2018 iPad Pro hands-on: Improving on the world’s best tablet

It's a new design, but the improvements that count are on the inside.

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[BullBearMS]

impressive thing here is doubling up on the number of big cores.

The iPhone version of the A12 was already twice as fast as anything in the Android ecosystem with only two big cores according to recent testing.

>The contrast to the best Android SoCs have to offer is extremely stark – both in terms of performance as well as in power efficiency. Apple’s SoCs have better energy efficiency than all recent Android SoCs while having a nearly 2x performance advantage. I wouldn’t be surprised that if we were to normalise for energy used, Apple would have a 3x performance lead.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/th ... -secrets/4

That same testing showed that the iPhone version of the A12 was in striking distance of the performance of the current Intel chips.

>What is quite astonishing, is just how close Apple’s A11 and A12 are to current desktop CPUs. I haven’t had the opportunity to run things in a more comparable manner, but taking our server editor, Johan De Gelas’ recent figures from earlier this summer, we see that the A12 outperforms a moderately-clocked Skylake CPU in single-threaded performance.

Now, with the A12X doubling up on the high performance core count, there is no Android tablet even close to being in the same league.

I'm looking forward to seeing the testing that shows where the A12X stands in relation to Intel.

Love Apple or hate them, you have to admit that this is one hell of an accomplishment.

 

[BullBearMS]

And the best tablet in the universe is a Surface Pro.... who are you kidding with that ghetto iPad stuff made for 4 year olds. You can't be the best at something and have the least amount of applications.

The entire point of a tablet is to run tablet apps designed for a touch screen, not running legacy Win32 based Windows apps that require you to use a keyboard attachment with a touchpad.

Metro never has caught on and the Microsoft's App Store is still a wasteland.

 

[BullBearMS]

And the best tablet in the universe is a Surface Pro.... who are you kidding with that ghetto iPad stuff made for 4 year olds. You can't be the best at something and have the least amount of applications.

The entire point of a tablet is to run tablet apps designed for a touch screen, not running legacy Win32 based Windows apps that require you to use a keyboard attachment with a touchpad.

Metro never has caught on and the Microsoft's App Store is still a wasteland.

Keep saying that you don't want Win32 apps, the last guy just said he'd like to run emulators.

Win32 apps work as expected when you are using a laptop with the sort of precision pointing device they were designed for.

However, a real tablet runs apps that were designed from the start to be used with a touch screen.

Windows has a severe lack of those apps.

 

[BullBearMS]

impressive thing here is doubling up on the number of big cores.

The iPhone version of the A12 was already twice as fast as anything in the Android ecosystem with only two big cores according to recent testing.

>The contrast to the best Android SoCs have to offer is extremely stark – both in terms of performance as well as in power efficiency. Apple’s SoCs have better energy efficiency than all recent Android SoCs while having a nearly 2x performance advantage. I wouldn’t be surprised that if we were to normalise for energy used, Apple would have a 3x performance lead.

While I can appreciate having that power in an iPad if you are running photoshop...but when 99% of the iPhone use is posting to facebook or instagram, messaging, or watching Netflix, I'm not sure why anyone would care about "performance advantage" at this point.

I mean, sure someone can come along with an oddball use case for that power in a phone but for the vast majority of mobile users and their use cases it's a silly talking point.

If Facebook and Instagram are your use case, then buy the $329 iPad introduced in the spring.

However, it's kind of silly to pretend there aren't apps that do things that require much higher performance that fall into other people's use cases.

 

[BullBearMS]

I strongly dispute the claim that this is the world's best tablet. Best Apple tablet maybe, but even then if I absolutely had to go with an Apple tablet I personally would go with the iPad mini.

At the size and price of the iPad Pro, it's directly competing with some very good Windows 10 2-in-1 tablets that will be far more capable devices that actually could replace a laptop in a pinch.

For everything Apple is trying to do with the iPad Pro, including getting full a full version of Photoshop on it, fundamentally it's still crippled by iOS and all of its limitations.

This totally misses the point. Yeah you can buy a Windows convertible, like a Surface Pro for the price of a fancy ultrabook, and it might be a solid laptop. But the point here is this is a tablet, not a laptop. The best apps on Windows are Win32 desktop apps, intended for use with a keyboard and mouse, not touch. iPad apps are actually designed to be used on a tablet screen, and there is hands-down the greatest selection there of any ecosystem.

The goofy thing is that even after Windows Phone failed due to the lack of touch based applications for it, the same people who claimed that touch based apps didn't matter for Windows Phone are now saying they don't matter for Windows "tablets" either.

If you're going to have to run legacy Win32 software anyway, a laptop is going to give you a better user experience than a Surface "tablet" every single time.