There is little doubt the Apple A12X SoC is potent. Apple claims it is faster than 92% of laptops available on the market, and there isn’t much evidence to refute this, but there really just isn’t a good breadth of evidence at all. A12X on iOS is very fast, and the less complicated applications on iOS are not going to cause this tablet to even break a sweat. A more telling test, perhaps, will be once Adobe has ported over the full-fat version of Photoshop to the iPad, which is expected next year.
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So is the iPad Pro an Xbox One S class of GPU? Likely it is. The Xbox One S is only slightly quicker than the original Xbox One launched in 2013, and that console would struggle to achieve 1080p in games of that vintage. The Vega iGPU in the Ryzen 7 2700U offers more theoretical FLOPS than the Xbox One S, although at a higher TDP of 15-Watts, compared to the iPad Pro. In the synthetic tests, the iPad Pro scored higher than the Vega GPU, albeit at a lower precision, but regardless, there’s little doubt that the GPU in the iPad Pro is quite powerful. Add in the efficiency and the lower TDP, and results are even stronger. On the sustained performance run, the iPad was averaging just under 8 Watts of draw for the entire device.
That all said… if there’s an ideal comic-reading iPad, it’s the new 11-inch model. That new aspect ratio, which is taller when held vertically, gives comics far more room to breathe. And the device is thin and light enough to be held comfortably with one hand while reading, which isn’t really the case with the larger model. I’m sticking with my 12.9-inch iPad Pro, but the size increase on the smaller model makes it a much closer thing.
I can’t advocate buying a $799 iPad Pro just to read comics—if you don’t use an iPad for anything else, maybe consider the sixth-generation iPad?—but evaluated just as a reading device, the 11-inch iPad Pro is the best combination of screen size and weight.
These days there’s digital fingerprints over all the music we listen to—all manner of transcription and translation as encoded music passes from cloud servers to computers to wireless headphones. I suspect that technology like True-Fi is only the very beginning of the processing technologies that will be deployed to optimize our listening. From that point of view, True-Fi is a fascinating peek at what’s to come, and certainly worth taking for a spin on a trial.
With each update, the app has added functionality that makes it more powerful and flexible without increasing complexity. Version 2.5, which is out today, continues that trend with four new core features, support for Apple Pencil gestures, a new background paper, and other refinements.
It's like saving items in Apple Notes, but with several added benefits: each saved item includes artwork in the list view, plus a handy synopsis in its detail view, and items can be checked off as they're enjoyed, which adds them to your Activity log.
Apple today reminded Mac developers that it is encouraging them to have their apps notarized, meaning that the apps have been scanned by Apple and checked for malware and other security issues.
But 12 months in, the legacy and impact of Apple’s new analytics is still very much a work in progress: trending positive, but complicated. The data has certainly proved useful, helping some publishers to better understand things like unlistened downloads, ad skipping, and episode retention rates. But based on the exchanges I’ve had, the general feeling seems to be that the data hasn’t fundamentally changed podcasting’s prehistoric perception among advertisers. Many argued that as long as the podcast business remains pegged to the download, trouble is afoot.
This isn’t to say that publishers weren’t able to secure more brand advertisers over the past year. (As many were quick to assure me.) Rather, some sources argue that until measurement actually shifts away from the download, the podcast ecosystem will never structurally unlock brand advertising dollars. One argued the nature of the problem has only worsened over the past year, given the increase in participation from competing platforms — Google, Pandora, iHeart, Spotify, and so on — that could, with their respective user bases and expertise in data and targeting, potentially end up assuming gatekeeper control between brand advertisers and podcast publishers, should any of them gain real traction against Apple.
At Flutter Live in London today, Google launched version 1.0 of Flutter, the company’s open source mobile UI framework that helps developers build native interfaces for Android and iOS.
Nearly 30 years after Microsoft Office came on the scene, it’s in the DNA of just about every productivity app. Even if you use Google’s G Suite or Apple’s iWork, you’re still following the Microsoft model.
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But that way of thinking about work has gotten a little dusty, and new apps offering a different approach to getting things done are popping up by the day. There’s a new war on over the way we work, and the old “office suite” is being reinvented around rapid-fire discussion threads, quick sharing and light, simple interfaces where all the work happens inside a single window. In recent years, the buzzwords in tech have been “AI” and “mobile.” Today, you can add “collaboration” to that list — these days, everybody wants to build Slack-like communication into their apps.