iPadOS 16: Now we know why iPad Air 5 has M1 chip

Apple iPads
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First, it’s Endicott, who has a well deserved reputation for hyperbole and click-baiting (as if Rubino and Bowden don’t).

Second, I do give him the benefit of the doubt on this one, given this quote:

" With Stage Manager, I get to maintain my workflow that requires multiple forms of input without having to pick up a second device. I can then detach my iPad from my monitor and keep the superior tablet experience delivered by iPadOS.

If all I used a tablet for was drawing, I could easily stick with Windows and pair my PC with one of the best drawing tablets. But for me, it’s about having the best tablet experience around, a drawing setup, and the ability to record and view media all with just one device."

This echos a lot of my feelings - no doubt the SP8 and SG3 are superior productivity devices because they are in fact Windows laptops, but try as they might, MS can’t replicate Apple’s tablet experience nor the integration across and between devices. So it comes down to compromise over which do I value more - better productivity but poor tablet and integration, or fair productivity but good tablet and integration. Like Bowden, I am choosing the later (with my MBP14 as the bridge to real productivity while I’m still practicing law more than half time)…

The one thing both he and I gloss over is the Surface Pro X factor - what if SPX could natively run Windows 11 AND the the full Android tablet experience (not just the Amazon chosen few) - SEEMLESSLY? Would that rebalance the equation? For me, no, because I rely on so many Apple services and find Apple tablet apps far superior to their Android cousins - but for the average Windows user…

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From the article:

Apple announced Stage Manager for iPadOS at WWDC yesterday. While the feature isn’t as groundbreaking as multitasking support or the ability to use a mouse on an iPad

I mean it does support using a mouse, right? What is he referring to here?

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I took it as meaning that he thought the mouse support was more groundbreaking when it happened.

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Oops, reading fail :joy: Thanks!

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This looks like a solid upgrade over my current Lenovo 4K/UHD Adobe RGB monitor, the Lenovo ThinkVision P27u-10. The UltraSharp U2723QE’s contrast ratio thanks to this IPS Black technology starts to hang up there with the likes of the multi-thousand-to-one ratios of VA-based LCD TVs, which speaks volumes. And when you think about it, with ambient light and inter-display haloing (which is why OLED infinite contrast ratio is never attainable in real-world use), once you venture into the 2000:1-and-up range, you hit a point of diminishing returns.

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@Hifihedgehog it wasn’t the absolute best display we’ve tested due to some quite small gray linearity issues, but it was in the top 5 for the last year or so.

BTW: My big problems with OLED and why I suspect the none of the OEMS use them in their truly “pro” level displays (such as HP’s dreamcolor) are the maximum brightness (of which miniLED is the new champ BTW) and more importantly for production especially print, is their tendency to drift both over short term use (as it heats up) and long term as the OLEDs RBG output vary unevenly over time.

A good hardware calibration tool can help with this, but because the short terms shifts are so frequent (for example just displaying a mostly red or green scene for 10 minutes will cause a measurable shift) that it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

OTOH, if you use a display more generally, especially if you want to watch HDR content, OLED certainly has more “pop”. And for instance somebody like HBO will also use OLED displays as "a final proof tool " before some video releasing on it’s platform.

BTW: The “haloing” or lack thereof you mention is a direct function of how much you want to pay. For instance we’ve seen a couple of panels from Samsung and LG that pretty much don’t have it , albeit they both have a raw cost over $2500 for a 27 inch panel.

PPS: IPS black is an interesting tech. It borrows some ideas from both traditional IPS and VA tech. TLDR: it loses the widest display angles of true IPS, but gains a lot of the contrast. IMHO, it’s perfect for computer desktop displays as users typically look at them fairly straight on, whereas with TV"s in a typical living room are much more likely to be watched “off angle” by at least some watchers.

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A little too large, heavy & power hungry for my needs so I’ve ordered a used/like new ViewSonic VG2455-2K 24 Inch IPS 1440p Monitor for $240 on Amazon, fulfilled by ViewSonic. Not really for my iPad Pro 11" so it’s fine if it won’t be compatible with Stage Manager. I just want a larger monitor for my Mac Mini than my current 15.6" 4K cheapie while being as power efficient as possible. This ViewSonic gets an Energy Star “Most Efficient” rating, the highest rated monitor in the 1440p category. Amazon customer reviews are very good, too. VESA mountable for my desktop arm and under the 11lb limit at 8.8lbs sans stand. We’ll see how it goes. :crossed_fingers:

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@Dellaster We have tested that display although not with an iPad .

Especially when you factor in cost, it’s an excellent display for what you pay. The only thing you might notice is slow pixel response in things like games, but OTOH it’s decently accurate out of the box (which always earns Kudos from me)

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Thanks for your input. Sounds like it’ll be OK for me. I don’t play anything but single player games so pixel response isn’t that important (specs say RESPONSE TIME (TYPICAL GTG) 15ms). It’s still way faster than the monitors I got used to back in the day. :wink:

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Just to be nitpicky, but I hadn’t noticed that they actually specified response time, albeit with the qualifier of “typical”. FWIW when we tested it, we got a 24ms response which is the norm for low to medium end IPS panels.

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Oh well, it’s a good thing I’m not looking for 2-3ms in order to make those head shots in a FPS tournament. :smile_cat:

I doubt I’ll be handicapped in Stellaris.

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Yeah, the last time I tested my own eyes, I couldn’t perceive any differences reliably below 30ms, OTOH my teenage son and slightly older daughter measured in the 3-4 ms range…

The blessing of young eyes…

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Young eyes that didn’t grow up having to deal with this:

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The irony is eye candy like high refresh rates and response rates don’t necessarily make a player any more successful. There was a guy I knew at a between-semesters job who had a low-end system (I think he may have even been using just Intel integrated graphics) who would top gaming tournaments against the players with high-end rigs. It is simple hand-eye coordination and reflexes, and the rest just makes it more enjoyable but doesn’t guarantee a level-up in skill level.

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True, the pixel response tests are specifically about visual acuity whereas pure reflex response is much more complicated.

BTW: odd fact, but the latest data we’ve seen shows that your ability to discern variations in shades of color and brightness peaks in your early/mid-twenties and then gradually falls off in your thirties and accelerates significantly in your forties, where as general visual acuity follows a more predictable curve.

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Federighi did an interview at TechCrunch that helps explain (better I think) why Stage Manager is an M1 only option:

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Okay, I’ll buy that. But I’m not who they need to appease since as the owner of an M1 iPP I’m not locked out of this stuff. Will the 2018 & 2020 non-M1 iPP owners buy it? :batman_thinking:

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My guess is they’ll try to at least give them full screen mode but with 2 side by side snapped apps and call it a day. Then they can upgrade in a couple of years to OLED if they still are unsatisfied. Courage + “can’t innovate anymore my a$$” = Apple :man_shrugging:

I realize that sounds harsh, but two thoughts: (1) I don’t think he’s lying about technical difficulties; and (2) so many of those same owners complained incessantly about NOT Mac-ifying their precious iPad experience until they couldn’t have it - tough -I’ve been hammered in Mac forums internet wide for wanting even more than Apple is delivering now (still want dual boot) so they can go pound sand.

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So this is far from definitive, but we have recompiled a couple of our custom apps to in theory anyway, be more fully compatible with IOS16 and stage manager.

Speaking to the complexity and why it’s an M1 only option, seems to start with a major change in the way the OS handles apps.

Basically with IOS15 regardless of processor, when you launch an app, it fully loads in to active memory and then stays there. If you launch another app, it does the same with the new app. If it then exceeds the available RAM, the previous app is essentially paused (or sleeps in Apple parlance) and if you switch back to it some or all of it is then loaded back in to RAM to make it active again.

With IOS 16 and the M1, when the app is loaded, it behaves almost the same as IOS15 in that it loads fully in to memory and stays there until you switch to another app. The key difference is that when the second app is launched, if it exceeds available RAM, the first app is not “paused” from an OS standpoint, but instead a significant portion especially anything UI or I/O related is then written out to virtual memory and continues to be refreshed by the OS for UI and I/O as though it was still the active app.

And thus if for example the app is actively doing something it continues to do so, albeit at slower rate due to the inherent speed differences between storage and RAM.

One thing that all need to consider when thinking about all this, is all of the A and M series chips uses a unified memory architecture which operates very different than Intel which uses in some cases a shared memory architecture.

To greatly oversimplify, with IOS and it’s chips the memory allocations are almost constantly adjusted and rebalanced between the the various chip cores, the OS and the apps.

Whereas with intel again oversimplifying quite a bit, but memory, both RAM and virtual are sort of allocated and reserved in a more fixed and rigid way. Yes Windows will change these as you are using the system. But if you observe closely, it’s not an instant process. In other words, it’s not uncommon for the app that was launched earlier and mostly written out to VM to be somewhat sluggish for at least a moment while Windows reallocates memory.

The M1, because it essentially has to be compatible with VM because of the way MacOS and it’s apps have used virtual memory forever, has specific microcode to expedite this memory management between virtual and real RAM. Prior to the M1, the A series chips didn’t (or need to) do this because even virtual memory has a power penalty. And the one or two potentially heavy memory use apps like procreate, basically had their own custom memory management.

So TLDR, both stage manager and full external monitor support ( up to a 6K external “canvas”) make external use of virtual memory constantly.

BTW: the amount of “virtual memory” is fixed and is a mirror of the RAM in the system. eg. an 8GB RAM M1 has 8GB of virtual memory, and a 16GB has 16GB of VM set aside. And thus why Apple inherently went with larger RAM allocations, only in the highest storage allocations, as obviously allocating 16GB when you only have 64GB total storage could be problematic.

That’s our findings/observations so far.

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My measly contribution is a better review of the Files App - guess I’ll have to pay up on my switch to iPad full time this fall