Stross on iPad 2

03/03/2011

Stross on iPad 2

SF writer Charles Stross weighs in on the new iPad:

Firstly, there's nothing revolutionary here — but a lot of minor irritants in the first generation iPad have been sanded smooth. It's a bit lighter, and now weighs as much as a 300-page hardcover novel: that's surprisingly important, as the predecessor weighed about as much as a giant doorstep book, and was just too damn heavy to hold in your hand for lengthy periods. They've replaced the inadequate old book-style case (a dirt magnet with sharp edges and a lid that flopped open, incompatible with docks — including the keyboard dock) with a genuinely elegant cover system held in place by magnets. And they've bumped the CPU and GPU performance significantly: no hardware teardowns yet, but it looks like they've gone from a single-core ARM Cortex A8 with 256Mb of RAM and a PowerVR SGX 535 GPU (same performance as the Intel GMA500, if I remember correctly) with a dual-core ARM Cortex A9, an unknown amount of RAM (probably 512Mb), and a GPU that's claimed to provide nine times the rendering throughput. That's going to make it a much snappier machine in everyday use.

Secondly, it's all about the hardware/software synergy.

For starters, iOS 4.3 uses a faster Javascript renderer — double the speed on the same hardware. But that's trivial. Every new feature of the iPad 2 seems linked to a piece of software that makes use of it....

There's no one thing about the iPad 2 that makes it a must-have upgrade over the iPad 1, but the sum of the parts offers a whole slew of benefits. Apple are going to sell a freightload of these things. And then in 6 or 12 months (once they can get part yields they can sell at an existing marketing price point rather than for $BIGNUM) they're going to roll out the iPad 3 with a quadrupled pixel-count and force everyone to upgrade again.

In the last week I used my iPad to: Watch QI on Youtube. Watch TV shows, movies, and music videos from my iTunes library. Online banking. Online shopping. Web access. WSJ. BBC. Dinner reservations over Open Table. Deer Hunter. Online poker. Document access via Dropbox. Document editing via Quick Office. IMDB. Twitter and Facebook. Online cribbage. Paypal transfer. NY Times crossword. Listed to Sirius radio. Looked stuff up on Wikipedia. Blogged. Played around with a mind map. And, oh yes, read a couple of books. It's become an essential gadget. A lighter, faster one with better hardware/software integration will be well worth it. Even if I do have to upgrade next year.

Posted at 10:16 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink

Comments

SF writer Charles Stross weighs in on the new iPad:

Firstly, there's nothing revolutionary here — but a lot of minor irritants in the first generation iPad have been sanded smooth. It's a bit lighter, and now weighs as much as a 300-page hardcover novel: that's surprisingly important, as the predecessor weighed about as much as a giant doorstep book, and was just too damn heavy to hold in your hand for lengthy periods. They've replaced the inadequate old book-style case (a dirt magnet with sharp edges and a lid that flopped open, incompatible with docks — including the keyboard dock) with a genuinely elegant cover system held in place by magnets. And they've bumped the CPU and GPU performance significantly: no hardware teardowns yet, but it looks like they've gone from a single-core ARM Cortex A8 with 256Mb of RAM and a PowerVR SGX 535 GPU (same performance as the Intel GMA500, if I remember correctly) with a dual-core ARM Cortex A9, an unknown amount of RAM (probably 512Mb), and a GPU that's claimed to provide nine times the rendering throughput. That's going to make it a much snappier machine in everyday use.

Secondly, it's all about the hardware/software synergy.

For starters, iOS 4.3 uses a faster Javascript renderer — double the speed on the same hardware. But that's trivial. Every new feature of the iPad 2 seems linked to a piece of software that makes use of it....

There's no one thing about the iPad 2 that makes it a must-have upgrade over the iPad 1, but the sum of the parts offers a whole slew of benefits. Apple are going to sell a freightload of these things. And then in 6 or 12 months (once they can get part yields they can sell at an existing marketing price point rather than for $BIGNUM) they're going to roll out the iPad 3 with a quadrupled pixel-count and force everyone to upgrade again.