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[Weaver]

My beloved has just bought herself a new iPad Pro v4 12.9" with 4G NIC and 256GB flash. I really don’t like the idea of having to swipe the screen instead of having an Apple button but luckily Janet is already used to it after just one day.

The machine has something called a 12Z Bionic processor in it. I have no idea exactly what that is apart from that it has 8 CPU cores and a multi-core GPU too, and is presumably ARM AArch64 like the others.

I would be interested in comparing it against my iPad Pro v1 CPU against CPU. What would be the easiest way of running a benchmark on each?

[Ronski]

Glad to hear you've got over your financial issues and are no longer going to starve as suggested in the Covid19 thread due to lack of funds.

With regards to touch I use my Huewei Mate Pro 20 via touch, and am now so use to it that I constantly try and swipe on my tablet.

[Weaver]

I could do with copying some of my enormous Shortcuts programs over from my machine to Janet’s because some are so enormous that they serve as a really good test of CPU performance, indeed one program takes so long to run that I mistook the situation for a bug and thought it had hung.

I’m digging around trying to find a convenient way of copying Shortcuts programs to another machine, including all dependent subroutines recursively. 

[sevenlayermuddle]

My own reservation about an iPad with no home button is, might I get confused over which way up I am holding it?   I feel I need to know that so I can correctly predict the edge on which I’ll find the other buttons, for volume &  sleep.  Maybe it’s not a problem in practice.

Congrats to Mrs W on the new purchase.

[Weaver]

If anyone finds out how to copy a Shortcuts program then do let me know. I’m on the trail of something useful in Reddit.

@7LM good point about orientation.


I prefer my ancient iPad Pro v1; I definitely want a home button, I think. Taking screenshots is fiddly without a home button and I use it to wake Siri up and make her listen to me when on battery. There must be solutions to these difficulties on the v4. She likes the display; ‘wide colour’, I presume, means more bits per pixel, better colour depth and to my eyes it appears that there might be better contrast.

On my iPad I never take photographs. Janet does a lot of photography mostly with her iPhone because her ‘proper’ dedicated digital camera  is never at hand at the right moment. The new iPad has two rear facing cameras - or something - but I’m not sure anyone ever takes photos with an iPad - especially a 12.9" one? So the benefit Janet will get from the new iPad is in looking at her images on the better display compared to that of the iPad 6 she is used to.

[g3uiss]

Having purchased an iPhone XR a year ago, it took a couple of dats to manage without the home button. Now if I pick up and older device with I don’t know how to work it 😊

[sevenlayermuddle]

I don’t know what a shortcuts program is.  That aside, but at risk of talking utter nonsense, might Airdrop help in your quest to copy them?

Airdrop has some good tricks, like sharing iCloud’s password manager’s website credentials with another person.   That has been very useful this past few weeks, allowing both other half and myself to independently login to ‘my’ secure Tesco account, adding stuff for the next home delivery as and when we think of it.

[Weaver]

Apple Shortcuts used to be called "Workflow". It’s iOS’s scripting language. I have written hundreds of routines, some of them quite long, for example one of them contains 447 actions; it talks to my Firebrick router and assesses the state of the modems and DSL links. It also diagnoses mistakes where a modem is plugged into the wrong DSL line.

[Weaver]

I looked into Airdrop but couldn’t get it to work for some reason when I tried to send the text of a routine to Janet. Janet has used Airdrop successfully often.

[Alex Atkin UK]

For benchmarking, I tend to use Geekbench 5 to compare all my devices.

[Weaver]

Thanks Alex - an excellent tip!

[Ronski]

For benchmarking, I tend to use Geekbench 5 to compare all my devices.

I'll have to give that a go on my two PCs , I'm currently fine tuning the memory on my new Ryzen 3900X system, I'll start a separate thread at some point.

[Weaver]

Comparison between the iPad Pro v1 and v4 using the iOS GeekBench benchmark app:

	Single core      score:	Multi-core    score:
My iPad Pro v1:	655	1205
Janet iPad Pro v4:	1117	4711
Ratio v4/v1:	1.71	3.91

I have some horrible enormous iOS Shortcuts programs that are really slow, take forever to run, could do with all that processor power; the v4 is 71% faster assuming we can’t take advantage of multiple cores.