What, was Apple supposed to over-engineer this brand new product that most in the media and even on this very website swore would be an utter failure?
Over engineer? No. Give us features they knew were coming in iPhone 4? Yes. Jobs got up on stage and said that iPhone 4 took 18 months to create. That means they knew a full year before the iPad announcement what the iPhone 4 would have. Yet they chose to deliberately hold back the iPad.
And who thought the iPad would fail? When it was announced at $499, just about everyone wanted one.
Sure, that hog Honeycomb needs a ton of resources and a gig of RAM just to be buggy and inadequate at launch (read the reviews) but did Motorola or Samsung have any vision or take any risk with their me-too tablets? Out of proportion specs and not much else seems to be their main selling point, as usual. That's worked out well for them so far, hasn't it?
Who said anything about Android devices?
Have you used an iPad with 256MB of RAM? Compared it to the iPhone 4's performance? The iPad is noticeably slower and has issues with apps crashing out upon leaving or closing the app due to RAM limitations. Multi-tasking isn't nearly as smooth.
Even if Apple didn't want to give us cameras, all while knowing "FaceTime" would launch with the iPhone 4, they could have at least given us 512MB of RAM. Even the B&N NOOKcolor has 512MB of RAM.
For the record, nobody outside of the 2% geek community is disappointed with the iPad's performance. People are still being blown away by it at this very moment, and the customer satisfaction ratings have been consistently through the roof.
I don't know who your "nobody" is, but I've seen plenty of people who have been less than impressed with the iPad. I just recently showed a close friend and after a few minutes of playing with it she said "this is basically just a big iPod touch, isn't it?". When she was talking to her sister about it, she described it as a "big iPod touch". And having owned an iPad since launch day last year, I could do nothing but agree. All of the arguments people used at first to say the iPad was more than a big iPod touch are simply not true. The "almost full size keyboard" is practically useless unless you're a slow typer on a real keyboard. It eats up too much screen real estate and you have to position yourself in awkward positions to be able to comfortably use it. And still actually see what you're typing since your hands and the keyboard itself take up your entire field of view otherwise. And Apple claims so many tens of thousands of apps specifically for the iPad, yet I'm still wondering where all of the good ones are.
Basically, iPad is only appealing because its neat and new.
But one has to wonder, how many people who bought the iPad didn't already own an Apple product? How many iPads were first Apple products for some people? Probably low single digit percentage of all iPads sold so far.
And, out of all of the iPads sold so far, I have never seen one used in public outside of an Apple Store. Not once. I've seen Kindles, I've seen nooks, I've seen more netbooks and full notebook computers than I can count. But never once have I seen someone in public, other than myself, using an iPad.
iPad will get retina display mark my words. Why?
1.) Engadget doesn't know anything. No one knew how much ram there was on the iPad until iFixit tore it down. And even with a stolen iPhone 4 all they could say was "uhh, I think the display is sharper".
2.) Competition has higher display quality, Apple would not fall behind. Plus Apple only has 1 chance to strike each year.
3.) They just payed 7.9 BILLION to Samsung!!! That's gotta be a huge order of Retina Displays
4.) We had rumors saying the new GPUs are capable of supporting 2X resolution. Also, new screen parts appeared that were more expensive
5.) Last year, Apple said they could lower the price of the iPad if the market does not respond well, also late last year, Apple said they expect to take a cut on the profit margins like they did with the Macbook Airs (why is MBA so successful? Because no one can match its price/quality with an SSD inside) Why am I saying all this, because Apple can afford to put the Retina Display on the iPad 2.
iPad 2 will NOT get a "Retina Display". Mobile GPUs that can handle that sort of resolution are not yet ready for the type of mass production that iPad 2 will require. Not to mention the fact that Apple would need more than 1GB of RAM to run that sort of resolution, as the frame buffer itself just to display the UI would require 256MB of RAM or more, and that doesn't even take games into account.
But it would be fun if apple did on purpose release boring rumours.
