Apple Thread

[killramos]

I still have a very hard time separating the iPad from being a toy in my eyes, whether you put “Pro” in the name or give it a USB port.

A toy that just keeps getting more expensive.

I can’t think of any productive task I do that an iPad could genuinely replace my laptop for without making huge sacrifices, all for greater expense than a real laptop.

[rage2]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

I still have a very hard time separating the iPad from being a toy in my eyes, whether you put “Pro” in the name or give it a USB port.

A toy that just keeps getting more expensive.

I can’t think of any productive task I do that an iPad could genuinely replace my laptop for without making huge sacrifices, all for greater expense than a real laptop.

I've pretty much moved all of my work onto the iPad Pro. I rarely use my Surface Pro these days, except for working with Lightroom. With a keyboard cover or whatever, it's an awesome laptop replacement that allows me to do pretty much everything in my day to day.

With that said, I'm Sr. Management, so I don't really do anything in my day to day haha.

[killramos]

Totally, if I had peons to make my excel and ppt changes for me and all I was doing was reviewing and sending emails? Sure.

I also don’t see why I would need 1TB storage, 6GB of RAM, and a processor that embarrasses an quad i7 to do that.

I used to use mine to remote into my desktop, but that’s a pretty stupid usage scenario 90% of the time. I ended up carrying around a laptop everywhere I had my iPad anyways.

My wife likes hers, but all she uses it for is slow motion videos to show the girls she coaches how they are fucking up lol.

I have a hard time getting excited about iPad updates because they seem like a hideous waste of money to me.

[rage2]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

Totally, if I had peons to make my excel and ppt changes for me and all I was doing was reviewing and sending emails? Sure.

I also don’t see why I would need 1TB storage, 6GB of RAM, and a processor that embarrasses an quad i7 to do that.

I used to use mine to remote into my desktop, but that’s a pretty stupid usage scenario 90% of the time. I ended up carrying around a laptop everywhere I had my iPad anyways.

My wife likes hers, but all she uses it for is slow motion videos to show the girls she coaches how they are fucking up lol.

I have a hard time getting excited about iPad updates because they seem like a hideous waste of money to me.

I use Google Apps (Sheets, Docs, Slides) regularly on the iPad Pro, so it's not just emails. I'm not that useless.

I also don't get the need for 1TB storage. I store everything in the cloud. My only use for the storage is really travelling. Stuff 30 movies on there for the flight.

The processor makes sense for me because I do a lot of video editing on my iPad.

[killramos]

My industry is also well known for being 20 years behind the learning curve on tech so pretty much everything is legacy system and implementations.

We do pretty good at my current shop, but the amount of pushback I got from trying to get people to play nice with a simple SharePoint site so more than one person could edit a meeting agenda document once a week was absolutely hilarious.

[Mitsu3000gt]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

and a processor that embarrasses an quad i7 to do that.

It doesn't.

A modern 4c/8t i7 with a TDP many times that of the iPad Pro beats it handily. The fact that an ultra low TDP, passively cooled CPU built within the tightest constraints of both size and battery life in a chassis a few millimeters thin cannot compete with actively cooled desktop/laptop CPUs with ~10 times the wattage should not be the least bit surprising.

I am guessing you are looking at Geekbench numbers without understanding that it is an architecture benchmark, not a device benchmark. It is useful for showing generational improvements and architecture efficiency. Apple's ARM CPU architecture is very good, which is reflected in benchmarks. This obviously does not mean a ~5-10W passively cooled Apple mobile processor running at a fraction of the clock speed can "embarrass" a modern quad core i7 running at many times the TDP and much higher clock speed with active cooling.

The iPad Pro stutters in the BBC app ffs

[killramos]

I am definitely NOT understanding those benchmarks then.

Seriously how am I supposed to interpret a benchmark that claimes “A12X iPad performance is now within range of higher end MacBook pros” where they explicitly quote latest gen 6 core i7 chips?

Geekbench claims they benchmark performance against an i7-6600, so are you saying that’s just not true? You are literally the only source I can find caveating these numbers as only “architecturally” relevant. Would love it if you could provide some background reading for that?

[Mitsu3000gt]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

I am definitely NOT understanding those benchmarks then.

Seriously how am I supposed to interpret a benchmark that claimes “A12X iPad performance is now within range of higher end MacBook pros” where they explicitly quote latest gen 6 core i7 chips?

Geekbench claims they benchmark performance against an i7-6600, so are you saying that’s just not true? You are literally the only source I can find caveating these numbers as only “architecturally” relevant. Would love it if you could provide some background reading for that?

To be fair, they aren't super clear - they are presented in a such a way that is supposed to allow for cross-platform comparisons but there is more to it than that. I think a lot of people interpret them like that, but you can see how it makes zero sense.

Apple's architecture is very good, and performance per watt is very good. That is what Geekbench is really measuring, but by providing numerical results that are so easy to compare, it's easy to think that your iPhone is more powerful than a desktop PC - which is obviously not the case.

Anandtech uses Geekbench specifically for comparing architectures - I don't have time at the moment but I will try to find the link. It is an interesting read regardless. There are some good Reddit discussions on it as well from people who are extremely knowledgeable on the subject.

If Apple's passively cooled 5W cell phone processors were as fast a full blown desktop i7, they could turn the entire computer world upside down - imagine that processor scaled up and given 100W of TDP. It just doesn't work like that though. On the flip side, you don't see people trying to build workstations around 5W Apple CPUs, nor does Apple use them in their own computers.

Geekbench 3 had a lot of issues but Geekbench 4 is pretty good for cross-platform comparisons, but the main takeaway is that it's not a device comparison - it does not mean your iPhone X or whatever is more powerful than a modern desktop computer. Think of it more as a performance-per-watt comparison.

Even Geekbench 4 is not without it's flaws cross-platform. For example one thing it does is pause during testing to allow mobile devices to cool down - an actively cooled desktop obviously does not need this, and would blow past it in testing if everything was left alone. Also, Geekbench results are typically higher in Linux than Windows so the OS does matter to a degree.

I am not saying their benchmark i7-6600u is not true, but the comparison is one of architecture, not total device power. The results are still extremely favorable for Apple, but a 5W A12 processor is not equal to a 95W i7. There are some ultra low voltage Intel CPUs that run as low as 7.5W (if not lower), and some that are 140W, so it's important to note exactly what i7 the iPad Pro is claiming to be better than. I don't doubt that it's equivalent to or slightly better than an older intel CPU at the same clocks and wattage - that last bit is the important part.

[rage2]

There are tasks where real world is comparable. I know my iPhone XS can out pace desktops and laptops in 4K rendering, which is absolutely ridiculous.

[Xtrema]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

There are tasks where real world is comparable. I know my iPhone XS can out pace desktops and laptops in 4K rendering, which is absolutely ridiculous.

I was also surprise how well stabilization algorithm runs on SD835 on Google Photos against 4K vidoes on my phone. I think once code is written from scratch and optimized for ARM, it can be as powerful as X86 with higher clocks.

[rage2]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

I am definitely NOT understanding those benchmarks then.

Seriously how am I supposed to interpret a benchmark that claimes “A12X iPad performance is now within range of higher end MacBook pros” where they explicitly quote latest gen 6 core i7 chips?

Geekbench claims they benchmark performance against an i7-6600, so are you saying that’s just not true? You are literally the only source I can find caveating these numbers as only “architecturally” relevant. Would love it if you could provide some background reading for that?

The best way I can put it, don’t let Mitsu’s love for Google and criticism of Apple confuse you.

The A12X and it’s recent predecessors can perform tasks at desktop cpu levels, but it’s specialized apps that really take advantage of ARM and realistically, there aren’t many. Even with video editing, until this year it’s only rudamentary video editors that really start pushing the iPad CPU’s. Mitsu is right, there are bigger Intel CPU’s out there that will outperform the AXX, but Apple also isn’t lying about the A12X being more powerful than 92% of laptops sold last year because not many of them are outfitted with the most powerful Intel processors.

So why aren’t laptop makers, including Apple introducing laptops with A12X over Intel? They are. Apple is targeting the first switch to a new ARM cpu in 2020. Why not now? Because all the serious software is for x86, and needs time to port over to ARM. There isn’t much serious software for AXX, it’s still a mobile first platform, but change is coming. Adobe is first to really commit, with Premier Rush starting to get real video editing capabilities, and of course full photoshop coming next year (hopefully with full Lightroom not far behind). These are the first tools to really take advantage of AXX for the masses. Of course Apple still has work to do to make the AXX a serious laptop replacement, things such as virtualization support was never needed for mobile, but is a necessity for a laptop. Apple has laid down the roadmap, so things will only get better for iPad Pro up towards the 2020 Mac ARM architecture shift.

[killramos]

Makes sense to me.

[cam_wmh]

For the second time in 3 months, I've fucking BENT my iPad Pro. Thank fuck, for AppleCare.

[rage2]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

For the second time in 3 months, I've fucking BENT my iPad Pro. Thank fuck, for AppleCare.

How the hell do you bend an iPad pro? You wearing clown pants with big enough ass pockets to fit it or something?

I'm kinda pissed off at AppleCare. Purchased it for iPhone X, XS and iPad Pro, none have been accidently broken yet.

[Mitsu3000gt]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

The best way I can put it, don’t let Mitsu’s love for Google and criticism of Apple confuse you.

What does Google have anything to do with it? Nobody even mentioned them We're talking about Apple's ARM vs Intel in Geekbench.

What did I say that was untrue or confusing?

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

The A12X and it’s recent predecessors can perform tasks at desktop cpu levels, but it’s specialized apps that really take advantage of ARM and realistically, there aren’t many. Even with video editing, until this year it’s only rudamentary video editors that really start pushing the iPad CPU’s. Mitsu is right, there are bigger Intel CPU’s out there that will outperform the AXX, but Apple also isn’t lying about the A12X being more powerful than 92% of laptops sold last year because not many of them are outfitted with the most powerful Intel processors.

That is what I said yes - if you want to try draw equivalents to Intel processors you need to look at the low-core count ultra low voltage laptop variants. I mentioned this above. Active vs passive cooling is also a big factor and not even Geekbench 4 takes that into account.

You can take that Apple stat with a grain of salt though because they also stated that the iPad was "faster than the fastest PC's" in the Keynote. They are literally spouting off lies at that point, but people eat it up.

The majority of laptops are entry level junk that sell for 1/2 or less what the iPad Pro sells for with similar stats, but they left that part out. If you spend iPad Pro money on a laptop you end up with something much more capable. What you're paying for is the size, not really the speed.

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

So why aren’t laptop makers, including Apple introducing laptops with A12X over Intel? They are. Apple is targeting the first switch to a new ARM cpu in 2020. Why not now? Because all the serious software is for x86, and needs time to port over to ARM. There isn’t much serious software for AXX, it’s still a mobile first platform, but change is coming. Adobe is first to really commit, with Premier Rush starting to get real video editing capabilities, and of course full photoshop coming next year (hopefully with full Lightroom not far behind). These are the first tools to really take advantage of AXX for the masses. Of course Apple still has work to do to make the AXX a serious laptop replacement, things such as virtualization support was never needed for mobile, but is a necessity for a laptop. Apple has laid down the roadmap, so things will only get better for iPad Pro up towards the 2020 Mac ARM architecture shift.

Full Photoshop is not coming to the iPad anytime soon. Adobe has even started to adjust their language because so many people are calling them out on that. Some of the most important things commonly used in professional workflow are not possible - no batch processing, no plug-in support, and no custom color profile support. No file system means you are running everything though the Photos app still. Further, the iPad screen cannot be hardware calibrated in the same way a high-end monitor can, and the screen does not support HDR10, which makes editing video from common devices less than ideal. There is no way to open multiple photos side-by-side to quickly to cull images. It's great for those casual vacation or social media edits, but it is a nightmare for anyone trying to work through thousands of RAW files. And if color accuracy is absolutely critical, it's not ideal either.


As for bending the iPad Pro - I always have mine in a case and have never so much as bumped it, but I can't imagine hitting it hard enough to bend it unless it was very weak to begin with.

[benyl]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

How the hell do you bend an iPad pro? You wearing clown pants with big enough ass pockets to fit it or something?

I'm kinda pissed off at AppleCare. Purchased it for iPhone X, XS and iPad Pro, none have been accidently broken yet.

It's insurance, it isn't meant to be used. haha

- - - Updated - - -

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

Lots of text....

[rage2]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

What does Google have anything to do with it? Nobody even mentioned them We're talking about Apple's ARM vs Intel in Geekbench.

What did I say that was untrue or confusing?

Google has nothing to do with it. I've always found it funny how you downplay Google flaws and downplaying Apple strengths at the same time (and vice versa). Just poking fun that's all.

You're trying to make it sound like geekbench isn't a good way to compare processors across multiple architectures and downplaying A12X's performance. There are many other types of benchmarks and tests that are in line with geekbench comparisons that shows A12X can outperform mid to high end desktop/laptops. I mean, video editing, however rudimentary is the best test in my case, as I've been iMovie editing for years now. It's just that not a whole lot of shit in iOS can take advantage of that.

[Mitsu3000gt]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

Google has nothing to do with it. I've always found it funny how you downplay Google flaws and downplaying Apple strengths at the same time (and vice versa). Just poking fun that's all.

You're trying to make it sound like geekbench isn't a good way to compare processors across multiple architectures and downplaying A12X's performance. There are many other types of benchmarks and tests that are in line with geekbench comparisons that shows A12X can outperform mid to high end desktop/laptops. I mean, video editing, however rudimentary is the best test in my case, as I've been iMovie editing for years now. It's just that not a whole lot of shit in iOS can take advantage of that.

What other cross platform tests are there with similar accuracy? Geekbench is just about the only one I am aware of.

What did I downplay? I think my explanation was accurate and fair. I went out of my way to mention how the Apple architecture was impressive and how they post impressive numbers in Geekbench. The fact that a 5W A12 cannot compete with a 65W Intel CPU with a much higher clock and active cooling should not surprise anyone, but that is how people talk and it is misleading. Saying that they have caught up to or are faster than 4c/8t Intel i7's without the appropriate context is highly misleading.

Of course it doesn't help that Apple doesn't ever elaborate on what kind of "i5" or "i7" is in their machines - this is done to help them sell 2013 hardware at 2018 prices because "it still has an i7", and most customers don't look further than that.

The entire point of my post was simply to discuss how Geekbench *IS* more of an architecture / performance per watt comparison, which is what makes it useful cross platform (to a point). It has weaknesses which were previously mentioned which make it difficult to be completely accurate but it is probably the best one out there at this time. I'd be much more interested in something like Cinebench, HDR creation times, Photoshop batch processes (impossible on an iPad), and execution times of huge Photoshop actions, but to my knowledge those types of comparisons aren't available cross-platform in a perfectly comparable way.

The problem is that Apple and others take these results that most people do not understand to try and make people think their phones and tablets are more powerful than and I quote "the fastest PCs" - that is highly misleading in the context it is often delivered in, so I think it's important to understand the whole picture.

I have not been able to find what wattage the A12X is getting yet, which will be a factor. Another huge bottleneck is iOS 12 - the hardware, especially on the 2018 Pro, has long surpassed it's capabilities. I think Apple could make a much better case for Laptop replacement if they fix the OS side of things because then you would end up with something closer to a Microsoft Surface competitor than a blown up iPhone. At least USB-C is a step in that direction.

Anyways, I am trying to buy an 11" 256GB WiFi model. Apple.ca originally said Nov 7 and now it's showing Nov 22-23 when I try to buy - hopefully they are available in stores sooner than that.

[rage2]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

Another huge bottleneck is iOS 12 - the hardware, especially on the 2018 Pro, has long surpassed it's capabilities.

This I agree with. What I believe Apple is doing with the iPad is trying to carve out a new way of working where we don't have to rely on the keyboard+mouse combo and won't rely on needing true multitasking in our day to day workflow. I don't think it's working particularly well because people inherently hate change, and trying to change decades of workflow muscle memory isn't going to happen. That's why they're moving things on the laptop/desktop side of things to ARM to try to get more software investment. Pretty risky gamble, Mac's really took off when it went from PPC to x86 as it was easy to port x86 wintel to x86 macos, giving Macs a huge library of software. x86 to ARM is going to be a bit backwards, but I guess Apple feels they have the market share now to pull it off.

In other news, some real world comparison for iPad Pro vs laptop performance. Fucking A12X Bionic crushed it.

https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/la...-2018-129-inch





Jesus lol.

[Mitsu3000gt]

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

This I agree with. What I believe Apple is doing with the iPad is trying to carve out a new way of working where we don't have to rely on the keyboard+mouse combo and won't rely on needing true multitasking in our day to day workflow. I don't think it's working particularly well because people inherently hate change, and trying to change decades of workflow muscle memory isn't going to happen. That's why they're moving things on the laptop/desktop side of things to ARM to try to get more software investment. Pretty risky gamble, Mac's really took off when it went from PPC to x86 as it was easy to port x86 wintel to x86 macos, giving Macs a huge library of software. x86 to ARM is going to be a bit backwards, but I guess Apple feels they have the market share now to pull it off.

In other news, some real world comparison for iPad Pro vs laptop performance. Fucking A12X Bionic crushed it.

Yeah I think the other problem is they added USB-C but then left it up to developers to do the rest. You can't even plug in a USB stick and pull a file off FFS. The most basic of tasks. You can't plug in a keyboard and mouse. You can't plug in an external hard drive. These are the kinds of day-to-day things people want to be able to do. Developers may add support for all these things but it wont be native through iOS12. iVerge actually gave it a surprisingly bad rating for these reasons.

The editing times are good but I believe Apple is feeding a lot of that through it's GPU, and all those laptops don't even have a discrete GPU - just a garbage Intel UHD 630 or similar. Those are not photo/video editing laptops by any stretch of the imagination. The processors in those laptops are also 10-15W TDP ultra low voltage - I am not sure what wattage the new iPad Pro is feeding it's CPU yet. I suspect the iPad Pro's GPU is a lot better than an Intel UHD 630 and if the App can take advantage of that, it would make a big difference. The App software is probably written differently to take advantage of that setup, but I am not sure since it's written for completely different platforms. The cross platform comparisons are REALLY hard to do accurately, which is why Geekbench is usually the go-to because it is an architecture / performance per watt comparison that is independent of just about everything else. There is a small variance with OS but it's not huge (eg. Linux benchmarks better than Windows). You could write an app that is a lot more efficient on platform A than it is on platform B or vise versa, so it is really hard to measure hardware performance cross platform that way - especially if one is using different pieces of hardware. At any rate, those are good results, but I would be very curious to see the whole picture as the article does not explain that part. I'd also like to see a Cinebench CPU loop but that is impossible cross platform to my knowledge. One nice thing about the iPad Pro is you can make an app for it and know that everyone is going to be using the same 2 or 3 hardware configurations and optimize accordingly - with a x86 program, there are hundreds of variants. I believe some processes that are brute-forced through the CPU in x86 are fed through the GPU on an iPad.

I use LumaFusion (probably the best App I have ever used anywhere) to edit my 4K video and an export on a ~4min video took about 15mins on my iPad Pro 10.5". The iPad also goes to sleep after 3-4 mins, so I have to keep it awake manually or it fails. I'm curious to see how long it takes on the 11" Pro, I will be able to test that soon. To my knowledge Adobe Rush only allows 1080P output so I've never used it. The main reason I am buying the new iPad Pro is basically hoping it will run LumaFusion better, since I use that for video editing on vacation.

Converting 50 RAWs (46MP) on my desktop takes about ~10 seconds if I recall - it's a highly threaded process so cores and clock speed are king there. Not a fair comparison obviously though.