I think the Snapdragon X Elite has only "performance" cores, right? Are there other versions with efficiency cores?
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iPad Pro's M4 Chip Outperforms M3 by Up to 25%
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There are two models in the Snapdragon X lineup: Elite (12-cores) and Plus (10 cores). If I'm not mistaken, both have only performance cores, no efficiency cores.
And Apple is big on performance per watt. So in most m4 models they deleted a performance core but added 2 efficiency cores.
That’s interesting, because my understanding is Apple didn’t really talk about the GPU. That uplift seems worth mentioning.
This is the correct way to approach it. My general advice to anyone who needs a new computer now is to get what is available now. There is always some improved version of a cpu, ram, processor, gpu, etc. on the horizon.
Totally agree. If you need a computer now, you shouldn't wait 6-12 months to resume working on all your projects. Not enough people understand the cost of doing nothing while they wait for the latest and greatest computer to be released.
So what? An iPad is useless as a productivity device (unless your are an artist which may represent a very small proportion of the iPad owner market and then most of the artists I know hate the thing). Read my email, reply to email, browse the web, watch movies stop. I cannot sort my photos or do sophisicated editing or do my music compositions or produce large and even marginally complex documents. The M4 is a complete waste of time in an iPad. However I am becoming convinced that Apple has bigger plans that may make this computing power useful in a slab of touch sensitive glass. I am waiting and wondering, but iPad OS with an M4 seems like a sledge hammer to crack a nut to me. I sure hope Apple has something up its sleeve that everyone has missed or this is a colossal miss.
You can do photo editing and music composition pretty well with ipad these days
Maybe for you but not for me. And I know a good number of people that agree. Lightroom on an iPad is, to me, a joke. Lightroom classic is still by the far the best app for managing your assets and doing relatively sophisticated editing. And do not bring up Photos which, to me is a disaster. I have 100K plus photos in my library. Try managing that on a iPad with or without an M4. Sorry, I hate to be a little over the top but this fawning over the M4 on an iPad just seems pointless. I doubt it can do anything better than the M1 or even pre M1 machines could do. The use cases Apple showed are so niche and specific that they probably make no sense at all to the average user.
Also, I'm quite sure it was workload-appropriate last week.
it remains so, this week.
So it doesn't work for you. Great, don't buy it.
iPad works great for other people. Useless to you maybe, but not broadly useless.
This is classic argument by failure of imagination. Because you can't imagine something being true, it isn't true. Except, your imagination doesn't define the limits of the possible, it just defines the limits of you.
This is a classic fallacy much enjoyed by flat earthers and anti-evolutionists. Not really good company to be in.
I don't really have any use for M4 levels of power in an iPad either. That doesn't mean I think nobody should want or can use that.
BTW, iPad Pros aren't for the "average user". So it really doesn't matter if what Apple showed makes sense to that sort of person.
Fair points but largely irrelevant. My issue is not with limits of imagination, I can imagine plenty of uses that this device might do, but cannot. Flat earthers and anti evolutionist do not suffer from lack of imagination but from lack of understanding. Quite different and comparing my point to this viewpoint is very insulting and misses the key point I was making.
The issue I have is that the iPad as currently implemented, which includes its software, does not require an M4 but might if Apple have a different destiny for device. I use my iPads a lot, but I have no way to make them do what I would like. And you are correct, the average iPad Pro user is not the average iPad user, but they are severely limited by the current implementation of iPadOS. An M4 will not help until there is a fundamental rethink in the way an iPad works, Pro or not. Try not to be so judgmental please.
You are correct I will not buy it until the software can make use of it. And if the people who can use the new facilities an M4 offers buy it, great. My point is that if the market for new facilities only an M4 offers is much larger than I suspect, then the majority of, even Pro, users can probably wait until we see what Apple has in store for it. The M4 is an amazing technological achievement but I still do not see what it does for the current iPad software ecosystem that an M1 or M2 does not, except for the use cases Apple demonstrated in their presentaction.
You realize you cannot sell a touch device which doesn't support Mac OS right? They are going to expose themselves to millions of complaints and potential lawsuits for selling a device that is faulty.
It's a good thing you are not Tim Cook.
If you want Mac OS on your iPad, use 3rd party solutions such as remote accessing apps.
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They barely talked about the CPU as well. I’m unsure why they downplayed it (they mostly sold the M4 as “much better than the M2, with more AI focus and a better display controller”), but it probably boils down to wanting to focus on iPads, which never came with the M3. Perhaps WWDC will give us a deeper dive into the M4.
Apple might be doing a mistake here. The innovators dilemma will catch them one day, and this device might be the one. They clearly built a device that from a hardware point of view would be a very nice Surface and MBA 11" replacement/competition. Apple deliberately decided to not compete with their macbooks.
Healthy internal competition would require to enable MacOS for it. There is no technical reason to not do so.
If they don't do it, competition will come up with this. Convertibles are all around now, the biggest remaining limitation is the crappy Windows OS. But still, I see Apple loosing business to them...
Pity! I would immediately upgrade my IPP 11" if I had the choice between ipadOS or macOS...
Healthy internal competition would require to enable MacOS for it. There is no technical reason to not do so.
If they don't do it, competition will come up with this. Convertibles are all around now, the biggest remaining limitation is the crappy Windows OS. But still, I see Apple loosing business to them...
Pity! I would immediately upgrade my IPP 11" if I had the choice between ipadOS or macOS...
So if you exclude the areas where Apple has made big improvements there are only minor improvements. Apple is doomed! /s
BTW I redid the analysis with Zen 3 to Zen 4 ... turns out they also benefited from a massive increase in Object Detection by incorporating AVX512-VNNI (basically using massive AVX 512 vectors or in AMD's case, dual 256 bit vectors), which GB6 supports to do AI on the CPU. Nobody seemed to mind Zen 4 getting a 2.2x increase in scores then. GB6 also supports AVX 512 in Blur and AMX (Intel's matrix operations) in Object Detection and Photo Library. Basically Zen 3 to Zen 4 in IPC looks very much like an M-series upgrade, maybe a very good one, but hardly as much better as you might think.
With comments highlighting how the iPad Air was over 2 years old and the iPad Pro was nearly the same, I can't see anyone suggesting iPad remain stagnant (despite M2 itself already being overkill). Just to be clear, criticism of iPad not being able to 'dual boot' or such for productivity or "power users" is valid. But, the "2-in-1" ideal or concept for Tablets / Laptops, has been marketed and sold, with no real success, for over a decade.
I mean, if Microsoft's 10 iterations of the x86 Surface Pro tablet can't establish anything more then niche interest while offering full desktop Windows on regular desktop Intel processors with full-size USB-A and USB-C and docks to allow for multi-monitor support to run unmodified desktop applications natively ... well then ... why would an iPad do any better?
If the M4 Apple Silicon (with an iOS that dual boots or allows native execution of Mac applications) is going to be what unlocks the utopian dream -- then Apple's been perfectly justified for the past decade to stubbornly keep the iPad just an iPad, uncompromised by niche appeal.
IMO, it could be a start for legitimate 2-in-1's or, at least, far less compromised ones.
What’s the actual downside for either of them though? Just the fact that so many people are still asking for it seems like it should be enough of a reason.
Microsoft already has to support devices and components from hundreds (thousands?) of different manufacturers. What’s one more? And it will increase sales of Windows licenses.
For Apple, it’s not some huge engineering undertaking. It’s just a tool to partition the drive and aid with installation, plus drivers. It would a be a big value add for anyone who might be on the fence between a Mac and PC. And they can again claim that the Mac is the best Windows capable device you can buy.
Parallels is an ok solution, but I’m not interested in spending $100 per year to occasionally run Windows, on top of the windows license itself. Bootcamp is probably the only thing I miss about Intel Mac.
Apple would need to make Windows drivers available. They don’t use ”off-the-shelf” components anymore for key features such as the CPU and GPU, display controller, and IO. They may not see much upside. It isn’t as if many are going to buy a MacBook Air/Pro specifically to run Windows ARM.
“Switchers” were important in 2006 when Mac was Apple’s main product. In 2024, the iPhone is Apple’s main product, and Apple uses the tie-ins to iOS/iPadOS to drive Mac sales.
I do understand what you’re saying but I believe you (and others) are reading too much into the M4 iPad Pro. It is about making it thin, with a large OLED display and maintaining a long battery life. Apple needed a new chip to accomplish this. So do they make a custom iPad chip or do they take a chip already in development and make it a “jack of all trades”? Hence the M4. Many of the M4 processing improvement features are wasted in an iPad (I do agree with you) but it was the most efficient means to bring a thin OLED Apple tablet to market quickly. And as long as the processing enhancements are there, it make for convenient marketing.
This is a bit of a detour but... Yes, failure of imagination is common in anti-evolutionists. You frequently read/hear arguments like "The eye is way too complex to have evolved! I can't imagine it developing through random chance!". True, there is a lack of understanding, usually a willful one (it ignores the selection half of the variation/selection team), but it truly is a failure of imagination as well. (Fun fact: the eye has independently developed over 40 times.) The same disability drives flat-earthers - the ones that aren't publicity-seekers, anyway.
I think this is an apt comparison to statements like "the iPad as currently implemented, which includes its software, does not require an M4". That's true for you, with your use cases. (It's also true for me with my use cases.) But it's not true for everyone, and your inability to recognize that is the failure of imagination.
To be clear, I agree with you (and many others) that the iPad is too hobbled. I would love it to be able to dual-boot. (Perhaps if a jailbreak is found, some enterprising hacker will make that happen.) But it is what it is. And for some people, more CPU/GPU, even in an iPad, is better.