Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple to Announce Second-Generation iPad Within 3-4 Weeks?
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
All such things in this day and age should be vector data, rasterized on the fly so as to be resolution independent.
People who are expecting a 10" Retina display this early in the game are out of their minds. Do you realize the pixels that processor would have to push? Not to mention the cost of such a display. I'd guess we're a couple of generations away from that kind of pixel density on the iPad. At least.
Have the specs for the cameras been released yet?
You're judging a speaker design from a mock up???
If Apple takes this long to update the hardware they will not be competitive with Honeycomb tablets. Motorola Xoom looks very impressive, so I hope that Apple has been paying attention.
I don't disagree that it should be that way, but the reality isn't always the way we think it should be...
Many people get hard-ons from being able to run quake 3 and a 1080p video simultaneously like that blackberry tablet, but I don't know anyone that actually would do this in real life. The battery drain would make it necessary to charge before you finish the movie.
When will people start thinking about what they need to do, and then determine what specs they need in stead of the other way around?
It's the functionality and the apps that make the iPad a success, not the specs compared to those supposed iPad killers we are seeing at CES. Some might be successful, but most won't be. The differentiator will not be specs.
Wow... How accurate, predicting that an iPad is coming in 3-4 weeks is like predicting it will rain in a cloudy day or saying that there will be holidays in December.
If he said a date and he would be right he would deserve all my respect.. He just made some headlines now
If he said a date and he would be right he would deserve all my respect.. He just made some headlines now
People who are expecting a 10" Retina display this early in the game are out of their minds. Do you realize the pixels that processor would have to push? Not to mention the cost of such a display. I'd guess we're a couple of generations away from that kind of pixel density on the iPad. At least.
Have the specs for the cameras been released yet?
You're judging a speaker design from a mock up???
I never said I was expecting retina display. I never said I didn't know how much the processor would push. Never said any of that.
I did say there would be no retina display, I was aware that would be comlicated. I was not expecting retina display, but I am waiting until there is a model with retina display before I buy my first iPad.
And yes, I am going to say the cameras are not going to be the best quality. The new iPod was the first iPod touch to have a camera, and the cameras on the iTouch are not the best quality. The first camera on the iPad are not going to be the best quality, either because Apple is not going to put out a great camera the first time. They are going to keep making it better so more people buy every year.
And I don't like the speaker on the back of the mock-up. And yes, I am judging the speakers by those of the mock-up. I am expecting the speakers to be where they are on the mock-up, just like everyone else is expecting a camera because it is on the mock-up.
Technology has progressed. Apple will not put a 2MP camera in the new iPad. Most likely it will be a 5 MP in the back and a lower-spec one in the front.
What do you really need for a camera in a device such as this? There is no lens and chip good enough on the market that would make a 12MP camera worthwile. If it has the same quality camera as the iPhone, it is sufficient for 99% of the needs of the prospective market.
Of course they will, what do you expect? Do you really think people would buy the iPhone4 if it had the same camera as the iPhone 2G? Would you do any different? Wouldn't you be pissed as a customer if they wouldn't upgrade their products?
but from what i hearing the specs on the iphone 5 are very nice
apple will have the fastest gpu in a selfone
and in embed devices only the psp2 will be faster
the SGX543MP4 in the psp2 and SGX543MP2 in iPhone5
but from what i hearing the specs on the iphone 5 are very nice
apple will have the fastest gpu in a selfone
and in embed devices only the psp2 will be faster
the SGX543MP4 in the psp2 and SGX543MP2 in iPhone5
Where did you hear that?
As for the cam, people need to not be states whores. My EOS350D will alow me to take better qualety pictures than any mobile device with 5 times as many MegaPixels. - That cam is f´n old but if you know what you are doing you can print images up to A3.... what on earth would you want with a gazillion MP Cam in an iPad? Exept for enlarging your gadget specs penis of cause.
As for the cam, people need to not be states whores. My EOS350D will alow me to take better qualety pictures than any mobile device with 5 times as many MegaPixels. - That cam is f´n old but if you know what you are doing you can print images up to A3.... what on earth would you want with a gazillion MP Cam in an iPad? Exept for enlarging your gadget specs penis of cause.
I would have put it slightly different, but I agree wholeheartedly with you.
My personal guess is that an iPad camera would see much less use for snapshots than a cellphone camera. Actually I'm wondering what I would use it at all for. I use my iPad daily everywhere and have not yet missed a camera function, EXCEPT a front facing camera for Facetime or Skype.
I think the larger the Tablet, the less likely you will take pictures with it for the following reasons:
- You look ridiculous taking pictures on the street with an iPad
- You will most likely not have it with you when you encounter a snapshot opportunity
I would rather see an SD slot than a camera on the new iPad.
So you can watch the movie you're shooting. That's one use I can think, though the thing will be very clunky still. Or I can envision it being a window to the world you write on in real time-there's a lot of potential uses. Just be creative when you think about it-other people will make a lot of money doing the same. Yes, it looks odd, no, its hard to think what it can do. But if you can think of something, well, you've just made money.
Gosh, you mean it isn't going to turn into a flying car by pushing a simple little button?? Apple really do suck don't they?.. especially considering you could do so much better.
Oh, and thanks for telling us your tech buying plans for the next few years by the way, we've all been really fretting over that.
Wrong. It's not about how quickly companies can churn out Honeycomb tablets or how quickly Google can update their code.
At least Apple design their products to make large steps and let other competitors catch-up within the year their product is their top product. I'm sure Apple have been keeping any eye on competition. It was going to happen for definite. However, I don't think they should get too distracted trying to supersede the competition's ideas. It's more about innovating new ideas to the product with their own visions. Not of other companies. Apple do this very well. Especially with very good software updates.
Retina Display - Yes, but not that set-up we saw in the iPhone. It'll be marketed as Retina display rather than be double the resolution.
Cameras - Yes for a front facing one at least. As long as they see Facetime becoming more popular; it'll happen. Maybe they'll integrate a swivel camera so it does front and back along the top?
SD Card - Only if they see a need to provide the photography/media market. iOS 5 will have to cater new changes for it to work better.
iOS 5 - We may not see it until after launch. I'm sure they'll talk it up like they did with iOS 4 promising new features and letting the iPhone 5 push it forward. Could Apple split the updates to cater the two devices better?
Smaller iPad - No way. I know Jobs has made public comments and then changed his mind later. I just don't see why we need a smaller tablet device unless Apple know scientific research shows adult human hands will get smaller.
I'm sure they'll have some tricks up their sleeves to surprise us. I'm just making common sense predictions rather than some fairy tale comments people have made so far.
I will get one
and I hope it's cheaper, unlimited data plan, better screen and more storage.
I want it all for less
and I hope it's cheaper, unlimited data plan, better screen and more storage.
I want it all for less
Excellent post. As I said before I don't think they'll increase the resolution at all for v2. Other than the technical reasons listed below, here are some more things to consider.
1. Fragmentation.
2. Bloating of universal apps. Older devices would suffer even more if application sizes increased significantly.
3. Cost to Apple would rise significantly, and I really don't think they want to raise the current $499 intro price. Don't forget they are going to be adding at least one camera, a faster processor, and extra RAM already. A higher res screen would kill their margins.
4. A new higher res screen would almost certainly become a supply issue. Not something you want when you are expected to ship 40 million units in a year.
5. Apple is far too competitive price wise for other companies to one-up. Look at the price of the Galaxy Tab and tell me you think someone else will be able to create a decent 10" tablet with a higher res screen for under $499. Not with any profit in mind.
6. All the current iPad apps would be fuzzy until properly resized.
7. Finally, and most importantly, people will buy the iPad 2 regardless of it's screen resolution. Why cause all the above headaches and cut into your profit to satisfy a few spec junkies?
Expect a res bump in v3, that's my best guess.
1. Fragmentation.
2. Bloating of universal apps. Older devices would suffer even more if application sizes increased significantly.
3. Cost to Apple would rise significantly, and I really don't think they want to raise the current $499 intro price. Don't forget they are going to be adding at least one camera, a faster processor, and extra RAM already. A higher res screen would kill their margins.
4. A new higher res screen would almost certainly become a supply issue. Not something you want when you are expected to ship 40 million units in a year.
5. Apple is far too competitive price wise for other companies to one-up. Look at the price of the Galaxy Tab and tell me you think someone else will be able to create a decent 10" tablet with a higher res screen for under $499. Not with any profit in mind.
6. All the current iPad apps would be fuzzy until properly resized.
7. Finally, and most importantly, people will buy the iPad 2 regardless of it's screen resolution. Why cause all the above headaches and cut into your profit to satisfy a few spec junkies?
Expect a res bump in v3, that's my best guess.
As a developer who has been working on game development for iOs for both the iPad and iPhone 4 platform, I thought I'd chip in with my two cents - sorry if some of this probably makes sense only to people on the developer side, but to me it seems that the question of the increased resolution is very clear in the sense that it's not going to happen right now, for several reasons:
First off, my current impression is that hardware-wise, the iPad's 1024x768 screen already feels somewhat at the limit when it comes to the issue of pixel-pushing power from the GPU. The iPad is actually pretty fillrate-limited - you could increase polygon count pretty significantly before running into performance problems, but the raw pixel fill rate is already relatively at its limit.
What I can see is that I only get about a 2x overdraw (meaning the amount of pixels that get drawn but then overdrawn with something in front of it) on the iPad before the framerate takes a dive whereas I could easily get a 5x overdraw on the 3GS.
I've seen a lot of developers complain about the limited fillrate of the iPad and the general sense is that the resolution is already a bit too high for the hardware powering it, but you can make it work reasonably with a couple of optimisations.
Additionally, comparing performance on the iPod touch 4G and iPad essentially lets me single out the performance difference in resolution between 960x640 and 1024x768, as the other main specs (A4, PowerVR SGX 535 and 256MB RAM) are pretty much the same, with the iPod touch having to push about 78% as many pixels as the iPad; so if the raw pixel number was indeed the limiting factor, I'd expect a performance increase of about 1/0.78 or 28% - what I'm seeing, however, is a performance increase that often exceeds that, especially in situations with a high overdraw. This to me indicates that the current hardware platform (as in A4 with a 535) is well at its limit with 1024x768 and won't be able to go any higher without a change in architecture. No doubt about it, Apple obviously did a great job in getting the maximum power from the hardware that we have, but to go any higher you'd need to pretty much change the whole underlying setup:
Now the 535 certainly isn't top of the line when it comes to mobile GPUs, and I've often heard that nVidia's Tegra 2 for instance would offer a performance boost in the region of 2x - 2.5x (although I'm not sure how much of that would be fillrate-based or if that number refers to the number of polys drawn). That's not to imply that Apple would go with nVidia for the iPad 2 (in fact, I'm pretty certain that they won't), but just as an example of what's possible.
What we haven't thought about here yet, however, is the question of what a different graphics chip would do to the battery life - it's unlikely that a more powerful chip wouldn't cause significant battery drain, and my feeling is that the 10 hour battery life of the iPad is considered one of its primary features and selling points by Apple and they'd be very careful to jeopardize that.
Now, the critical question is what resolution we'd be shooting for with a higher res display:
Keeping with the 4:3 ration (and I very much doubt that they'd change that), the first possibility comes at 1280x960, as has been suggested multiple times in this thread. Now that's a 25% increase in every dimension, so overall yields about 56% more pixels than 1024x768, and has the advantage that 720p video could be played back in the displays native resolution, albeit letterboxed.
However, a pixel number increase of more than 50% will definitely require at least a different GPU, and it will massively increase fragmentation on the iOS platform - right now, I already have to worry about making everything work at both 960x640 and 1024x768, add in another resolution and things just get worse. Of course, you could just scale up existing apps (I have now idea why people on this thread seem to think that you can only scale up old apps if the new resolution is an integer multiple of the old resolution - you could of course just scale everything up by 25%, how do you guys think video playback works fullscreen for a multitude of different resolutions?)
The question is whether it would really be worth it for Apple to have to massively change the underlying hardware, possibly jeopardizing battery
life and increase the fragmentation (what will that look like on the app store? Will we have a regular iPhone version, an HD version for the iPad 1 and a "super HD/HD HD/real HD/true HD" (or whatever) version for the iPad 2?) for something as minor as an upgrade from 1024x768 to 1280x960? I sincerely doubt it, as that would hardly qualify as an additional selling argument but cause a whole lot of problems.
Display resolution isn't a hardware spec that can easily be graduallly increased (like RAM or processing power) - if you're changing the resolution, everything will have to be rewritten to take advantage or it just won't look any better, in which case you could just have stuck with the old one in the first place.
Of course, Apple could decide to go all-in and actually significantly boost the resolution so it can slap a "retina display" label on the iPad 2 . Just for the sake of argument, let's say Apple does decide to go for that and boosts the resolution by a factor of roughly 2.5x up to 1600x1200 (and that's just the very lower end of what could conceivably be called "retina", doubling the resolution both horizontally and vertically to 2048x1536 would increase the number of pixels by a factor of 4, so the following argument applies even more strongly):
I don't think most people on here realize what an incredible challenge that would pose in just about every conceivably way:
As far as I know (I'm no expert on display technology, so most of this is second hand information; I'd appreciate it if someone with actual expertise on this area could tell me if this is correct), a 10-inch display with that kind of resolution is still the domain of medical imaging and other specialized (aka non-consumer) fields and hence incredibly pricy. Furthermore, developing such a screen that is not only affordable (and remember, we're talking about a consumer product with a $500 price tag) but at the same time also energy-efficient would be an amazing feat and something not expected at least for the next 3-4 years. It's not as simple as just putting four iPhone displays together side-by-side - as the physical size increases, keeping the pixel density becomes exponentially more expensive and power-intensive.
Even if Apple somehow miraculously manages to pull this off and come up with such a screen, the real problem that needs to be tackled is the underlying hardware that's going to push the pixels to that screen. Now we'd need a new architecture with at least three times the pixel pushing power for the raw fill rate, so again Apple would have to come up with a new CPU/GPU combination that triples current performance - all the while also not significantly consuming more power. Of course, you could argue that we don't need additional CPU power and perhaps doubling the fill rate could be enough - but in that case, what's the point in pulling of all these technical miracles if you can't show off much higher poly rates and higher resolution textures? (If you don't believe me, try running a N64 game in an emulator at HD resolution and you'll see that just upping the resolution doesn't help, and in fact sometimes even hurts, when you're not simultaneously upping polygon count and texture resolution).
So with a new GPU/CPU thus has to come more RAM - roughly speaking, I'd guess that you would want at least 4x as much RAM, so that puts us at 1GB. That actually seems feasible, so that part wouldn't be the biggest problem.
However, if all the textures, videos, etc. are 4x as big, they're going to need at lot more storage space (again, yes you could compress a 2048x2048 texture down to the same file size as a 1024x1024 texture, but then you'd be forfeiting the gains from the higher resolution).
Now Infinity Blade for instance already clocks in at over 300MB, so that would be boosted to over 1.2GB for an app, and once you get larger amounts of video in there, you'd need a bluray disc or prepare for really long download times.
Now I realize that all of these issues concerning new GPU, more RAM, increased app size, etc. would be fixable in different ways, but remember that these are only the issues that come up after Apple has managed to build a display unlike anything on the market for only a fraction of the current costs of high-end displays and simultaneously boost the raw power of the iPad by a factor of more than 3.
If you look at Moore's law (which is still pretty valid these days), tripling (or even just doubling) performance in about 12 months would be pretty spectacular in its own right, and it's simply not what Apple does - it took over three years to go from iPhone to iPhone 4, and that step was arguably smaller than the step from an iPad to the hypothetical "retina iPad 2" would be.
My final argument is that even if I grossly underestimate Apple's engineers and they did manage to solve all of these problems in just about a year, why would Apple want to blow this great innovation right now?
The iPad is strongly in control of the tablet market for a number of reasons (mostly ease of use, wide ranging availability of apps and content as well as really strong battery life), and a higher display resolution does not add anything to the iPads core selling points, but might in fact potentially damage some of them (lower battery life, less ease of use due to higher fragmentation of the iOs platform, etc.).
It's much likelier that the iPad 2 will be a minor upgrade that adds the features that might have intentionally been left out of the original iPad (camera, gyroscope, more RAM, more storage space, etc.), but it will certainly be much more of an evolution than a revolution.
Eventually, I'm sure that Apple will go down the path towards a higher resolution display, but without any apparent really strong threats to the iPads position in the tablet market, they are certainly not going there right now.
Wow, that was longer than I'd expected, but I hope that looking at things from the developer's perspective adds something to this discussion.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet a good amount of money on the fact that the iPad 2 will NOT feature anything that can even remotely be called retina (say, at least 1600x1200) - anyone here willing to take the other side of that bet?
Augmented Reality is the keyword. Don´t think of it as a Photo but as a Video Cam to have fun with (not creat blockbuster cinema). Of cause you need much less MP for that.
As an example for a AR Game not useing a Front Facing Cammera. INVIZIMALS (PSP)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPoxj0PD-Z0
Last edited:
@zweigand: I completely agree: I think that if Apple were to pull this off now, it would end up being probably the most under-appreciated technological miracle I've ever seen: in terms of sales, I doubt that there would be much of a difference between an upgraded iPad with camera, more storage, and better CPU versus the same thing plus a retina display - in terms of margins, however, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot massively. Sure a much higher resolution screen would be nice to have, but I don't really see this as being a deal breaker for anyone.
Bottom line is that it just wouldn't be a good business decision, and Apple knows this.
Here's what I would do if I were in Apple's position, and I'm going to go out on a limb and put my money (again, you may take that literally - let me know if anyone's up for a bet on this, that always makes the keynotes even more interesting) on the following prediction:
The iPad 2 will be announced as having an "improved display" in some way (my guess is they're sticking with backlit IPS LCD, not AMOLED), probably with reduced glare and less susceptible to smudging (or something of the sort) but with the same resolution.
This way, they get to make legitimate marketing claims about an improved display, and that should be enough to satisfy most people who were expecting this as a feature for the iPad 2, while being only a tiny fraction of the cost (and other problems) of an actual new higher resolution display.
That said, I'm sure there's already a team in Cupertino feverishly working on the concept of a high-res iPad screen for release a few years down the line - either that, or they've considered the idea and already realized that it will still be too expensive and essentially infeasible for the next couple of years, which in turn also means that it's unlikely they'll have to deal with a competitor who boasts this as a major selling point any time soon.
I think what many people are missing here is the fact that while small cellphone and smartphone screens have been increasing in resolution massively over the past decade (in the sense that they've gone from something like 84x48 black-and-white on the Nokia 3210 to 960x640 on the iPhone 4), larger screens (anything 10" and up) have hardly increased in resolution at all - the TFT I bought in 2003 had essentially the same resolution as the notebook I'm typing this on right now, so evolution in screens of a larger size has not been anywhere near as rapid.
You might argue that this lack of development was not primarily due to technological difficulties but merely because the need for higher-res screens of that size never arose; however, even in that case, I'm guessing that it's going to be much more difficult to take a 10" screen to twice the pixel density than it was for a 3.5" because the industry still has a lot of R&D to put into this before they can provide anything at a reasonable price.
Because of this, I think it's probably not a good idea to expect the same kind of evolution for iPad displays as for iPhone displays - do you agree or am I missing something here?
@GnillGnoll: thanks for your updates. I basically hope that your counterarguments weigh stronger than my arguments, because I would
love to have an iPad with a screen that approaches retina quality, I hope I'm just being pessimistic and (at least in the medium term) this could become possible.
My thoughts on what you said:
1. I don't actually know very much about the power consumption of different displays, so good to learn something here; however, I've never really thought that the pixel density of the screen would be the problem that leads to the higher power consumption but rather that the more powerful GPU/CPU needed to take advantage of the higher resolution would end up being the problem.
2. Again, I'm not that into hardware specifics (my development experience is limited to PC, DS and now iPhone 4/iPad, so I'm not really aware of what's available as GPU options on the market right now) - my intuition was that for the MBX Lite, 3D performance really wasn't considered crucial at all and only with the SGX535 did it even begin to matter, so I'm doubtful that the jump from the SGX535 to a more powerful GPU would yield anywhere near the same performance jumps - going from "essentially none" to "pretty good" is going to yield a much higher boost than going from "pretty good" to "improved".
I don't know what PowerVR currently has in store (and anyway, it's pretty hard to quantify 3D performance in terms of a simple number - are we talking about polys processed or pixel fill rate, how do shaders come into the equation, etc.), but my reasoning until now was as follows:
If nVidia itself claims about a 2-2.5x performance increase for the Tegra 2 over the SGX 535, then that number is probably measured in the metric most favorable to the Tegra 2, so the effective performance increase definitely isn't going to be more than that. If there existed an alternative on the market (or at least in the near future) that offered a performance increase of somewhere from 3x - 10x over the SGX 535, as you stated, then surely some of the competing Android tablets (of which there literally seem to be thousands)
would take advantage of that huge boost in performance? Btw, I'm not saying that you're claim is wrong, but rather that I'd love to know what mobile GPU out there could bring that kind of a boost and what tablet is going to be built on that platform
3. Completely agree - at least for universal binaries, it makes no sense to have to provide the same artwork multiple times. From a dev standpoint, I would have been so much happier if Apple had at least decided to stick with the same aspect ratio for iPad and iPhone - I know, an iPad with iPhone aspect ratio would probably look weird, but the major problem in developing for both isn't the difference in resolution but the difference in aspect ratio that forces you to rethink a lot of things.
4. I agree that games don't necessarily have to render at the native resolution, but personally I just have an aversion between rendering anything at a lower resolution on the iPad and then letting the hardware scale it up - in doubt, I'd probably even prefer letterboxed over scaled, but then again that's just me.
From a 3D gaming perspective, I feel that the easiest way to improve graphics quality on the iPad in fact wouldn't necessarily be to increase the display resolution but instead to provide a GPU with the power for high quality anti-aliasing; the display resolution and the fact that you can make out individual pixels becomes so much more noticeable with aliased lines (incidentally, I'm sure that that's one of the major reasons that 3D on the iPhone 4 looks so much better - it's not the higher pixel density per se but the fact that the
higher pixel density makes aliasing almost unnoticeable). I've compared anti-aliased renders (made on PC) with the aliased version I get on the iPad and I can confidently state that I'd definitely take 1024x768 at 4x FSAA over, say, 1280x960 without anti-aliasing any day (at least for 3D, of course not for text display). I know that technically, Apple has started to support anti-aliasing with the release of iOS 4.2, but due to the fillrate limitation, it is basically unusable as it cuts down framerates by three-fourths, meaning I've never gone over 15fps, and somehow produces very washed-out colors at the same time.
Btw, this worked very well for the Nintendo DS - even though the resolution seems laughable at 256x192, the flawless anti-aliasing that comes practically without a performance penalty makes such a huge difference.
******
On a completely different note - what I've never actually heard anyone talk about until now is what the device will actually be named - everyone is so far referring to it as the iPad 2, but I somehow doubt that this is the naming convention that Apple will stick with.
On the other hand, they're probably going to be reluctant to call it the iPad 2G because I suppose that a lot of people will be associating different cellular wireless standards with the terms 2G, 3G and 4G.
I guess that it could just be called the "new iPad", the way they've been doing it with iPods and the Macbook Air, for instance, but I would certainly appreciate always having easily distinguishable designations for different generations.
I've thought about whether they would consider naming it the "iPad Air" if it indeed turns out to be much thinner than the first generation, but that just doesn't seem like something Apple would do...
What do you think?
Bottom line is that it just wouldn't be a good business decision, and Apple knows this.
Here's what I would do if I were in Apple's position, and I'm going to go out on a limb and put my money (again, you may take that literally - let me know if anyone's up for a bet on this, that always makes the keynotes even more interesting) on the following prediction:
The iPad 2 will be announced as having an "improved display" in some way (my guess is they're sticking with backlit IPS LCD, not AMOLED), probably with reduced glare and less susceptible to smudging (or something of the sort) but with the same resolution.
This way, they get to make legitimate marketing claims about an improved display, and that should be enough to satisfy most people who were expecting this as a feature for the iPad 2, while being only a tiny fraction of the cost (and other problems) of an actual new higher resolution display.
That said, I'm sure there's already a team in Cupertino feverishly working on the concept of a high-res iPad screen for release a few years down the line - either that, or they've considered the idea and already realized that it will still be too expensive and essentially infeasible for the next couple of years, which in turn also means that it's unlikely they'll have to deal with a competitor who boasts this as a major selling point any time soon.
I think what many people are missing here is the fact that while small cellphone and smartphone screens have been increasing in resolution massively over the past decade (in the sense that they've gone from something like 84x48 black-and-white on the Nokia 3210 to 960x640 on the iPhone 4), larger screens (anything 10" and up) have hardly increased in resolution at all - the TFT I bought in 2003 had essentially the same resolution as the notebook I'm typing this on right now, so evolution in screens of a larger size has not been anywhere near as rapid.
You might argue that this lack of development was not primarily due to technological difficulties but merely because the need for higher-res screens of that size never arose; however, even in that case, I'm guessing that it's going to be much more difficult to take a 10" screen to twice the pixel density than it was for a 3.5" because the industry still has a lot of R&D to put into this before they can provide anything at a reasonable price.
Because of this, I think it's probably not a good idea to expect the same kind of evolution for iPad displays as for iPhone displays - do you agree or am I missing something here?
@GnillGnoll: thanks for your updates. I basically hope that your counterarguments weigh stronger than my arguments, because I would
love to have an iPad with a screen that approaches retina quality, I hope I'm just being pessimistic and (at least in the medium term) this could become possible.
My thoughts on what you said:
1. I don't actually know very much about the power consumption of different displays, so good to learn something here; however, I've never really thought that the pixel density of the screen would be the problem that leads to the higher power consumption but rather that the more powerful GPU/CPU needed to take advantage of the higher resolution would end up being the problem.
2. Again, I'm not that into hardware specifics (my development experience is limited to PC, DS and now iPhone 4/iPad, so I'm not really aware of what's available as GPU options on the market right now) - my intuition was that for the MBX Lite, 3D performance really wasn't considered crucial at all and only with the SGX535 did it even begin to matter, so I'm doubtful that the jump from the SGX535 to a more powerful GPU would yield anywhere near the same performance jumps - going from "essentially none" to "pretty good" is going to yield a much higher boost than going from "pretty good" to "improved".
I don't know what PowerVR currently has in store (and anyway, it's pretty hard to quantify 3D performance in terms of a simple number - are we talking about polys processed or pixel fill rate, how do shaders come into the equation, etc.), but my reasoning until now was as follows:
If nVidia itself claims about a 2-2.5x performance increase for the Tegra 2 over the SGX 535, then that number is probably measured in the metric most favorable to the Tegra 2, so the effective performance increase definitely isn't going to be more than that. If there existed an alternative on the market (or at least in the near future) that offered a performance increase of somewhere from 3x - 10x over the SGX 535, as you stated, then surely some of the competing Android tablets (of which there literally seem to be thousands)
would take advantage of that huge boost in performance? Btw, I'm not saying that you're claim is wrong, but rather that I'd love to know what mobile GPU out there could bring that kind of a boost and what tablet is going to be built on that platform
3. Completely agree - at least for universal binaries, it makes no sense to have to provide the same artwork multiple times. From a dev standpoint, I would have been so much happier if Apple had at least decided to stick with the same aspect ratio for iPad and iPhone - I know, an iPad with iPhone aspect ratio would probably look weird, but the major problem in developing for both isn't the difference in resolution but the difference in aspect ratio that forces you to rethink a lot of things.
4. I agree that games don't necessarily have to render at the native resolution, but personally I just have an aversion between rendering anything at a lower resolution on the iPad and then letting the hardware scale it up - in doubt, I'd probably even prefer letterboxed over scaled, but then again that's just me.
From a 3D gaming perspective, I feel that the easiest way to improve graphics quality on the iPad in fact wouldn't necessarily be to increase the display resolution but instead to provide a GPU with the power for high quality anti-aliasing; the display resolution and the fact that you can make out individual pixels becomes so much more noticeable with aliased lines (incidentally, I'm sure that that's one of the major reasons that 3D on the iPhone 4 looks so much better - it's not the higher pixel density per se but the fact that the
higher pixel density makes aliasing almost unnoticeable). I've compared anti-aliased renders (made on PC) with the aliased version I get on the iPad and I can confidently state that I'd definitely take 1024x768 at 4x FSAA over, say, 1280x960 without anti-aliasing any day (at least for 3D, of course not for text display). I know that technically, Apple has started to support anti-aliasing with the release of iOS 4.2, but due to the fillrate limitation, it is basically unusable as it cuts down framerates by three-fourths, meaning I've never gone over 15fps, and somehow produces very washed-out colors at the same time.
Btw, this worked very well for the Nintendo DS - even though the resolution seems laughable at 256x192, the flawless anti-aliasing that comes practically without a performance penalty makes such a huge difference.
******
On a completely different note - what I've never actually heard anyone talk about until now is what the device will actually be named - everyone is so far referring to it as the iPad 2, but I somehow doubt that this is the naming convention that Apple will stick with.
On the other hand, they're probably going to be reluctant to call it the iPad 2G because I suppose that a lot of people will be associating different cellular wireless standards with the terms 2G, 3G and 4G.
I guess that it could just be called the "new iPad", the way they've been doing it with iPods and the Macbook Air, for instance, but I would certainly appreciate always having easily distinguishable designations for different generations.
I've thought about whether they would consider naming it the "iPad Air" if it indeed turns out to be much thinner than the first generation, but that just doesn't seem like something Apple would do...
What do you think?
iPad 2 screen resolution
The reference to a lower screen resolution than that of the Retina display suggests that there will not be a major change in the processor in the second generation unit.
The Tegra 2 platform is fully capable of processing HD level displays.
I certainly hope that this turns out not to be the case as IMO Apple needs a platform to compete with the Tegra 2. Although, I believe, Moto is the only company announcing a Tegra 2 powered tablet at CES the rest can not be far behind in deploying it or variations on it.
Edit: I do not know that a lower than Retina display resolution would be a deal breaker, but the iPhone 4 has raised expectations of the buying public, both as to the screen and also as to RAM.
The reference to a lower screen resolution than that of the Retina display suggests that there will not be a major change in the processor in the second generation unit.
The Tegra 2 platform is fully capable of processing HD level displays.
I certainly hope that this turns out not to be the case as IMO Apple needs a platform to compete with the Tegra 2. Although, I believe, Moto is the only company announcing a Tegra 2 powered tablet at CES the rest can not be far behind in deploying it or variations on it.
Edit: I do not know that a lower than Retina display resolution would be a deal breaker, but the iPhone 4 has raised expectations of the buying public, both as to the screen and also as to RAM.
@ds445 I agree that they will announce an "improved" display. I just don't see them going down the road of upping screen resolution every time it's possible. If that were the case we would have seen an iPhone with a middle of the road resolution.
There will be Android devices out there with nicer screens, and it's simply not going to matter.
There will be Android devices out there with nicer screens, and it's simply not going to matter.
Why? To do what? What does or can this Tegra2 platform do, that the iPad isn't doing or can't do?