That memory viewing utility looks cool, I wish the reviewer did more tests with higher end apps with that. Anandtech said the 64 bit apps use about 25-30% more RAM just doing the same things, so with no increase in RAM capacity that worries me a tad. With my 1GB RAM iOS devices it already kicked things out of RAM way more than I wanted.
I know its probably hard to believe but I can buy and enjoy Apple products, own stock in the company, but also be critical at times when warranted.
Okay, will give you the benefit of the doubt on your genuineness. I tried to reproduce some of the behaviors you cite, and I agree, they do exist. But, man, you have to be super-critical to even notice them. Are they a problem or irritant? Not for me—had to be led by the hand to even notice them. As for side-by-side, I have used the iOS 7 implementation of multitasking several times to my benefit. I consider it an improvement. Bottom line, your criticisms are valid, but unusually nit-picky in my opinion. Your rush to negatively characterize the group was self-fulfilling to a large extent. Hope you visit more often but don't come in half-cocked.
This feels like a completely different device that my previous iPad 3. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. It's also smokin' fast. I'm missing the TouchID (whudda thunk it!?!) from my iPhone on this device. Other than that little niggle, it's about damn near perfect.
I can't wait to replace my 3rd gen iPad with the iPad Air arriving today
@Ireland, The lighter the better? Even at the expense of battery life? Because, make no mistake, that is exactly what you're suggesting we compromise on.
If I got 10 hours out of it, then maybe I'd be happy with the battery on the Air. As it is — and I admit it's only been three days of usage— I'm getting a few hours less than that. No, I reckon I often need around 15 *claimed* hours & for that I'd be happy to lug around a 50% heavier iPad.
Mine came fully charged out of the box on Friday. After setting it up and topping off the charge, here I am on Monday morning with 22%. I use it off an on all day. Nearly always by my side to do email, play games, visit websites, etc. probably won't see the charger until I go to bed tonight, three and one half days after last charge. For my fairly constant punctuated usage I'd say this is pretty darned good. Better than my 3 for sure. Your mileage may vary, but hey …
I've become real close to boycotting Apple and pulling the Apple logo's off my car. I refuse to buy any Apple iPad or iPhone with a touch ID sensor. Pros: There should not be one. Police state 5.0 Thank you Snowden
Please remove tinfoil hat before posting.
1. The iPad doesn't have a Touch ID sensor.
2. You don't have to enable it.
3. If you enable it, it doesn't transmit your fingerprint data anywhere.
4. If the Feds wanted your fingerprints, they could get it legally and easily.
Cool. I'll wait for ipad6 then and pass on ipad5 this time.
It's hard to resist the Air, but if I had an iPad 3/4 I'd try to wait for iPad 6 too. The iPad is really beginning to come into its own. I think the iPad Air is the true beginning for the iPad. The late 2014 model iPads are going to be absolute beasts!!!
Just bought an Ipad Air and still have my Ipad 4 that I'm wanted to sell.
I don't know if this is specific to the one I bought, but my experience with the Air is not as entirely positive as everyone else.
Of course the weight reduction is great and the thing is beautiful. But I was surprise by the 2 things:
1- The image quality on my Ipad 4 is little bit better (a bit crispier and more beautiful colors).
2- The sound quality on Ipad 4 is also better (and I can feel vibrations through the Air when volume is high).
Anybody else experienced the same with the Ipad Air?
Thinner isn't always better for sound quality, less space to bounce the sound into itself that creates better mids and lows. Just buy a bluetooth speaker, Bose makes the best I have ever heard. As far as the image quality is concerns, I don't see it, it looks fantastic to me.
Back to the real world, Apple's decision to gimp the backlighting is already resulting in a lot of returns due to screen uniformity issues. Fortunately my copy seems to be OK.
Just got my 128GB slate grey, and in the process of setting up.
It's bloody gorgeous.
I always wonder what people put on such large drives. Even on my MBP 128GB would be more than enough. I do have a home Mac which has 16TB but for my mobile needs I just don't need that much. I suppose if it was my only Mac or only computing device I'd want more.
I'd rather an iPad that was twice as heavy if it had twice the battery life!! (I feel like I'm a voice in the wilderness on this one. Does no one feel likewise?)
No one, and I repeat no one, wants a heavier tablet. With the wild success of the light-weight iPad mini, Apple learned that people wanted a light-weight tablet they could hold in one hand and be comfortable doing it. The brick-weighted iPad was history. The iPad gaining weight was not the strong selling point. The iPad Air was the next logical step, not another heavy iPad with the same fat bezel. 10 hours isn't good enough for you?
Love my new Air, i got the 64g wifi. The speed bump from the ipad3 is just incredible. I got the smart case, my new air with the case is lighter than my old ipad3 without a case.
Btw i just sold my ipad3 32g 4g for $350, reducing the cost of the upgrade.
A few benchmark:
Basemark X on screen score: 13.32 fps
Basemark X offscreen score: 15.52 fps
GFXbench 2.7 T-REX HD off screen : 1488 (27 fps)
GFXbench 2.7 T-REX HD on screen : 1152 (21 fps)
GFXbench 2.7 Egypt HD off screen : 7164 (63 fps)
GFXbench 2.7 Egypt HD on screen : 5507 (49 fps)
I wish that Egypt HD test could be a real game, looks so nice.
Just pointing out that apple is still selling 2nd gen. 16 GB for $400 but a used 3rd gen 32 gb cellular (naturally around $600 newi would guess, then another $100 for used) much better is about same price as IPad 2.
I would have literally bet a million dollars the iPhone 5s was the only device to get Touch ID this year. And I don't think it's to keep the iPhone 5s at the top of the pile like Gruber suggested in his bollox 'forward looking' comment. I think the 2 reasons why the 5s was the only device getting Touch ID this year was: 1. product clarity, in terms of the product, the customer and marketing, and 2. to give Apple 1 year to test Touch ID in the marketplace before adding it to all of their products. Could you imagine the catastrophic failure it would be if after 6 months in the real world Touch ID started failing? Apple would have to recall every new iDevice sold over that period.
And the bonus for Apple is this time next year, when they feel comfortable with Touch ID they can start slapping it on all new high end iOS devices.
The Air is nice but let's be honest the iOS7 is choppy on this device. The multitasking still sucks and again is choppy, the lack of 2 apps side by side is again a major short coming and 1GB of ram is a huge disservice. I can barely get 5 tabs on Safari without a refresh.
I realize if this was Microsoft people would be up in arms and rightfully so, but because it's Apple things are acceptable as always. The fact that 16GB is still priced at $499 which is woefully inadequate these days makes me laugh even more.
Having gone from the 4s to the 5s, I totally appreciate the speed bumps. I will not touch one because I know that I will want it to replace my version 3. But using the Touch ID lets me know I want that on my next iPad, even though security is less of an issue on an iPad than an iPhone, but I still want to have it.
No one, and I repeat no one, wants a heavier tablet.
Oh dear, it just must be me then, no one.
Look, I don't want a heavier iPad for the hell of it, I just want more hours of usage. If that means it weighed the same as my iPad 1, i.e. 730 grammes - roughly 50% heavier, I would be very happy. To me that wasn't a brick, that was light.
I thought I made it perfectly clear a couple of times already. Let me restate: I would like 10-15 hours of usage. Not 7.
Everyone's different. I'm quite happy with the Air and I think that the weight savings are an impressive engineering achievement. But if I could get at least a 50% longer battery life I'd be happy to take whatever weight gains are associated with that.
Comments
That memory viewing utility looks cool, I wish the reviewer did more tests with higher end apps with that. Anandtech said the 64 bit apps use about 25-30% more RAM just doing the same things, so with no increase in RAM capacity that worries me a tad. With my 1GB RAM iOS devices it already kicked things out of RAM way more than I wanted.
This feels like a completely different device that my previous iPad 3. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. It's also smokin' fast. I'm missing the TouchID (whudda thunk it!?!) from my iPhone on this device. Other than that little niggle, it's about damn near perfect.
I can't wait to replace my 3rd gen iPad with the iPad Air arriving today
No. I never said that trade off.
Please remove tinfoil hat before posting.
1. The iPad doesn't have a Touch ID sensor.
2. You don't have to enable it.
3. If you enable it, it doesn't transmit your fingerprint data anywhere.
4. If the Feds wanted your fingerprints, they could get it legally and easily.
The iPad 6 (Air 2) is seriously going to kill:
Improved display
8MP camera
802.11ac
Touch ID
A8
You'll need an excuse not to buy it.
Cool. I'll wait for ipad6 then and pass on ipad5 this time.
...
4. If the Feds wanted your fingerprints, they could get it legally and easily.
True. But NSA obtains emails, cell comms, social media posts, etc., all illegally. What else NSA couldn't do.
It's hard to resist the Air, but if I had an iPad 3/4 I'd try to wait for iPad 6 too. The iPad is really beginning to come into its own. I think the iPad Air is the true beginning for the iPad. The late 2014 model iPads are going to be absolute beasts!!!
Just bought an Ipad Air and still have my Ipad 4 that I'm wanted to sell.
I don't know if this is specific to the one I bought, but my experience with the Air is not as entirely positive as everyone else.
Of course the weight reduction is great and the thing is beautiful. But I was surprise by the 2 things:
1- The image quality on my Ipad 4 is little bit better (a bit crispier and more beautiful colors).
2- The sound quality on Ipad 4 is also better (and I can feel vibrations through the Air when volume is high).
Anybody else experienced the same with the Ipad Air?
Just bought an Ipad Air and still have my Ipad 4
that I'm wanted to sell.
I don't know if this is specific to the one I bought, but my experience with the Air is not as entirely positive as everyone else.
Of course the weight reduction is great and the thing is beautiful. But I was surprise by the 2 things:
is little bit better (a bit crispier and more beautiful colors).
is also better (and I can feel vibrations through the Air when volume is high).
1- The image quality on my Ipad 4
2- The sound quality on Ipad 4
Anybody else experienced the same with the Ipad Air?
Thinner isn't always better for sound quality, less space to bounce the sound into itself that creates better mids and lows. Just buy a bluetooth speaker, Bose makes the best I have ever heard. As far as the image quality is concerns, I don't see it, it looks fantastic to me.
Cool. I'll wait for ipad6 then and pass on ipad5 this time.
Actually you can keep all of that, I want more memory, iPads been stuck on 1GB of RAM since version 2, inexcusable.
Back to the real world, Apple's decision to gimp the backlighting is already resulting in a lot of returns due to screen uniformity issues. Fortunately my copy seems to be OK.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1665350
It's bloody gorgeous.
I always wonder what people put on such large drives. Even on my MBP 128GB would be more than enough. I do have a home Mac which has 16TB but for my mobile needs I just don't need that much. I suppose if it was my only Mac or only computing device I'd want more.
I'd rather an iPad that was twice as heavy if it had twice the battery life!! (I feel like I'm a voice in the wilderness on this one. Does no one feel likewise?)
No one, and I repeat no one, wants a heavier tablet. With the wild success of the light-weight iPad mini, Apple learned that people wanted a light-weight tablet they could hold in one hand and be comfortable doing it. The brick-weighted iPad was history. The iPad gaining weight was not the strong selling point. The iPad Air was the next logical step, not another heavy iPad with the same fat bezel. 10 hours isn't good enough for you?
Just pointing out that apple is still selling 2nd gen. 16 GB for $400 but a used 3rd gen 32 gb cellular (naturally around $600 newi would guess, then another $100 for used) much better is about same price as IPad 2.
Oh dear, it just must be me then, no one.
Look, I don't want a heavier iPad for the hell of it, I just want more hours of usage. If that means it weighed the same as my iPad 1, i.e. 730 grammes - roughly 50% heavier, I would be very happy. To me that wasn't a brick, that was light.
I thought I made it perfectly clear a couple of times already. Let me restate: I would like 10-15 hours of usage. Not 7.
Everyone's different. I'm quite happy with the Air and I think that the weight savings are an impressive engineering achievement. But if I could get at least a 50% longer battery life I'd be happy to take whatever weight gains are associated with that.