It’s Fast

By  |  Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 10:56 pm

Like John Gruber says, the iPad is a remarkably fast gadget. (The only thing that seemed less than near-instantaneous about it during my time with a unit today was the speed of the Wi-Fi–which is the one thing that Apple has the least control over.)

Gruber raves about the Apple-designed A4 chip at the heart of the device and says it looks to be the best mobile processor in the world; I wanna get a better sense of the real-world battery life before I come to any conclusions on that front. And presumably the fact that the iPhone OS was written for slow CPUs and is now running on a fast one is a major contributor to the overall sense of speed.

But if you’ve got $499 to spend on a secondary computing device and are trying to decide between an iPad and a netbook, the sheer zippiness of the iPad is going to be a major point in its favor.

I’m already having visions of the Stevenote in which Jobs explains to us why Apple is moving Macs from Intel chips to Apple’s own CPUs…

 
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2 Comments For This Post

  1. Will Blake Says:
    January 27th, 2010 at 11:11 pm

    I understand the use of some kind of “intelligent” cache on the machine contributed to its quickness as well as the OS having a faster processor to run on. My feeling of an iCache a possibility?

  2. BladRnr Says:
    January 28th, 2010 at 11:14 am

    Gruber makes good points. If the iPad is really fast, that should take away a few negatives. People like speed. And the fact that the processor is from Apple must be scaring Intel. Suddenly Apple is looking like a true technology company when they are making their own OS, software, hardware and now chips, all marketed with Apple’s superior brand. Who can compete against that? Seriously.

1 Trackbacks For This Post

  1. Maybe the “A” in “A4″ Stands for “ARM”? Says:
    January 28th, 2010 at 11:28 am

    […] a chip geek, so I can’t really judge this story. And I persist in thinking that it’s too soon to judge the Apple A4 chipY inside the iPad, period. But the article I’m linking to says the A4 is mostly existing […]