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iPad Pro With its 8 gbs of ram M1 expected life expectancy?
- Thread starter waloshin
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Depends what you wanna do with it. I have 32 GBs and use containers and VMs heavily. 8GB wouldn't be workable from day 1
I didn’t even know my iPad could be ordered with 32 GB RAM!
Given that a great many are used solely at home, chances a high that they fall on a cushion or soft carpet.
With a 1024x768 screen in 2021 and the snail performance, this will be a tiny user group these days.
And the rapidly dwindling number of apps that will run on it. I had been using it for email, but it no longer meets my provider's security requirements. But the battery is still going strong.
the M1 pro will have a much longer life than the older iPads. Hardware has been advancing much faster than software requirements... The OG iPad was underpowered even for its time. The M1 pro is more powerful than the vast majority of laptops and has an OS and apps that are less demanding that desktop devices (and Apple doesn't seem to be wanting to change this radically anytime soon and that's also why they are extending the life of old devices so much, and this will probably increase further, to 10 years or more, with the current pro iPads)
I looked for the sarcasm signal at the end of this '/s'. I have had an iPad since the original, and not one screen crack. I actually own 3 now. I routinely knock them off the table, desk, bed, to hardwood floors. no screen crack. the only one I have even actually seen with a screen crack (not mine) was because someone sat on theirs (on a cushion), and it was warped silly, like literally inches in a nice big curve. the funny thing is that still turned on, and I could still hook it up to my computer and download the pics (because he had not password protected it, the cracked screen no longer functioned as a touch screen lol).
so yeah. not nearly as fragile as you portray.
Put it this way, the 2014 Air 2 and 2015 1st gen iPad Pro are still getting updates and if the battery is good they run great, so any iPad Pro newer than 2018 I imagine will get upwards of +7 years, probably a full decade at least.
Considering Apple is STILL supporting the first generation 12.9" iPad Pro and will continue to until AT LEAST fall of next year (at least seven years total), I'd say 6-10 years is likely. Even with 8GB of RAM on lower end M1 iPad Pros, they still are not allowing apps to fully continue to run in the background and each app is limited to 5GB. So, iPadOS isn't even utilizing the full 6GB of RAM that the 2020 A12Z iPad Pros had, let alone the 8GB of RAM that the 128-512GB M1 iPad Pro models have, let alone the 16GB of RAM that the 1-2TB M1 iPad Pro models have. It will be a good while.
The device become useless when it is too slow to do anything. The answer to the question relies on the future projection of iPadOS and iPad apps complexity/demands for performance. With the current projection of OS/Apps, physical breakdown will limit the life span of the device with the battery likely giving up first.
Unless you need top performance, the iPads has become Macs, you can use them 10+ years and only need to replace them when they break down.
Unless you need top performance, the iPads has become Macs, you can use them 10+ years and only need to replace them when they break down.
A couple of remarks:
1. Slowness is a subjective thing. Some people tolerate it much more than others and also may only use apps where speed doesn't matter much... So very different views about it....
Some here say the iPad air 2 is still great. I find it annoyingly slow. Same for the mini 4.
Even the first gen pro, which is much faster, feels sluggish when you are used to something like A12/A12X, but it definitely requires much less patience than the air 2.
2. Most people here consider that an iPad is dead when the battery is, that is they either don't know that Apple offers battery swaps (=iPad swaps) or, more likely, they think that it is not worth spending an extra $100 on an old device. Sure the service stops 5-7 years after end of sales, but at that point the device it often 7-10 years old already...
1. Slowness is a subjective thing. Some people tolerate it much more than others and also may only use apps where speed doesn't matter much... So very different views about it....
Some here say the iPad air 2 is still great. I find it annoyingly slow. Same for the mini 4.
Even the first gen pro, which is much faster, feels sluggish when you are used to something like A12/A12X, but it definitely requires much less patience than the air 2.
2. Most people here consider that an iPad is dead when the battery is, that is they either don't know that Apple offers battery swaps (=iPad swaps) or, more likely, they think that it is not worth spending an extra $100 on an old device. Sure the service stops 5-7 years after end of sales, but at that point the device it often 7-10 years old already...
RAM is a decisive factor in perceived ’slowness’. The first big iPad Pro from 2015 had 4GB of RAM. Although it’s a bit slow to use when it’s under heavy load, it’s generally very usable with modern iOS and apps. However, the first smaller iPad Pro from 2016 (iPad Pro 9.7”), only has 2GB of RAM and it’s really quite slow now in all regards, even launching simple apps like remote and music takes some time. Compare: iPhone 7 Plus from the same year has 3GB of RAM despite having a lower screen resolution than the iPad Pro 9.7 inch.
So given that the current generation of iPad Pro is the first generation that significantly increased the RAM from 4GB/6GB to 8GB, the longevity is going to be very good, and will not be perceived as slow for many years to come.
All of the above didn’t take into the factor that Apple’s SoC has seen enormous performance gain over the past 5 years. The iPad Pro 9.7 inch has a Geekbench 5 score of 634 (SC) and 1187 (MC) compared with over 1600 And 7200 for the latest generation.
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Note, the 5GB RAM per app limit is just for the 2021 iPP. The 2020 iPP has a limit somewhere around 4GB RAM while the 2017 and 2018 iPP is around 3GB. While a single app may be limited, the RAM does get fully utilized by the OS. Besides, the OS itself, GPU, etc. also need to use RAM.
Honestly, I don't see how one can say 6GB RAM isn't being fully utilized when I'm getting reloads on that one and have seen free RAM drop to 100-200MB. That suggests to me there really isn't sufficient RAM available for background apps to use unless Apple implements swap ala-MacOS.
With that said, I expect all flavors of the 2021 iPP will be supported for 6-10 years and support will be the same regardless if RAM is 8GB or 16GB.
Compatible doesn't mean works well.
I've got iOS 14 on an Air 2 and Pro 9.7 and honestly, force close + complete app reload actually seems faster than reloading from saved state. Like when I open Safari after it's been put in background (even when there's only 2 tabs), it would take more than a minute before Safari would respond to touch input.
With that said, in future, I expect the low RAM would be more of an issue for the iPad 8th gen and Air 4 with just 3GB and 4GB RAM respectively than with the 2021 iPP with 8GB+. And really, that's OK since the basic iPad and Air are cheaper to replace anyway.
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6-10 easily. After seeing the iPad Mini 4/Air 2 get iPadOS 15 I will never again be surprised how long these devices last.
The only real difference in speed between the 2015 and 2016 pro, other than reloads, is that the 9.7 sometimes becomes unresponsive because of lack of RAM, but in normal use the difference is relatively small most of the time... In some demanding web pages (like youtube or gmail on Safari) it struggles (granted much less that something like the air 2 or the mini 4), while A10X with the same RAM is definitely faster and A12 even with only 3GB RAM is even faster than A10X and extremely fluid. At this point the CPU is more of a deciding factor than the RAM, and from 3GB and above RAM becomes a non issue for speed in 99% of situations. Things might change though in a few years...