despite my previous comment.And since Im here before the usual army of raging, frothing at the mouth, fifteen year old fanboys has arrived:
(After all: How dare you say something positive about an Apple stylus?!? Since you dont share our mindless hate of a particular electronics manufacturer, clearly you must be paid off!!!)
Don't let the comments get to you... Good work so far, and can't wait to see the final result!
halca - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Is it possible to measure the latency of the stylus and compare it to surface pro 4?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Not with the tools that we currently have. But yes, for larger labs the tools do exist.lefty2 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Wow, it scores 80 in Manhatten. The Tegra X1 can only score 56.9 in the same test: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9289/the-nvidia-shie...lefty2 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Sorry, 65 - read the wrong graphdennis.forbes - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
"in retrospect I’m starting to think that A8X was an anomaly and Apple didn’t really want a tri-core CPU in the first place"The A9X looks absolutely brilliant, and is another winner from Apple, however I wish we didn't have to find retroactive justifications for everything Apple does, or why every decision they make is intrinsically correct.
Apple has a given die size and a given power consumption profile. They design their SoC accordingly. I doubt they "want" 2 or 3 (or 4 or 8 or 16) cores intrinsically, but it ends up being decided by the preceding restrictions, and in this case it was 2 fast cores with a very large, very powerful GPU. I have no doubt they'll move to 3 cores next year, as optimizations and restructuring presents itself, and again we'll hear why 3 cores is really what they wanted.
Aenean144 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Think of it from the outside in.What workloads will benefit or require 3 cores or 4 cores. If they want to support workstation workloads, moving to 4 core might be the right way to go. If you have smartphone workloads, 2-core. Tablet workloads, hmm.
Waiting on FCPX, Logic, Xcode, etc for iOS to drop. If Apple intends on that happening, odds are pretty durn good that iOS laptop, like a MBP, will also come.
tipoo - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
These are two sides of the same coin really, but I'm sure Apple would have avoided scaling to three cores if they could have had that performance in two at the die size. Even with automatic management of loads the third core won't scale nearly as well as the second one (nor the fourth, etc), Amdahl's law and all that.Aenean144 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
20 years from new Joshua, you are going to be looking at your notes and thinking, "WTF!" The rosetta stone in your head that makes that scribble legible is going to be long lost to make room for all the more advanced stuff you have to learn. ;)One of the holy grails of pen computing I've been waiting for is seamless conversion of analog drawing input into vector graphics and fonts so all that cursive becomes legible in the future. Might give handwritten note taking another shot if there was an app that can do this. Sort of like an iWork app mashup where hand-input tables, drawings, notes, spreadsheets, images, etc are all first class citizens.
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
-- One of the holy grails of pen computing I've been waiting for is seamless conversion of analog drawing input into vector graphics and fonts so all that cursive becomes legible in the future. Might give handwritten note taking another shot if there was an app that can do this. Sort of like an iWork app mashup where hand-input tables, drawings, notes, spreadsheets, images, etc are all first class citizens.If you visit any R textbook, there you'll find "simple" examples of doing just that.
xthetenth - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I'm really glad to see note-taking capability that's actually superior to pencil and paper is finally coming to iOS, it's been a badly needed bit of functionality for a long time, and should help make their tablets more than souped-up big phones. I feel that by the time you're carrying around a device that doesn't fit in your pocket, and definitely one in the 10+ inch range, you should be getting the ability to do more things than with something that fits in your pocket, rather than the ability to do things a bit better. Hopefully Apple will eventually make something that doesn't mandate carrying a tablet and a laptop if you want a tablet but have to get a bit of serious work done, it makes a mockery of the effort they put into making their devices thin and light, since currently there's no contest between a Surface (Pro) and an iPad Air (with an MBP stuffed in there too).Wineohe - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Hmm I'm in a conundrum as I read this article on the cracked screen of my ipad3 and at the same time pondering the replacement of my aging Lenovo X220. Yes I know I'm behind the times. However spending another grand on a tablet with the limitations of iOS and the the lack of even basic IO is not attractive. A convertible laptop or the like with a real OS geared toward productivity seems way more appealing, since that is what the Pro is starting to compete with. Help me out folks, what am I missing.melgross - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
It's a use case. If you need to do something beyond what the system can manage, then it's not for you.I'm seeing complaints that a numher of apps aren't as full as their Desktop versions. But what limitation is that, really? Even on a Surface Pro 4 the size is a limitation for many things. So what? Adobe, Autodesk, and others, allow you to store your work in their cloud, where it appears in their Desktop software for more sophisticated work. That works well, if you need to do more sophisticated work.
So I think you need to look carefully at what you really need to do, and see if the apps available will allow that. It will take some effort to do that exploration, but that's nothing new. In addition, these devices will continue to get better with time. Now that the hardware is there, it's a matter of software, both on the OS and app end. I've been beta testing iOS 9.2, and it adds some features that the Pro, with 9.1 don't yet have. Next year's iOS 10 will do more. That's just the nature of things.
nikon133 - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Size of what...?If someone wants to use Surface as one's main work machine, there is hardly an excuse why it wouldn't be with Surface's docking station... which will allow for 2 desktop screens, USB3.0-attached storage (or anything USB/NAS/SAN over lan), wired network. We barely have laptop users who don't use docking stations in the office, save for handful of very small setups - essentially on-man bands... recommendation does transfer to Surface users, and it does work well.
Our Surface users are not suffering any handicap over desktop users, for huge majority of cases. I mean, we will not recommend Surface (docked or not) for graphics designers, but for anyone who does common office tasks on their machines, there is no handicap. There is, however, benefit of having machine more portable than average laptop, and also capable to replace tablet. Sure, it does come with higher price than desktop, but actually competes quite well with laptops nowadays. Here in NZ, we pay for base Elitebook i5/4GB/120GB SSD around NZ$1,500. Surface Pro 3 i5/4GB/128GB SSD with keyboard and extended 3 years warranty (to match Elitebook) is NZ$1,420.
cbf - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
You don't say what you do on your laptop. If it's serious content creation -- be if CAD, Adobe Creative Suite, or even Office, I think it will be quite a while, if ever, before the iPad Pro can match the level of productivity that you get with a full desktop OS.If you haven't looked at a Surface yet, you should get yourself someplace where you can examine the whole product line (the 3, 4 Pro, and Book). A comparably equipped Surface Pro 4 is actually cheaper than an iPad Pro once you include the stylus & keyboard.
Wineohe - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Yes, thanks, you are supporting my thinking. At what point does a tablet try to be something it's not, at least from a price perspective. The iPad Pro is something very few people asked for. The Notes application should run on any newer iPad. Of course if money is no object then spend away on a large, overpriced, limited functionality tablet. Otherwise I think a Surface or the like makes far more sense. My own needs will be Office and the occasional Lightroom use while traveling, and of course email and surfing.The Tablet and Laptop concepts have merged, but they forgot to tell Apple. Instead they just gave us a larger more expensive iPad. Generous and genius at the same time.
kirsch - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
> To do this, I took the iPad Pro to class and simply relied on the built-in Notes application to try and see how well I could follow along in lectures and discussions.What? They let you take the unreleased iPad Pro still under embargo to class???
melgross - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Once they show it do us in the introduction, it's not as much of a concern. They're in the stores already, so people have been playing with them there.Mondozai - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
"To do this, I took the iPad Pro to class"TIL: Joshua Ho is very popular in his classes and probably has to deal with a lot of new-found "friends" who are all of a sudden extremely interested in befriending him(and getting to see new, unreleased Apple hardware in the process).
Good preview, Josh, looking forward to reading the full one.
On a sidenote, the pace on this website has truly picked up after being in the doldrums for a while. KUTGW!
JoshHo - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
UCLA is a big place. If no one is next to you then it's pretty hard for anyone to see anything, especially when iPads and Surface Pros are common sights in classrooms. :)kmmatney - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I went to UCLA for my engineering B.S. and M.S. degrees. I still don't see what is wrong with using a pen and multi-subject notepad. You can write as fast as you want, and it's easy to make amendments, etc... At least it worked for me (still does, in fact). It just seems like taking notes has gotten more complicated than it needs to be.lmcd - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Unless you're an absent-minded person that loses paper notebooks and loose-leaf with ease. Then it's simpler than ever.zeeBomb - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
That's interesting haha. If I was there I would walk out to Josh and say: "Hey man, love your reviews. But uh, can you give me a little shoutout on your next article?" haha.N Shaftoe - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Guys, guys,Why bother? Cube i7 stylus costs less than $400 , it is well made and comes with
CoreM, HD5300, SSD, Wacom (!) digitizer+pen and runs heavy desktop apps
like Maya , ZBrush and Photoshop. Now, try that with this..erm 'Pro'..
osxandwindows - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
This is not for you.This is for artists music production, app development? and media consumption on the side.
Also I could see this being applied in to a video editors workflow.
Plus windows tablet apps aren't that good, yet.
anand_apple_fanboy - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
The lack of apps on windows 10 is appalling. All the developers offer at full fledge productivity suites, when all I want are watered down apps with limited functions but fanciful and smooth interface.tipoo - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
What's the L3 cache size on the A9X? Any upgrade there to help out the GPU? Other than that question, it seems largely similar to the A9 with added bandwidth/GPU grunt to deal with the higher res screen. For on-screen tests it's not terribly ahead of the Air 2, but for offscreen it is. Most of the added power just nullifies the added resolution.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
"What's the L3 cache size on the A9X?"We're still working on that. The answer is looking a bit more complex than we first expected.
tipoo - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Intriguing!bhd2 - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link
Hi Ryan,Our initial Chipworks die shot shows six GPU pairs, so 12 cores, and a similar twin-CPU to the A9. The odd thing is that the L3 cache seems to have disappeared! As far as I can see it has not been distributed around the die, it is just no there..
Dick
unkinected - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Like others, I'm curious what your thoughts are on the Surface Pro + pen. You say that the lag is virtually unnoticeable on the iPad Pro, but yet you see up to a 5mm difference in pencil tip vs screen display. To me, that's a huge latency and would make precise work difficult. I haven't yet played with the SP4 or SurfaceBook, so I don't know how they compare in that regard.JoshHo - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
The lag is only apparent on extremely fast strokes. The actual lag in inking is something I need to quantify properly and something I'm hoping to do for the full review.id4andrei - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Don't forget other characteristics, like sensitivity levels.arkhamasylum87 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Can you please compare the Intel Core M7 (top bin) vs Apple A9X. That piece should be very interesting. I believe Apple will trump Intel on GPU but Intel might have a lead on CPU. Don't forget to include power numbers. Nothing makes sense without discussing the perf/watt.Thanks!
digiguy - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
For now we only have geekbench results, with all the limitations of cross-platform benchmarks. However, according to Geekbench, Core M7, A9X and the i5 in the SP3 are very close, virtually on par. Looking forward to see more tests. Anyway, both Intel and Apple have done a great job with these fanless processors (Skylake m7 and A9X)anand_apple_fanboy - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
What about some gaming benchmarks? I do some light gaming every now and then, e.g. L4D2, Dota 2. Can you run some gaming benchmarks to compare the iPad Pro with the surface pro 3? Comparing it to the 4 or surface book would be unfair.Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
So this thing utterly destroys a Surface Pro 4 i5 in graphics? And is basically just as fast as a Core i7 with GT 940M? Haha bye bye intel. It now makes zero sense for the next macbook to contain an intel chip.id4andrei - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
It does not destroy anything. The ios workload is FP16 and double in osx/windows, F32.chris w - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
I'd be surprised if it's 100% FP16. Normally we use a mix of 16 + 32 as needed (no point wasting power on 32 bit precision when you don't need it at all!)If it's using FP16 at the expense of quality it's not an equal benchmark, but if it's using FP16 purely for greater efficiency, that's nothing but an architectural advantage over platforms limited to FP32.
tipoo - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Where do you see it coming close to the 940M? It comes close to the Iris Pro, if you don't take into account it uses half precision, but the 940M, especially with GDDR5 as the SB has, is still decently ahead.Spunjji - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Would love to see a more fully-fledged review of note-taking for the full review, perhaps with a comparison to OneNote. I have found the latter's text conversion and diagram recognition technologies to be powerful, if not flawless, in practice.ciderrules - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Apple ARM processor performance is nothing short of incredible in just a few short years.I can remember when everyone had 2 core processors. Apple stuck with 2 cores and improved their performance. Everyone else made smaller improvements to the cores and just added more. First quad-core and now otca-core. And yet Apple still performs better.
What are Samsung and Qualcomm going to do next year? Apple could make an ARM based laptop (for example) using a quad-core A10 and have a serious challenger to Intel in mobile. Are Samsung/Qualcomm going to start making 12-16 core processors just to keep up?
They should have invested in making custom cores earlier instead of taking the easy way out by using ARM designs (like the A53/57).
xthetenth - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
How much wider can Apple make their cores and still get good improvements? Their arch is starting to look more and more like core which we all know is years deep in extracting blood from a stone, they've cashed in on FinFET gains and are looking at a node that wasn't a big improvement for Intel, where's their next big improvement coming from?tipoo - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I'm curious as well. For a while with ARM there were lots of easy pickings to be had as it's performance was way behind x86, but as process nodes shrunk and they were able to add more and more they were able to catch up to an impressive degree, even trading blows with Core M.I wonder how much longer Apple can pull these gains out of their hat, or if they're going to hit the wall Intel did and just give us 10-25% improvements each year, more like the 5S-6 than the 6-6S.
linkgr - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Maybe then they will start to introduce 4 core designs to their products.A 4 core a9x design on a laptop form factor, with perhaps active cooling and a higher tpd could probably be faster than most of the Intel SoCs by a margin with tasks that use multiple cores.
I think the real question here is how they compare cost wise.
If the arm soc is cheaper, in a meaningful way, then the only real question is when, not why, we will see them in our laptops.
lucam - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
It's always a mystery knowing which GPU Apple exactly uses. And it is more mysterious why only Apple uses high specs Powervr GPU...Ryan do you have an answer for that? :)
malcolmz07 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I think the answer is : the price , it's like the iris in the laptop , very few OEM uses it because of the pricelucam - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Maybe....but Imagination has a various list of PowerVr Gpus nowadays...all series 6xt and series 7xt...can't believe that Android market stuck with G6200 or G6430 (basically the same of the iPhone 5s..Ipad Air...almost A 3 years ago GPU...)...:(Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
An answer for why Apple uses PowerVR GPUs? That's a million dollar question I'm sure that ARM asks themselves every year. From the outside it's hard to say anything for sure. Certainly momentum plays a part, and there's nothing to indicate that Apple and Imagination have anything less than a solid working relationship. Apple's technical criteria is a greater mystery, though between the options of rolling their own GPU, using Mali, and using PowerVR, clearly they find PowerVR to be the best choice.lucam - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Hi Ryan, thanks for that.My question was more why only Apple uses high specs PowerVr by the way. The best you can get in the Android market is the G6430 at this stage...an almost 3 years old GPU.
My guess is that Apple has some sort of exclusive use of Imagination GPUs...but who really knows..
tipoo - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I don't think it's that, I think it's the same reason why Apple is the only one spending die size on an 8MB l3 in the A9. They know what their total product margins will be, they know they'll sell in the millions, so they can afford to be more risky with die size since it's barely any risk to them at all.Android players are working off lower margins, and lower sales per model to boot. Samsung did pretty good with the GS6 Exynos, but other than them, everyone is going for smaller SoC dies.
lucam - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
True. I can accept that.Anyway Samsung in their previous Exynos used to have PowerVr GPUs as well. Now they use only Mali (high specs of it).
I believe losing Samsung as client was a big loss for Imagination...
lilo777 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I think the answer is quite simple. I believe the leading SOC manufacturers for Android devices (Samsung and Qualcomm) do not use PowerVR period. So the question why nobody (but Apple) uses high spec PowerVR is kind of irrelevant. And if I remember correctly PowerVR produces good results but Mali and Adreno are not bad too. Very often iDevices have advantage in on-screen benchmarks only because they have lower resolution. Then of course Anantech reviews of Apple devices are always special with rather peculiar selection of benchmarks emphasizing the strong features of Apple SOCs. For example, multi-core performance is always de-emphasized even though in most cases when performance really matters (gaming, image processing etc.) the algorithms are perfectly multi-threadable and single core performance is becoming less and less relevant (browsing is probably the last hold-out).BTW, did you notice that AT now are getting iDevies directly from Apple for early reviews? This was not the case before. Couple of years of glowing iDevice reviews and voilà...
lucam - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Yes Qualcomm use their own house solution Adreno Gpu and Samsung uses Mali - ARM GPUs.There are some other products around that uses Powervr such as Intel, Mediatek, LG and somebody else that I can't remember. Low-middle range PowerVR specs as i said anyway.
I remember Samsung used to license PowerVr in their Exynos socs, but then they moved on licensing ARM - Mali only.
In my opinion we will need to focus more in GPUs performance degradation/ throttling rather than only fps in the future.
Maybe AT get Apple products earlier for early review, but they take ages to come up with a full review. See for example iPhone 6S...:)
blackcrayon - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
I don't know if Anandtech is getting review devices due to "glowing reviews", but I do know that "glowing reviews" are always followed by several of your whines in the comment section and thinly veiled attacks on the integrity of the site. Nice job.I noticed you left out the embarrassing throttling of the other SoC GPUs noted in the iPhone 6 review. I'm sure that was another one of your biased unfair tests - simply running a benchmark several times and seeing which devices slow way down...
Feel free to show some examples where multi-threaded games or image processing apps show an advantage with something like the Exynos 7420 vs. the A9, would be an interesting comparison. I've yet to see any real world situation that shows this but would be happy to look at examples that I'm sure you have :)
lilo777 - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
What a stupid post! Are you implying that muti-threading does not improve performance of image processing? A lot of image processing is done in GPUs. Obviously I do not refer to this use case but image processing done in CPU (also a very common case for more specialized image processing like the one often done in Photoshop and, probably, Instagram etc.) can and will use multi-threading. Besides my post was not about GPUs at all. And speaking about the integrity of this site... the fact that two previous iDevice reviewers from this site are now employed by Apple could be a coincidence but I have a more cynical view. I am not saying that the new reviewers are intentionally misinterpreting the benchmarks or anything like this. They guys are actually really good. It's just that we are all humans and so are they and maybe deep in their mind they also want to follow the path of their predecessors...lilmoe - Monday, November 16, 2015 - link
Multi-core performance is getting much more important. All social media apps utilize the cores to compress shared images and videos.Anandtech seriously needs to stop using browser benchmarks and other increasingly irrelevant "compute" benchmarks in favor of real world usage;
- audio and video encoding
- complex website loading from a local server (NOT the internet)
- signal quality
- MICROPHONE and speaker (the audio in videos recorded with an iPhone stinks, but no mention of that in their review)
etc, etc, etc............................
Sometimes I believe that tech reviewers have WAYYYYYYYY different needs and usage habits than other users.
vladx - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
It's well known Anandtech is biased towards Apple so whining oe not it's warranted.lilmoe - Monday, November 16, 2015 - link
+1name99 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Apple is Imagination's ONLY big customer. This means they can work closely with Imagination to get everything they want in a GPU, while ensuring that no-one else gets the exact models they use. All the advantages of in-house design, BUT with lower cost because the design (eventually) also gets sold to other buyers.This matches, eg, Apple manufacturing. And the manufacturing at TSMC or Samsung. But they can't do it with CPU design because the possible partner design houses (eg ARM or QC) have large enough other customers that they wouldn't wrap their world around Apple's needs.
lucam - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Yes that's was my primary suspect.I was hoping seeing some future android phones or tablets with PowerVr Series 7, 6-10 clusters, but it's not gonna happen.
qtqtqt - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Now, if it could TeXify your notes…Lavkesh - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
The A9X chip seems to be a beast as per the Ars benchmarks. It is incredible what Apple has been able to achieve in the last 3-4 years with their in-house chip design. It staggers me that even with the kind of IP intel has because of manufacturing the x86 chips for all these years, Apple suddenly comes up and beats them at their own game. Is Apple the new technology God?lilo777 - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Apple is God now? I though it was just a cult. Did not you notice that Apple and Samsung SOCs leapfrog each other in performance every year? Qualcomm did this too until they stumbled for one or two years. Most of the performance improvements in the last two years came from the improvements in semiconductor process and PowerVR design. I am not saying that Apple is not doing a good job too but claiming that they are the sole innovators not is just childish.techconc - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Single core performance is the measure of better design. Throwing in more cores is what you do when you can't improve your design. Most of Apple's competitors are using ARM reference designs.lilo777 - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Single core performance might be a measure of the better design if that is the goal but it might not be. Anandtech authors do pay a lot of attention to it and there are valid reasons but this is just one of the approaches. I see it differently. There are very few tasks on the phone/tablet that require high performance in a first place and those that do in most cases can be parallelized. With that in mind, having four smaller cores could be advantageous because you get:* better performance for the tasks that do require it (four smaller cores will do better than two large cores in most cases)
* better power consumption on typical phone/tablet tasks
Use of ARM reference design in itself is not an issue. Apple not using reference design does not automatically mean that their design is better. It just means that it is different. (it also happens to be good indeed).
solipsism - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
"Did not you notice that Apple and Samsung SOCs leapfrog each other in performance every year?"I haven't seen that at all when equalizing for the same number of cores, same clock rate, and the same TDP. Apple seems to not only be ahead, but increasing that lead.
PS: Apple has a large stake in Imagination Technologies so one could argue that the direction of PowerVR is on their behest.
Zizy - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Why don't you also normalize to the color of the sky and temperature of the sun?What matters is performance and perf/W. Not frequency, not IPC, not number of cores, not anything else. Talking about any other metric than these meaningful ones is a sign of either mental instability or agenda, unless in an extremely few exceptions.
And in performance, single threaded tasks are hugely in Apple favor. Which tasks are relevant here? Some low threaded games and browsing. Multithreaded tasks are very slightly in Android camp favor when Apple releases new parts and go back to somewhat higher advantage when QC/Samsung/... release their new chips. Which tasks are relevant here? Most games and mostly just games.
But... games require GPU way more they need CPU, so whoever has the best GPU will do the best. Apple therefore has a very smart approach - good ST performance to have great web benchmarks, with great GPU to have great games performance, covering almost all bases.
blackcrayon - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
"And in performance, single threaded tasks are hugely in Apple favor. Which tasks are relevant here? Some low threaded games and browsing."You're implying that only a minority of tasks benefit from having fewer, faster cores, when it appears to be the majority. And it isn't just "web benchmarks", it's real world web browsing. Anything that relies heavily on javascript is going to be much faster with an equivalent iOS device (probably a combination of hardware and software here).
BehindEnemyLines - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Ars uses Geekbench across platforms ARM vs. Intel. Anandtech doesn't use Geekbench to compare differences between platform because it has certain issues with SHA-1 testing, which the ARM will decimate x86.Ytterbium - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Hope you can takes some notes with Surface Pro as comparison? Does OneNote iOS support pencil?solipsism - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
iFixit shows that it contains a Fresco Logic FL1100 4-port USB 3.0 Host Controller. Hopefully we'll see some data transfer tests that can confirm whether the USB is better than 2.0 speeds.iwod - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
The real deal, is in 2017, when Apple moves to TSMC 10nm.Next year it will be TSMC 16nm FFC, that is 10 - 15% better performance / watt basis. 2017 we will see Apple moves to 10nm, That will likely double the performance of the current A9X with Quad Core. And double the GPU performance again.
2017 sounds like a year of iPad.
tipoo - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
There's always something better coming. You could say A5 was a similar leap, A6 was, A7 was, A9 was...althaz - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Am very interested to see how this compares to the best note-taking device on the planet, the Surface Pro.ahimsa - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Hi Joshua and Ryan,Thanks for your preview! Keep up the good work.
I'll wait for goodnotesapp to support iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. I hope you will compare iPad Pro and Apple Pencil with iPad Air 2 and Adonit Jot Script 2 Stylus. Which one will do better taking notes.
ThreeDee912 - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Cool first impressions on the stylus/pencil. Not sure if you noticed, but instead of using an actual ruler you can apparently use two fingers to bring up a virtual one to draw straight lines. I know you were testing how straight the thing can actually draw, but the multitouch ruler thing seems pretty cool and was wondering if you tried it out.really_this_is_so_bad_I_have_to_comment - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
I keep trying to find an entire article dedicated to using a Surface Pro 3 or 4 to take notes but I can't find one.michal1980 - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
apple = magiceveryone else = junk.
anand_apple_fanboy - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Oh no no no, you don't get it. The apple pencil is meant to take notes. It replicates the experience of using a pencil on paper. No one takes notes with a Microsoft surface. It's not realistic. Which pen comes with an eraser?nikon133 - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
You are trying wrong.Typing simple "taking notes with surface pro 3" returns pages of articles, users' experiences, YouTube videos about taking notes on Surface devices.
Braincruser - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Can we have an IPC comparison of A9 and modern intel cores?anand_apple_fanboy - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
I've never seen a product as revolutionary as the iPad pro! It supports pen input and multitasking, and the ingenious keyboard cover. I would gladly pay $99 for a pen and $169 for a keyboard without backlit or a touchpad. And the iPad Pro is the ultimate productivity machine! It has got all the ports anyone ever needs - a headphone out and a lightning port! The battery life is so good, I can choose to charge the iPad or plug in something to use as a mouse.This is the 5th apple pencil I've misplaced though. I kept trying to attach it to the iPad Pro but there doesn't seem to be anywhere for me to secure the pencil.
blackcrayon - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Clearly there's no correlation between interest in detailed technical reviews and maturity level among readers that comment on them :/anand_apple_fanboy - Monday, November 16, 2015 - link
I wouldn't call note taking experience a detailed technical review...jaberg - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link
Never lost my "good" pen in over 20 years. I secure it in my pocket. (Might have to hack a clip for the Apple Pencil when I get one though).toyotabedzrock - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
The original high resolution winxp based tablets actually had pen input perfected a decade ago. It had no lag and awesome pressure sensitivity. No battery was needed in the pen and the pen had a button on it as well as a eraser that functioned as you would expect in a real pencil.solipsism - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
So we can check back here for a link to your comparison review of the decade old. WinXP tablet to the iPad Pro?ciderrules - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Funny, we have a bunch of those at work. Also some Win 7 tablets with pen support.They all suck. Terrible response/latency. And they constantly lose calibration such that you have to run the calibration software and touch a bunch of points on the screen so it works again.
Perhaps you can provide a link to some of these devices that shows how good they work? Because I haven't seen one yet.
Ethos Evoss - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
I think I will rather GRAB piece of paper to scratch som random child drawing.. and NOT spendingRETARDED BLACK HOLE or I rather say BIG BANG price !!! black hole word is not enough!!
This piece of useless device is for MOST retarded ppl in the world who will buy it ..
gw74 - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
As they say on Twitch, Anandtech is love, Anandtech is life!Love you guys. What would we do without you?!
darkich - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link
You say there's no real way to turn the note content into a word document.. Wait..does that mean that the iPad pro doesn't have handwriting recognition?!?Of true, rhattsthat's utterlutterly laughable, esleespecially compared to Samsung’s Note devices.
darkich - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link
*if true, that's utterly laughable, especially compared to Samsung’s Note devices*Don't know what happened in the above comment
blackcrayon - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link
Probably typed it on one of Samsung's Note devices.darkich - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link
Lol, you got that right. :DBut seriously, I think it had to do with the browser used which had some issues with the word input within the reply window.
Besides, it's irrelevant to my point - a lack of handwriting recognition on such a device is beyond belief and a total insult to the user.
Gary323 - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link
Any ETA for the full review? I would really appreciate a side by side comparison of note taking in onenote (iPad Pro vs Surface Pro 4). I'm looking for the best stylus onenote experience. Thanks!simard57 - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link
What are your need for the OneNote experience?Do you require handwriting recognition?
Do you require searching the notes?
Gary323 - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link
My needs would include handwriting recognition, with search functionality. I would also like to embed audio recordings and videos into my notes. As far as I can tell, both iOS and windows versions support this functionality (with the exception of embedding video in onenote on iOS - although this feature is coming according to microsoft). Are there other significant differences between the latest onenote for iOS and the onenote for Windows? If not, it seems like a decision should be made based on the best stylus experience.Link for the OCR and handwriting recognition in iOS onenote: https://blogs.office.com/2015/05/14/search-handwri...
Link for audio and video embedding on both platforms:
https://blogs.office.com/2015/11/12/onenote-in-nov...
sergiu - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link
From some other quick reviews it seems that A9X is quite powerful in per core. May I suggest trying some more unusual tests like a Skylake CPU against A9X in single thread scenarios?. This would imply finding some more tests other than the standard web ones that can run on both machines. It could be some Java benchmarks, Java based transcoders or C/C++ code that can be ported on both machines. Tests should be done with all optimizations possible on both systems and then results normalized per GHz. It would be an apple to oranges test, but it will show how efficient ARM can be these days compared with plain old x86.darkich - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link
Well if core frequency is a reliable measure, we can expect a Geekbench score of slightly over 3000 (!!)This thing has loads of raw compute power.
Now. Just imagine four of those cores clocked at 3GHz. More than enough raw CPU power even for the highest end MacBook Pro
darkich - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link
And of course, by 3000 I mean the single core performancetipoo - Tuesday, November 17, 2015 - link
Depending on if the pipeline is long enough to clock that high. As high IPC as Apple cores are I think it's probably short/optimized for lower clocks.blackcrayon - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
Going to be difficult getting Java code running on an iOS device, it's not supported by Apple in any way. There are JVMs for jailbroken devices but that obviously wouldn't be a good test for a number of reasons (not that you can JB an iPad Pro yet).There are at least some real world tests that could be done as well- there are some cross Mac OS X and iOS apps to make some comparisons. Microsoft Office, Pixelmator, iMovie... These would be tests of the OS & code as much as the CPU, but still of practical usefulness when wondering just how quickly an iPad Pro does something compared to a MacBook.
marty_himself - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link
I tried the smart keyboard in a local Apple Store yesterday. It is awful and an ergonomic nightmare. I have no idea why anyone would want to use this to do any sort of productive work. It's just completely bizarre.KPOM - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link
Any guesses as to whether the storage is PCIe NVMe like the iPhone 6S? For the other internals (LTE baseband, Touch ID, etc.) the iPad Pro is closer to last year's iPhone 6 than this year's iPhone 6S. But PCIe NVMe would make sense.ironwing - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link
I tried out the pencil at the Apple store today. It worked fairly well but definitely shows input lag on quick movements. The pixel trail would lag the pencil by up to 7-8mm if I flicked the pencil across the screen. For more deliberative work the lag was not noticeable. The accuracy (where the pixels landed relative to where the tip touched) was very good regardless of speed of movement. I haven't used the Wacom or Surface tablets to compare. Overall, very pen-like. The keyboard was about what I expected, okay for short messages but nothing to write a thesis on. The touch screen is simply the best I have experienced, tied with the iPhone 6s (again, I haven't tried the Surface yet).KPOM - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link
Which app were you using? I've heard that Apple's apps have better latency than some of the other apps.ironwing - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link
Notes or Pages, can't remember which, one worked with the pen and the other didn't plus Zen Brush and Something 53. We were trying different apps that the Apple store already had loaded on the iPad.zodiacfml - Tuesday, November 17, 2015 - link
Sigh. They're doing it right again, awesome CPU.Jukens - Wednesday, November 18, 2015 - link
Any ETA for the complete review?Krysto - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Why are there no comparisons to Surface Pro 4? I can't be the only one who wants to know how A9X does against Core M.KPOM - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link
PC World has some benchmarks against a Core i7-equipped Surface Pro 4 and a Broadwell Core M-equipped Dell Venue 11. There are several other PCs including an Atom-based tablet.ironwing - Tuesday, December 8, 2015 - link
Any time frame for the full review?rbarone69 - Wednesday, December 9, 2015 - link
If it wasn't for the page swapping to http://ads.pubmatic.com/AdServer/js/showad.js every 30seconds while I'm trying to read I think this would be a good thing! Edge browser on Win10. Hope this helps!okashira - Wednesday, December 9, 2015 - link
When are you going to post a comparison on the surface pen vs ipad pencil performance?Alecgold - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
When will the full review be posted?Leveleight - Thursday, January 7, 2016 - link
Team,This was a great preview but you left us hanging a bit. When is the full review coming? Thanks!
sburlew - Thursday, January 14, 2016 - link
Any ETA for the full iPad Pro review?Thanks for all the work you do to keep us informed!
shermanx - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
Will we see the full review before iPad Pro fuses with Macbook?C0Y0T6 - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
Hi guys, I am still awaiting the full review. I hope you didn't drop and break your iPencil. If so we will likely be waiting for another 4-6 weeks......Constructor - Thursday, January 21, 2016 - link
The longer the wait, the higher our expectations! ;-)Asherlying - Thursday, March 10, 2016 - link
the note pen is a nice touch, you can get one if you are rich enough, otherwise you can take a look st some budget tablets, like Onda, Teclast, etc. http://www.tinydeal.com/brand-android-tablets-c-99...