“Should you buy the iPad Air? ” David Phelan writes for The Independent. “he first thing you notice about the iPad Air is the gadget’s new design. It’s been updated to match the iPad mini, released a year ago. This means boxier corners and a back cover coloured to match the front bezel. It’s an altogether snazzier look, with a chrome Apple logo in the middle of the lighter coloured iPad, previously called white, now silver, while a black logo sits in the middle of the darker one, called Space Grey.”
“This is the thinnest full-size iPad yet. And even that’s not the real reason the design is improved. It’s now much lighter. It weighs 478g instead of last-season’s 662g. This is the real killer improvement,” Phelan writes. “Of course, that’s not the only upgrade on the new iPad. It now has the same processor [64-bit Apple A7] as the iPhone 5s. This seemed ludicrously over-powered for a phone (though who’s complaining?) and is certainly more than fast enough here. It means that the things you’re used to doing on an iPad happen more quickly now. The whole thing just feels faster. And it means that as more complex and demanding apps are devised (and you can bet they are in development now), the iPad Air and its smaller sibling the iPad mini with Retina display will be able to handle them with ease.”
“Apple’s key advantage is that it makes the hardware and software, so they can work together flawlessly. So the new iOS 7 operating system dovetails with the iPad in every way, down to the matching of iPad case colours to the system palette,” Phelan writes. “Its spiffy new styling may be enough to persuade you to upgrade. The faster processor is cool and will become more useful as more apps arrive. But above all, this is the super-light iPad, the most portable iPad, the most powerful iPad.”
Read more in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: The most portable iPad is the iPad mini, not the iPad Air.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Enzos” for the heads up.]
A7 ludicrously over powered smartphone! I like that.
MDN he didn’t say it’s the most portable iPad mini, he said its the most portable iPad. I take that as meaning compared to previous iPads which were full size.
Yes you have to laugh when MDN constantly lectured us about there being no need for a smaller iPad back in the day. As rational as Ballmer at times.
Doc W etc.,
(OED) [Having explained the history of usage] “In the twentieth century, grey has become the established spelling in the U.K., whilst gray is standard in the United States.”
However, since:
a) the colour’s designer is British (and would spell it grey),
b) the Indie is British and spelt it grey, and
c) grey is used in India, Pakistan, Australia [yeah!], South Africa, NZ, UK, Ireland, and Canada (i.e. 1.7 billion *English* speaking people versus 0.3 billion Yanks)
.. I think we can take the MDN correction as a simple case of American shit stirring.
Interesting I hadn’t realised it was spelt ‘gray’ in the US. Yes lots of things have gone one way or the other or indeed use both options. Result of the loss of the ‘æ’ with popularisation of print. Here in UK such examples can vary in different parts of the country as old maps often reveal. Hertford here is e whereas in the US its Hartford despite being established by the people of the former but for a while it could be spelt either way. Things like Railway timetables often standardised them as it did time.
A similar thing happened with ‘The’ which you will see in olden times spelt ‘Ye’. Despite hollywood films thinking otherwise it never was pronounced Ye the Y simply represented a combination letter that dissapeared but always had the ‘th’ sound. Ok digression over for today.
Similar situation with “gh” being reduced to “g” in many cases, such as “burgh” to “burg”. The general trend has been to simplify and eliminate extraneous vowels and consonants.
The “e” versus “a” thing is pretty straightforward, through. “Gray” sounds like a long “a”.
Oi! The arch spelling correction has been removed as has Doc Wallaby’s objection. Now where’s the fun in that!?
After the American war of independence the American leaders started to miss spell a number of words just to show the world that Americans were very different than their British cousins.
they even started saying different than instead of different from!
Interesting though that the use of ‘of’ in place of ‘have’ (would of/would have) seems common on both sides of the pond even though its original usage is attributed to the Danelaw and Norse influence. Language is a fascinating thing.
Actually some of the American usage is from an older English rooted back in the 17/18th centuries which changed more slowly than in English cities which had considerable continental influences. Why in the countryside older usage prevails here too though sadly disappearing as people move around so much more. Indeed the Scottish accent would have been typical too of English back in Chaucer’s time.