Merino Wool Felt and Leather iPad Pro and iPad Air Sleeve: $79.99

We have a deal on the Hampshire iPad Pro (11″) and iPad Air (10.9″) sleeve. This sleeve is made from Merino Wool felt and leather, and it features a pocket and a loop for your Apple Pencil, too. It’s also designed to hold the Magic Keyboard with your iPad, and the front flap closes with a magnetic clasp. It’s $79.99 through our deal.

Swiper, NOT Swiping — Mac Geek Gab 848

These days we do lots of swiping on our devices, and sometimes the results are expected, other times not so much! Listen as John and Dave share tips and answer questions about swiping. That’s not all, of course, the topics expand from there, including a great dive into USB speeds on Apple’s new iPads. Listen as your two favorite geeks walk through all of this for you this week!

iPad Air Might Make the Pro Obsolete

The reviews of the new iPad Air are starting to appear. Wired UK‘sis very positive, with author Jeremy White saying that it might make the Pro redundant for many users.

The inclusion of Apple’s A14 Bionic means you get the company’s latest chip that is in some respects even better than the one in the current iPad Pro. While to say this results in better performance than the Pro would be outright wrong, you do get a big bump in power – a 40 per cent increase in performance over the previous iPad Air, Apple says, and a 30 per cent uptick in graphics performance. Much like the new iPhone 12 series that also carries the A14, the Air is noticeably faster than its previous iteration. Battery life is of the usual iPad standard – top drawer. You will not need to charge the Air for days with light use, and if you do employ it as a PC replacement (which is certainly possible, especially with the keyboard) you will get many more hours out of it than a standard laptop. The faster 20W charger that comes in the box will help top things up if you do run low. It’s not all good news, though. Despite stealing so much from the Pro there is no LiDAR and no ultrawide camera.

Apple’s Chip VP Tim Millet Talks About Designing the A14

Tim Millet, Apple’s VP of platform architecture, and Tom Boger, senior director of Mac and iPad product marketing, talk about designing the A14 used in the iPad Air and upcoming iPhone 12.

“One of the ways chip architects think about features is not necessarily directly mapping [transistors] to a user feature in the product so much as enabling the underlying technology, like software in the graphics stack to be able to leverage a new capability in the GPU,” Millet said. “That will inevitably come as a visual feature in a game, or in a snappy transition in the user interface.”