Speed test: Netbook versus Apple iPad Video

Speed test: Netbook versus Apple iPad Video Transcript

>> I am Dan Ackerman and we are taking a look at that all important question, what is faster, Apple's iPad or a Netbook. Now obviously for basic computing test some people say, oh an iPad will be a lot better in that kind of stuff; other people say a Netbook would. You know, an iPad looks very fast, looks very responsive, but its whole operating system is kind of built around its hardware. While a Netbook technically has more powerful hardware, but it's also trying to do the same things that a big full sized laptop does. In order to answer this all important question, we grabbed our good friend Mr. stopwatch and we ran both systems through not terribly scientific, but you know real world situations to see who would respond faster. First one, very important a boot-up test. So, we turned both systems on at the same time, two fingers, two different stopwatches. As you can see the iPad finished its boot-up cycle first followed by the Netbook, took almost twice as long. Now obviously, for this test, we have speeded this up, so you can see this in kind of fast motion, but the iPad took 23.1 seconds to boot-up, while the Netbook took 50.5 seconds to boot up. That is almost twice as long. Now our next test, we decided to load up our favorite website CNET.com and see how long will it take Safari on both systems to render that page. Now for our next test, we obviously didn't need to speed this footage up. It only took 5.4 seconds for both of our browsers to boot-up CNET.com. That is the Safari browser for the Netbook and Safari Mobile for the iPad, so they are not exactly same, but pretty darn close and as you can see, web surfing really quick on both of these machines. Now our next test is probably a little more technical. We took the SunSpider JavaScript test as a benchmark that will run your computer through a bunch of different JavaScript test, repeated a couple of times, then give you a time in milliseconds on how fast it ran. That is a great kind of cross platform test we could run both in Safari Mobile on the iPad and in the Safari browser on the Netbook. So again, we had to speed-up this test just to show it to you, but this shows you where a more powerful hardware for the Netbook comes in that completed the test in 2,272-milliseconds while the iPad took a heck of a lot longer 12,591-milliseconds to run through the same test. Now, a lot of people may say this is like comparing apples to oranges, maybe some people would say it is more like oranges to tangerines. They are kind of different flavors all of the same general sort of computing device and as you can see in some tasks like boot-up the iPad is a lot faster because it is really optimized for its hardware. When you take a more general interest just like our JavaScript test that really relies on the computer hardware more, well then obviously, our Netbook, even though it is a low powered laptop still a lot more powerful in terms of processing than the iPad. Well, that is going to do a heck of a lot better. I am Dan Ackerman answering the all important question, what is faster, Apple's iPad or a Netbook.