Maybe I'm a fool, but I don't want multitasking. I don't want to manage background apps. That's a pain in the butt. But since I already know it's coming, I can only wish that Apple will let me turn it off. (oh, and turn off cut-and-paste as well).
Yeah, you are a fool, or as your name states...a crusty old man that has no idea about what you're talking about. You don't "manage" background apps in the current iOS. It's done for you....idiot
But check out the web-browser at the 13 minute mark.
C.
Hehe. You seem to be really want to hold onto the slight stuttering in the browser and hang the Tab for it.
I guess you and I will have to agree to disagree over it. I personally think it's more of a software (browser) thing than any reflection on the hardware, as the rest of the device is very snappy.
Personally, I'm waiting for the ASUS 10" tablet to show early next year running the tablet optimized version of Android. I'm looking for something to replace my laptop for browsing/multimedia/games while I'm on the couch watching TV.
Personally I expect iPad2 to really take off it it comes to market real soon. It will need to have the right ingredients though.
What do I mean by the right ingredients? Well how about:
More RAM!
A dual core Cortex A9 based CPU!
More than double the amount a Flash storage!
Factime support!
A faster GPU!
This would be a shame because it means we would have slumped back into the 'hardware-specs-are-everything' regime which served only to distract consumers into buying the wrong platform. What each OS is able to do with those naked resources is inconsistent so this approach has no value & never did . Only system concepts and software design are important, everything else amounts to semantics.
For me, forget iPad2. iOS 4.2 needs to untether the current iPad from iTunes to become a real, standalone computer (with AppleTV's wireless sync) & get iLife Touch apps released ASAP. The only hardware change Apple needs to make is a front-facing camera & an SD card slot. These changes add tangible benefits not the old hypothetical faster=better.
I didn't say dual core even if Wizard did. The A9 has lower power consumption and better top end. I would be significantly surprised if the next rev of the A4 was not A9 based. Dual core A9 makes sense given the multitasking nature of iOS 4 as does the additional RAM.
An A8 on a smaller process makes far less sense than a single core A9 coupled with the A4 changes. The A9 claims 250mW/core vs 525mW/core on the A8 at the same process level (45nm). The A9 also scales better with speed than the A8 did.
Faster access to flash and a better GPU will not affect running multiple apps as much as more RAM and going dual-core (or hyperthreading). Better GPU is also highly desired and expected. That's almost a gimme in the same sense as going with an A9.
Multitasking on an iPad isn't like multitasking on a Mac. I'm not going to transcode video in the background on my iPad. Multitasking on an iPad mostly just means saving states and rapid switching between apps. Actual simultaneous execution of multiple processes generally involved waiting for something to download in the background or playing music. It's not at all obvious to me that you need a dual core CPU for that.
The speed improvement that I said I wanted is to be able to scroll through PDFs more quickly. Right now in iAnnotate, when I'm moving a PDF around, there is some noticeable lag in rendering the PDF. I'd like that to be gone entirely. It's not al all clear to me that a dual core CPU is the best solution to that problem. But again, I leave it to Apple to figure it out. I'm focused on the outputs, not the inputs.
C'mon. Apple differentiates most all of its products based upon exactly that stuff. Look at the laptop lineup. Look at the desktop lineup. Look at the brand-new Mac Minis - they have different models, differentiated by that unimportant 1990's stuff.
Yeah and thats the problem with the Mac. Potential switchers look just at the hardware specs, see they can get an equally specced PC elesewhere for less and stick with Windows.
Apple needs to focus more on the software and the whole polished solution as the OP said, and less on whats inside
Yeah and thats the problem with the Mac. Potential switchers look just at the hardware specs, see they can get an equally specced PC elesewhere for less and stick with Windows.
Apple needs to focus more on the software and the whole polished solution as the OP said, and less on whats inside
I don't think even that is true. PC buyers might get steered to "this one goes to 11" at the BestBuy, but my impression is that in general the average home PC buyer is just buying on price and brand.
It's not that they can get an "equally" specced PC for less, it's that they can get "a" PC for a great deal less, since Apple has declined to compete at the commodity end of the market.
This is actually quite different from their new mobile offerings, which are managing to deliver both Apple's customary build quality and user experience and extremely competitive pricing (phones, of course, are a special case due to carrier subsides).
Multitasking on an iPad isn't like multitasking on a Mac. I'm not going to transcode video in the background on my iPad. Multitasking on an iPad mostly just means saving states and rapid switching between apps. Actual simultaneous execution of multiple processes generally involved waiting for something to download in the background or playing music. It's not at all obvious to me that you need a dual core CPU for that.
The speed improvement that I said I wanted is to be able to scroll through PDFs more quickly. Right now in iAnnotate, when I'm moving a PDF around, there is some noticeable lag in rendering the PDF. I'd like that to be gone entirely. It's not al all clear to me that a dual core CPU is the best solution to that problem. But again, I leave it to Apple to figure it out. I'm focused on the outputs, not the inputs.
I see no need to make the distinction between MT on a Mac vs iPad. They're both computing devices that in some cases need to be running more than one app. There are plenty of needs beyond video transcoding that need multitasking.
I don't see cannot be obvious to anyone who's even passively followed computing architecture for the last half decade.
Single high clocked processors = more heat
dual core processors allow for lower clocks which = lower heat yet there are many "pipes" to push data into the CPU.
If multi core didn't matter we would be computing on 8Ghz single processor systems now. We've already hit that wall and multicore is the answer at least today.
Apple would not have brought Open CL and Grand Central Dispatch to iOS 4 if they had not planned to leverage multicore processors eventually in mobile devices.
I think Wizard's post was logical. I expect to see more RAM/Storage and Facetime. Retina display would be a plus.
Multitasking on an iPad isn't like multitasking on a Mac.
No, it pretty much works like multitasking on any OS.
Quote:
I'm not going to transcode video in the background on my iPad. Multitasking on an iPad mostly just means saving states and rapid switching between apps.
What apps folks use differs. Folks do use it for more than simply looking at PDFs.
Quote:
Actual simultaneous execution of multiple processes generally involved waiting for something to download in the background or playing music. It's not at all obvious to me that you need a dual core CPU for that.
Dual core also help in multi-threaded apps which is supported under IOS. It's not as if that second CPU will sit idle even assuming you use only one app at a time.
Some of these background apps are pulling from RSS feeds or some other XML data stream and processing them. Amusingly this does sometimes take a non-trivial amount of CPU cycles to do...at least when there's a lot of data elements for some reason.
Monitoring your portfolio in real time could be one such example.
Quote:
The speed improvement that I said I wanted is to be able to scroll through PDFs more quickly.
Yah, scrolling through PDFs is the only iPad use case to consider. Since it might not help YOU it doesn't matter at all if it applies to other use cases.
I wonder what Apple would have to do to allow the iPad to work without the need for a PC or a Mac.
Imagine if it could do all this stuff over WiFi or over the Internet....
Backup and restore.
Media syncing and organisation - From media library larger than the device capacity
OS Upgrades.
Perhaps this is the reason for that big data center?
C.
I would love that too, but there is a very big downside to "OTA" sync and upgrades/backup.
1) Backup is expensive bandwidth-wise, you'll be transmitting at least 16GB to upwards of 64GB over the wire, and unless you're running dual-channel 5Ghz N-wireless (ie, not most people) you're looking at maybe 10-20MB/s real speed. That's 2-4 minutes a GB, and at least a half an hour for the smallest iPad. Double and Quadruple the times for 32/64GB respectively. Imagine granny with an old wifi-B ... she'd be lucky to have it done overnight. Unusable.
2) Syncing is a more likely possibility, if you don't have too much (ie, say an album, a couple of apps, 3 podcasts, and 30 photos = 300MB) you could do it easily in a few minutes. Apple could state a cutoff per sync or what they do now with apps DLs over 3G, and not permit OTA sync for large delta sets.
3) Upgrades sound like a clear winner, but take this anecdotal real-life scenario:
My coworker was talking about how his Droid (orig) was doing an OTA upgrade to 2.2, and it bailed halfway through (he said it had lots of battery, but the Verizon store said it ran out during upgrade)... the store couldn't fix it, so he not only lost his unsync'd data, but had to get a replacement (refurbished) phone and manually reset his homescreen and repopulate his data.
That scenario would almost NEVER happen on iOS because OTA upgrades don't exist, so you must plug it in via USB which guarantees a charge and so the upgrade will never fail during firmware recycle.
My next purchase is holding for FaceTime on the iPad. Oh, and if Apple wants to shove in more "pixie dust" then go for it.
(See, that's much faster than typing out the multitude of engineering approaches that could result in faster performance at the same or lower thermal generation)
I really don't have a problem these predictions...but AI should start a policy of listing the last three predictions of the Analyst with how panned out (in chart form) and publish said chart everytime the analyst issues a prediction.
AI could even have running average/percent of the accuracy... Right off the bat one would their competency
I really don't have a problem these predictions...but AI should start a policy of listing the last three predictions of the Analyst with how panned out (in chart form) and publish said chart everytime the analyst issues a prediction.
AI could even have running average/percent of the accuracy... Right off the bat one would their competency
Best
+20 - Now that would be serious value added and all it takes is for Kasper to keep an excel spreadsheet. Tedious but not hard.
Apple would not have brought Open CL and Grand Central Dispatch to iOS 4 if they had not planned to leverage multicore processors eventually in mobile devices.
+1
The new API in iOS 4.0 is riddled with GCD. it is hard to do anything with the newer API without it.
Apple provides constraints on multitasking on iOS but under the covers it pretty much works as you would expect.
Multitasking use cases remain much the same as well...at least within the constraints of the kinds of MT modes Apple allows to 3rd party devs and what they can get away with in getting approved for the app store. I can use these services to do a lot outside the descriptions of these services as long as I'm aware the system might kill me in favor of the foreground task or my background task request is refused for some reason (don't recall the max time I can request for a long running task).
I can do a lot of things for an enterprise app that Apple likely wouldn't approve for the app store today. For a dual core iPad these rules could get relaxed but nothing in iOS intrinsically makes multitasking all THAT different.
Apple provides constraints on multitasking on iOS but under the covers it pretty much works as you would expect.
Multitasking use cases remain much the same as well...at least within the constraints of the kinds of MT modes Apple allows to 3rd party devs and what they can get away with in getting approved for the app store. I can use these services to do a lot outside the descriptions of these services as long as I'm aware the system might kill me in favor of the foreground task or my background task request is refused for some reason (don't recall the max time I can request for a long running task).
I can do a lot of things for an enterprise app that Apple likely wouldn't approve for the app store today. For a dual core iPad these rules could get relaxed but nothing in iOS intrinsically makes multitasking all THAT different.
Yah, and those constraints don't make multi-tasking innately different. You can still background your app to do stuff. It also has no impact on the advantages of additional cores on multi-threading which helps you even with a single app.
Comments
Maybe I'm a fool, but I don't want multitasking. I don't want to manage background apps. That's a pain in the butt. But since I already know it's coming, I can only wish that Apple will let me turn it off. (oh, and turn off cut-and-paste as well).
Yeah, you are a fool, or as your name states...a crusty old man that has no idea about what you're talking about. You don't "manage" background apps in the current iOS. It's done for you....idiot
This review is a shop-bought unit. It's quite positive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db0K47E31Ks&feature=related
But check out the web-browser at the 13 minute mark.
C.
Hehe. You seem to be really want to hold onto the slight stuttering in the browser and hang the Tab for it.
I guess you and I will have to agree to disagree over it. I personally think it's more of a software (browser) thing than any reflection on the hardware, as the rest of the device is very snappy.
Personally, I'm waiting for the ASUS 10" tablet to show early next year running the tablet optimized version of Android. I'm looking for something to replace my laptop for browsing/multimedia/games while I'm on the couch watching TV.
Hehe. You seem to be really want to hold onto the slight stuttering in the browser and hang the Tab for it.
I just have yet to see any footage of the browser that does not look bad.
I am sure this issue does not matter to everyone. But it doesn't look slight to me.
We will see how well these devices perform in the marketplace.
My guess is that no version 2.X Android tablet will sell more than 700K units.
I think next year the HP/Palm tablet, and Android 3.0 are more likely to give the iPad a challenge.
C.
I'm a big Apple fan and a long time Apple investor but.... these estimates coming from no name analysts are getting out of control.
Who the freak is Brian Blair and what freak is Wedge Partner? Anyone who can grab a number out of their butt can call themselves analyst now?
And who are you, BunnyTurd?
Personally I expect iPad2 to really take off it it comes to market real soon. It will need to have the right ingredients though.
What do I mean by the right ingredients? Well how about:
This would be a shame because it means we would have slumped back into the 'hardware-specs-are-everything' regime which served only to distract consumers into buying the wrong platform. What each OS is able to do with those naked resources is inconsistent so this approach has no value & never did . Only system concepts and software design are important, everything else amounts to semantics.
For me, forget iPad2. iOS 4.2 needs to untether the current iPad from iTunes to become a real, standalone computer (with AppleTV's wireless sync) & get iLife Touch apps released ASAP. The only hardware change Apple needs to make is a front-facing camera & an SD card slot. These changes add tangible benefits not the old hypothetical faster=better.
McD
I didn't say dual core even if Wizard did. The A9 has lower power consumption and better top end. I would be significantly surprised if the next rev of the A4 was not A9 based. Dual core A9 makes sense given the multitasking nature of iOS 4 as does the additional RAM.
An A8 on a smaller process makes far less sense than a single core A9 coupled with the A4 changes. The A9 claims 250mW/core vs 525mW/core on the A8 at the same process level (45nm). The A9 also scales better with speed than the A8 did.
Faster access to flash and a better GPU will not affect running multiple apps as much as more RAM and going dual-core (or hyperthreading). Better GPU is also highly desired and expected. That's almost a gimme in the same sense as going with an A9.
Multitasking on an iPad isn't like multitasking on a Mac. I'm not going to transcode video in the background on my iPad. Multitasking on an iPad mostly just means saving states and rapid switching between apps. Actual simultaneous execution of multiple processes generally involved waiting for something to download in the background or playing music. It's not at all obvious to me that you need a dual core CPU for that.
The speed improvement that I said I wanted is to be able to scroll through PDFs more quickly. Right now in iAnnotate, when I'm moving a PDF around, there is some noticeable lag in rendering the PDF. I'd like that to be gone entirely. It's not al all clear to me that a dual core CPU is the best solution to that problem. But again, I leave it to Apple to figure it out. I'm focused on the outputs, not the inputs.
C'mon. Apple differentiates most all of its products based upon exactly that stuff. Look at the laptop lineup. Look at the desktop lineup. Look at the brand-new Mac Minis - they have different models, differentiated by that unimportant 1990's stuff.
Yeah and thats the problem with the Mac. Potential switchers look just at the hardware specs, see they can get an equally specced PC elesewhere for less and stick with Windows.
Apple needs to focus more on the software and the whole polished solution as the OP said, and less on whats inside
Yeah and thats the problem with the Mac. Potential switchers look just at the hardware specs, see they can get an equally specced PC elesewhere for less and stick with Windows.
Apple needs to focus more on the software and the whole polished solution as the OP said, and less on whats inside
I don't think even that is true. PC buyers might get steered to "this one goes to 11" at the BestBuy, but my impression is that in general the average home PC buyer is just buying on price and brand.
It's not that they can get an "equally" specced PC for less, it's that they can get "a" PC for a great deal less, since Apple has declined to compete at the commodity end of the market.
This is actually quite different from their new mobile offerings, which are managing to deliver both Apple's customary build quality and user experience and extremely competitive pricing (phones, of course, are a special case due to carrier subsides).
Multitasking on an iPad isn't like multitasking on a Mac. I'm not going to transcode video in the background on my iPad. Multitasking on an iPad mostly just means saving states and rapid switching between apps. Actual simultaneous execution of multiple processes generally involved waiting for something to download in the background or playing music. It's not at all obvious to me that you need a dual core CPU for that.
The speed improvement that I said I wanted is to be able to scroll through PDFs more quickly. Right now in iAnnotate, when I'm moving a PDF around, there is some noticeable lag in rendering the PDF. I'd like that to be gone entirely. It's not al all clear to me that a dual core CPU is the best solution to that problem. But again, I leave it to Apple to figure it out. I'm focused on the outputs, not the inputs.
I see no need to make the distinction between MT on a Mac vs iPad. They're both computing devices that in some cases need to be running more than one app. There are plenty of needs beyond video transcoding that need multitasking.
I don't see cannot be obvious to anyone who's even passively followed computing architecture for the last half decade.
Single high clocked processors = more heat
dual core processors allow for lower clocks which = lower heat yet there are many "pipes" to push data into the CPU.
If multi core didn't matter we would be computing on 8Ghz single processor systems now. We've already hit that wall and multicore is the answer at least today.
Apple would not have brought Open CL and Grand Central Dispatch to iOS 4 if they had not planned to leverage multicore processors eventually in mobile devices.
I think Wizard's post was logical. I expect to see more RAM/Storage and Facetime. Retina display would be a plus.
Multitasking on an iPad isn't like multitasking on a Mac.
No, it pretty much works like multitasking on any OS.
I'm not going to transcode video in the background on my iPad. Multitasking on an iPad mostly just means saving states and rapid switching between apps.
What apps folks use differs. Folks do use it for more than simply looking at PDFs.
Actual simultaneous execution of multiple processes generally involved waiting for something to download in the background or playing music. It's not at all obvious to me that you need a dual core CPU for that.
Dual core also help in multi-threaded apps which is supported under IOS. It's not as if that second CPU will sit idle even assuming you use only one app at a time.
Some of these background apps are pulling from RSS feeds or some other XML data stream and processing them. Amusingly this does sometimes take a non-trivial amount of CPU cycles to do...at least when there's a lot of data elements for some reason.
Monitoring your portfolio in real time could be one such example.
The speed improvement that I said I wanted is to be able to scroll through PDFs more quickly.
Yah, scrolling through PDFs is the only iPad use case to consider. Since it might not help YOU it doesn't matter at all if it applies to other use cases.
I wonder what Apple would have to do to allow the iPad to work without the need for a PC or a Mac.
Imagine if it could do all this stuff over WiFi or over the Internet....
- Backup and restore.
- Media syncing and organisation - From media library larger than the device capacity
- OS Upgrades.
Perhaps this is the reason for that big data center?C.
I would love that too, but there is a very big downside to "OTA" sync and upgrades/backup.
1) Backup is expensive bandwidth-wise, you'll be transmitting at least 16GB to upwards of 64GB over the wire, and unless you're running dual-channel 5Ghz N-wireless (ie, not most people) you're looking at maybe 10-20MB/s real speed. That's 2-4 minutes a GB, and at least a half an hour for the smallest iPad. Double and Quadruple the times for 32/64GB respectively. Imagine granny with an old wifi-B ... she'd be lucky to have it done overnight. Unusable.
2) Syncing is a more likely possibility, if you don't have too much (ie, say an album, a couple of apps, 3 podcasts, and 30 photos = 300MB) you could do it easily in a few minutes. Apple could state a cutoff per sync or what they do now with apps DLs over 3G, and not permit OTA sync for large delta sets.
3) Upgrades sound like a clear winner, but take this anecdotal real-life scenario: That scenario would almost NEVER happen on iOS because OTA upgrades don't exist, so you must plug it in via USB which guarantees a charge and so the upgrade will never fail during firmware recycle.
(See, that's much faster than typing out the multitude of engineering approaches that could result in faster performance at the same or lower thermal generation)
AI could even have running average/percent of the accuracy... Right off the bat one would their competency
Best
I really don't have a problem these predictions...but AI should start a policy of listing the last three predictions of the Analyst with how panned out (in chart form) and publish said chart everytime the analyst issues a prediction.
AI could even have running average/percent of the accuracy... Right off the bat one would their competency
Best
+20 - Now that would be serious value added and all it takes is for Kasper to keep an excel spreadsheet. Tedious but not hard.
I would love that too, but there is a very big downside to "OTA" sync and upgrades/backup.
1) Backup is expensive bandwidth-wise, you'll be transmitting at least 16GB to upwards of 64GB over the wire,
There's no reason to back up the whole iPad. Because most of the data lives somewhere else.
Your apps are already on the cloud.
So is any purchased media.
Podcasts could be downloaded from their source. As opposed to pulling them from your iPad.
So really all the backup would need is your application documents and data. Settings. game save state etc.
There would be an issue backing up home (and pirated) movies. Because these could possibly be multi-gigabyte uploads.
But everything else would probably amount to less than a megabyte a day.
C.
Apple would not have brought Open CL and Grand Central Dispatch to iOS 4 if they had not planned to leverage multicore processors eventually in mobile devices.
+1
The new API in iOS 4.0 is riddled with GCD. it is hard to do anything with the newer API without it.
No, it pretty much works like multitasking on any OS.
Thats just not true.
Thats just not true.
Apple provides constraints on multitasking on iOS but under the covers it pretty much works as you would expect.
Multitasking use cases remain much the same as well...at least within the constraints of the kinds of MT modes Apple allows to 3rd party devs and what they can get away with in getting approved for the app store. I can use these services to do a lot outside the descriptions of these services as long as I'm aware the system might kill me in favor of the foreground task or my background task request is refused for some reason (don't recall the max time I can request for a long running task).
I can do a lot of things for an enterprise app that Apple likely wouldn't approve for the app store today. For a dual core iPad these rules could get relaxed but nothing in iOS intrinsically makes multitasking all THAT different.
Apple provides constraints on multitasking on iOS but under the covers it pretty much works as you would expect.
Multitasking use cases remain much the same as well...at least within the constraints of the kinds of MT modes Apple allows to 3rd party devs and what they can get away with in getting approved for the app store. I can use these services to do a lot outside the descriptions of these services as long as I'm aware the system might kill me in favor of the foreground task or my background task request is refused for some reason (don't recall the max time I can request for a long running task).
I can do a lot of things for an enterprise app that Apple likely wouldn't approve for the app store today. For a dual core iPad these rules could get relaxed but nothing in iOS intrinsically makes multitasking all THAT different.
Except the constraints you mentioned.
Except the constraints you mentioned.
Yah, and those constraints don't make multi-tasking innately different. You can still background your app to do stuff. It also has no impact on the advantages of additional cores on multi-threading which helps you even with a single app.