iPad 3

WSJ: Apple testing 8-inch iPad

The invites haven't even been sent out and yet the frenzied speculation about what Tim Cook will whip out on stage at next month's purported announcement has begun. The Wall Street Journal believes Cupertino's planning to produce a smaller, 8-inch slate to partner its 9.7-inch flagship. Unnamed sources at the company's suppliers say it'll pack a screen with a resolution close to the 1024 x 768 display on the current model. This jibes with what we've heard about the iPad 3 toting a Retina Display -- unless the smaller unit is aimed at budget buyers. The report claims test panels are being produced by AU Optronics and LG Display and that this model might also run on LTE. It's probably fair to point out that Apple is famous for producing prototypes in a wide variety of sizes that will never see the light of day, so don't get your hopes up too soon.
sourceWSJ

I love my iPad 1 even after buying and playing with an iPad 2 for my wife. I have no real reason right now to upgrade.

Although the retina display (and possibly a better camera) on iPad 3 might make me reconsider. However, I'm concerned about the potential sacrifices on speed and battery life. Will all this high res overhead bog the system down to the extent that overall the device doesn't feel much faster? Or if it does, will it be at the expense of battery life?

TheGameguru wrote:

Yeah beating Nintendo at network/online is like setting the bar fairly low...not like Jags season attendance numbers low...but still pretty low.

Hey! Chicago, Arizona, Miami, Oakland, Tampa Bay, St. Louis, and Cincinnati all did worse!

My wife has an iPad 1 and I want to get my own. The iPad 2 wasn't a big enough jump for me. I'm really hoping they announce it pretty soon.

*Legion* wrote:
Malor wrote:

Yeah, I get the definite impression that Apple holds its collective nose near gamers, because it's just not Hip and Cool(tm). They don't seem to actively sabotage gaming, but they don't seem to go even a millimeter out of their way to make it better.

I wouldn't quite say that. When gaming took off on iOS, Apple created Game Center. It's still more than Nintendo has ever delivered in the online/social gaming space.

They've also put a non trivial amount of effort into developer tools for OpenGL ES. I'm not saying gaming is a high priority for Apple, but they are definitely not ignoring it.

Will all this high res overhead bog the system down to the extent that overall the device doesn't feel much faster? Or if it does, will it be at the expense of battery life?

No way to answer that for sure until it ships. My guess is that it will feel at least as fast as the iPad 2, maybe faster, while offering incredibly good text quality. Games will probably look about the same, because they'll almost certainly run at iPad 2 resolution.

Why? The iPad 3 is unlikely to have enough horsepower to drive 3D at full resolution. Its reported resolution will be 2048x1536, or 3 megapixels. At the moment, driving 1920x1200 (which is just 2 megapixels) on a desktop takes about a 150-watt video card to do really well. If we assume the iPad 3 is using new miracle technology that's twice that efficient, you're talking 112.5 watts of heat to push 3 megapixels, 60 times a second.

Considering that the entire power budget for EVERYTHING(CPU, memory, video card, physical display, peripheral devices) on an iPad is probably no more than 40 watts, I just see no possible way that it's going to be any speed demon running 2048x1536. It'll be fine in 2D, zippy and quick and fun to use, but I think it would be impossible to drive a 3D screen to PC quality levels in that power budget. They would have to make enormous tradeoffs to maintain any kind of reasonable frame rate.

So, the obvious and easy tradeoff is just to switch to iPad 2 resolution for games -- half resolution both ways, or 1024x768. That's quarter-res, 0.75 megapixels, which even a 10 watt video card should do okay with, these days. Text in the quarter-res games will look a little blockier than it does now, but actual gameplay will look almost identical.

I suspect that you'll probably be able to think of it as an iPad 2 with a unbelievably good screen for reading and web browsing, but very slightly reduced quality for gaming. So if you use it as a bookreader, you'll probably be very, very interested, but if you mostly game, maybe not.

Again, however, until they actually announce hardware, this is all guesswork.

Malor wrote:

So, the obvious and easy tradeoff is just to switch to iPad 2 resolution for games -- half resolution both ways, or 1024x768. That's quarter-res, 0.75 megapixels, which even a 10 watt video card should do okay with, these days. Text in the quarter-res games will look a little blockier than it does now, but actual gameplay will look almost identical.

I suspect that you'll probably be able to think of it as an iPad 2 with a unbelievably good screen for reading and web browsing, but very slightly reduced quality for gaming.

Wouldn't you expect improvements in performance? It would be a (presumably) faster chip driving the same resolution as the old device.

This is Apple. They tend to use weak video hardware. I wouldn't count on it.

It certainly COULD happen, and I rather hope it does, but I'm used to being disappointed when it comes to Apple and video card performance.

But Malor is correct.. there just isnt a way technically to push that amount of pixels and still have it run the amount of polygons its been running on the ipad2.. so either its half/quarter rez with improved details in the polygons.. or its full rez and polygons that look like Quake models.

LTE is looking like a potential feature as well (via WSJ).

If that's true, then that's awesome. Makes sense to have a non-iPhone release as a bit of a test bed to see if any major problems arise prior to an iPhone 5 LTE.

You know, this is the most leaking I remember about any Apple product. I wonder if Apple is losing its operational security after Steve's death? We'll have to see how accurate the rumors are, but if they're really spot-on, I'd call that the first major change at Apple.

If the leaks are real, I suspect that people either don't respect or don't fear Tim Cook they way they did Steve Jobs.

Hmmm. I feel like there's been lots of rumors and leaks of iPhone/iPad stuff in the past, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

Certis wrote:

Hmmm. I feel like there's been lots of rumors and leaks of iPhone/iPad stuff in the past, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

Well, they did lose an iPhone 4... That's sort of a big leak

Malor wrote:

You know, this is the most leaking I remember about any Apple product. I wonder if Apple is losing its operational security after Steve's death? We'll have to see how accurate the rumors are, but if they're really spot-on, I'd call that the first major change at Apple.

If the leaks are real, I suspect that people either don't respect or don't fear Tim Cook they way they did Steve Jobs.

What's leaked, really? Retina display and LTE are both pretty obvious. The iPad 3 supporting LTE is a "leak" that dates back to when Steve was still running the company. Retina display was "leaked" for the last iPad and was wrong - eventually, it'll be right. I mean, these are features that I would strongly assume to be possibilities for the next iPad even if there was a complete absence of rumors suggesting them. They're just kind of obvious answers to the question of, "how can we improve on the iPad 2?"

I think you can say that there's lips loosening over at Apple when someone actually leaks something novel, something non-obvious. Something that people aren't already assuming is at least a possibility.

If the information lock-down really was easing up at Apple, then maybe we would have some clue what the hell is going on with the Mac Pro. Is a new one ever going to come out? Are they killing the line? I've got a team of designers at the company I work for wanting to know, and there's not a shred of information out there.

I was told by several high ranking Verizon Wireless exec's that it is 100% an LTE device.. they have a big internal meeting in a few weeks to start preparing for the campaign...

I would be also cautious about "obvious" and Apple

Everyone was so convinced that the obvious successor to the iPhone 4 was the iPhone 5.. and we had numerous "leaks" to convince us that indeed that was the case..

It could be that there are internal iPad3 designs that feature a retina display that is rumored..but in the end we end up with a slightly smaller iPad 2S (the rumored 8" model) with the same resolution but 4G connectivity... and no iPad 3 with retina display.

Certis wrote:

Hmmm. I feel like there's been lots of rumors and leaks of iPhone/iPad stuff in the past, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

After the iPhone 4S "press"bacle I cringe whenever stories "leak" about iPhone 5 or iPad 3.

I'm excited about the iPad 3. Going to sell of my iPad 1 and get a 3 on launch day. The iPad 2 just wasn't enough of a jump for me (didn't care about the camera) so I decided then to wait for a 3. I think Malor is right about the gaming. You just can't produce quality graphics at that resolution without sacrificing something. I do hope that it looks better than iphone resolution conversion. That looks okay but not great. What is the best bet for a 3 on launch day? We dont' have an apple store anywhere close to me, by the way. Closest thing is Best Buy. Do they open the online stores before launch or do they open them at launch?

TheGameguru wrote:

I would be also cautious about "obvious" and Apple

By "obvious", I don't mean true. I mean they're obvious potential features. They're not novel, not something earth-shattering and new.

If the iPad 3 is LTE, will people be shocked and amazed? No, of course not. That's what I mean by obvious. It's an easily predicted evolution of the product, something that people with no inside information would have no problem conjuring up themselves. It may or may not prove out to be actually there, but if it is, it's such an obvious feature that absolutely no one will be caught off-guard by its presence.

My point is, when something leaks that's non-obvious - something that people wouldn't just assume on their own is likely to be in the next product - that's when you can say that maybe the information lockdown at Apple is weakening.

Yeah, I think you're right, Legion. Point retracted.

"I hear the next iPad is going to be spherical, with retina display resolution and touch sensitivity on the entire surface of the sphere."

So, assuming the same screen dimensions, I'm figuring that at 264dpi, or almost as good as a first-generation laser printer, at 300dpi.

That's basically the resolution in screens that I've been waiting for since the first time I really thought about what screens would someday look like--- the improvement past 300dpi is very subtle, but it's major up to that point. The iPad 3 isn't _quite_ there, but I'd call it close enough.

If it's jailbreakable, I might buy one.

Hypatian wrote:

"I hear the next iPad is going to be spherical, with retina display resolution and touch sensitivity on the entire surface of the sphere."

So I can get all touchy feeley with my iBall? That's a day one purchase for me....

Regardless of what the next iteration has for upgrades, I think it's awesome to see the adoption of these devices in schools and the ease in which children interact with them.

As amazed as I am to see how much computers in general have become natural for kids, it's even more awesome to see that happening with the iPad.

As someone who works with a lot of tech, I am definitely not a Mac person, nor am I an iPhone person, but my goodness am I an iPad person.

I've been holding out since last year for an iPad, since the 2 didn't have the retina screen. I'm really hoping the new hardware can handle the graphic load.

It'll be fine for 2D, but it's very unlikely that it would be able to run fast 3D at full resolution. 2048x1536 is 3 megapixels. That's a LOT of data to be pushing out, 60 times a second. It's exactly halfway between 1920x1200 (2 megapixels) and 2560x1600 (4 megapixels). Only the really high-end video cards can push that kind of bandwidth, and they'll burn between five and ten times as much power, all by themselves, as the whole iPad is allowed to consume.

It's just flat physical reality. This isn't even laptop-class graphics, because there's no cooling fan or way to move heat out of the case, and people won't like the iPad if it gets hot. Yet, we'd be asking for desktop-level performance.

I think 1024x768 in 3D is about the best you can really hope for, although rumors are now claiming that the 2 does have stronger video, so it should at least be faster at that resolution.

March 7th

http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/28/a...

Let the consumer whoreness commence.

I am so thrilled to have someone else footing the bill on this

I hope the rumor of the price hike isn't true.

Gizmodo (over)analysis of the screen, based on the event invite.

Apple just flashed their new iPad 3 on their Wednesday 7 event invite. You can clearly see the new Retina display in all its glory. Compare the left (invitation) to the right (the iPad 2).

IMAGE(http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17ewsvzky0754jpg/original.jpg)