RaduTyrsina
News Team
Technology pundits have taken the iPad Air 2 for a ride and have put it under the magnifying glass to see what this shiny new toy can do. John Gruber from the DaringFireball publication has taken a closer look at the performance of the iPad Air 2 and has discovered some interesting tidbits.
According to some recent benchmarks tests, The Air 2 is noticeably faster than the iPhones 6 in single-core performance and it’s faster than a three-year-old MacBook Air, and close to the performance of a two-year-old MacBook Air. It’s also more than half as fast as today’s top-of-the-line 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Here are some more details shared by Gruber:
"But Geekbench only measures CPU performance — year-over-year, the iPad Air 2 is even more impressive in terms of GPU performance. Apple claims, “The A8X chip has an astonishing 2.5 times the graphics performance of the A7 chip,” and from what I’ve seen, that’s true.
The iPad is no longer following in the wake of the iPhone, performance- and specs-wise. It’s forging ahead. With 2 GB of RAM, it’s a year ahead of the iPhone (we hope) in that department. Performance-wise it’s fast enough to replace a MacBook Air for many, many people. The demos that Apple chose for last week’s event — the Pixelmator image editor and Replay real-time video editor — emphasize that. Those are performance-heavy tasks, and the iPad Air 2 handled them with aplomb."
He also advises those who are on the fence about buying a 16 or 64 GB new iPad, especially the Air 2, to pay the extra $100 for the 64 GB version.
This is a clever strategy from Apple to drive sales towards the bigger storage option, since the production of flash storage has drastically cheapened over the years.
Source: DaringFireball
