LeSving wrote:
There are basically no 7-8 inch Android tablets left.
I am still using a 2013 Google Nexus 7. It does a great job (and is the perfect size, fixes to the yoke or sits on a thigh) but it will not last forever. I have not seen any suitable replacements out there.
dublinpilot wrote:
leaves you needing a good reason to go Android instead of iPad
How workable is it to use a single Apple device (i.e. an iPad Mini) and not join the Apple ecosystem at all? Can you use it without having any sort of account, or perhaps an account that does nothing except let you download SkyDemon? 15 years on, I am still scared of iTunes and things ‘synchronising’.
I haven’t used iTunes on the PC in years. You can have an apple account, use it to buy SD or other software, and never touch a PC, Mac or other device.
How workable is it to use a single Apple device (i.e. an iPad Mini) and not join the Apple ecosystem at all? Can you use it without having any sort of account, or perhaps an account that does nothing except let you download SkyDemon? 15 years on, I am still scared of iTunes and things ‘synchronising’.
We have a 2011 Ipad 2 here and it still works. One cannot install most new apps on it because the OS cannot be upgraded, so this is not like Android 4 from a similar era which still runs most current apps and anyway one can easily sideload .apk apps (without rooting the device). One also needs an account on the Apple store to download apps and somehow this account got broken and I can’t create another one. So the device continues to run existing apps, and an old browser.
The problem with aviation apps is that the ones in question are under development (which itself is a good thing of course) and you can expect to be forced to move to later and later OS versions, so the lifetime of the device will be limited.
Itunes is a horrible POS but you don’t have to use it unless you want offline backups, or (AIUI) you want to back up apps which are no longer in the Apple shop. The online backup/restore doesn’t actually restore your old apps; it downloads new ones from the shop, and if the app has been removed from the shop (which many of the less common ones have been) it won’t restore. Maybe this situation has changed in which case somebody is 100% sure to comment 
I tried to mount it on a suction cup holder in the past but it falls after a while, I think the pro is too heavy for that.
Suction halves at FL180 (500mb) 
airways wrote:
In the Diamond you don’t have that choice, but you can take notes on an iPad Mini which is mounted on a yoke with a decent mount.
My plane has a similar control stick and canopy configuration to that of Diamonds. Initially I used a suction cup on the side of the windshield for my iPad Mini, but they are not at all reliable in my experience. Eventually I installed 1 inch screw-attached diamond ball bases on the left and right sides of the panel, in non-structural locations on both sides. This makes the ball base a minor modification to which you can ‘temporarily’ attach whatever you need to put the Mini (or anything else) where it’s in clear view.
As mentioned above the resulting left corner of panel, tilted slightly up location puts the iPad Mini where it is easily read, doesn’t block my view of the panel, doesn’t sit on my lap and is easy to reach. It’s closer to my face than the panel itself but I can deal with that visually. I don’t use a notepad on the device but it would be well positioned for that purpose as well.
Graham wrote:
How workable is it to use a single Apple device (i.e. an iPad Mini) and not join the Apple ecosystem at all? Can you use it without having any sort of account, or perhaps an account that does nothing except let you download SkyDemon? 15 years on, I am still scared of iTunes and things ‘synchronising’.
I’m a long time Mac user and I also have an iPad Mini. I don’t use any of Apple’s cloud services, so there’s zero “Apple-based” synchronisation between the two. I synchronise using Google Drive and Dropbox which also work with my Android phone.. You do need an Apple ID, but that’s about it.
Peter wrote:
The problem with aviation apps is that the ones in question are under development (which itself is a good thing of course) and you can expect to be forced to move to later and later OS versions, so the lifetime of the device will be limited.
So do I have this correct – will the aviation apps eventually refuse to run (or at least, not allow you to run the latest update) on an older version of iPadOS, potentially one that users are unable to update because the devices won’t run it?
SkyDemon for Android has never nudged me towards an OS update and I am still able to run the latest version on my 2013 Nexus 7 which is running a really quite old version of Android – it bricks if you try to go newer that the version it has.
I would not want to end up in a situation with a ticking clock where eventually my device won’t run the software I want because the device manufacturer declares it too old and prevents the software vendor maintaining compatibility with my device. Of course the Nexus 7 will eventually need replacing in the role, but that will be after ~ 10 years of use, not due to a decision of the hardware manufacturer, and in any case it cost less than £200 in the first place.
Peter wrote:
More CPU power → more heat to be dissipated. No free lunch.
This isn’t quite true: processors can become more efficient. My iPhone 12 for instance runs a lot cooler than my iPhone 4, despite having considerably more processing power. My 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 system is considerably cooler (and uses considerably less electricity) than my Pentium 4 system from the early 2000s, despite having at least an order of magnitude more processing power.
Comparing like-generation with like-generation, certainly – a more powerful version of a processor from the same generation will dissipate more heat, but newer generation processors tend to be more efficient than previous. For an extreme example, consider the heat dissipation of a Cray-1 which needed building scale watercooling, with the heat dissipation of a Raspberry Pi, which is several orders of magnitude more powerful – yet doesn’t even need a heat sink.
Adding to that:
The reason for what alioth describes is that the modern platforms are all designed for a particular power profile, and have a max design power (and associated heat dissipation).
If they approach that limit, they “clock down” to stay below that power level, and the simple truth is that the typical multi-core processor cannot run all cores simultaneously at full tilt.
So a lot of the “more cores, more power” is an illusion, doubling core count does NOT double the CPU throughput, even before you take into account memory bus bottlenecks and the general lack of applications using cores in parallel well.
PCs certainly draw a lot less power now but mobile devices have been constant in terms of battery life, and run just as hot as ever. Getting forced air ventilation is key.
Various previous threads on tablets overheating.
Peter wrote:
More CPU power → more heat to be dissipated. No free lunch.
To be fair, the newer CPUs tend to be better optimized, so yes, while “more powerful” they don’t necessarily dissipate more heat. The “more power → more heat” mantra was most true back when Intel was stuck in P4 hell…
