iPad

The video below shows the iFixit teardown of the new iPad mini. If teardown are not your thing, skip to 1:20 in for a great shot of the iPad mini “jelly scrolling”. Best video of this I’ve seen.

As you watch it, note the left and right sides of the screen alternating their refresh. That’s the effect. Slightly annoying, perhaps, but it is what it is, and for me, it’s more interesting than it is a problem.

We posted about iPad mini jelly scrolling a few days ago.

From the linked Ars Technica post, here’s Apple’s response:

In response to our inquiry, Apple has told us that the “jelly scroll” issue on the 6th-generation iPad mini is normal behavior for LCD screens. Because these screens do refresh line by line, there is a tiny delay between when the lines at the top of the screen and lines at the bottom are refreshed. This can cause uneven scrolling issues like the ones observed on the iPad.

And Ars’ take on this response:

We maintain that this effect is noticeable on the iPad mini in a way that it is not noticeable on other 60 Hz LCD iPads we’ve tested, like the iPad Air 4 and the latest $329 iPad. There’s also a clear dividing line down the middle of the screen in portrait mode, as observed in our testing and in the video linked below—it’s not a problem isolated to the extreme edges of the display. The upshot is that the company doesn’t believe there is a hardware or software issue to “fix,” and that the screen apparently is the way it is.

Bottom line, Apple is saying, “Is what it is, get used to it”.

M.G. Siegler:

For the 11th straight year that Apple has been making iPads, there will be no native Weather app for the device. This despite the fact that such an app launched on day one with the iPhone, fourteen years ago. And despite the fact that a Weather widget, made by Apple, has existed for a few years now. With iPad OS 15, that widget is getting the same upgrade that it got in iOS 14. That is, it’s moving to the home screens of millions of devices.

OK, sounds good, a weather widget on the Home Screen, what’s not to like?

And when they click on it, they’ll see… this bullshit.

Pausing so you can follow the link.

Honestly, it’s embarrassing. Apple has outsourced its soul to an absolutely awful weather.com webpage. On load, you’ll see crappy ad after crappy ad. Keep scrolling and you’ll quickly be subsumed by shitty click-bait-y ads. “Kill the Goblin!” And go further still and it’s full-on porn-y spam. Apple is sending millions upon millions of their users to this experience. Apple!

And:

That default Weather widget is about to land on tens of millions of iPad screens with the launch of iPad OS 15 this fall. And with that, Apple will be sending tens of millions of dollars (maybe more?) indirectly to weather.com — which, incidentially is now owned by IBM. Insert the Steve Jobs giving the finger image here.

Just for you, M.G., here’s that famous photo.

Side note: The photo was taken by Jean Pigozzi, and shared with Andy Hertzfeld, who shared it with the world.

Is weather.com paying for this placement on iPad? Why is the iPhone weather experience so different from iPad? Have long wondered this. Anyone know the real scoop?

Follow the link for images of the old vs new tab design, as well as the Settings interface for switching between them.

You can also see these two things on Twitter (here’s my Settings tweet, and here’s one showing the new tab layout).

I do appreciate the new setting, which separates the issue of the all in one address bar from the design of the tabs themselves. Here are some thoughts on the tab design:

The rounded rects feel retro, outdated. The tabs feel like blobs, floating in space. An individual tab does not feel strongly rooted to the page below it. If you have multiple tabs open, it’s not immediately clear which tab is connected to the page below it.

The current tab is marked by a different shade. Unfortunately, this effect is subtle, not at all obvious-at-a-glance. All of these point combine to make it difficult to get a sense of where you are (which tab is active) and where to tap to make changes.

Beyond this are some behavioral issues, which I see more as tweakable beta issues, not foundational design problems. When I tap on a non-active tab to switch to it, the destination tab is selected, and then, after a slight pause, the tab layout changes. This comes up consistently when I try to select a background tab to close it. I tap the tab, then head to the close “x” to tap on it. By the time I get to it, the tab layout has changed just enough for me to miss and cause another tab to come to the front.

There are other tweaky behavioral issues, but I think if the iPadOS Safari team can address the tab design issues, the rest will sort itself out over time.

My two cents.

“Expectations are the thief of joy.”

Michael Simon, Macworld:

Despite few negatives and a 4-star score in this review, I wouldn’t actually recommend the 12.9-inch iPad Pro to anyone who wasn’t already dead set on buying one. The screen is nice but not noticeably better than last year’s. The chip is fast but not noticeably faster than last year’s. The front camera is improved but not noticea—OK, the front camera is a lot better. But that’s not really a reason to spend a thousand-plus dollars to upgrade.

Read the review. If you ignore the headline and the conclusion (quoted above), it makes a great case for how phenomenal the new iPad really is. There’s the FaceTime camera and Center Stage. The incredible speed boost. The display upgrade. There’s a lot to love here, especially if you make use of apps that place a demand on the iPad processor.

But, to be fair, like most Apple hardware that has evolved over time (iPhone, Apple Watch, Apple TV), if you own the previous model, the leap in performance might not justify the expense of moving up by a single model. That’s just life in the ecosystem.

Sebastiaan de With, Halide blog:

Let’s take look at what’s new with the M1 iPad Pro cameras. In taking a quick look at what’s new, we’ll share a discovery: your iPad has a superpower that not even Apple has told you about.

Superpower? You have my attention.

I’m one of those people that got the nearly-thirteen inch iPad Pro, which is an absolute spaceship of a tablet. It certainly does not evoke thoughts of anything micro, but that’s precisely where its strength lies.

iPad basically comes with a microscope. That’s right: you can take some pretty incredible macro shots of things without any accessories. The iPhone 12 Pro (or any iPhone, really) has a different lens design and only focuses to about 8 cm (that’s over 3 inches) away from the camera lens. iPad Pro easily focuses on things much closer to its sensor.

And:

Interestingly, with the LIDAR sensor assisting autofocus it can sometimes be a bit hard to try this fun attribute of the camera — With Halide for iPad, you can drop into manual focus mode and to get ultra-close-ups of everyday things. Try it out for yourself if you have an iPad!

Yet another compelling argument for jumping on the iPad Pro train. Look at those closeup photos. I use a macro lens on my mirrorless Sony camera, but the display is what holds me back. It’s hard to get the focus just right.

But when the screen is one of the best in the world, and ten times as large? That’s a game changer.

Zoom blog:

Attention all iPad Zoomers! You’ve got some great new features coming to the Zoom app on Apple’s latest iPad Pro models, which were announced at Apple’s Spring Loaded event on April 20.

Two new features – support for Apple’s Center Stage and expanded Gallery View – will help you better participate in calls, potentially stave off video fatigue, and better connect over Zoom.

And:

Previous iPad models can display up to 25 video tiles in Gallery View, but those using Zoom on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro can now see up to 48 video tiles (6×8 in Landscape Mode), allowing them to better connect in large meetings.

Don’t have the latest iPad Pro? No worries! Many iPad models are also getting expanded Gallery View, and those users will see a few additional participants on a single screen, depending on the device.

To bring more or fewer people into view on any iPad, simply pinch the display with two fingers to zoom in and out.

Nice to see Center Stage adoption happen so quickly. You’ll need Zoom 5.6.6 or later, hitting the App Store this week.

I always look forward to Austin Mann’s camera reviews. But, in this case, he’s showing off the flip side of the lens, the M1 iPad Pro used as a photography tool.

Specifically, scroll down about a quarter of the way down the review and hit play on that first video (it’s portrait mode), check out that performance as Austin steps through, and then fast scrolls through a large collection of 60 megapixel images.

And, with Thunderbolt, this is true for internal or external storage. Blazing fast. No lag. Amazing.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Based on five legitimate Geekbench 5 results (here’s the fifth) for the fifth-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the M1 chip, the device has average single-core and multi-core scores of 1,718 and 7,284, respectively. By comparison, the fourth-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the A12Z chip has average single-core and multi-core scores of 1,121 and 4,656, respectively, meaning that the M1 iPad Pro is around 56% faster.

That is crushingly fast. That is a bigger leap than the benchmarks comparing the Intel vs M1 MacBook Pro.

David Nield, Gizmodo:

One of the marquee features of Apple’s 12.9-inch Pad Pro for 2021 is its Liquid Retina XDR display, a screen tech that you might have previously seen mentioned in relation to the super-expensive Pro Display XDR monitor that Apple also sells. But what exactly do all these terms mean?

And:

Nowadays, just about every bit of Apple hardware qualifies as Retina, which is why you’ll now see extra words like “liquid” tacked on as well—the Liquid part of Liquid Retina on the iPad Pro listings just means even more pixels per inch, and even less chance of your eyes seeing any pixelation no matter how close you bring the screen up to your face.

And:

In the simplest terms, XDR is an enhanced version of HDR (High Dynamic Range) that extends its benefits.

And:

The key to HDR is having a very high contrast ratio, or the difference between the blackest blacks and the whitest whites that a display can put out. With XDR, Apple has pushed that range even further. The Apple Pro Display XDR can manage 1,000 nits of full-screen, sustained brightness, and a peak of 1,600 nits, resulting in a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio.

My current iPad (the 2018 “education” iPad) is 500 nits. My M1 MacBook Air display is only 400 nits. So the leap to 1,000 nits, with a peak of 1,600 nits is a bit mind-blowing.

There’s a lot more of this in the article. After reading it, makes me want to order the new iPad Pro just to experience this screen in my day-to-day iPad life.

Matthew Panzarino interviewing Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak and Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus about the new iPad Pro:

Last year’s model is still one of the best computers you can buy, with a densely packed offering of powerful computing tools, battery performance and portability. And this year gets upgrades in the M1 processor, RAM, storage speed, Thunderbolt connection, 5G radio, new ultra wide front camera and its Liquid Retina XDR display.

And:

Apple has essentially ported its enormously good $5,000 Pro Display XDR down to a 12.9” touch version, with some slight improvements. But the specs are flat out incredible. 1,000 nit brightness peaking at 1,600 nits in HDR with 2,500 full array local dimming zones — compared to the Pro Display XDR’s 576 in a much larger scale.

And:

“One of the things that iPad Pro has done as John [Ternus] has talked about is push the envelope. And by pushing the envelope that has created this space for developers to come in and fill it. When we created the very first iPad Pro, there was no Photoshop,” Joswiak notes. “There was no creative apps that could immediately use it. But now there’s so many you can’t count. Because we created that capability, we created that performance — and, by the way sold a fairly massive number of them — which is a pretty good combination for developers to then come in and say, I can take advantage of that. There’s enough customers here and there’s enough performance. I know how to use that. And that’s the same thing we do with each generation. We create more headroom to performance that developers will figure out how to use.

“The customer is in a great spot because they know they’re buying something that’s got some headroom and developers love it.”

And:

“How crazy is it that you can take a chip that’s in a desktop, and drop it into an iPad,” says Joswiak. “I mean it’s just incredible to have that kind of performance at such amazing power efficiency. And then have all the technologies that come with it. To have the neural engine and ISP and Thunderbolt and all these amazing things that come with it, it’s just miles beyond what anybody else is doing.”

The use of the same processor in a smartphone, a tablet, and a desktop is no small things. Intel made a living building custom processors for different enclosures, tuning their chips to get the most performance per watt for each specific device type (Here’s Steve Jobs talking about the origins of this strategy). With Apple’s M1, they’ve flipped this strategy on its head.

“Your battery life is defined by the capacity of your battery and the efficiency of your system right? So we’re always pushing really really hard on the system efficiency and obviously with M1, the team’s done a tremendous job with that. But the display as well. We designed a new mini LED for this display, focusing on efficiency and on package size, obviously, to really to be able to make sure that it could fit into the iPad experience with the iPad experience’s good battery life.

And:

One of the marquee features of the new iPad Pro is its 12MP ultra-wide camera with Center Stage. An auto-centering and cropping video feature designed to make FaceTime calling more human-centric, literally. It finds humans in the frame and centers their faces, keeping them in the frame even if they move, standing and stretching or leaning to the side. It also includes additional people in the frame automatically if they enter the range of the new ultra-wide 12MP front-facing camera. And yes, it also works with other apps like Zoom and Webex and there will be an API for it.

And:

It also goes a long way to masking the awkward horizontal camera placement when using the iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard.

And:

I ask how they would you characterize an iPad Pro vs. a MacBook buyer? Joswiak is quick to respond to this one.

“This is my favorite question because you know, you have one camp of people who believe that the iPad and the Mac are at war with one another right it’s one or the other to the death. And then you have others who are like, no, they’re bringing them together — they’re forcing them into one single platform and there’s a grand conspiracy here,” he says.

“They are at opposite ends of a thought spectrum and the reality is that neither is correct. We pride ourselves in the fact that we work really, really, really hard to have the best products in the respective categories. The Mac is the best personal computer, it just is. Customer satisfaction would indicate that is the case, by a longshot.”

And:

“Contrary to some people’s beliefs, we’re never thinking about what we should not do on an iPad because we don’t want to encroach on Mac or vice versa,” says Ternus. “Our focus is, what is the best way? What is the best iPad we can make what are the best Macs we can make. Some people are going to work across both of them, some people will kind of lean towards one because it better suits their needs and that’s, that’s all good.”

Great interview.

Great video from Jeff Benjamin, 9to5Mac. Jump to about 1:10 in to skip the unboxing.

This is a pretty cool gadget if the iPad is your main computing device. It’s a solid stand, continuously rotatable and tiltable, with (about 2:45 in) a bunch of ports (that’s the hub part). And there’s even an add-on so you can charge your Apple Watch.

I do love the concept, but this is an expensive bit of kit. $480+. Gulp.

And, like an iPhone case, once you move on to a new generation of iPad, chances are, this stand won’t work with the new shape of the new iPad. Watch Jeff insert his iPad (3:50 in). This hub was designed specifically for a particular iPad. No one size fits all. But my gut tells me a one size fits all design would be possible. And that would have been a home run for me.

Still, iPads do have pretty long lives, and if you are living that good iPad life, this is worth a look.