KITA

lkrupp said:

If you want to do real work on a tablet you get an iPad, end of story. The ‘competition’ are just media playback devices.

Care to elaborate on what "real work" on iPadOS is? Is it doing POS tasks? Accessing a cloud service? Skimmed down MS Office work? I'm curious.

The iPad Pro is an amazing piece of hardware, but iPadOS is holding it back from actually being useful for productivity beyond basic or niche tasks. Even previous iPad Pro models are well under-utilized for their hardware capabilities.

Despite all the flak they get for "not being a tablet", Microsoft's 2015 Surface Pro 4 was the benchmark for productivity in this form factor. Sure, it didn't have smooth touch apps that iOS/iPadOS offers, but it could use the pen for literally any drawing app, OneNote, StaffPad, CAD software, etc. While at the end of the day, it was a still full Windows PC that could run just about any software, VMs and work with pretty much any device (dock, printer, monitor, controller, external storage, wired network, etc.)


Yes, it was running full desktop PTC Creo in 2015.

I do hope Apple finally finds a way to bridge macOS and iPadOS for the iPad Pro, because there is so much potential there (keeping my fingers crossed for WWDC21).

AppleInsider said:

According to sources of Bloomberg, Microsoft is working on an in-house processor design, one that could be used in its Surface lineup, but may also end up in servers. Thought to be ARM-based, the chip design unit is said to report to Jason Zander, the head of Microsoft's Azure cloud business.

That's a weird spin in the title to make it sound like Microsoft is following Apple to ARM.

First paragraph in the bloomberg article:

Microsoft Corp. is working on in-house processor designs for use in server computers that run the company’s cloud services, adding to an industrywide effort to reduce reliance on Intel Corp.’s chip technology.

Microsoft is going the ARM route for servers (Azure), similar to their largest competitor Amazon. AWS has already been using Amazon's own second generation ARM Graviton2 processors which, as Amazon claims, offers customers 40% better price performance than x86 based instances. A third generation Graviton3 (likely based on Neoverse V1 or Neoverse N2) is expected in 2021.

Seriously, this isn't all about Apple all the time.

sflocal said:

Apple's chip beats out Qualcomm chips?  Wake me up in a few years when Qualcomm actually does something.

This is embarrassing.

This is a bit deceiving given the claim seems to hang mostly on peak CPU and peak GPU performance.

While I understand it's going on what's been provided, the Snapdragon 888 likely has a more powerful GPU in sustained performance (claimed and historical implementations demonstrate this).

Note - the higher end Snapdragon 865/+ based devices have typically offered the same peak and sustained performance. Meanwhile, the A13 and especially the A14 can be a bit of a mess despite that impressive peak performance.



The 888 also has a better integrated 5G modem and an extremely impressive ISP. In terms of AI? The 888's DSP (+CPU/GPU) offers 26 TOPS, the A14 only offers 11 TOPS.

It looks like Qualcomm will have to continue to rely on ARM's Cortex X program if they want to catch up (or at least try) to Apple in raw CPU performance. The underclocked Cortex X1 is an impressive jump, but not exactly ARM's ideal implementation (larger L2 and higher clock). Even in the ideal case, it would still fall short of Apple.

The Surface Laptop 3 was their competitor to the MacBook Air. The Surface Laptop Go has a 12.4" 3:2 display and is 2.4 lbs.

Surface Laptop 3 (2019) - $999

13.5" 2256x1504 display
Intel Core i5-1035G7 (4 cores / 8 threads with G7 graphics)
8 GB LPDDR4X-3733
128 GB SSD (user replaceable) 
2.79 lbs

MacBook Air (2020) - $999

13.3" 2560x1600 display
Intel Core i3-1000NG4 (2 cores / 4 threads with G4 graphics)
8 GB LPDDR4X-3733
256 GB SSD
2.8 lbs