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Comment by alexfromapex | Hacker News Reader

I was trying to think of a reason you'd need the full power of an M3 chip in an iPad...any ideas?

Supply chain consolidation. Supplying newly manufactured iPads with chips no longer in production isn’t really a winning strategy. Honestly it’s a bit surprising they didn’t just jump to M4s since the iPad Pros debuted with that about a year ago.

I believe the “you” in the “you’d” that the comment refers to is the customer, and the customer certainly doesn’t “need” supply chain consolidation.

I mean, as a potential customer “you’d” probably like to be able to buy the product announced. Fitting new products with A15 or M1 chips that aren’t in production anymore will impact the ability to buy one unless Apple is sitting on a big stockpile of unused chips.

As someone struggling to find the limits of his M2 iPad air, you don't.

Hopefully 7 years from now you'll still be able to use it with modern apps, websites, and video content. IMO, The benefits of these chips are in longevity rather than pushing them to the limit today.

This is the pretty obvious answer. I'm looking at replacing my gen-3 iPad Air from 2019 because it's feeling pretty pokey now. (And my wife's gen-1 iPad Air from 2013 is entirely unusable.)

I don't think there's any amount of processing power that can keep up with website bloat long term, but you out to get an extra year or two from the M3

Gaming and local LLM to name two specific things I use my m4 iPad Pro for. I have no idea if an M1 or whatever would have the same performance. I think it's really cool that I can have the same processor-ish in my laptop and my tablet, but that's not a reason to spend $2k.

3D design/sculpting, Procreate with many layers, intensive gaming, video editing.

Though I agree most workflows aren't remotely capable software-wise compared to Mac counterparts.

Because you plan on keeping it for as long as possible. I'm still using my 2018 iPad Pro (it's my favorite computer to use).

Beats me, but in prior iPad release posts on HN, people would swear up and down that AR work would be a key use case, because Apple had put in an AR-capable camera in the Pro. These people have since moved on to posting fantastical visions of what the Apple Vision Pro will be capable of.

That’s because if you’re on the forefront of AR you’re probably targeting Vision 2. The people doing AR work have moved on to different hardware.

Meta smart glasses are selling well. Apple smart glasses will arrive eventually, based on VisionOS.

To sell more ipads.

Video editing apps like DaVinci Resolve will take advantage of this nicely, as will similar multimedia apps.

Local AI models and gaming also come to mind.

I wanted to say x86 (and PPC) emulation for gaming, but Apple doesn't allow JITing unfortunately.

Probably those who do 3D modeling, sculpting, illustration video editing, photography etc.

Nobody on earth needs an M3 in an iPad.

Why not? Honest question.

Because there’s nothing you can do on an M3 that you can’t do on an M2. Or M1.

But can't you do it faster on a faster processor?

If shaving milliseconds off of your workflow is so mission critical that spending an additional few hundred to few thousand dollars is worth it, you don’t need a snarky HN post to tell you which iPad to buy.

And I’m not convinced that person even exists except in their own minds.

I read M4 is about 20% than M3 in editing photos from Lightroom. That's seems significant.

I don't have skin in the game here, as I don't own anything from Apple. I was just curious.

640K of RAM should be enough for anyone.

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