iPad Mini

TheGameguru wrote:

I've also come to the conclusion that most peoples definition of "runs and looks great" is nowhere near my own..

I'm pretty sure you can even say most GAMERS definition is nowhere near your own. We're usually happy to get your sloppy seconds. In fact, I think most of us would cut each other's internet cable connection to get Guru's cast-offs.

Eh, The Witcher looks like a sub-par PS2 game with a hinky framerate on my MacBook Pro. It doesn't bother me (I'm a proud Wii gamer; I don't get to criticize how things look ;)) but I'm pretty sure it would bug the crap out of most people on this site.

TheGameguru wrote:

I've also come to the conclusion that most peoples definition of "runs and looks great" is nowhere near my own..

I'm right there with you. I see "it looks great and runs like butter at max settings on my (insert five year old hardware here)" all the time and in benchmarks better hardware than they list averages like 25fps at middling resolutions with no AA/AF. I only fell for it a few times before I finally figured out that my definition of smooth game play just isn't the same as a lot of people. I want 60fps solid no matter what at 1080p at minimum. Faster is always better. If it drops lower than that I'm either tweaking settings or eyeballing new hardware.

Back on topic, any opinions on where the best direct comparison of the Nexus 7 and the I pad mini is at? I'm on my phone at the moment and I'm having trouble with searches for some reason.

I haven't watched the announcement yet and so somehow missed the fact that the mini doesn't have a retina display. So I think the choice depends on intended use. The mini gets all of the AppStore apps and has more screen real estate than an iPhone, but isn't a really great system for reading books if you care about text sharpness.

I think that is the one thing that Apple should have done and is to have put in the retina display.
On the other hand, now they have something to upgrade for the 2nd gen iPad mini.

My definition of 'runs well' is usually mid- to high-50s in frames per second, with most or all of the eye candy on. For games where you really need over 60 FPS, you can usually turn a few things down and get that. Getting over 60 with absolute maximum everything often takes a really expensive video card, and those last little bits of image improvement aren't usually that important, at least to me.

I read somewhere that the mini has the same resolution as the old iPad, so the resolution choice is probably to avoid having yet another display layout for devs to target. But I'd still like to see a retina display in the mini form factor.

There's also the fact that a retina display takes a good deal more power to drive it than a lower density display of the same physical size. That would have meant either a shorter battery life or a heavier battery, either of which would be a big minus on a device whose basic selling point is that it's just as good as a full-sized iPad only smaller and lighter.

Also, something I've been wondering about: they're still selling the iPad 2 as a kind of mid-range iPad, between the mini and the "real" iPad. But with the 4th gen update to the main iPad line, that leaves the iPad 2 as the only Apple product still using the old-style connector, doesn't it? I wonder how long that's going to last.

I'm running the new Retina Macbook 13" (I added 256GB drive) and really impressed so far. Mind you I've been on an OG unibody since 2008 so there's OS improvements I haven't seen before too. The screen is really, really nice. A total game changer, just like they say.

Damn. I missed the announcement for the MacBoob line!

Certis wrote:

I'm running the new Retina Macboob 13" (I added 256GB drive) and really impressed so far. Mind you I've been on an OG unibody since 2008 so there's OS improvements I haven't seen before too. The screen is really, really nice. A total game changer, just like they say.

Dammit. Freudian I'm sure. The screen isn't as good as boobs, but it's close.

MacBoobs are slightly more expensive than regular boobs, but the user interface is so intuitive...! And at 336ppi, it's more boob than the human eye can detect

I found the whole retina thing overblown.. I have a 15" Retina and was kinda bummed that Apple removes the ability to ever use all the pixels unless its a Retina "aware" application..I want everything to be Retina aware..

SommerMatt wrote:

MacBoobs are slightly more expensive than regular boobs, but the user interface is so intuitive...! And at 336ppi, it's more boob than the human eye can detect

"We believe that we have something special here. It's sooooo easy. You just reach out, Pinch and slide. And suddenly! Aureola from wall to wall. Takes your breath away"

Certis wrote:

I'm running the new Retina Macbook 13" (I added 256GB drive) and really impressed so far. Mind you I've been on an OG unibody since 2008 so there's OS improvements I haven't seen before too. The screen is really, really nice. A total game changer, just like they say.

How's the performance? I'm worried that the integrated graphics card will have a hard time powering that resolution.

Ulairi wrote:
Certis wrote:

I'm running the new Retina Macbook 13" (I added 256GB drive) and really impressed so far. Mind you I've been on an OG unibody since 2008 so there's OS improvements I haven't seen before too. The screen is really, really nice. A total game changer, just like they say.

How's the performance? I'm worried that the integrated graphics card will have a hard time powering that resolution.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/1/35...

Reading the verge review it sounded like it was a fairly major issue.. in fact given its price point relative to the more beefy 15" Retina I'm frankly surprised their score was as high as it was..given the tone of their review.

Played with an iPad mini today. The size is really nice. Screen resolution is still great, despite not being retina.
Form factor works for sure.

TheGameguru wrote:
Ulairi wrote:
Certis wrote:

I'm running the new Retina Macbook 13" (I added 256GB drive) and really impressed so far. Mind you I've been on an OG unibody since 2008 so there's OS improvements I haven't seen before too. The screen is really, really nice. A total game changer, just like they say.

How's the performance? I'm worried that the integrated graphics card will have a hard time powering that resolution.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/1/35...

Reading the verge review it sounded like it was a fairly major issue.. in fact given its price point relative to the more beefy 15" Retina I'm frankly surprised their score was as high as it was..given the tone of their review.

Wow. I was expecting a much lower score based on reading the review. To me, if a laptop fundamentally has poor performance it is not a good laptop no matter how thin, pretty, or whatever.

Sparhawk wrote:

Played with an iPad mini today. The size is really nice. Screen resolution is still great, despite not being retina.
Form factor works for sure.

I think it's great except for the....price. I have a feeling the 2nd iPad Mini will be $299 and have the retina display so I'm going to hold off.

Sparhawk wrote:

Played with an iPad mini today. The size is really nice. Screen resolution is still great, despite not being retina.
Form factor works for sure.

Thinking I need to get a hands-on sometime this weekend. Really concerned about the resolution since my family is looking to get one for our mother who is in her mid 60's.

Ulairi wrote:

I think it's great except for the....price. I have a feeling the 2nd iPad Mini will be $299 and have the retina display so I'm going to hold off.

The price is steep. Wish it would be a bit lower. Not buying one yet either and I do agree on 2nd gen to be with retina. They gave themselves some
room to improve.

Ulairi wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:
Ulairi wrote:
Certis wrote:

I'm running the new Retina Macbook 13" (I added 256GB drive) and really impressed so far. Mind you I've been on an OG unibody since 2008 so there's OS improvements I haven't seen before too. The screen is really, really nice. A total game changer, just like they say.

How's the performance? I'm worried that the integrated graphics card will have a hard time powering that resolution.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/1/35...

Reading the verge review it sounded like it was a fairly major issue.. in fact given its price point relative to the more beefy 15" Retina I'm frankly surprised their score was as high as it was..given the tone of their review.

Wow. I was expecting a much lower score based on reading the review. To me, if a laptop fundamentally has poor performance it is not a good laptop no matter how thin, pretty, or whatever.

Sparhawk wrote:

Played with an iPad mini today. The size is really nice. Screen resolution is still great, despite not being retina.
Form factor works for sure.

I think it's great except for the....price. I have a feeling the 2nd iPad Mini will be $299 and have the retina display so I'm going to hold off.

This is no bit of amazing insight on my part, but Apple's problem with pricing is the iPod Touch-- you can't sell a Touch for $299 and then have a 7" iPad going for less. What I assume they're going to do is phase out the iPad 2 altogether & make the Mini the "low-end" option. Even then, their market share IS going to continue to be eaten by Google, Amazon, and the $199 tablet sellers... but they're never really cared about competing on price alone, so who knows?

SommerMatt wrote:

This is no bit of amazing insight on my part, but Apple's problem with pricing is the iPod Touch-- you can't sell a Touch for $299 and then have a 7" iPad going for less. What I assume they're going to do is phase out the iPad 2 altogether & make the Mini the "low-end" option. Even then, their market share IS going to continue to be eaten by Google, Amazon, and the $199 tablet sellers... but they're never really cared about competing on price alone, so who knows?

As Gruber pointed out, you can't strap an iPad Mini to your arm and go running (well, not unless you want to look like an idiot). There's always a market for small devices, so perhaps Apple don't see the iPad and iPod directly competing? Maybe a $249 iPod Touch and a $299 iPad mini makes sense though.

I think I'm going to pick up a low end Mac Mini to replace my dead iMac. It looks like it's 3-4 times faster than my old machine and I don't need a laptop any more.

Hmmm. Couple things to note from the review.

You can go into the display options and switch to 1440 x 900, which still looks nice, but you lose a hair of Retina crispness since you’re scaling to a non-native resolution. Think about it this way: where the Retina "best" setting fits each pixel of a 1280 x 800 image perfectly onto four pixels of a 2560 x 1600 screen, each pixel of a 1440 x 900 image fits imperfectly onto 3.6 pixels of the display, so it’s a little bit blurrier. You might not notice it, but it still isn’t what you’re paying for. And running at higher resolutions imparts a performance penalty, which isn't good news on this machine — more on that in a bit.

This is insanity. To my naked eye I see no difference between the "best" setting and 1440.

My standard workday set of 15-20 tabs open in Chrome, music playing in Spotify, email and IRC open, and Skype, iPhoto, and Messages running in the background never pegged the CPU meter, but I could clearly feel the system running just a hair behind me. You might not notice it if you’re coming from an Air or a much older MacBook, but I’m used to my 15-inch Pro with 2.3GHz Core i7 and Radeon HD 6750M graphics, and and the 13-inch Retina is definitely a little slower. If you’re a pro looking to step down to a smaller machine, you’ll almost certainly notice the performance dropoff as well.

I guess you want your laptop reviewers to be like the princess and the pea, but I honestly have no idea what he's talking about. If you're deeply offended by a gnats fart of slowness when you click something, by all means you should absolutely spend an extra $500.

It probably helps this is a work machine for me so gaming isn't even on my radar. For what I'm doing, I've never used a snappier laptop. I'm running VMWare Fusion (Windows XP loaded for some older windows-only stuff), have a dozen chrome tabs open, Office documents, email and a few other things running with zero lag. I can force the issue with 50 chrome tabs but ... why?

Overall I'm enjoying the experience with it. He DOES make a good point about dropping the extra $200 if you're going to upgrade the 13" HD to 256 anyway. I'll have to think about that one.

iPad mini review.
Written by John Brownlee, Cult of Mac.
In short: 3 stars out of 5

I would recommend that most people wait until the second-generation model to buy an iPad mini.
Certis wrote:

I'm running the new Retina Macbook 13" (I added 256GB drive) and really impressed so far. Mind you I've been on an OG unibody since 2008 so there's OS improvements I haven't seen before too. The screen is really, really nice. A total game changer, just like they say.

you seem to be sitting exactly where I am in terms of apple upgrade cycle. I have a 2009 unibody Im tempted to trade in, I just sold my ipad 1st gen for 200 (thanks for the advice on price point!)

so ipad mini, thoughts? I've had this ipad first gen I just sold for 200, Im thinking of getting a mini as a replacement. I know it doesnt have retina, but its small and I red a lot on the original ipad.

edit:
wtf apple, you put the ipad 2 chip inside this thing!

Well, it's the same resolution as the original iPad 2 so I guess it makes sense and effectively reduces the number of target platforms for developers.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

Well, it's the same resolution as the original iPad 2 so I guess it makes sense and effectively reduces the number of target platforms for developers.

I was hoping for a more modern cpu/gpu combo though

Blotto The Clown wrote:
Certis wrote:

I'm running the new Retina Macbook 13" (I added 256GB drive) and really impressed so far. Mind you I've been on an OG unibody since 2008 so there's OS improvements I haven't seen before too. The screen is really, really nice. A total game changer, just like they say.

you seem to be sitting exactly where I am in terms of apple upgrade cycle. I have a 2009 unibody Im tempted to trade in, I just sold my ipad 1st gen for 200 (thanks for the advice on price point!)

so ipad mini, thoughts? I've had this ipad first gen I just sold for 200, Im thinking of getting a mini as a replacement. I know it doesnt have retina, but its small and I red a lot on the original ipad.

edit:
wtf apple, you put the ipad 2 chip inside this thing!

Spend an extra $50 and get a refurb iPad 3.

I dont actually want another full size ipad. I was initially going to grab a kindle, but then the mini came out. I do a lot of reading, but it would be great to have access to all my iphone/ipad apps still. /sigh

I did a bit more reading, most reviews are pretty down on it. The verge liked it, gizmodo, cult of mac, and a a couple others are most definitely NOT fans. Dont much feel like waiting for next years edition, maybe a refurb ipad 3 is the answer.

I guess you want your laptop reviewers to be like the princess and the pea, but I honestly have no idea what he's talking about. If you're deeply offended by a gnats fart of slowness when you click something, by all means you should absolutely spend an extra $500.

Macs use the GPU for a lot of the screen display work, and they store a lot of stuff in video RAM. Macs use a surprising amount of VRAM. If you're running a LOT of applications, and you run out of backing VRAM for their windows, the system will slow down somewhat, as it has to buffer into main RAM instead, and then does a lot of copying back and forth from RAM to texture memory when changing between apps. This will make the system feel a little sluggish, even though most programs will actually still be running at close to full speed.

He mentions running a ton of stuff, so he could be running out of VRAM and getting slowdown... if you're not a power user, with a bunch of stuff open, it wouldn't be visible.

I suspect, on a Retina display, the required VRAM per app could be much higher than on a standard screen. I'm unclear on how Apple's doing its scaling, but the naive observation is that a display with double the resolution in both directions will take four times as much texture memory. They're doing some complicated trickery to hide the Retina display from apps that don't know about it, so the VRAM requirements probably aren't increased by four times, but they're probably higher than normal.

I have a 15" Retina and was kinda bummed that Apple removes the ability to ever use all the pixels unless its a Retina "aware" application..I want everything to be Retina aware..

Yeah, their choices in how to handle scaling are quite odd. The whole backfit of Retina displays to OS X really feels hackish and nasty, not elegant like I've come to expect from most Apple software. Some apps use it, some apps don't, few (no?) apps are allowed to just use the pixels on a Retina display 1:1. They are doing some deeply weird crap in that OS to actively hide the screen from programs, but they're not providing proper tools to truly drive a display without knowing the resolution. Every detail I've gotten so far has just had 'ugly' written all over it, to the point that even now, after reading a fair bit about Retina displays, and the abstraction layer they came up with, I have no idea what they were thinking, or even what problem they were trying to solve.