I think a Retina display (IPS, 300+ PPI) screen would be awesome.
I agree that a Retina display would be awesome and I disagree with people who doubt that the iPad needs it. I use an app called Evernote (EN) that has clients for Windows, iPhone and iPad (and lots of other platforms) and the idea is that one can enter notes on one client and then view them anywhere. Unfortunately there are currently serious design flaws in the software that means that if I create a note that is in the correct font size for my 23" PC monitor then, when that note is downloaded to my mobile devices and viewed using the appropriate EN iPhone or iPad client, the fonts come out as absolutely tiny. What is interesting here though is that this note is actually readable on the 3.5" screen of my iPhone 4 because the display is so sharp but is totally unreadable on my 9.7" iPad screen unless I zoom in.
Even just for simple text work a retina display on the iPad would be great and I suspect that it would make the iPad more useable as a content creation device because it would become comfortable to use apps like word processors and spreadsheets at lower zoom levels so that one got more on the screen at a time while still being perfectly readable and, at least for spreadsheets (which is what I do most), that would bump up the useability factor for me.
There are multiple platforms used in netbooks and even nVidia solutions (ion?) for enhanced GPU capability on a very small device.
If apple can fit a 320M in an 11" macbook air, is a separate GPU chip on the ipad really such an impossibility?
On the point of just fitting in a separate GPU chip then I'd say that it is by no means an impossibility, it would be perfectly possible. The issue though is power consumption and heat dissapation. Your example of the 11" macbook air (MBA) is a good one and illustrates the point. I just went to Apple's spec page (
http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html) and they quote up to 5 hours of "wireless productivity". Assuming that's comparable to the what the iPad spec calls "surfing the web on Wi-Fi" then the iPad claims 10 hours, i.e. twice as much as the MBA, and that's with the iPad only having a 25 watt hour battery vs the MBA's 35 watt hour battery so the MBA is really soaking up the power compared to the iPad.
OK, not all the extra power draw is down to the GPU, the MBA does have a bigger screen, but it gets worse. The separate GPU (and the CPU) in the MBA is driving a 1366 x 768 pixel screen which is a total of 1,058,304 pixels. If Apple follow the same strategy as the iPhone and take the iPad to higher resolution by quadrupling the pixel count then an iPad retina display would have 3,145,728 pixels, i.e. almost exactly three times the pixel count of the MBA (2.97x to 2 decimal places) so even the CPU/GPU combo in the MBA is facing a much less daunting task than the one that would be presented to the electronics in a retina display iPad and needing a battery that's already 40% bigger than the one in the iPad to only get half the battery life while driving one third of the pixels.
I would love it if Apple made me look like an idiot by releasing a retina display iPad in 2011 but I just don't think that the technology is there yet to do it. In my opinion 2012 is where we start to maybe get some chance of it happening and 2013 is when I would begin to start getting disappointed if it doesn't happen.
And of course this doesn't even consider the other part of the picture, whether there is a hope in hell right now of getting good enough manufacturing yields to produce a 9.7" retina display at a realistic price point.
- Julian
