And what will I be able to do with that performance bump? I use a tablet mostly for taking notes, email and looking at websites. I can’t see how the former can get any quicker. The latter is slow mostly because of the websites themselves. Will games or office apps get faster or have new possibilities?

Apple has kind of disappointed me with the software situation on iPads. I have an iPad Pro that I use as a laptop, but the reality is that the processing power available is underused. It has a 120Hz screen, but websites can't render to the canvas at 120Hz. There is no CAD software (which is nice when you design something and head to your makerspace to actually manufacture it -- I just print plans out on paper, but it's annoying if you need to change something while you're working). There is no software development software. (iSH is neat, but TestFlight-only, and probably something Apple doesn't like. I assume it will be removed from my device at any moment.) I can kind of download pictures from my digital camera and edit them, but the experience isn't great.

I think Apple's problem here is that they don't want to cannibalize OS X sales with tablets, and they don't want to cannibalize App Store revenue by letting people type in code to solve their problems.

Anyway, I've been relatively happy with the crippled mobile device model for a while, but it doesn't seem sustainable. I'm waiting for someone, anyone, to produce a 5nm ARM chip that anyone can buy, and then just having a Linux laptop like a normal person. As it stands, nobody other than Apple seems to be able to produce a decent mobile chip. This is very bad for the field of computing in general.

> they don't want to cannibalize App Store revenue by letting people type in code to solve their problems.

This seems implausible as a reason for keeping dev tools off iDevices, because 1) what percentage of their users would do that in the first place, beyond using spreadsheets, which are already available? Would it even be 1%? 0.1%?, and 2) they've made moves to add features like Shortcuts that enable that sort of thing, but which productivity-nerd non-programmer project managers and such are able and willing (and eager) to use, unlike dev tools—and those aren't just toys, they can absolutely replace certain kinds of what might could have been paid apps, before.

I think it's more likely that it's hard to add them without opening up security holes and making it easy to bypass the App Store and/or offer a 3rd party store, without making the tools so crippled that they're insufficient for actually developing & deploying serious software for oneself (in fact they've already released something so-crippled, in Playgrounds), coupled with their expecting extra sales of iDevices from adding dev tools to be tiny (so, not worth the cost & risk).

I agree in general, but it really depends. The iPad port of Clip Studio for example is literally, 100% the desktop version. I mean exactly, it has the top bar menu (file/edit etc) and everything.

Most of the other painting applications like Procreate have no real desktop equivalent either. From an art perspective, the iPad is at or ahead of the desktop experience. There are digital artists right now who have had 100% of their career on an iPad.

I completely agree with your point but just wanted to note that iSH is available on the App Store (and hasn't been booted out as of now by some miracle) and love it to bits.

> I think Apple's problem here is that they don't want to cannibalize OS X sales with tablets…

This seems unlikely. Tablet sales are way more of their business than the Mac. My guess is they’d be happy to Tablets consume the Mac altogether.

> …by letting people type in code to solve their problems.

You must have missed the announcement that Swift Playgrounds will be able to build complete apps and submit them to the store.

Why is it acceptable at all for you to work on a platform where the vendor has the power to remove anything at will?

It’s a sub 500 dollar device aimed at casual users and students. You sound like a power user, you should opt to go for the MacBook Air bare-minimum.

The comment you're replying to says they have an iPad pro, that's not a sub 500 dollar device.

The M1 is neat but it's not worth it for me. I hate everything about OS X. BSD command-line tools, a slow-as-most-glaciers Terminal.app, constant nagging about some menial task I need to perform for the computer. Nope, nope, nope. ("But if you just screw around with it for 20 years, then it will be just perfect." I already spent 20 years screwing around with Linux, so that cost is sunk. Sorry.)

I really don't like doing "computery" stuff on more than one machine, and I already have a 32 core desktop workstation for normal work. That will never go away, which means the laptop can't be at all "computery". I want to touch an app with my finger and have the app start up. Every time, no matter what. (And to be fair, the iPad Pro absolutely delivers on that.) To me, a laptop will always be the second fiddle, something I use once a month or so. I find that if I don't screw around with my computer for a month, everything has stopped working -- but with a tablet, it just turns on and all is well. So you just throw the thing into your backpack for a trip, then when you get to the airport it turns on and 4G connects to the cell network, and everything is great. You have a computer, not computer problems.

(Other laptops I've used in the past... Surface Pro 4. Left it turned on on my desk, went to get it ready for a trip... BAM brand new version of Windows and everything was broken. I didn't take it on the trip and just used my phone to browse the Internet at night. Chromebook Pixel: basically no problems, but just as limited as an iPad. Various Linux laptops: honestly, most of my vacation memories involve wpa_supplicant.conf, and a lot of problems 10 minutes before whatever conference talk I was giving. Not sure if conference WiFi or Linux bugs, but it wasn't pleasant.)

Casual users and students will go with the base model 10-inch iPad that's about $200 less.

Ever since the Mini 4, Apple's set premium pricing on the Mini. This is the most expensive one yet.

Of course not.

We all know that there have been no functional improvements to software enabled by processor speed increases since the 8081. Everything since then has been programmers slowly using up their "wait()" calls placed in code in the 70s to fake it.

"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."

— Henry Petroski

We need to bring back the Turbo button.

Generally better battery life. Mobile devices are generally get task done, go to sleep or wind down whatever cores/systems possible. So by doing it faster, it’s generally using less power for the same task. This is often spent in areas like smaller systems, lighter, brighter screens or radio’s though as they work towards a battery life as the budget.

Then buy a lower end device. Some of us rely on these things to do productive work, or play resource hungry games.

I wouldn't say that slow websites are because of slow network traffic in most cases now, though. I think this will make the web much quicker on this new edition, and that's a useful thing in itself.

Gaming performance and capabilities should be very much improved. Whether you will use or notice the improvements is an entirely different question, of course.

It's down to personal preference, but my wife went from an iPhone 8 to 12 (A11 to A14) and it was a night and day difference in speed.

About to go from a 7 to a 13 Pro, and expecting a nice bump in speed...

The performance is to help you add more work types into your current workflow.

Things will be faster for a little bit then will bloat up to be just as slow as soon as the new hardware is standard

People who say this obviously don't remember watching the screen slowly draw itself on old text terminals when you hit page down.

Now, we complain when it drops from 60fps to 40fps while rapidly slinging high resolution text + images with our fingers, and also that this is somehow "slower".

Its amazing how much our expectations have changed.

Yep. Not much inventive to keep their software fast - if it gets slow, people buy more hardware from them!

It can monitor for 3rd party payments in the app store three times as fast.

Do you have a source for the claim that they use the A15 in the iPad mini? It stood out to me that they left the details of the SoC out of the announcement.

lede of the linked post:

>iPad mini features [...] the A15 Bionic chip

whoa a performance bump!