I have been up and down with my health and have been struggling lately with finding something positive in my life to focus on. I mean when you eat, sleep and work (and your job is not a job that is providing you with a sense of fulfilment) life starts to et a little bleak. When you pile on no outside of work activity and and a dash of to ill to go out and live life to the fullest, it is very hard to really enjoy yourself. Now I am not saying that there is absoltley no fun in my life but there is very little time for me to reallly enjoy the things in life that I am really lucky to have. For instance my beautiful and super smart girlfriend. As well as my love of martial arts and out door activities (ie: walking, bicycling, hiking, etc…) So what I can do is blog. I may not put something up everyday but I will definitely get back to that. I will mostly be commenting on things that are going on in the world or that I think are just cool. As many people know I am a very big apple fan and user, not to mention tech in general.

http://youtu.be/l5J908SxAgA

So naturally I was excited when the iPad mini and the new mac line were announced yesterday. One thing that I have always liked about the mac and apple is that they design things with a very simple and very zen approach to them.  The most important thing about the apple products is that they just work. They are what they are and what they say they are no more no less.

Unlike many other apple fans I am not a hater of other companies. In fact I am super glad that apple has competition, if not there would be less need to push the envelope to strive to be the best. Many of my fiends are converts to apple thanks to my wisdom but many are also hatters. I mean HATERS! There have nothing good to say about them and that their products are crap and too expensive… and on and on. I how ever choose to think a little different (plug)! I choose to wan to get the best item for what i need to preform. For instance my Dad and I bought my mom an android tablet for my Mom for her birthday. That was in our price range and did what she needed it to do. However not that the iPad mini is a fact and not fiction I sort of think it would have been better for her. At only $80 more you get lighter, faster, more software, better design, better looks and the option to integrate with their apple tv unit (i got them the year before, not to mention integration with my house and sisters house that is all apple electronics for entertainment). Another very useful part of the iPad line is the data capable models. Connected to everyone and everything all the time… Zen. Other than the amazon model none of the others tablets in this category really offer this feature, which to me really separates the products and almost cripples them.

So many people complain that the iPads are not quad core processors and that Dual cores are a dead technology, that they don’t have the speed. I think however, it is irelevent what running shoes you are wearing, what’s important is who wins the race. Have a little gander below.

GLBenchmark 2.1

In GLBenchmark 2.1, one of the few benchmarks that has versions for both Android and iOS, the new iPad scored higher. On the program’s Egypt Standard test, which shows a 3D animation of ancient Egypt, the new iPad and its A5X chip processed 6718 frames at a rate of 60 frames-per-second to the Transformer Primer’s 5,939 frames at 53 fps.

When GLBenchmark ran the Geometric test (vertex weighted), which measures low-level shader performance, the new iPad processed 7,530,524 frames at a rate of 57 fps while the Tegra 3-based Transformer Prime processed just 3,523,926 at a rate of 27 fps. We saw the same trend on the program’s Fill test, which measures texturing speed, as the iPad processed 1.98 billion textels per second to the Prime’s 404.61 million.

(image and info taken from GLBenchmark)

Just a quick note, the new iPad 4th gen actually uses an A6X apple chip that is twice as fast as the A5X that is in the current iPad… nuff said.

all that aside

I thought you might enjoy viewing the apple iPad mini prodcut video:

http://youtu.be/qL0UlqpfuQc

What the real question is, “what is best for you?”

Here is a comparison of three top 7″ portable tablets. (notice that Ipad mini is small lighter and has a bigger screen)

(image taken from digitaltrends.com)

http://youtu.be/HtphI6DiU54

Well I hope that this is informative for you :) and if you are in the market for any apple product used or new and want an opinion on something to buy feel free to drop me a line.