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0 pointsjwr3y ago0 comments

Heck yeah. "Reading" sounds boring and easy, except when you have to quickly skim through 600-page PDFs with illustrations, and switch between those. This is a common use case for anybody designing electronics. I will take every CPU cycle I can get.

The existing iPads were already the best devices for this kind of thing, but faster is always better.

I still find it sad that:

a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"

b) Companies do not ship better iPad apps. At this point, Fusion 360 would work better on this M2 iPad than on most PC machines, but we only get a half-baked "viewer" thing which doesn't really do anything useful.

0 comments

yamtaddle3y ago

> a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"

Really, I can't think of a ton of uses for desktop/laptop hardware this powerful. And I don't do any of them, gaming aside (I have a mediocre Windows PC for that, and even that is often using only a fraction of its power for gaming).

The one and only time I've given my m1 Air a real workout is playing with one of those AI art generators, but it's not like that was something I needed to do, or I'd have felt like I was really missing out if I hadn't done it. I did it because I could and it was low-effort.

Faster compiling is nice I guess. That's... it.

jwrOP3y ago

> Really, I can't think of a ton of uses for desktop/laptop hardware this powerful.

Oh, there are plenty — for one, I would really like to have a good CAD/CAM application. Parametric, history-based, like Fusion 360 or SolidWorks. There is Shapr3D which is absolutely amazing and shows what the hardware is capable of (take a look at the demo videos), but nothing I can use for actual work.

These kinds of apps need both a reasonable GPU for rendering and a really good CPU for computing constraints in sketches, and then for recomputing solids.

Unfortunately, Fusion 360 being an Autodesk product, we aren't even graced with an Apple Silicon version on the Mac yet, even though it's been what, two years since Apple Silicon is out? The application is a slow pig, where usability comes last. So I guess I can keep on dreaming.

Or take electronics CAD — having KiCAD on an iPad would be amazing.

yamtaddle3y ago

Yeah, not a ton, I didn't write none. 3D modeling, cad, running scientific models. Gaming. Hi-res video editing workflows. Machine learning. I guess "crypto" junk. And some of that (machine learning, crypto, probably most compute-intensive scientific models) aren't something you probably want to do on a tablet or laptop except in a pinch, anyway, because a purpose-built server's much better-suited to it and you probably don't need continuous and detailed visual feedback.

But I don't think it's weird that people struggle to come up with ways to really use super-powerful hardware, because most folks don't do (and don't want to do) much of the above except maybe gaming, and most people who do game don't do it—or at least not in a way that's taxing on the hardware—on all the kinds of devices they own.

The cool stuff lots and lots of people actually use tends to end up in dedicated hardware or paths, like video codecs and image processing and face recognition and all that, not mainly processed by the general CPU or graphics power of their platforms.

1 more reply

cassianoleal3y ago

There is Onshape for parametric mechanical CAD.

educaysean3y ago

This made me wonder: Why do PDFs feel so much slower and bulkier compared to something like viewing HTML over a browser? When it comes to displaying static images and text, shouldn't PDFs outperform HTML pages by miles?

kaba03y ago

I don’t think it’s true in general, you may just used bad PDF viewers. I can scroll through a content-rich PDF much faster and smoother, than a similarly resource-packed website.

jwrOP3y ago

Yep. With PDF Expert on an iPad, you can instantly see a thumbnail view of your pages, as well as swipe the page slider through 600 pages with a thumbnail being shown for each of those as you swipe.

This does get slower for some pathological PDFs, which is why an even faster CPU would help.

smoldesu3y ago

Yep. You can actually use WebKit to render PDFs in Linux and it works perfectly fine as well. Performance problems seem to be most prevalent when you browse them in a web browser.

darthrupert3y ago

>Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"

Doesn't faster CPU tend to imply potentially better battery life?

diebeforei4853y ago

In general, not necessarily.

But in this case the M2 has efficiency improvements, so yes.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

yamtaddle3y ago

> a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"

Faster compiling is nice I guess. That's... it.

jwrOP3y ago

> Really, I can't think of a ton of uses for desktop/laptop hardware this powerful.

These kinds of apps need both a reasonable GPU for rendering and a really good CPU for computing constraints in sketches, and then for recomputing solids.

Or take electronics CAD — having KiCAD on an iPad would be amazing.

yamtaddle3y ago

1 more reply

cassianoleal3y ago

There is Onshape for parametric mechanical CAD.

educaysean3y ago

kaba03y ago

I don’t think it’s true in general, you may just used bad PDF viewers. I can scroll through a content-rich PDF much faster and smoother, than a similarly resource-packed website.

jwrOP3y ago

Yep. With PDF Expert on an iPad, you can instantly see a thumbnail view of your pages, as well as swipe the page slider through 600 pages with a thumbnail being shown for each of those as you swipe.

This does get slower for some pathological PDFs, which is why an even faster CPU would help.

smoldesu3y ago

Yep. You can actually use WebKit to render PDFs in Linux and it works perfectly fine as well. Performance problems seem to be most prevalent when you browse them in a web browser.

darthrupert3y ago

>Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"

Doesn't faster CPU tend to imply potentially better battery life?

diebeforei4853y ago

In general, not necessarily.

But in this case the M2 has efficiency improvements, so yes.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse