So today is apparently the day Twitter decided to become a public company, and I have it on in the background right now, ticker crawling across a browser tab while I actually want to talk about something else. TWTR opened around $26 and by the time I'm typing this it's sitting way north of that, which is its own kind of insane, but every tech site on the internet is going to have that story covered six ways by tonight. I don't have anything to add to it except that watching a stock chart for four hours is a genuinely terrible way to spend a Thursday.
What I actually want to write about is the iPad Air, because I picked one up over the weekend and I've had a few days with it now.
I've been carrying the third-generation iPad since it came out, the one everybody just calls "the heavy one" in retrospect. I never thought of it as heavy until I held the Air next to it at the Apple Store on Saturday and it was like someone had swapped my tablet for a prop. Apple says 1 pound versus 1.44 pounds for the old one, and normally I roll my eyes at spec-sheet numbers like that, but this is one of those cases where you feel it in about two seconds. Reading in bed with the old iPad meant propping it against a knee or a pillow because holding it one-handed for more than a few minutes made my wrist ache. The Air I can just hold. That's the whole review, honestly.
The bezels are the other big visible change and I was skeptical going in, thinking it was going to make accidental touches a problem when I'm gripping the sides. Hasn't happened once. If anything the narrower bezel is what makes the weight loss feel real instead of just a spec on a box, because the actual footprint barely changed while the screen looks like it's floating closer to the edge.
Inside it's got the A7 chip, same silicon family as the iPhone 5s, plus the M7 motion coprocessor. I'm not a benchmark person so I can't tell you FPS numbers that mean anything, but app switching and Safari tab-juggling feel noticeably snappier than they did on the old hardware, especially with a bunch of tabs open, which is basically my entire use case.
Two complaints, and I mean actual complaints, not the fake-balance kind where you say something nice right after:
First, no Touch ID. It's on the 5s and it's genuinely great there, one of the few "future" features that actually delivers day to day, and its absence here feels like an odd line for Apple to have drawn. I get that it's a newer sensor and probably a supply thing, but going from unlocking my phone with a thumb to typing a passcode on the tablet is a small daily annoyance now that I know the alternative exists.
Second, the pricing. $499 for the base 16GB model is the same starting price as always, sure, but 16GB feels stingy in 2013 when you've got a family taking photos and video on the thing and downloading a few games for a kid in the backseat. Storage tiers jump in $100 increments and cellular adds another $130 on top of that, and it adds up fast if you actually want the amount of space that matches how people use these things now.
I tried to grab a Retina iPad mini at the same time and the guy at the store just laughed a little. Apparently they've been basically impossible to find since launch, some component shortage, so that's going to be a later post whenever I actually manage to get my hands on one. Small annoyance: everyone online is calling the color "Space Gray" now like it's a law, and while I like the shade fine, I miss just calling things "black."
Anyway. Line at the Apple Store on Saturday was maybe twenty people deep at eleven in the morning, mostly calm, one guy loudly explaining to his friend why he was "skipping a generation" from the iPad 2, which, fair enough I guess. Nobody in line was talking about Twitter going public this week. Everybody was talking about how light the box felt when they picked it up off the shelf.