All iPads Never fast enough, Am I the only one?

[kmoreau48]

Spoiler: this might be the most "first world problem" you read about today.

I currently use an iPad pro 12.9 4th gen and I have pre-ordered the new 5th gen with estimated delivery in early June.

I don't consider myself a "power user" but even for simple task on my devices, I feel like it's never fast enough for me. I see people here complaining that the M1 is useless since iPad OS is not made for true productivity or intensive tasks. For me, using the iPad for reading and annotating a somewhat large PDF file in notability is just not fast enough for the processor and the RAM. When I zoom in, I have to wait for the PDF to load and when I zoom out to later come back to a previously loaded section of the PDF, it restarts the loading of that section. I have made a screen recording of this issue I have been having since 2012. It has become significantly faster... but it is still not fast enough for me.
By the way, the file is a 2MB PDF exported from AutoCAD.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/elaez03d6bpbs38/RPReplay_Final1620750854.MP4?dl=0

Anyone else have the same feeling? I really hope that the M1 chip with 16GB of RAM can solve this simple loading issue.

A second issue I have is when making a FaceTime call, I open the app, I see the first name at the top which is the person I want to call, I bring my thumb to that name but then the screen refreshes and the name at the top is now change to the last call from the day before and I end up calling someone I didn't mean to call. That happens to me more often than not. Why can't the facetime list be updated after the end of the previous call instead of right before the next call?

 

[keeper]

Dude you need to learn to slow down, relax a little

 

[sparksd]

The first issue you describe may indeed be ameliorated by the new chip & greater RAM - remains to be seen as no one has one. The second is an app issue and the question should be directed to Apple Support.

 

[rui no onna]

Ah, yes. Vector drawings. I'm not sure if it was you but I remember there was a forum member that had even worse issues. I think the PDF just crashed the PDF reader and he needed to rasterize the PDF in order to view it on his iPad. Can't remember what model though.

Do update us if 16GB helps keep the rendered areas in memory.

 

[AutomaticApple]

Spoiler: this might be the most "first world problem" you read about today.

I currently use an iPad pro 12.9 4th gen and I have pre-ordered the new 5th gen with estimated delivery in early June.

I don't consider myself a "power user" but even for simple task on my devices, I feel like it's never fast enough for me. I see people here complaining that the M1 is useless since iPad OS is not made for true productivity or intensive tasks. For me, using the iPad for reading and annotating a somewhat large PDF file in notability is just not fast enough for the processor and the RAM. When I zoom in, I have to wait for the PDF to load and when I zoom out to later come back to a previously loaded section of the PDF, it restarts the loading of that section. I have made a screen recording of this issue I have been having since 2012. It has become significantly faster... but it is still not fast enough for me.
By the way, the file is a 2MB PDF exported from AutoCAD.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/elaez03d6bpbs38/RPReplay_Final1620750854.MP4?dl=0

Anyone else have the same feeling? I really hope that the M1 chip with 16GB of RAM can solve this simple loading issue.

A second issue I have is when making a FaceTime call, I open the app, I see the first name at the top which is the person I want to call, I bring my thumb to that name but then the screen refreshes and the name at the top is now change to the last call from the day before and I end up calling someone I didn't mean to call. That happens to me more often than not. Why can't the facetime list be updated after the end of the previous call instead of right before the next call?

Well, you're in luck!

M1 iPad Pro Over 50% Faster Than Previous Generation in Early Benchmarks

Last month, Apple introduced a new iPad Pro with the same M1 chip found in the latest Macs, and early benchmark results indicate that the M1 iPad Pro...

www.macrumors.com

 

[kmoreau48]

Dude you need to learn to slow down, relax a little

haha yes often tell myself that there are much worse problem in the world than the speed of my iPad (or any first world problem I am having on that particular day). What triggered this post is more the fact that people complain that the M1 is too powerful and that we don't need it until there is a major overhaul of the iPadOS... but I guess those people are also the same who would complain that the iPad is not powerful enough if the OS was more capable.

 

[kmoreau48]

Ah, yes. Vector drawings. I'm not sure if it was you but I remember there was a forum member that had even worse issues. I think the PDF just crashed the PDF reader and he needed to rasterize the PDF in order to view it on his iPad. Can't remember what model though.

Do update us if 16GB helps keep the rendered areas in memory.

Definitely, I will test the same exact file in notability and and post back to confirm if there is any improvement!

 

[maflynn]

I don't consider myself a "power user" but even for simple task on my devices, I feel like it's never fast enough for me.

I too am not a power user and my 2017 iPad Pro is plenty fast, so the 12.9 is certainly going to be over kill in that regard. I would recommend accepting that the iPad Pro isn't more powerful then a laptop and use the laptop for the heavy duty stuff and the iPad for light non-power user stuff

 

[Aetherhole]

I will say that I've experienced a bit of slowness my 2018 iPad Pro, but with very specific apps/programs. The three specifically that I can think of off the top of my head are Photoshop, Lightroom, and Symphony Pro. I do think a faster processor and more RAM are going to reduce/eliminate this problem.

All other apps I use, from video/media apps, to everyday apps, and even games run smoothly without any sort of hitch.

 

[poorcody]

Normally upgrading from one generation to the very next isn't genuinely worth the cost, but in your case I think I would, given the M1 should be a big jump, and your video clearly shows you could make good use of a speed increase. M1 may actually push the iPad into broad laptop-performance territory.

Also, have you tried any other apps for dealing with your PDFs? I can't help wonder if there is some CAD app or such which might be better designed to handle a complex vector-based schematic like the one(s) you are dealing with. An app designed for such drawings may better cache or take other approaches to rendering such documents, whereas Notability really is probably not optimized beyond basic document PDFs.

 

[rui no onna]

Normally upgrading from one generation to the very next isn't genuinely worth the cost, but in your case I think I would, given the M1 should be a big jump, and your video clearly shows you could make good use of a speed increase. M1 may actually push the iPad into broad laptop-performance territory.

Also, have you tried any other apps for dealing with your PDFs? I can't help wonder if there is some CAD app or such which might be better designed to handle a complex vector-based schematic like the one(s) you are dealing with. An app designed for such drawings may better cache or take other approaches to rendering such documents, whereas Notability really is probably not optimized beyond basic document PDFs.

It doesn't seem like using alternate apps will solve the issue. Found the post I was talking about earlier.

I went through this with the developer of PDF Expert when I was experiencing significant lag navigating around pages in my engineering drawings for work. The slow regeneration of graphics on certain pages in some of my PDFs would be similar in PDF Expert as well as Notability or Adobe’s app as well only to different degrees.

I ended up sending sample files to Readdle’s support team to test and the conclusion drawn by them was that the files that I had were simply too graphically intensive to render efficiently. File sizes were not huge, nor were page counts. These were pages 24x36 in size printed from CAD software with lots of vector information within them. Large areas of hatching or topographic contouring can sometimes slow things down in my experience. Here’s an exact quote from their email:

“I am afraid this file contains lots of graphics and such a situation can not be avoided while working with this file in the current version of the app. PDF Expert relies on iOS component and although we can not influence the system component itself, the situation might be improved in the future iOS updates. We will also investigate possibilities to improve the situation in the future updates of the app. Also, the issue is file-specific and you can try rasterizing your file using third-party solutions.

Please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience.”

The solution for me has been as suggested by them to rasterize some of the content that I’m receiving from my engineers to review. I’ll re-PDF the review sets that I get from them down to 11x17, opting to print as image and setting a reasonable resolution that I can still see detail in. This will often result in larger file sizes as things go from vectorized to raster but performance can go up.

Again this is just one experience, certainly more of an exception rather than a rule but from this experience I can honestly say that there’s more to performance rendering PDF files on iOS than JUST page count and PDF file size.

 

[Digitalguy]

Normally upgrading from one generation to the very next isn't genuinely worth the cost, but in your case I think I would, given the M1 should be a big jump, and your video clearly shows you could make good use of a speed increase. M1 may actually push the iPad into broad laptop-performance territory.

Also, have you tried any other apps for dealing with your PDFs? I can't help wonder if there is some CAD app or such which might be better designed to handle a complex vector-based schematic like the one(s) you are dealing with. An app designed for such drawings may better cache or take other approaches to rendering such documents, whereas Notability really is probably not optimized beyond basic document PDFs.

All iPad pros generations have been a big jump CPU-wise, except A12Z. M1 is no exception.
- The first pro almost doubled the single core performance of the air 2 and doubled the RAM.
- A10X increased single core and added a third performance core (but did not increase the RAM, at least for the 12.9)
- A12X added a forth power core (but again did not increase the RAM, except for 1TB)
- A12Z kept the same CPU, slightly increased GPU performance and added RAM (that was the only real upgrade, unless you had 1TB A12X, which is basically the same as the 2020).
- M1 made a big jump in single core (around 70%), even if it didn't add new power cores (overall pretty much in line with the generational improvement of previous pro, except the 2020), and a big jump in RAM...

 

[poorcody]

It doesn't seem like using alternate apps will solve the issue. Found the post I was talking about earlier.

If you look at that post closely though, he or she is saying they don't control the PDF rendering component so can't influence how it is written -- but not outright saying the iPad is incapable...

The software developer in me is looking at the video of the OP and it looks like the PDF is re-rendering at each pan/zoom. For a normal PDF representing a typical document, that is probably fine. But you wouldn't write it that way for large detailed schematics. PDFs are very expressive but not efficient -- if you were writing a CAD app that worked with PDFs, you would probably convert it to some other internal format for dealing with it. That's why I don't think the limitation is the iPad's capacity, just the way the software is written. It may be no one has written such a thing for the iPad yet, but I would think it would be possible.

 

[poorcody]

All iPad pros generations have been a big jump CPU-wise, except A12Z. M1 is no exception.
- The first pro almost doubled the single core performance of the air 2 and doubled the RAM.
- A10X increased single core and added a third performance core (but did not increase the RAM, at least for the 12.9)
- A12X added a forth power core (but again did not increase the RAM, except for 1TB)
- A12Z kept the same CPU, slightly increased GPU performance and added RAM (that was the only real upgrade, unless you had 1TB A12X, which is basically the same as the 2020).
- M1 made a big jump in single core (around 70%), even if it didn't add new power cores (overall pretty much in line with the generational improvement of previous pro, except the 2020), and a big jump in RAM...

Yeah, I'm not saying the jump is unprecedented, just that it has probably crossed a threshold where you can't say it is incapable of doing things a low- or even middle-end laptop can do now. Given the M1 is the same chip in the Air and MacBook Pro (albeit with different thermal conditions), and comparable RAM, I think it is fair to say it has entered new territory.

 

[Digitalguy]

Yeah, I'm not saying the jump is unprecedented, just that it has probably crossed a threshold where you can't say it is incapable of doing things a low- or even middle-end laptop can do now. Given the M1 is the same chip in the Air and MacBook Pro (albeit with different thermal conditions), and comparable RAM, I think it is fair to say it has entered new territory.

CPU wise, A10X was already on par with middle-end laptops when it came out (dual core ones back then).... A12X was closer to high-end quad core ultrabooks and definitely better than most laptops. A Mac with A12X would have been competitive (faster) with a macbook air. The real difference was RAM. And when the DTK got a variant of it (A12Z) with enough RAM, developers were surprised by how fast it was....
M1 is way better than any ultrabook and more in line with the best desktop replacement laptops.
So other than for RAM, A12X had already fully entered fast laptop territory.

 

[Carlanga]

Have you tried with other software? looks like the issue is the app not being able to render things based on the file formatting. At that size of a file it should be pretty fast once loaded. Maybe export with the pages as images or another format type.

 

[noteple]

I always expect the computer to be faster then whatever I might be doing.
Users get frustrated when the scrolling isn’t smooth or operations begin to stutter.
I still batch videos for watermarks and transcoding.
It’s a reminder to get a coffee and relax.

 

[defferoo]

If you look at that post closely though, he or she is saying they don't control the PDF rendering component so can't influence how it is written -- but not outright saying the iPad is incapable...

The software developer in me is looking at the video of the OP and it looks like the PDF is re-rendering at each pan/zoom. For a normal PDF representing a typical document, that is probably fine. But you wouldn't write it that way for large detailed schematics. PDFs are very expressive but not efficient -- if you were writing a CAD app that worked with PDFs, you would probably convert it to some other internal format for dealing with it. That's why I don't think the limitation is the iPad's capacity, just the way the software is written. It may be no one has written such a thing for the iPad yet, but I would think it would be possible.

agreed... it might just be that notability is not very efficient when it comes to rendering vectorized PDFs. At 2MB, that's something that can easily be held in memory and you shouldn't need to re-render each time you pan or zoom. try opening the same file with the built in Apple PDF viewer and see if it has the same issues?

 

[Apple_Robert]

Your main problem is the Notability app. It really isn't made for that kind of real world usage. You would have much better results with PDF Expert.

 

[nappes]

I agree

I notice a difference in speed eg between my older 10.5” pro and my iPhone 12 doing lots of little things. It’s certainly not the end of the world, my iPad is in absolute terms pretty fast, but faster is nice.

I like that safari is a little bit faster I like that reloads happen a little bit less

 

[sananda]

A second issue I have is when making a FaceTime call, I open the app, I see the first name at the top which is the person I want to call, I bring my thumb to that name but then the screen refreshes and the name at the top is now change to the last call from the day before and I end up calling someone I didn't mean to call. That happens to me more often than not. Why can't the facetime list be updated after the end of the previous call instead of right before the next call?

I've done that several times; it's annoying!

 

[marty1980]

Apps have to consider iPads that only have 1 or 2GB of RAM. On top of this Apple is stringent on RAM usage for apps. So there’s a good chance that 16GB won’t solve the problem.

This isn’t about the hardware not being capable. 2MB files are nothing. It’s how those files are rendered to screen. Try multiple apps if you have that option. I haven’t had much of this problem on my 2020 iPad Pro. If open a large PDF in the Files app, I don’t experience the problems you’re describing. But I don’t do that often, so take that with grain of salt.

The FaceTime list issue might be a snapshot issue. The app may not be fully loaded and you’re just seeing the screenshot from the last time the app was used. Also consider that the Database has to query and rebuild that list, which might be slower than it should be.

Take note of these things and just understand that you can’t force what can’t be changed. These are just some of the pains of using an iPad vs a “real computer.” Over time these types of issues will work themselves out, but we’re still in a transitional period where the iPad is growing into something more than what we’ve attributed to tablets since the first one came onto the scene.

 

[gnomeisland]

Yeah, as long as the app is written to address all that memory the M1 w/ 16gigs should help a lot with those PDFs. As a side note have you tried PDF Viewer? It probably won't completely solve the issue but IME it is faster than Notability for just PDF notation. I don't do anything with complex vectors like you showed though. I do think the iPad is the right device for that type of work.

While I get the frustration with iPadOS (to a degree) and (to a greater degree) the number/quality of "pro" apps on the iPad, I'm with you that there are many workflows that can use that extra power. They aren't for everyone, but that's why it is great that Apple sells such a range of iPads. I don't know that I've ever seen a compute device get so much hate for being too powerful.

 

[kmoreau48]

After experimenting with different apps that I currently use (don't really want to change my workflow for this issue) and Dropbox seems to be the fastest with almost no reload time. Then GoodNotes is a good alternative as it seems to reload faster than notability. I might use GoodNotes in the future for those types of PDF. Still looking forward to see the possible improvement with the M1 and 16GB of RAM.

Your main problem is the Notability app. It really isn't made for that kind of real world usage. You would have much better results with PDF Expert.

I believe PDF expert has the same issue, see this post from another user:

I went through this with the developer of PDF Expert when I was experiencing significant lag navigating around pages in my engineering drawings for work. The slow regeneration of graphics on certain pages in some of my PDFs would be similar in PDF Expert as well as Notability or Adobe’s app as well only to different degrees.

I ended up sending sample files to Readdle’s support team to test and the conclusion drawn by them was that the files that I had were simply too graphically intensive to render efficiently. File sizes were not huge, nor were page counts. These were pages 24x36 in size printed from CAD software with lots of vector information within them. Large areas of hatching or topographic contouring can sometimes slow things down in my experience. Here’s an exact quote from their email:

“I am afraid this file contains lots of graphics and such a situation can not be avoided while working with this file in the current version of the app. PDF Expert relies on iOS component and although we can not influence the system component itself, the situation might be improved in the future iOS updates. We will also investigate possibilities to improve the situation in the future updates of the app. Also, the issue is file-specific and you can try rasterizing your file using third-party solutions.

Please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience.”

The solution for me has been as suggested by them to rasterize some of the content that I’m receiving from my engineers to review. I’ll re-PDF the review sets that I get from them down to 11x17, opting to print as image and setting a reasonable resolution that I can still see detail in. This will often result in larger file sizes as things go from vectorized to raster but performance can go up.

Again this is just one experience, certainly more of an exception rather than a rule but from this experience I can honestly say that there’s more to performance rendering PDF files on iOS than JUST page count and PDF file size.

 

[kmoreau48]

Yeah, as long as the app is written to address all that memory the M1 w/ 16gigs should help a lot with those PDFs. As a side note have you tried PDF Viewer? It probably won't completely solve the issue but IME it is faster than Notability for just PDF notation. I don't do anything with complex vectors like you showed though. I do think the iPad is the right device for that type of work.

While I get the frustration with iPadOS (to a degree) and (to a greater degree) the number/quality of "pro" apps on the iPad, I'm with you that there are many workflows that can use that extra power. They aren't for everyone, but that's why it is great that Apple sells such a range of iPads. I don't know that I've ever seen a compute device get so much hate for being too powerful.

Exactly what I'm thinking as well, I guess it's human nature to complain no matter how good something is.