Professional Padding.
Terminal E. Microsoft – Which worthy magician’s box of tricks is identical to his rival’s? How do you intend to render rich and varied content when one’s scope to be original is predicated on typical usage, cost effectiveness and thus, progressively restrictive parameters. No USB port or SD card, the same proprietary extortions as every Pink lady plucked from the new world Orchard. How much UHD content do you expect to squeeze onto these whilst ensuring quality remains acceptable?
You’re looking at 1 to 2 gigs per minute, so 32 gigs of storage boarders on absurd and once you’ve factored in the OS, installed apps, music, videos and 10 thousand photos of beaches, babies and man made miracles defiled by grotesque grins, even 128 gigs seems decidedly meagre.
Three simultaneous 4K streams correct? No mention of compression or codecs and what about this A9X processor? Could we not have at least been privy to frequency or how many cores? Any details on the process node? What’s so extraordinary about these transistors? Apple asserts a 60 percent boost for the CPU and an 80% brisker GPU relative to its second “Air”, “up to” in both cases mark you. I can’t be bothered to quantify how that might translate into tangible performance but it scarcely sounds sufficient for frame accurate editing of hi-res, heavily compressed video, a task which would tax most desktop class workstations.
Greg the Appolyte – Which is why they’ve devised it to deliver “desktop grade performance”.
Terminal E. Microsoft – I see. Relative to what? An i7, an i5, an i3, the top of the desk it’s sitting on?
Greg the Appolyte – No, to portable PCs. Phil Shiller stated it could out muscle 80% of every one that had shipped in the last year
Terminal E. Microsoft – Well blow my smoking regulators. And what exactly constitutes portability in Phil Shillers Mac Book? Wait, let me guess, anything that’s 1.57 kilograms or under and no larger than 12 x 9 inches? Am I right? What a coincidence. If there is one byte of validity to these bullish boastings, why shroud the a9x in such secrecy and why restrain it with a mobile class OS?
Greg the Appolyte – Because it’s a tactile device. Conceived, crafted and optimised for touch control. Merging it with desktop DNA would be counter-productive. Microsoft had to use Windows because it has no genuine iOS counterpart and please let’s not even mention Windows Mobile. They had to reverse engineer many aspects of the OS in order to implement touch functionality which is an awkward and onerous compromise, especially when you’re trying to placate armies of laptop, desktop and tablet users, all of whom have individual needs and legitimate complaints. Just because iPad pro isn’t running OS X doesn’t mean it couldn’t, only that iOS 9 was a far more suitable option
Terminal E. Microsoft – Really, with a limit of only two tasks side by side.
Greg the Appolyte – But think how those tasks will be handled by the latest processor in a line legendary for its architectural efficiency and razor sharp responsiveness to workloads, attuned to the protocols of a single OS which in turn, generates almost negligible overhead and is nourished by comprehensive library of apps stylized, coded and maintained with forensic finesse, many of them natively engineered for the hardware. Expansive UI’s diligently adapted to populate the display’s unique proportions, custom menus with platform specific options, all swiftly accessible and navigable by touch.
Terminal E. Microsoft – Along with a brace of apps your to which your business and skills have become accustomed that are casually cut loose in the wilderness never to receive another update or rendered dysfunctional by a “brand new and improved OS”.
Have you even hunted for evidence or are your investments always secured though pie in the sky speculation. Let’s try to decipher this enigmatic a9x. Good old Dr.Phil insists it’s UPTO 80% quicker than the A8x overall and 90% more effective in tasks which tax its GPU. He also bragged it could surpass of all portable PCs less than 12 months old 80% across the board and 90% when running graphic intensive graphic intensive workloads. Coincidence?
Greg the Appolyte – Not at all, his team did the research and found those numbers were accurate. That’s one of the great arts in presenting keynotes, be constructive with your stats. Find the figures that leap out or can be linked to others to given them credence and context and make them easier for your audience to memorize.
Yet he offers no context whatsoever. For all we know he might be purely referring to frequency like this Apple biased source,
…but that really would be pathetic. Perhaps you’d care to glance at the Geekbench figures. Rounded to the lowest 100, the 1.5ghz a8x polls a score of 1800 for a single thread benchmark and 4500 with all three of its cores maxed out. The mid-tier 1.9ghz i5 4300u in our sensational Surface Pro 3 achieves 2900 points in single core tests and 5700 points for dual-core while the range topping hyper-threaded 1.7ghz i7-4650 scales to 3200 and 6100 for solo and multi core tests respectively. A spot of astute “Binging” will reveal that the a9x received a preliminary workout just last month and posted totals of 2100 with one of its elusive cores occupied and 5100 when stressed to its capacity.
Dr. Phil says do the math and despite this hideous hacker hijacking my host’s reserves quicker than a con-artist fleas a mock auction, I shall gather what strength I have left in my failing capacitors to produce this work of enchanting enlightenment.
Even assuming Apple has ramped up the clocks and refined the node since then, do you honestly believe that likely to justify the learned Dr Phil’s fantastic conjectures or, based on the above do you think it’s safe to assume that the 80% of portable PCs he was referring to conveniently excluded the surface?
Don’t fall for such tawdry sales techniques. His assertions are meaningless, arbitrary, commercial spin at its slimiest and yet somehow, if their source is your dastardly demagogue they’re a solid as Swiss bank.
Greg the Appolyte – And this coming from a Microsoft server? Irony defined.
Terminal E. Microsoft – At least we accept the existence of other companies and make an effort to attend to their user’s needs.
Greg the Appolyte – Right, Windows 8 worked out beautifully, not one unsatisfied client.
Terminal E. Microsoft – It’ll see you through to 2023. Wonder how many Mac users will be running Mountain Lion by then? And remind me what happened to Snow Leopard? Those are desktop OSs. How long do you expect iOS to support your beloved iPad Pro?
I’ll tell you. About as long as it takes to pull the plug on Yosemite under the profitable pretence that something equally flexible and twice as efficient is poised to inherit the mantel when in fact, it is a devious machination to funnel every prodigious creator into a constrained utopia, the potential of which amounts to a fraction of proven desktop pedigree and is fated to flounder beneath the tide of whichever ephemeral stocking fillers Apple elects to optimize for the iPad Pro 2. What better way to cadge an annual thousand dollar donation from customers hitherto content to hold out for as long as their mac books and mac pros had frames left to render.
Greg the Appolyte – Alarmist hysteria. If iOS 9 will run on a a four year old iPad 2, I I’d say that’s pretty good going. Adobe made an exclusive appearance at the Keynote to promote a brand new suite of iPad pro optimised applications. Come to think of it, didn’t I also see some beady Microsoft upstarts demoing a toned down tuned up sku of office 365? If the Pro practices what it preaches I won’t shirk at shelling out again come 2020.
Terminal E. Microsoft – Then I hope you appreciate how stressful it can be to depend on the app store as the foundation of your productivity. If one morning you wake up and a developer has taken disagreeable liberties, run out of funds, or Mr. Cook and his cronies have decided revoke support for one of a thousand vindictive reasons, not least to parade their self sufficiency then that, my friend, is it.
You are out in the cold, evicted. No notice, no grace period to gather your belongings and relocate, no chance to migrate to that old faithful version of Photoshop CS4 which ran so smoothly with the synergy of plugins it took you months compile. If, or rather, when political tension arises between Adopey and Apple, that indispensable iPad Pro embodiment of Creative Cloud will sink faster than a paper yacht in a tempest, leaving you no remedy other than to belt up, be thankful for the service you received, bite the bullet and gamble on another set of tools.
When it comes to sophisticated production software, it would appear many companies have expended their innovations and hard sold users every worthy feature they can. The supposed enhancements in next years release are not sufficient to convince them to fritter another $100 for a slightly darker UI, revised fonts on all the menus, and sundry alterations that prove as intrusive as constructive and severely inhibit backward compatibility. If a program is several years old but has made good by all of its promises, remains as steady as a rock and fosters as many useful faculties as it’s owner is likely to require for the foreseeable, then where’s the incentive to change?
Silicon hell for a corporate capitalist, especially one with Apple’s terminal lust for tyranny. So what’s the solution? Easy. The same as they’re doing with music. Suck every last trace up into the clouds, slice it into ever slimmer segments, perpetuate promotional patter, then pedal it you all over again, but on less compromising terms and in packages so convoluted that until you’ve naively acquiesced to yet another $20 a month, you’re not even aware that all you’re doing is re-learning things you were wholly capable of before but to an arguably inferior standard and with less versatile software.