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Apple introduces M4 chip
(www.apple.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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The primary benefit for the average consumer tends to be longer battery life due to the same task using less power, in theory anyway.
Sure but I already charge my iPad about once a week and it's never flat - 13 hours for video playback if you watch one or two TV episodes a day goes a long way.
I guess they could add a smaller battery, but I don't think that would reduce the weight by much — it's pretty small.
What iPads really need is better software. Safari, for example, is vastly inferior to the Mac version. And don't even get me started with how window management works on an iPad. It's total garbage.
Maybe with better software, I'd use it for something more computationally demanding than watching TV.
Sure, if you use it for an hour a day, you're not gonna notice it much. And I'm not disagreeing that a lot of the software sorely needs to be improved. The people who are going to notice aren't you. They're the ones using their devices all day for work or similar.
I spend about 10 hours a day doing "real work" - writing software - on a desktop Mac with an M1 chip. It's way faster than I need. Having even more power than that in an iPad? Overkill is an understatement.
I get why they're using an M4 — supply chain / economy of scale works better if you have most of your hardware on the latest chipset and also the M1 is missing some important features. Also the M2 was basically an M1 and the M3 used a particularly expensive manufacturing process that was only really sensible for high margin products like the MacBook Pro... so that leaves M4 as the best choice. But for me the marketing is missing the mark by focusing so much on CPU performance. Just say "it's really fast" and move on to other things, leave the exact details for the spec sheet.
Well that was apple's exact argument when they would not release phone cpu specs back in the day. "It's not relevant" they would say, as the whole experience is faster. It's really just whatever suites their marketing people. Slowed down your phones, oh, we got caught. But, it's a FEATURE, and so we don't get dragged through lawsuites, we're adding it as an OPTION. Look, the M4 looks great. But any spin they put on anything, I just take it with a grain of salt.
Yes. And instead of taking advantage of that they shrunk the battery to have thinner tablet instead of better battery life.
The 13” version actually has a larger battery than its predecessor.
The primary benefit is they can now include RAM and GPU on die to increase the SKU cost for consumers.