It’s now seven iPhones in a trenchcoat
Top sku iPad pros with the keyboard case cost more than some MacBooks and people try and use them like MacBooks, which is crazy to me given the severe limitations of iPadOS compared to macOS.
Does M3/M4 support AV1 encoding?
The “bento box” graphic during the presentation yesterday said AV1. From the press release:
The Media Engine of M4 is the most advanced to come to iPad. In addition to supporting the most popular video codecs, like H.264, HEVC, and ProRes, it brings hardware acceleration for AV1 to iPad for the first time. This provides more power-efficient playback of high-resolution video experiences from streaming services.
Ah again. One more moving target to chase for the nice AsahiLinux project.
I love it on my M2 Mac mini. Useless with macos because it needs more than 8gb of ram just to start without loading anything but Asahi turns it into a fantastic ARM server. I just wish GPU team had more resources to finish the driver. M2 is absolute shit at transcoding on CPU. I mean it’s also terrible on GPU, but I can’t complain considering how little power it consumes.
AsahiLina was at it yesterday, ultimately chasing Vulkan compatibility:
I know, but I don’t care about GUI or gaming. I just need transcoding.
I guess they did a poll and most people want kde on these to replace their desktops so my use case is low priority. That’s why I wish Lina and her team had more resources.
The iPad Pro screen looks pretty good, but don’t need all that processing power to just watch videos and browse websites.
Was really hoping they would upgrade the iPad Mini.
ipad pro is specifically marketed for artists and their software actually needs power and speed. Having OLED on mini would be great. It’s one of my most beloved devices.
It’s a really good point though, it is a bit of an odd device with all that power and the significant limitations in software. Yeah it’s marked at artists, but if you’re talking about drawing with pen input, it’s actually pretty overpowered. There’s Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro but they benefit a lot less from a touch screen, and there’s a bunch of workflow issues due to iOS’ lack of a file system.
I really wish Apple would add some kind of “windowed mode” like Samsung Dex or the Surface Tablets. A $2.5k super high-powered device that can’t even open two Excel sheets side by side is quite strange.
There’s procreate which introduced advanced animation and effects thanks to the new chip. I also know people use it heavily for 3D modeling. “Drawing with pen input” is the use case for the rest of the line up, Pro is specifically for computation heavy professions.
ipads have side by side window view and float over view, of course it should be much better but viewing two apps or tabs side by side hasn’t been an issue for me. Maybe excel just doesn’t support opening a second window or a separate tab.
