Godspeed And Fare Thee Well AnandTech ▉

Ryan Smith breaking the news:

It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.

For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry.

A lot of things have changed in the last quarter-century – in 1997 NVIDIA had yet to even coin the term “GPU” – and we’ve been fortunate to watch the world of hardware continue to evolve over the time period. We’ve gone from boxy desktop computers and laptops that today we’d charitably classify as portable desktops, to pocket computers where even the cheapest budget device puts the fastest PC of 1997 to shame.

The years have also brought some monumental changes to the world of publishing. AnandTech was hardly the first hardware enthusiast website, nor will we be the last. But we were fortunate to thrive in the past couple of decades, when so many of our peers did not, thanks to a combination of hard work, strategic investments in people and products, even more hard work, and the support of our many friends, colleagues, and readers.

Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again. So, the time has come for AnandTech to wrap up its work, and let the next generation of tech journalists take their place within the zeitgeist.

I remember reading AnandTech back when I first started building PCs. AnandTech shutting down is a huge blow to the PC hardware community. Their reviews were always top notch and got tot he depths of places other reviews just don’t seem to have the stomach to go. AnandTech was one of the first places I checked for reviews of the 9950x.

My first PC was a Gateway 2000 machine sporting a Pentium 2 and, if memory serves, a whopping 64 MEGABYTES of RAM. It ran Windows 95 in a plain beige box. The best thing about it hardware wise was that it was sporting a Riva 128 “graphics accelerator” from a little known company called Nvidia. I was ordering what a friend of mine had essentially told me to get and when I mentioned the graphics the sales rep on the phone when ordering said “no you don’t want that, you want this” and it was the best upsell I think I’ve ever had. My grandparents bought that machine for me in late 1996, though it didn’t arrive until January of 97 but that machine was my gateway (no pun intended) into the world of PC Gaming and, little did I know, all the PC building, troubleshooting, and curiosity that comes with that.

I started reading them shortly after deciding it was time to replace that machine a few years later when I was building a machine around the upcoming Quake 3 Arena in the winter of 1999.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 27 years. In a way, I feel like I grew up with them even though I was 20 or so when I started this journey.

But Ryan also leaves us with a warning:

Finally, I’d like to end this piece with a comment on the Cable TV-ification of the web. A core belief that Anand and I have held dear for years, and is still on our About page to this day, is AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o’clock-news reporting. It has been our mission over the past 27 years to inform and educate our readers by providing high-quality content – and while we’re no longer going to be able to fulfill that role, the need for quality, in-depth reporting has not changed. If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.

For all the tech journalists out there right now – or tech journalists to be – I implore you to remain true to yourself, and to your readers’ needs. In-depth reporting isn’t always as sexy or as exciting as other avenues, but now, more than ever, it’s necessary to counter sensationalism and cynicism with high-quality reporting and testing that is used to support thoughtful conclusions. To quote Anand: “I don’t believe the web needs to be academic reporting or sensationalist garbage – as long as there’s a balance, I’m happy.”

Yes, times have changed. YouTube has grabbed people’s attention and while there are great YouTube channels for tech out there, there is also a lot of sensationalism on there as well as people make click bait titles and thumbnails for low value videos. Social Media makes it even worse as people argue for engagement.

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Great White Singer Jack Russell Dies At 63 ▉

TOMÁS MIER for Rolling Stone:

JACK RUSSELL, ONE of the founding members of Eighties band Great White, has died. He was 63. In a social media post Thursday, Russell’s family announced that the glam metal singer died “peacefully” surrounded by his family and friends. Russell died of Lewy body dementia and multiple system atrophy, his memoir co-author K.L. Doty confirmed to Rolling Stone.

“Jack is loved and remembered for his sense of humor, exceptional zest for life, and unshakeable contribution to rock and roll where his legacy will forever thrive,” read the statement. “His family asks for privacy at this time.”

The singer announced in July that he would be stepping away from touring due to his dementia and MSA diagnosis. “I am unable to perform at the level I desire and at the level you deserve,” Russell said at the time. “Words cannot express my gratitude for the many years of memories, love, and support.”

Yet another reminder of just how short and fragile life can be. One minute you’re fine and the next you aren’t. It’s also a reminder to not take everything so seriously and just enjoy what you can while you’re here.

Russell was born in Montebello, California, and was once the lead vocalist for the rock band Great White, which had its biggest hits “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” (a cover of the Ian Hunter song) and “The Angel Song” in the late Eighties. He co-founded the band in 1982 with Mark Kendall, and dropped several LPs, including 1987’s Once Bitten and 1989’s Twice Shy.

Great White was one of those 80’s bands that came along at the very end of the Hair Metal days. I had no idea that “Once Bitten” was a cover until just now. To me it was always one of those songs that renforces that Rock N’ Roll comes from the blues. It’s a hell of a cover to be sure and like all good covers takes the foundation of the original and adds to it in the band’s own way. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it makes the wheel better.

It’s also a great reminder that the 80’s really were a ton of fun even if you were just a kid.

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AMD Learns From Past Mistakes And Pushes Back Launch Of Ryzen 9000 Series CPUs ▉

AMD SVP and GM of Computing and Graphics, Jack Huynh on Twitter X:

We appreciate the excitement around Ryzen 9000 series processors. During final checks, we found the initial production units that were shipped to our channel partners did not meet our full quality expectations. Out of an abundance of caution and to maintain the highest quality experiences for every Ryzen user, we are working with our channel partners to replace the initial production units with fresh units. As a result, there will be a short delay in retail availability. The Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X processors will now go on sale on August 8th, and the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X processors will go on-sale on August 15th. Apologies for the delay. We pride ourselves in providing a high quality experience for every Ryzen user, and we look forward to our fans having a great experience with the new Ryzen 9000 series.

AMD is doing the right thing even if you want to be cynical about it. They’ve learned their lesson from the vapor chamber issues that were found during the launch of the Radeon 7900 XTX graphics cards and are not letting potential issues with the Ryzen 9000 series of CPUs.

As this article from AnandTech clarifies, this only affects only the desktop processors.

Importantly, however, this announcement is only for the Ryzen 9000 desktop processors, and not the Ryzen AI 300 mobile processors (Strix Point), which are still slated to launch next week. A mobile chip recall would be a much bigger issue (they’re in finished devices that would need significant labor to rework), but also, both the new desktop and mobile Ryzen processors are being made on the same TSMC N4 process node, and have significant overlap due to their shared use of the Zen 5 architecture. To be sure, mobile and desktop are very different dies, but it does strongly imply that whatever the issue is, it’s not a design flaw or a fabrication flaw in the silicon itself.

While it’s good to know it’s not a design flaw, which I still think is the case with Intel’s situation involving the 13th and 14th series i9 and i7 CPUs, we may never actually know the reason this happened. Hopefully we do once this situation gets sorted out though.

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Assassin’s Creed At The Paris 2024 Olympics ▉

Who’s the mysterious hooded figure carrying the Olympic torch throughout Paris?

As the 2024 Paris Olympics kicks off with the opening ceremony, spectators notice a resemblance between the torchbearer and a video game character from Assassin’s Creed — and they seem to be loving the similarity of the unknown figures traveling through the city using parkour moves.

While we can’t confirm whether there’s actually a connection between the game and the torchbearer video game creator Ubisoft, a French video game publisher, tweeted a photo from “Assassin’s Creed Unity” during the Olympics opening ceremony. The game just so happens to be set in Paris during the French Revolution.

As soon as I saw it I was like “Wait, is that an Assassin’s Creed reference?” and apparently it was. Nobody is outright saying it, but this tweet from Ubisoft pretty much confirms it for me. I also keep forgetting that Ubisoft is French.

Generally speaking I thought the opening ceremony was long but one of my favorites over the years. I loved how they incorporated the entire city into the show and didn’t really do much that, to me, was terribly fancy or smacked of over the top tech1 like drones. It was also unapologetically French and driven by French history and blended with modern France. I mean who else has the balls to incorporate Les Miserables, a French Revolution song, and have it performed by a French metal band with a French opera singer.

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  1. The irony coming from a tech guy. ↩

Intel Says It Finally Found The Root Cause Of The 13th and 14th Gen Instability ▉

Based on extensive analysis of Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors returned to us due to instability issues, we have determined that elevated operating voltage is causing instability issues in some 13th/14th Gen desktop processors. Our analysis of returned processors confirms that the elevated operating voltage is stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor.

Intel is delivering a microcode patch which addresses the root cause of exposure to elevated voltages. We are continuing validation to ensure that scenarios of instability reported to Intel regarding its Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors are addressed. Intel is currently targeting mid-August for patch release to partners following full validation.

Intel is committed to making this right with our customers, and we continue asking any customers currently experiencing instability issues on their Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance.

The key phrase here is “elevated operating voltage”. Higher voltages mean more clocks sure but it can also degrade silicon faster. Hopefully this is the fix but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is still more to this.

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Wonderful Explanation By Former Microsoft Engineer On What Happened On Friday With Crowdstrike ▉

This is a great explanation in layman’s terms about kernels and what’s technically allowed to happen in them. It’s why people freak out about things like kernel level anti cheat in games: it’s completely unnecessary.

At this point the only real question I have is why does Windows allow this? I know Macs don’t and I’m not sure about Linux since I don’t use it on a daily basis but I’m pretty sure this would’t fly there either.

The fact that so much of the computer systems that we depend on for critical things runs on Windows genuinely scares me.

UPDATE: Apparently not only does CrowdStrike exist on Linux but it’s also been causing issues there too.

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Zen 5 Architecture is the “tock” to Zen 4’s “tick” ▉

Gavin Bonshor, Anantech:

The key features under the hood of the Zen 5 microarchitecture include a dual-pipe fetch, which is coupled with what AMD is calling advanced branch prediction. This is designed to reduce the latency and increase the accuracy and throughput. Enhanced instruction cache latency and bandwidth optimizations further the flow of data and the speed of the data processing without sacrificing accuracy.

The Zen 5 integer execution capabilities have been upgraded over Zen 4, with Zen 5 featuring an 8-wide dispatch/retire system. Part of the overhaul under the hood for Zen 5 includes six Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) and three multipliers, which are controlled through an ALU scheduler, and AMD is claiming Zen 5 uses a larger execution window. These improvements should theoretically be better with more complex computational workloads.

Other key enhancements that Zen 5 comes with include more data bandwidth than Zen 4, with a 48 KB 12-way L1 data cache that can cater to a 4-cycle load. AMD has doubled the maximum bandwidth available to the L1 cache, and the Floating-Point Unit has been doubled over Zen 4. AMD also claims it has improved the data prefetcher, which ensures faster and more reliable data access and processing.

More pipelines means more instructions. More instructions means more gets done faster.

For CPUs, cache is king. Having wider pipelines allows it to do more tasks or just simply have more data ready without having to reach out to system memory. While it may not seem like a bog deal, in computers, reaching out to system memory is costly in terms of time. Time that may not seem that much to us but is forever in computer terms. It’s most noticeable to a user when, say, a game or application stalls or takes a while to start.

Something else AMD is claiming is that they have improved the overall thermal resistance of the CPUs and managed to reduce the operating temperatures with the Ryzen 9000 processors (Zen 5) over the previous Ryzen 7000 (Zen 4) series. In terms of thermal resistance, AMD claims a 15% improvement over Ryzen 7000. At the same time, they also claim they have managed to reduce operating temperatures by 7°C when operating at a like-for-like TDP. Unfortunately, when asked at the Tech Day in LA last week, AMD wouldn’t divulge how they managed these improvements, but that’s not a surprise.

Despite operating with a lower TDP, comparing performance like-for-like, the Zen 5 cores perform up to 22% higher on the Ryzen 9 9950X vs. the Ryzen 9 7950X, while even the Ryzen 9 9900X with a 120 W TDP against the previous Ryzen 9 7900X (170 W), performs up to 16% higher. One thing AMD’s Zen microarchitecture is known for is its power efficiency, as well as how much performance is retained when operating at a lower wattage than TDP. We did some power scaling testing with the Ryzen 9 7950X against the Intel Core i9-13900K, and we were impressed with how much performance the Zen 4 cores managed to retain despite operating at much lower than stock in relation to TDP.

This is really great to hear. One of my concerns was the trend, even with AMD, of higher and higher thermals due to more and more power draw in an effort to reach higher clock speeds. While speeds are up, the TDP is either the same or lower than Zen 4. This is probably how AMD is making their efficiency clam. Lower temps mean the chip can work longer at the same temps which means it can maintain it’s higher clock speeds in more burdensome workloads. Like gaming or compiling code.

AMD has really taken on Intel’s old “tick tock” cycle. Release a CPU that has some pretty good gains one cycle and then refine that CPU the next cycle. That’s exactly what they did here with Zen 4 to Zen 5.

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Intel Is Still Having Raptor Lake Crashes And Now Its Affecting Server Customers Too ▉

Wendell’s reporting here is just devastating and the follow up conversation with Steve From Gamers Nexus makes it sound like this is even worse than anyone thought.

The fact that Intel still hasn’t gotten to the bottom of this makes me think there’s a serious flaw in the architecture. Either that or there’s some serious silicon degradation happening. What makes it even worse is that it’s affecting server customers. It’s one thing when part makers like Asus or Gigabyte push the power profile or something too high and it causes an issue. We saw that when the 7800X3D launched. That’s easily fixed. If a user overclocks the CPU and causes a problem, that’s on them. Sucks, but also easily identified.

The fact that they can’t pin it down between power profiles (which they let get completely out of hand on the consumer side) and something else makes me think there’s a serious flaw in the architecture itself. The issues aren’t even consistent with the Raptor Cove (performance) cores or the Gracemont (efficiency) cores.

What’s curious is that this is also affecting server boards that are essentially just the basics and not overclocked in any way. Their power profiles are also way lower and basically at spec. The only difference is that the servers run twenty four hours a day seven days a week as opposed to end user systems that run for a period of time and then get shut down. As a result the silicon gets degraded faster than it would on some random gaming PC.

Intel better get it together with Zen 5 launching at the end of the month. They also better pray that Arrow Lake doesn’t embarrass them too.

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GSK or GSK? ▉

From Today’s XDefiant Patch Notes:

Factions

  • After coming to an agreement with pharmaceutical company GSK, the Team Rainbow faction will hereafter be known as GS-Kommando. Feel free to continue calling them Grenzschutzkommando as a handy time saver.

I would love to know who was confusing a fictional German special forces group based on the Kommando Spezialkräfte (KSK) with the London based pharmaceutical company. I’m not sure these are two worlds that cross often enough that this was an actual problem.

  • Fixed an issue where DedSec’s Spiderbots were ignoring victims previously targeted by the deploying player. Now they’ll spiderhug faces new and old with equal enthusiasm.

  • Players can once again shoot DedSec Spiderbots off their own faces. Not sure why; everybody loves Spiderbots.

  • Tuned the functionality of Echelon’s Intel Suit. Now it pulses every four seconds instead of every three. Enemies remain highlighted for 1 second instead of 2.7 seconds, so everybody pay attention.

  • Some abilities such as Firebomb, the Digital Ghillie Suit, and BioVida Boost weren’t always activating or occasionally stopped working. That’s fixed.

Whoever writes these patch notes definitely has fun with them where they can. This is one of the less sarcastic sets I’ve seen.

Anyway, if you haven’t checked out XDefiant yet you absolutely should. It’s free and only has Skill Based Match Making in the appropriate places: the intro playlist and Ranked. Oh yeah, and cheaters actually get banned too.

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> Well Here We Are Again: 2024 iPad Pro Edition

In the world of Apple products the “pro” moniker can mean a handful of different things. Pro can mean “professional”. It can also be a shorthand for “nice” or “luxury”. Often times it’s somewhere in between. The iPhone Pro is a nice upgrade from the iPhone. It can also do Pro things. The Apple Watch Ultra isn’t much more than a nice upgrade to the regular Apple Watch. I would throw AirPods Pro in this category as well. Simply a nice upgrade form the normal AirPods. The base MacBook Pro is a nice upgrade from the MacBook Air but the MacBook Pro truly becomes “pro” once you start adding the higher end hardware to it. These are obvious things. The iPad Pro however sits in this somewhat strange place. In reality, it’s not really a “pro” product but it has way more compute power than the average user will ever need. If anything it sits in the same position with the iPhone: a nice upgrade form the iPad Air that can also do some pro things. The difference is that unlike the iPhone Pro, I feel like the iPad Pro really is less of a mainstream product. Everyone in 2024 needs a phone. Not everyone wants or even needs an iPad to begin with.

The average consensus among reviewers and Apple Nerds is that this incredibly powerful hardware is held back by what is basically a glorified version of iOS in iPadOS. That this incredibly powerful computer is going to waste inside this aluminum and glass slab with this underwhelming software. It’s true that given the M series chips powering the Pro and even Air lines of iPads, these are workstation caliber slabs of glass. But iPadOS is not a workstation OS. The EU has even called bullshit and lumped it in, correctly, with iOS. Enter the argument that the iPad Pro should run a version of MacOS. But what if we’re thinking about things the wrong way? What if the iPad Pro is just a really nice iPad that can occasionally do Pro stuff. What if the iPad Pro is just a really nice iPad? Like the iPhone Pro mentioned above. We’ve already done this experiment twice already: Microsoft Tablet PCs and Windows 8 on the Microsoft Surface.

There’s a reason everyone forgets about Tablet PCs and that the Surface tablets laptops don’t sell all that well.

The Hardware

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. – Alan Kay

Ever since the debut of the M series chips on the iPad there has been a call to have macOS on the iPad as well. And, arguably, from a hardware perspective, rightfully so. The hardware is generally the same as any Mac. It really just comes down to what other chips Apple wants to put on the logic board that enable other functionality1. In the sense that people want macOS on their iPad, this hardware is more than capable. And, I would even argue, you may not need an iPad Pro to do it. After all, they’re putting the same chips in the iPad Air.

The problem here isn’t with the hardware. It comes back to the Alan Kay quote above. Apple is a serious hardware company and they’ve been building their own hardware for decades. It just so happens that now they’re building their own SoCs. Because we have this hardware, people seem to have this expectation that simply because it can do more it should do more. That isn’t always the case.

While the expectation is that since we have a desktop class CPU, we should have a desktop class OS (We’ll get to apps in a minute). I disagree. I think that it speaks to the confidence that Apple has in their SoC’s power consumption and resource management that they feel comfortable putting these on mid to high end iPads. As a PC gamer I can tell you that if I was into any kind of mobile gaming I would snatch this hardware up in a heartbeat. Why? If this thing can handle Ray Tracing then my games will look absolutely incredible and that is one of the reasons I build gaming PCs. I want the graphics to look amazing and the performance to be the best I can afford. It doesn’t do me any good if the game plays at 120 FPS but looks like shit. But I would never want to use macOS, let alone Windows, on a slab of glass. To take this one step further, the iPhone 15 Pro does hardware ray tracing as well and we don’t ask for any kind of desktop OS there. In fact, I seem to remember some visible confusion when Apple used the iPhone 15 Pro and it’s pro feature set at the Scary Fast event last year.

Apple has managed to do something that most companies have a hard time with: managing resources while maintaining performance2. The M Series chips are the exemplification of this. A desktop class SoC in a portable computing platform. An example of power and portability at its best.

The Software

The OS

What most people don’t know is that, as an operating system, iPadOS is essentially a scaled version of macOS. I know this has been mentioned in the past in relation to iOS but I think people forget this. The only difference is in how the OS is presented. Apple, realistically can do whatever they want and segment it as a product however they see fit. And they do. The iPad, by design, was never meant to replace a Mac. It was always meant to be an “in addition to” thing.

Remember, macOS is POSIX compliant and an amalgamation of the Mach and BSD kernels which have their roots in Unix. The thing that makes this possible is that it’s a hybrid kernel. Meaning it attempts to take the best of both monolithic and microkernels making it easily scalable. iOS uses this kernel, and iPadOS is essentially iOS on steroids. Looking at it this way, macOS powers everything from the strongest of Macs down to smallest of Apple’s devices. So, in a sense, we’ve already got macOS on the iPad. Apple has just stripped out all the things that make macOS a “heavy” system and given us only what the iPad hardware and user experience would need. Nothing more, nothing less. By doing this they’ve ensured that, as a user, I can’t accidentally break something and ruin the iPad experience.

Its why we don’t:

  • have access to the file system in the same way as macOS
  • have a command line without a third party app
  • Don’t have or have limited access to things in Settings that we have full access to on the Mac.

The User Experience

But what good is an OS without a UI? Even the most basic of systems has something, even if it’s just a command line. This is the first and most obvious issue with bringing macOS to the iPad. The iPad is based on touch. macOS is not. Whenever I hear of anyone asking to bring macOS over to the iPad I never hear of any UI redesigns to macOS. While we all get annoyed with iPadOS, it’s already designed for touch. If we were to bring macOS over as is, it would be a disaster. How do we know this? Because Microsoft already tried it with Windows 8 and the Surface.

Stephen Sinofsky, former head of Windows, who has some experience with this stuff, on Twitter X:

Simply enabling touch on a Mac gets a lot of flakey software that doesn’t really work with touch plus Macs will always have a trackpad so why bother.

Simply running macOS on an iPad (certainly something they have done internally) only shows the above even more. Without a keyboard/trackpad attached the device would be enormously frustrating. PLUS it would not run a bunch of Mac software not because the underlying hardware couldn’t run it but because huge chunks of those apps/tools would be somewhere between unusable and broken to try to use exclusively with touch.

If anyone knows about this and has publicly shipped a product like this it would be Sinofsky. At this point we’ve probably all forgotten Windows 8 and rightfully so. It was a bad product and it was Microsoft’s attempt to do exactly this. Their attempt to essentially plant Windows on a tablet and serve both desktop and tablet users with the same OS and UI. As we learned, neither worked. Desktop customers were both confused and infuriated and tablet users felt it didn’t go far enough.

But, while most people’s complaints about Windows 8 were the start menu, this is actually a problem macOS wouldn’t have thanks to Launchpad. One problem that macOS would have though is the same problem as the Ribbon interface: it’s really hard to tap that small stuff. Imagine trying to use the Menu Bar in macOS. Or really any of the UI for that matter on such a small screen. Websites work because things like CSS or frameworks like React tell them what size screen to present themselves for. OS UIs don’t really do that. I can’t imagine trying to tap any of the side bars in any window let alone try to tap to minimize or close a window in macOS. This is why we don’t really have a windowing system on the iPad. This is why as awful and annoying as the current UI is, for what the iPad is, it works. This is the compromise that Apple has made.

I know I said we’d talk about apps but the truth of it is, this has the potential to be an absolute disaster if developers just ported their Mac apps over to the iPad. At the very least this gives a sense of consistency and cohesiveness to the iPad experience. It creates standards and allows users to know how things work. We don’t need to make things more complicated than they already are.

Windows 8 has already proven that this would be a nightmare for the average user.

Resources

That’s just using the OS itself. What about the resources a full blown desktop OS would need, regardless if it’s native or virtual? Again, Sinofsky points us in the right direction, having been down this path:

Will you be happy with battery life? The physics of an iPad mean the battery is 2/3rds the size of a Mac battery. Do you really want that? I don’t. The reason the iPad is the 5.x mm device is because the default doesn’t have a keyboard holding the battery.

Now, I admit, I’m not the heaviest iPad user. My battery tends to last for days, as it arguably should any way. But mostly my iPad is one of two things for me: either a media consumption device, such as for YouTube or web browsing, or lately it’s become my Stream Deck. And that’s pretty much it. Yeah I do the occasional email but there’s nothing crazy happening here. The biggest drain on that battery as I sit here and write this is…. Notifications. Yes, notifications. Because every time one goes off the screen lights up, draining the battery. That screen, in the way I use my iPad, is the biggest resource draw on my battery that I’m aware of. A full throated macOS on the other hand would absolutely destroy that battery. As I’ve said before, the hardware here can keep up and ARM based CPUs are great for power management but imagine having to load a full desktop version of Word. Those apps don’t sip battery, they chug it. They hit the CPU hard when they start, and the CPU hits the battery.

Battery life is one of the main experiences Apple is selling with the iPad, pro or otherwise. To have this diminished, even for “power users” would ruin the experience for everyone. It’s the same reason why killing apps on you iPhone is a notoriously bad idea3: it kills your battery. People assume that just because the app is still visible in the app switcher it’s “running” in the background. It’s not. It’s not like on your PC where if you click away it’s still running. It does what it needs to do, saves its state, exits memory, and essentially goes to sleep. The system allows for background tasks on occasion or will group them into a batch to optimize that task and then ejects it. It’s meant for important things like email but a bad actor can certainly take advantage of this. Killing the app just makes it start from nothing which begats the cycle of taxing the CPU which taxes the battery all over again.

Mentioning apps brings up multitasking on a device like the iPad. I feel like in the ideal world, anyone asking for a macOS type experience is looking for multiple windows at the same time. While I agree the the multitasking on iPad isn’t the greatest, it works given what it is: a large touchscreen device. This combines both arguments above: not only would the battery life diminish immensely, trying to tap windows like that would be a terrible experience. Multitasking and context switching in an OS requires resources. Resources that are scarce on a device like the iPad.

From The Verge’s Surface review in 2012:

Overall performance on the Surface was a bit hit or miss. In terms of general UI responsiveness, touch response, speed and framerate of the tile interface, Windows desktop, and most basic OS functionality, the Surface felt incredibly speedy. Switching between apps was fast and fluid, organizing and navigating the Start screen felt snappy, and live tiles flipped and updated smoothly and as expected. Many of the first-party apps — particularly Internet Explorer in the new interface — felt good to me, but others left me wanting. The native email application, for instance, could be slow to update and unresponsive to touch on a regular basis. Other apps, both first and third-party, could be slow to open, then stall or crash altogether. Some 3D games, such as Rocket Riot, seemed fluid and natural, while others staggered along, seemingly struggling to pump out an acceptable frame rate.

When I was just dealing with the core OS, the Surface felt like a lively, sophisticated, fast-moving new system, but the deeper I got into apps and the more apps I opened, the more the device seemed to bog down. There were other issues too: video playback in the browser was a spotty experience. Flash content didn’t fare too well in either the desktop or new browser, and some HTML5 playback stuttered and dropped frames during play.

Is this really the iPad experience we want?

A Computer Of Convenience

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad he positioned it squarely between the Mac and the iPhone. It was the in-between device. At the time, most of the industry was trying to push Netbooks for this but they were awful4. Enter the iPad.

The iPad is a consumption device that you can get things done on. It’s also a productivity tool that lets you get things done whenever inspiration hits, wherever you happen to be. The iPad Pro, in 2024, lets you do all those things just better. It sits at the intersection of convenience and productivity. It’s not meant for power users or overly complex tasks. But it is meant for convenient tasks.

It comes back to [Steve’s analogy of cars and trucks].

“PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around [but] one out of x people will need them.” … “We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it’s uncomfortable.”

But more importantly, it really comes back to approach. It seems we’ve all forgotten that the iPad is a tablet. In 2024 it might have some laptop like properties but those are few and implemented with care for the user experience. It’s simply not meant to be a laptop replacement.

Microsoft, even before Windows 8, tried to force the desktop onto a slab of glass. It didn’t work for the UI reasons mentioned above because it was based on a PC. Based on the Windows desktop where precision matters. It had all the benefits and flaws of a laptop. All the flaws listed above. The power flaws. The UI flaws. All of them. Then they tried a second time with Windows 8 and the Surface products. It still didn’t work. Even though Windows 8 was much more acclimating to touch, both of these products are based on PCs. They had the same flaws5. The approach was wrong.

iPads, by nature, are based on touch. Instead of trying to squeeze something down into a smaller device with no compromises, it was designed to do the things it does better. They’re meant to do one task at a time and (hopefully) do it well. That’s the compromise. Few tasks done well. This saves on battery which will let the device run for hours if not days at a time. It allows the system UI to be minimal, efficient, but as fully featured as the hardware and developer will allow. And that has even evolved over the years to include a mouse pointer when paired with the correct hardware. The one thing I think the iPad, and tablets especially, are not well equipped to do is window management and multitasking. That’s not an iPad issue, that’s a form factor issue. It can get better but it will never be the same as on a personal computer no matter the OS.

To come back to Steve Jobs’s analogy of cars and trucks I say let the iPad be the iPad. Let it be the car that lets you get most things done quickly and easily. Let the Mac be the Mac. Let it be thing that you pull out when you need to do the heavy lifting. And let the iPad Pro just be a really nice iPad.

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  1. Things such as cellular modems and audio amplifiers, thunderbolt controllers, etc.  ↩

  2. Where by resources I mean computer resources for the uninitiated. When managing any computer system you have to manage not just memory and processes but often times power as well, especially in the case of the iPad. Apple’s chips are honestly the best out there at this right now. I mean ask Intel how that’s working out for them at the moment. Even AMD’s chips are on the high side, though they’re way better than Intel at this right now. The closest competitor would be Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips. ↩

  3. It’s honestly one of my biggest technology pet peeves. Killing apps on an iPhone prevents the device from managing its memory and contexts and it needs it to help manage battery life and its other resources.  ↩

  4. Remember those horrible things? Everyone said Apple “needed a netbook”. No they didn’t.  ↩

  5. This seems to be a habit with Microsoft. Back in The Time Before Smartphones they tried to compete with Palm by essentially cramming Windows CE into “Pocket PCs”. Trust me, as someone who had to use these things for work at the time, they weren’t good. Same issues as the Tablet PCs. Slow, hard to use, poor battery life. Same shit, smaller package. ↩