Category Archives: iPad

The future of computing

iPad mini – 2021

iPad

Neither fish nor fowl.

The other day saw me with many accumulated ‘free’ shopping points on Amazon Prime, courtesy of a couple of years of ordering home delivery of groceries during the pandemic (I cannot speak for other states, but Arizona shoppers interpret personal freedom as a right to infect and get infected, dropping masks at the first opportunity, making the supermarkets places to avoid) so I thought I would buy myself a toy.

I no longer have any interest in traditional bulky, inept cameras which lack dozens of the features and capabilities of the iPhone, and the iPhone 12 Pro Max has been my ‘go to’ camera since it was introduced. So a new camera was out. By the way, that iPhone too was more than ‘free’, paid for with the proceeds of all the MFT and FF DSLR hardware.

So I sprung for an iPad Mini, the current 2021 model.


iPad 9.7″ A1893 and the iPad Mini A2567.

I rather think what pointed me in this direction was mention by a friend that saw him with a colleague who whipped out the Mini from his jeans’s back pocket. While I’m not into accidentally sitting on devices, if that can be helped, the idea was planted. And yes, the Mini does indeed fit the rear pocket of a pair of genuine Levi 501 button fly jeans perfectly. Heck, it probably fits the counterfeit pair made in Turkey which are gracing your bottom as I type.


In my Levis – nearly put my back out getting this shot …..

Setup is trivial. I simply downloaded my iPad’s data and apps from the iCloud where I have a monthly backup plan running all of $3.23. But you can just as easily transfer everything from your current iPad. Apple could not improve on this painless process.

On a more serious note I have given up on the Kindle as a reading device having had three fail over the years. They cannot be repaired. Disposable tech at its worst. I read a good deal and while reading on the iPhone 12 Pro Max has been nothing but a joy – light, superbly engineered, nice screen size – the thought occurred that maybe a slightly larger screen than that in the Kindle without the bulk of the full sized iPad would be nice.

For comparison, my iPad is the 6th generation model, now discontinued. The screen is 9.7″ diagonal and the device remains perfectly fine for reading, composing blog entries, noodling with stock charts and the like. The iPad Mini has a screen area 27% smaller than the full size device. Here are the comparative specifications for the iPad and the iPad Mini, courtesy of MacTracker:



Specifications.

While the older iPad adopts the rounded edges found on iPhones through the iPhone 11, the 2021 iPad Mini has the square profile ones found on the iPhone 12 and later. They make for decent single handed holding, provided you have long fingers which can comfortably span the device. Mine do, but only just. The Mini could be 1/2″ to 1″ narrower for maximum comfort. Here are the weights:

  • iPhone 12 ProMax, with bumper – 8.6oz
  • iPad Mini – 10.3oz
  • iPad 6th gen – 16.5oz

Reading using the Kindle app, there is a very noticeable drop-off in brightness at the edges. Enough that it’s irritating, and frankly inexcusable on so costly a device. I measured it at two stops, which is unacceptable – like a 1970 era wide angle lens before computer generated design improve things. Not visible in other apps. Why have no ‘expert’ reviewers remarked on this? (Answer – because they do not read. Most are besotted with puerile games). By comparison, my sixth generation iPad shows no such drop off. Also, auto color temperature management renders a slightly warmer image than the full size iPad.

I fitted a stick on loop strap to aid in holding the Mini when reading in a prone position. There are many styles on Amazon, and it helps when reading sprawled on the sofa, the Mini held up in the air.


For easier prone reading.

For those who like long reading sessions while sacked out on the sofa, this is an essential addition to the iPad Mini in my opinion, especially if your hands are small as you will have difficulty spanning the rear to hold it up.

While the screen can be very bright in room lighting, it remains useless in direct sunlight. Only the Kindle works well there. Screen definition is outstanding, by the way.

Apple chintzed on the screen coating and deleted the oleophobic coating on the iPhone which is really good at fighting fingerprints. No that big a deal but at the price asked that is really cheap of them. There’s Apple for you. Always squeezing those profit margins.

Conclusion:

After a period of hard use I confess that I think the iPad Mini is very poor value for money, especially if you already own a large screen iPhone. The best use case I can think of is if you have a small screen iPhone and no iPad and wish to read a lot. But, in that case, a full-size iPad might be better and the base model is certainly cheaper.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that it’s not meaningfully easier to read on the Mini for lengthy periods than on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, and the Mini’s management of font sizes, even in native applications like Apple Mail is poor. The native fonts tend to be too small so you go to Settings->Accessibility to adjust them, whereupon the screen displays frequently become a mess.

The implementation of TouchID to sign in with your fingerprint is also quite strange. On the full-sized 9.7″ iPad you simply hold your finger over the big home button at the base of the screen. With the iPad Mini you have to lightly touch the fairly small and narrow on/off switch at the top right of the device. It’s counterintuitive, so much so that Apple was compelled to add a flag below the button when TouchID is called for. Sure, it’s very fast, and I’ve given it a week to see whether this is just a problem with being comfortable with what I know, but I still come to the conclusion that it is a poor design. Fingers do not react well to small, narrow touch surfaces. Indeed, programming fingerprints for this small area button is a chore as the finger(s) has/have to be repositioned many times for all of the fingerprint to be recorded.

At the recommended retail price of $500 it’s just greatly overpriced. I paid $400 plus tax (AMZN special) and I still think that is $150 too much. At the price asked, the device should, as a minimum, include FaceID and a lot more memory. For comparison the current base iPad retails for $329, uses a fast A12 CPU from the iPhone X (and the Mini is indeed very fast, using the A15 CPU from the iPhone 13), and seems priced about right. How a device with a smaller display and battery can cost 60% more than its larger sibling is hard to understand.

One positive note is that I have not found the modest memory capacity of 64 GB to be a limiting factor. It’s half of that in my full size iPad (the current base model chintzes yet again, as the memory is just 64gB – what is it with Apple and gouging for memory?), but I really do not need very much for my purposes which include reading, blogging, the occasional stock market chart, email and so on. There is absolutely no purpose in using the camera if you have a modern iPhone.

If there is a consolation it is that mine was “free“ as I bought it with those accumulated Amazon shopping points. I’ll lend it to my son to see if he likes it. If he does, it is his. If not, it’s out of here. Save your money. If you must have an iPad, the base model at $329 is an excellent value by comparison.

No more identity theft

Hall of Shame, iPad, iPhone, Ramblings

Hasta la vista, Zuck.


No more theft.

iOS 14.5 for the iPhone and iPad will be released shortly. Unlike previous versions of the operating system, apps which would require the user to opt-out of tracking their activity now will require the user to consciously agree to be tracked. The opt-in screen appears above.

Why is this a big deal?

Let me flashback to to my son’s 6th grade year in California. That was in 2014. As we were walking home I noticed that all the kids in the playground were busy staring at their smartphone screens.

“What are they doing, Winnie?” I asked in all innocence.

“Facebook, Dad”.

This set me off on a process of discovery and disclosed what has to be the greatest evil of our time. Not only was Facebook absorbing and wasting huge amounts of time for these fertile young brains, it transpired that it was tracking everything these kids did even if they were not on Facebook. And unless you have been in a nuclear blast-proof bunker the last few weeks with no access to any sort of connectivity, you will also know that Facebook extended its evil ways as an organizing vehicles for traitors, seditionists and insurrectionists. Censorship of hate speech be damned, thanks to Mr. Zuckerberg. The people who stormed the Capitol on their Pig’s orders on January 6, 2021 had organized their meetings on Facebook and, to a lesser extent, on Twitter.

But it gets even worse. 4 years ago a very close US presidential election awarded that same Pig the Oval Office thanks to the Russkies’ massive campaign of disinformation on …. yup, you guessed it, Facebook. And every time those seditionists clicked on the site of their local guns and ammo supplier, Facebook was there making money off their clicks. Zuckerberg was, simply stated, being paid by the makers of deadly weapons.

Now Zuckerberg is up in arms about Tim Cook’s privacy decision. He argues that the requirement to opt-in to being tracked will make your “….advertising experience worse.” Excuse me? Is there something like a good advertising experience?

Come to think of it, while you are at it, you might as well install an ad blocker on all your devices to cut the noise and disruption ads cause in the reading experience.

So when iOS 14.5 is announced, I advise all iOS users to upgrade immediately and refuse to opt-in to tracking of their activity. If you prefer to be watched, sold, tracked, filed and numbered while enhancing Mr. Zuckerberg’s bloated net worth, then stick with your Samsung cell phone. iOS 14.5 works on iPhone 6S or later.

As for my son, he gave up Facebook shortly after the experience explained above, and has never been happier or more productive.

How wide is the iPhone UWA lens?

iPad, Micro Four-Thirds, Photography

Incredibly so!

It’s not easy to convey just how wide the UWA in the iPhone 11 is. Apple states it’s 13mm FFE, so I decided to compare results with those from my Panasonic GX7 MFT body fitted with the 7.5mm MFT Rokinon fisheye (both now sold). As I have little interest in heavy spherical distortion (iPhone 11 UWA) or in the tedious fisheye effect (Rokinon), both images were corrected for linear projection, using my lens correction profile for the iPhone 11 (which reduces the FFE to some 14mm) and Fisheye Hemi for the Rokinon image. The defished Rokinon field of view computes to 12mm FFE.




GX7/Rokinon at left.

There’s much to be learned here. Both images were taken under identical fluorescent lighting with the cameras set to Auto White Balance. The Rokinon image is certainly 2mm or so wider, but there the Rokinon’s advantage ends. The iPhone does a superb job of auto white balance, rendering realistic daylight tones but, more importantly, take a look at the near cylinder on my classic BMW motorcycle. The dynamic range correction from the iPhone is superb. The MFT would need significant post processing to recover the shadows.

Except for distortion correction, both images are SOOC.

So yes, the UWA’s image is not quite as wide as that from a de-fished fisheye. But the advantage of the computational photography applied within the iPhone, which greatly enhances dynamic range, considerably outweighs the slight loss of width.

The genius of Steve Jobs

Android, iPad, iPhone

His greatest strategic decision is little recognized.

Samsung cell phones are made by thieves.

Samsung steals the design, UI, even the packaging from Apple. The Android OS which these devices run is made by America’s greatest thief, Google. Sure, the fine print says you agreed to it, and consequently your data are stolen and resold to anyone who cares to pay. And because thieves do not care for the welfare of their victims, Android sees to it that its infinitely penetrable code is open to bad guys to further abscond with your life and secrets. If you use Android, that’s a tacit admission that your data is worth to you exactly what Google paid you for it.

Daniel Eran Dilger has been writing technical articles for Apple Insider for as long as I remember. Invariably thoroughly researched, his latest series chronicles Jobs’s greatest stroke of genius, one which directly addresses these thieves and their nefarious ways.

Sure, we all know how the iPod took a clunky concept and turned it into a supremely elegant rendition, accompanied by one of the greatest advertising slogans ever:




October, 2001. “1,000 songs in your pocket”.

The iPod followed the 1998 iMac and between them the products turned around a failing company. The string of hits – the Apple II, the Mackintosh, the iMac, the iPod, and the greatest of all – the iPhone – rightly saw Jobs branded as the greatest visionary since Thomas Edison. Unlike Edison, Jobs never created completely new technologies such as the light bulb, the phonograph, the movie camera. Rather, he looked at what the market had to offer and improved those offerings with quantum leaps in design and user interfaces. Obsessing over the smallest detail, he reminds us that “don’t sweat the small stuff” is an expression dreamt up by those who have no attention span or standards.

When the iPhone was released on June 29, 2007 the army of buyers had already been astonished by the user interface, displayed by Jobs in his earlier presentation (January 9, 2007), with such seemingly magical features as scrolling, with that little bounce when the end of the list was reached. I recall gasping when Jobs first showed that off. As one of his friends put it when discussing his presentation of the first iPhone: “You had me at scrolling”. It was fun, it was new and it was breathtaking UI design. Samsung immediately stole that for it’s better cell phones (most of their money is made on low end devices for the third world). They had already long been stealing from anyone in sight, right down to emulating the easily removed cellophane in which Apple’s beautifully packaged products were ensconced. Jobs finally said “Enough!” and applied to make the scrolling/bounce feature trademarked. He lost, the judge denying his claim stating that it failed on grounds of obviousness ….

So in 2008, Jobs took another tack. He decided to bring the design of mobile CPUs in house, meaning that the ARM designs would hereafter be exclusive to Apple. The first such CPU was the A4:




The A4 CPU.

As Dilger explains, that CPU was first installed in 2010 and within 6 years was the brain in over one billion Apple devices. Moving away from generic Samsung chips, the A4 was installed in the iPad, iPhone 4, the fourth generation iPod touch, and the second generation Apple TV. The decision to bring CPU design in house was Jobs’s greatest stroke of genius and we are now seeing the fruit of that decision.

The most astonishing outcome of this decision is the latest A13 CPU, containing all of 8.5 billion transistors, we are told, spaced just 7 nanometers apart. It’s what makes computational photography possible in the game changing iPhone 11 and 11 Pro and will see the speedy demise of most mainstream digital camera manufacturers.

The day of the big sensor is done, with each sensor’s area in the iPhone 11 being just 5% (five percent!) of that in the gargantuan DSLR’s full frame carcass, yet delivering comparable performance. Along with the demise of big sensors and the bodies which house them, we will see the simultaneous demise of vast catalogs of enormous – and enormously costly – lenses, some claiming apertures as fast as f/0.95. Why? Because the f/2 or so apertures in the iPhone’s lenses are the functional equivalent of f/0.2 when you add in computational photography and such seemingly magical technologies as Night Mode. The traditional meaning of ‘aperture’, as in “f/1.4 is faster than f/2.8”, no longer makes sense.

Dilger tells us that the major competing CPU, used by Samsung and Android, is the Qualcomm Snapdragon which is already two generations slower and requires larger batteries (that’s a ‘feature’, in Samsung ads) to satisfy its electrical thirst. Despite two years’ development, Qualcomm has been unable to improve the performance of its CPU.




The garden at night, Night Mode and A13 CPU at work. SOOC. LR reports
1/8 sec. at f/1.8, ISO 1000, but I am no longer sure what that all means. Hand held.

Meanwhile, Samsung has abandoned its efforts to steal Apple’s FaceID security technology, unable to clone it, while Google’s Pixel has done a poor job of stealing Apple’s older fingerprint recognition. Stick a protective plastic sheet on your purloined Pixel’s screen and any fingerprint in the world will open the phone. That seems appropriate. What, after all, would you expect from the world’s premier thieves? At the same time Apple has been undertaking a multiple year effort to rid itself of all Samsung content in its devices. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Apple has had three major CPU makers for its desktops and laptops. The Apple II used the Motorola 68000 family, the Mac switched to IBM’s more powerful but hot running PowerPC CPUs and current hardware uses Intel chips. As the saying goes on Wall Street, “If you want loyalty, get a dog“.

Jobs’s decision to bring mobile CPU design in house will eventually see Apple’s desktops and laptops move to the ‘A’ series CPUs used in iPhones and iPads, allowing Apple to sidestep Intel’s interminable delivery delays and have a far less costly CPU in its devices. And performance will only improve.

The A13 is now approaching the fastest Intel CPUs in performance, and we can expect the same stellar gains in battery life in the MacBook as the iPhone 11 sees over its predecessor iPhones. Apple already uses A series chips to control the touch bar in its MacBook Pro. The writing is on the wall.

Dilger’s series of exhaustively researched articles is recommended to those who want a deep look inside the genius of Steve Jobs.

iPhone 11 Pro image, standard lens.

The 2018 iPad

iPad

Same size but faster.

With consumer protection laws having been destroyed by the current Pig Administration – along with civility, discourse, integrity, diplomacy, science, education and the environment – it’s little wonder that Apple gets away with its multi-layered planned obsolescence strategy for its older devices. Leading the charge is iOS which magically makes all older phones and tablets from Cupertino suddenly behave as if they are slogging through frozen molasses.

That symptom had very much affected my 4 years old iPhone6 which I upgraded to a used 128 gB iPhone 7 for a modest $345 after selling the iPhone6. The speed gains from the A10 CPU in the iPhone7 are very significant indeed. Why, it now performs as fast as the iPhone6 did four years ago.

A like infection of molassesitis also affected my iPad Air which, believe it or not, is approaching its fifth anniversary and after daily hard use remains as good as new. Except for the speed, that is. It’s now awful.

So it’s off to the local Apple Hipster Store to be met by a 14 year old sporting colored hair and tattoos, passing as an Apple salesperson (gender unclear) to pick up a new 128gB 2018 iPad. The ‘Air’ moniker seems to have been dropped and the top priced models are, Apple assures us, ‘Pros’. Uh huh.

Here are the comparisons of the current models:

A glance at pricing is an eye opener. I’ll focus solely on wi-fi versions as anyone with an iPhone can simply tether the iPad to the phone’s cellular service and get cellular connectivity. No need to spend an additional $130 on cellular circuitry in your iPad, incurring additional monthly fees in the process.

The costliest iPad, the 12.9″ iPad Pro costs $1149, which strikes me as an awful lot of money. By contrast, the 9.7″ regular iPad, albeit with 128gB rather than 512gB of memory and a marginally slower A10 CPU (same as used in the iPhone7) is just $429. No prizes for guessing which one I chose. Buying used makes no sense here as few recent iPad models are available used. People hang on to these devices a long time. My old iPad Air will sell for $180, making the upgrade cost just $249. That works for me.

So if ever the word ‘bargain’ can be associated with Apple hardware, I do believe the 2018 iPad qualifies.

With a 9.7″ screen, the same size as in the original iPad Air, size is perfect for anything from book reading to stock analysis or movies. And it fits travel luggage just fine.

How do the CPUs compare? Geekbench data show the following:

The 163% CPU speed gain on single core operations (which dominate use) is comparable to the speed gain of the iPhone7 over the iPhone6.

One reason Apple’s iPad sales have been so weak is that the device is very long lived and very well made, retaining high resale value unlike your Android or Amazon Fire piece of junk. Further, Little Johnny in the classroom does not mind too much if he has to wait a few more seconds for his iPad schoolbook to open. His major upgrade reason is that he just dropped the device on the floor. The life expectancy is high even in LJ’s uncertain hands and his affluent folks are welcome to pony up an outrageous $99 for the Apple Pencil so that he can scribble away to his heart’s content. Until he loses it, that is.


Now that’s what you call a downward trend.

iPad sales have pretty much flat lined since 2014 when the original iPad Air hit the market. For far too long the device was overpriced and seriously lagging in hardware compared to its iPhone siblings. Now Apple seems to have woken up, slashed prices at the lower end (my iPad Air ran some $600 5 years ago – call it $700 in today’s money, and with just 64gB of memory) and brought the innards up to speed – a far better camera (though, really, only folks with plastic pocket protectors use an iPad for photography), a speedy CPU and lots more memory at non-gouge prices. Add the fingerprint sensor in the 2018 model I bought and you have iPhone-like speed and functionality.

Mercifully the 2018 iPad retains the coaxial headphone/earbud socket and dispenses with face recognition, the latter an idiotic technology and the ultimate solution looking for a problem. What on earth, pray Apple, is wrong with fingerprint recognition? How about redirecting some of those vast R&D monies wasted on face recognition on making Siri actually work? Or improving voice recognition?

Fingerprint recognition works fine on the 2018 iPad though the nice haptic feedback found in iPhone7 is sadly missing. The Home button on the iPad is still a mechanical micro switch, not a zero wear touch sensor. That said, after 5 years of daily use the Home button on my original iPad Air continues to work well. Also missing is ForceTouch, a nice iPhone7 feature Apple appears to be discontinuing (Hint: It’s called Margin Greed).

I’m looking forward to a happy 5 years with the new 2018 iPad, and to an Administration which will once more honor Consumer and Human rights. Meanwhile I console myself with the thought that the 2018 base iPad may actually be a bargain. And iOS 12, which I just installed, does not cripple performance. In fact, it works well.