Comment by Havoc
8 hours ago
To what end?
I genuinely don’t get the purpose of these high end processors in a tablet. Like more power is nice but what would I do on it that needs it?
Serious gamers mostly steer clear of Apple. Video editors presumably use desktops/laptops. Browsing doesn’t need power. Video watching doesn’t need it. Programming on iPads is cumbersome.
Who is the target audience that gains from this?
You'd be surprised by the horsepower some games require, my wife plays Love and Deep Space and she recently just bought a new iPad because the game requires some good specs and a LOT of storage space. She's not a "serious gamer" as your parlance.
But the iPad is not a console … it doesn’t even do Steam. All that horsepower to play … a couple of forever titles and that’s it. I have the M1 iPad Air and it has never used that processor to its fullest. I think iPad is just an odd device for most people
mobile gaming is much bigger than HN would believe.
A lot of people do in fact, play more than a couple forever titles.
I know multiple weebs that want more powerful ipads to play mobage.
But that's the thing, most "gamers" aren't the ones that games that normally on Steam are targeting. Mobile Gaming is almost double the size of Console Gaming by revenue. Some people just like having a huge screen for their games.
On the go video / photo editing is AMAZING on my iPad! More power speeds up some the effects / transition editing. Batch processing, all with a device that has great battery life and is smaller than a magazine. For super heavy stuff, sure, use my Mac, but when I travel and want to be productive on the go, the iPad is awesome!
Remember, the reason the iPad doesn't do Steam is because Apple won't let it. It is perfectly capable otherwise.
I do wonder about this too… I'm cutting 4K video and doing SwiftUI development on an M1 MacBook Air. My current plan is to upgrade next year, but only if they upgrade the screen. An M4 seems like a dramatic over-spec for a tablet.
Yeah, maybe I'm too much of a "real gamer" but my iPad sits unused. The quality (and greediness!) of games on the iOS App Store is often worse than the direct-download console slop.
Music production is the killer feature that benefits a lot from CPU performance.
I only recently bought an iPad for the first time this year after realizing this was feasible. I’ve always preferred digital music workflows, but hated dealing with a laptop and DAW. iOS supports AUv3 plugins and cross app audio, so it’s pretty much a full DAW experience (I use loopy pro). The form factor forces AUv3 devs to design smarter interfaces.
Plus, I dislike using the iPad for literally anything else, so I’m less likely to get distracted :)
>hated dealing with a laptop
Can you expand on this, as im having a hard time comprehending. At the least, a laptop is a tablet with a built in stand :). How is a laptop hard to deal with?
Music production with a DAW is better on a computer. Music performance is much better on an iPad. There is a big difference between direct touch controls and using a trackpad. Apps like AUM and AniMoog Z highlight what makes music making on an iPad amazing.
And people here don't want to hear this but the closed nature of the App Store is why audio is so strong on both ios and iPadOS. There are far more music apps for those OSes than Android. In addition to that, many VSTs made for DAWS are available on iPads as AUV at much lower prices than Mac or Windows. The lack of piracy, narrow build targets, and predictably great audio implementation makes it both easier to build and more profitable than other platforms.
It's probably the immediacy. You click an app and you get a fullscreen touch UI with no distractions. Quite different to opening a slow-loading DAW and starting up various plugin windows inside it.
iPad music apps are typically priced far lower than the equivalent PC apps, and there's a thriving community of iOS-only development as well.
For me it's the sweet spot between hardware (which is expensive and annoying to cable up) and PC VSTs (I associate my laptop with work). The fact the iPad can also be used for videos/books/drawing/note taking is just a bonus.
I prefer music production on a laptop, so I'm not the target audience here. But it's so easy to pick up the iPad and noodle on a synth for 5 minutes.
And the music you write is infinitely better than the music you don't. Anything that inspires gets extra points for that alone. :)
Better chip = better performance per watt = longer batteries for similar levels of performance, running cooler. Also it never hurts the smoothness of the interface.
It just ultimately makes it a nicer device to use.
Ive been using mine since 2018, the ipad pro. If you do any drawing then it’s a no brainer, and that’s why I got it in the first place.
Then it was so good that I used it to travel and to watch videos in bed in place of my computer. If I need to work I’ll take my laptop though.
IMO if you don’t use your laptop to work it doesn’t make sense to use a laptop instead of an iPad.
It's great, sure. But why release an M4 iPad Pro when essentially no software can make use of the processor power improvements since 2018?
No software? DaVinci Resolve? Affinity Designer? Final Cut, Procreate, AUM, Logic Pro etc etc etc. As the processors get more powerful more demanding software can be made for it. Running multiple physical modeling AUVs along with FX loops eat up clock cycles. Final Cut Camera on iPhones along with Final Cut on an iPad allow for full multi camera controls and recording from 4 different iPhones with ProRes and log shooting at the same time.
If Apple hadn't continually upgraded the processing power then none of those programs would work. It's up to Apple to make compelling hardware. Better hardware allows more advanced programs. iPads are amazing.
Because people will buy it.
People complain when Apple doesn't do spec bumps. But when Apple does do spec bumps, people complain again.
It’s as if there are a bunch of different people out there.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
People complained when apple doesn't do spec bumps back in the intel era when their computers were getting legitimately clapped.
Artists benefit hugely from the extra horsepower. My brother works in the animation industry and uses an ipad as his primary work device when travelling.
It's a spec bump, soon they'll introduce M5 powered iPads. More GPU cores, more neural engine cores, more unified memory -- eventually iPadOS features will spring up to take advantage of this stuff. I assume the target audience for this is folks who want to make future-proof purchases or those who likely have more money than sense.
iPad is the most absurd device ever. It is fully capable of running a full blown general purpose OS, but artificially restricted to be a YouTube machine. Something you give kids in a restaurant to be quiet. Putting an M4 in it is like Apple rubbing our faces in it. Look at this device that could do everything, but can't do anything.
Comments like yours just go on to show how narrow the worldview of many HN users is. Just because you don't know how people are using their iPads doesn't mean iPads "can't do anything". It defies common sense, too. If iPads couldn't do anything, why would people buy them consistently? I can imagine people buying them once because they don't know any better. But iPad is more than 15 years old now.
I know exactly how it's used. I said in my comment it's used by kids to watch YouTube. By age 4, 58% of children have their own tablet. And YouTube is the #1 app for iPad. This is the majority use case, next to collecting dust on a shelf, or gifts for people's aging parents.
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/researc...
You don't think an M4 chip, amazing, screen, form factor, quality - all for children to watch YouTube videos with is absurd? TSMC all busy making 3nm chips to be used for watching CoComelon. An amazingly powerful, affordable device that is totally locked out of being used for general purpose computing. That doesn't irritate you?
Those are not high end processors? You can get them in apple's most basic laptops. They are just good, but not high end.
They're half a second away from offering an iPad running MacOS (or a tablet MacBook, take your pick). They're baby-stepping their way to this, obviously.
I've yet to figure anything you can do with these but watch videos and play some games; I always end up grabbing the laptop.
Doubt. Apple doesn't see hardware sales as a primary revenue driver, rather they're a rent-seeking company that makes money by being the iron-fisted middleman for the app store. They don't see any benefit from user freedom if it makes them less money in the end.
They're amazing for digital art. That and reading PDFs at near true-life size.
At the very least it is one less TSMC 3nm chip in the hands of competition.
So even if they break even, which I highly doubt, they would rather use it in a kids tablet than let the competition use it to power a flagship phone.
It lets the iPadOS/app devs write slower software without you noticing too much
Web browsing modern websites like Github (or some worse ones)
People who buy things, mostly.
But is that really a market worth going after?
Is it really worth going after a market known for people who buy things? Do companies like money?
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> But is that really a market worth going after?
Clearly yes. Those things keep selling.
Bill Gates, is that you?