New iPad finally catches up to iPad 2
It's a strange title, but the truth is that when you have 4 times as much stuff to draw and your processor is the same speed, your drawing speed sucks. iPad 1 had a slow processor relative to what the display could allow you to do. iPad 2 caught up. iPad 3 may have had 4x the graphics chip performance, but things like text rendering are done in the main processor, not in the graphics chip. Sure it can do movie playback better, even animations better, but for lots of info changing on screen quickly that's not already in a hardware optimized format, the iPad 3 actually completes screen rendering noticeably slower than an iPad 2. Furthermore, many image processing algorithms are not linear in the number of pixels, so having 4x the GPU for 4x the pixels is actually down on the curve when your algorithm now taxes 16x as long. But who wants to ditch that gorgeous retina display?! So I'm hoping with double the CPU performance in the 4, Apple will again be at par between processor capability and screen capability. Ditto other comments about heat dissipation and weight. Wish that mini was gonna be retina...