ipad 3 compared to iPad Air 2

[poofyhairguy]

I would think power per pixel isn't an issue at all nowadays.

Don't you have a G2? I am shocked you would say that.

The G2 is a clearly better phone than the G3 IMHO because it has more power-per-pixel. Until they stop upping the pixels counts power-per-pixel is a very important metric.

I do think that this iPad Air 2 is the first "good enough" compute device in mobile. Honestly more than anything I wish it had 3GB or 4GB of ram. I can't tell you how often I strip past the 2GB while web browsing. I don't know how almost every other iOS device owner tolerates 1GB personally, but I have been asking and I think the answer is they use way fewer tabs than me.

 

[Eug]

The only iOS device I can think of that LOOKED like a bad product, but wasn't, is the iPhone 4. I thought for sure its power-per-pixel long-term would hurt it, but thanks to the extra RAM and the fact that the developers ripped out some of the iOS 7 eye-candy it had a long life. Outside of the iPhone 4 the bad devices have been easy to spot.

That sounds about right, except I bought the iPhone 4 without much reservation, precisely because it had 512 MB RAM and got Retina.

I knew 4S would have a better CPU, but I wasn't sure by how much, and knew the 512 MB RAM would make a huge difference.

This was partially based on my experiences with computers, which was that CPU speed for non-gamers generally didn't matter that much, but amount of memory did.

so your ipad3 was working perfectly fine. and then it slowed down after an update?
and there's no way you can revert the update?

You can usually revert for a few days, but after that, no.

I reverted from iOS 8.0 to 7.1.2 on my iPad 2, because I couldn't take the performance hit. However, when 8.1.x dropped, I installed it. It was still slower than 7.1.2 but 8.1.x offered a big improvement over 8.0, and there were a few things I wanted/needed on 8.

BTW, regarding consumers and lack of interest in upgrades based on spec:

I asked two kids (tweens) what they thought of iOS 8.0 on the iPad mini (original). They both liked it, whereas I felt it was way too laggy. They simply didn't notice the problems, or if they did, they didn't care since their games still worked fine.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Don't you have a G2? I am shocked you would say that.

The G2 is a clearly better phone than the G3 IMHO because it has more power-per-pixel. Until they stop upping the pixels counts power-per-pixel is a very important metric.

.

It's probably because I do relatively little in the way of gaming. Probably the most stressful thing in that regard is running the hq4 shaders in my GBA emulator which the G2 does beautifully. Admittingly, the only thing I can compare my current phone to is my old G2x.

Looking at the great 3d visuals in benchmarks and such, I'd assume rendering 2d elements with extra shader effects would be a snap. Now, memory bandwidth on the other hand, I could see being an issue in the ui with increasingly high resolutions. For all the progress in mobile tech, memory bandwidth didn't seem to keep pace quite as well. It's quite possible that more bandwidth would benefit the UI over more compute.

 

[UglyCasanova]

New question. If I buy an iPad with cellular, is the t-mobile 200mb free each month still active? Is that a temporary thing they are doing or will this be ongoing? That would be enough to check emails and get messages, so I'm thinking about going this route.

Is it just flat out free, or is there some kind of catch?

 

[rudeguy]

New question. If I buy an iPad with cellular, is the t-mobile 200mb free each month still active? Is that a temporary thing they are doing or will this be ongoing? That would be enough to check emails and get messages, so I'm thinking about going this route.

Is it just flat out free, or is there some kind of catch?

Is that some kind of deal if you buy through Tmo?


The Air 2 does have an internal SIM, so there might be some kind of catch. I have no idea.

 

[dagamer34]

The longevity of most iPhones is such that by the time they hit their brick wall, you've already upgraded to something else. The only true issue is the 6+, which I hit the brick wall daily, due to the 1GB of RAM causing apps to be kicked out of memory at a rather quick pace.

This has always been a much bigger issue for iPads however, because there's little driving force to get you to replace your current device. All money comes from your pocket. Then again, with the US market slowly switching away from phone subsidization, it will start to fall into the same pattern as well, some version are clearly "better" than others.

Long term, we probably have may 2-3 more years of this, as I don't think we'll be seeing screen resolutions go up much higher than what we have now. We can then focus on pure performance increases, hopefully without OS vendors increasing requirements for no reason at all.

 

[ponyo]

New question. If I buy an iPad with cellular, is the t-mobile 200mb free each month still active? Is that a temporary thing they are doing or will this be ongoing? That would be enough to check emails and get messages, so I'm thinking about going this route.

Is it just flat out free, or is there some kind of catch?

It's free but you have to buy the T-Mobile SIM. It's like $15. I'm waiting for the $1 or free SIM sale.