

Cold Water on the iPad 2 Retina Display Hype - dave1619
http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/cold_water_ipad_retina_display

======
frisco
Every time I read one of these articles I wonder, "who _is_ Gruber?" Not in
the, "who is this hack?" sense, but in that there must be more in his
relationship with Apple than is immediately apparent. He's very much Apple's
style, continually has insane access considering Apple's intense culture of
secrecy, and essentially acts as extended PR when Apple won't say something
directly.

~~~
saint-loup
There's definitely a "Steve Jobs is fake Gruber" side in Daring Fireball, as
Gruber constantly tries to take Apple's point of view in any situation.

As for his supposedly "insane access" to secret informations, I don't know if
he knows _that_ much. He's not often wrong in his predictions, but that's just
mean he's more cautious than the average tech-related website. He certainly
has connections, but since he's a reliable guy and well-respected Apple
evangelist, there's nothing really strange in it.

Not much of a mystery, I think.

~~~
akavlie
No, he does have insane access. he tends to get earlier and more accurate
scoops than the tech blogs. Sometimes dropping it nonchalantly in the comments
of a linked list entry, ex:

<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/29/wsj>

As I recall it, no one was running any rumors about a display res like that at
the time Gruber called it, or the front-facing camera.

And he gets scoops on things that are _not_ happening, despite reports from
other tech blogs, just as often (as in this example). If you did some digging,
you'd find that his source was right almost every time.

~~~
zyb09
Gizmodo leaked the whole thing in january.. everyone knew about the display,
cpu and front-facing camera.

~~~
kristofferR
If you're talking about the bar leak, that happened in April.

~~~
zyb09
oh you're right, guess he did have some inside knowledge afterall.

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jpcx01
At this point, Gruber is basically an extension of Apple's marketing
department. Someone at Apple said "people are going to be disappointed when
iPad doesn't have double resolution, leak some info to gruber to tamper down
expectations".

I'm going to go ahead and take this one as fact. Retina iPad would be great,
but that'll be in a year or 2.

~~~
brianpan
Gruber, of course, has some interesting comments in that area:

>From an official PR perspective, Apple, famously, says nothing regarding what
it will or will not be announcing before a major keynote. But they do,
somehow, seem to occasionally manage expectations quietly behind the scenes.

-On the pre-MacBook Air hype

<http://daringfireball.net/2008/01/macworld_expo_prelude>

~~~
nestlequ1k
So Gruber is well aware that he is a tool.

~~~
brianpan
Name calling aside, all journalists depend on their subject for news and all
subjects have a interest in being reported in a positive light. Of course
there are degrees to which that relationship is a two-way relationship. A war
correspondent doesn't _want_ war, but yet without it, they don't have a job.
And the politicians waging the war are considering the impact of media
portrayal. Are they using the media as a tool? They sure will if they can.

Movie critic? Game review blog? Local news reporter? They are all being
"used".

------
rbranson
The iPhone 4's display density at it's size had precedent. A high volume,
remotely affordable, production 260+ PPI panel anywhere near as large as the
iPad doesn't exist anywhere.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Quite so. Firstly, it wasn't a very high total pixel count, it's still smaller
than XGA which is considered the modern absolute minimum acceptable resolution
for desktops and laptops. Secondly, it wasn't that much of a bump over the
existing highest resolution displays of that size. The Motorola Droid used an
854x480 display at 265 pp and was released a year before the iPhone 4. A 50%
bump in total pixel count and a 23% bump in linear pixel resolution is
impressive, but hardly a quantum leap in engineering.

In contrast, the equivalent leap for the iPad would be to resolutions that
only extremely high-end, very large LCD monitors display today (such as 30"
displays) at pixel densities for the display size far beyond what anyone is
producing in commodity hardware.

~~~
rbranson
To add to the list: The HTC Touch Diamond2, which was released in Oct 2009,
had a 480x800, 3.2" display. The HTC Touch Diamond, which was released in May
2008, had a 480x640, 2.8" screen. Both of those screens are around 300PPI.

~~~
InclinedPlane
What's remarkable is that Apple is able to use perfectly normal engineering
advances to generate the sort of awe of the company's abilities that then
causes people to imagine that very large leaps in technology should be routine
and expected from them. I'd imagine that this could pose a problem but in
practice it hasn't before.

~~~
rbranson
Apple picks technologies and features that only enthusiasts would normally
appreciate, and educates consumers on why these features mean something. Their
products are an embodiment of an up-sell.

------
dave1619
I was getting excited about the hype around the super high resolution screen
on the next iPad. But John Gruber makes some good points and is very
convincing. It would make sense that the next iPad is just faster, maybe
thinner, adds camera, etc. (like the 3gs was to the 3g). Oh well... maybe for
2012.

~~~
baddox
What good points? He vaguely references his sources, makes an unsubstantiated
claim that there couldn't possibly be enough RAM to drive a 2k display, and
makes an unsubstantiated claim that such a display would be cost prohibitive.

I agree that cost and performance would be two huge obstacles, but the iPhone
4 seems to have overcome similar obstacles. Also, those double resolution
graphics seem pretty telling.

Of course, I've been planning on buying a new iPad if the display rumors are
true. I'm probably exhibiting some wishful thinking. (An iPad at its current
resolution and size will never interest me.)

~~~
cloudwalking
Retina display on iPad is 5x more pixels than retina display on iPhone. That
takes significantly more processing power and RAM to deal with. Since the iPad
is a $500 machine, the math doesn't work. It's prohibitively expensive.

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Raphael
Apple really ought to put 1 GB of memory in the iPad. 512 MB will not cut it
for very long, and the current 256 MB is laughable.

~~~
mishmash

      ...and the current 256 MB is laughable.
    

Except to the 15 million people who bought it last year.

~~~
masklinn
No, it's worse for them. This is even noticeable when using Safari: the iPad
can hardly keep a pair of pages in memory, it refreshes them all the time
(very similar to the experience on a 3G). The iPhone 4's experience is much
smoother as it has enough RAM to keep web pages cached as you switch between
them.

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icarus_drowning
Apple is ahead of the game much of the time, but not all of the time. They
seem to have this weird, innate ability to know when its best to be first, and
when its best to be... well, best. This issue (iPad resolution) is a good
example.

My guess? Apple will wait for the BlackBerry Playbook, which has close to the
specs Gruber mentions Apple will need to support the "iPad retina display",
and see how it affects (1) the price and (2) the battery life of the Playbook.
I expect screen size and resolution to be a big differentiator if we ever
start seeing the plethora of Android tablets we've been promised as well,
which will lead to fanboyism criticizing Apple's decision to leave the iPad's
resolution at its current state until 2012.

But, if the iPad 3 does have a 'retina display', I expect it will also have
battery life and system performance that will make its competitors look silly
by comparison.

I think Apple, having been _first_ into the tablet market will wait to do that
tablet's resolution _right_.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_PlayBook>

~~~
anonymous246
> Apple will wait for the BlackBerry Playbook, which has close to the specs
> Gruber mentions Apple will need to support the "iPad retina display", and
> see how it affects (1) the price and (2) the battery life of the Playbook.

(1) is a trivial lookup in a spreadsheet somewhere in Apple (2) is likely the
same; if not it's about half a day's work to do the calculations.

Do you really believe figuring out (1) and (2) is so complex they have wait
for somebody else to do it first?

~~~
icarus_drowning
I don't think these are technical problems for Apple (at least in terms of the
question "do we include this feature"), but I have to believe Apple is
interested in how successful those differentiators are once their competitors
attempt to use them on the market.

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jsz0
I believe the rumors. Gruber's reasoning is sound enough but I'm thinking back
to the iPhone 3GS where Apple lost some momentum by not pushing the hardware
platform aggressively enough. The iPad is such a huge part of Apple's future
it seems to me if there's any possibility of pulling this off they will go for
it along with a very significant iOS update. That would go a long way towards
crushing this first generation of competition from HP, RIM, Android devices,
etc. It will be expensive but let's assume the sales of the iPad 1 surprised
even Apple and they priced it out projecting 5-8M sales. They may have a
pretty decent profit margin here to offset the costs. If they're producing
30-50 million of these displays in 2011 I don't think price will be a major
concern come 2012 and beyond.

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ludwigvan
The argument is very well made.

Apple will defer retina display until ram/cpu and battery issues will not
cause any issues. I agree that the display is not as crisp as an iPhone 4, but
given that one usually looks at an iPad from a greater distance, it is simply
not needed at this point.

From a marketing point of view, given that there are no serious contenders to
iPad after almost one year, I would think Apple would leave a few weapons like
this unrevealed until seriously challenged.

The major differences in this version will be a ram/cpu upgrade, and addition
of cameras.

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yrral
The argument about RAM is just plain wrong. It only takes 12 megabytes 2048 *
1536 * (32 bits per pixel) = 12 megabytes to store the display. 24 megabytes
if it needs to double-buffer.

~~~
rbritton
There's actually quite a bit of overhead at the CG* and Core Animation layers
of the SDK that bump that up substantially. In the current iPad, it takes just
a bit over 10 MB to store the image data for 1024x768 and have the necessary
system stuff loaded into memory. I suspect that extra bit would not increase
substantially on a 2x screen, but I'm sure it would some.

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aaroniba
_The math on increasing the pixel density for iOS touchscreen devices is such
that it only works out perfectly if the resolution doubles, like when the
iPhone and iPod Touch went from 480 × 320 to 960 × 640. Trust me, it’s double
or nothing._

That's interesting. Can someone explain why this is the case?

~~~
mcav
Developers use bitmaps for many visual elements. Bitmaps will appear blurry
when scaled unless they are enlarged by double.

Since UI elements often include one-pixel lines, blurriness would be
unacceptably noticeable.

~~~
rdl
The obvious thing would be to rotate things sideways and display full iPad 1
resolution apps on screen with maybe 33% screen real estate left over for a
menu of some type, or a second type of app, or tabs, or just blank space, and
then to allow developers to make new iPad 2 apps if they really want.

1362 x 1024 would be feasible with current CPU tech, battery, and 512MB RAM,
and would be a nice bump. Since the iPad works well in either orientation, I
don't think this would be a big hit at all. They could also go for another
non-standard resolution with a border around another dimension if 1362x1024
were not desirable. But, 1024x768 with 1024x594 left over for something novel
seems like it wouldn't be the end of the world for ipad 1 apps, and then an
easy way to expand to full screen for safari, mail, and any recoded apps.

~~~
kylec
The problem with that is that unless the screen size is increased
proportionately, the apps will be physically smaller. On a laptop this doesn't
matter, but on a touchscreen device it would make buttons on the screen harder
to hit.

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kondro
They key point here is… who cares?

What's knowing what the iOS resolution is going to be in advance really going
to get for you? It's not like you'll be able to take advantage of it any
earlier.

You might say that it will allow app developers to design for the larger
resolution now. However, one thing app developers should already realise is
that the resolution _will_ change over time and it may not be a simple,
doubling of the pixels. Good developers are already using vector-based images,
at least as their source images, for apps anyway - or they just don't care.

What's the point of wasting all this time on conjecture?

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cletus
It's going to be interesting to see what Apple does here.

Prior to the iPhone 4's release, Android competitors were poo-poo-ing the 3GS
for its pitiful 480x320 display, which by then looked dated against the (up
to) 800x480 (iirc).

In hindsight, Apple's move was both farsighted and brilliant. In doubling the
resolution they provided a seamless user experience.

In light of this I was a little surprises theipad introduced both a new aspect
ratio and resolution, a resolution not even fully capable of 720p.

It really makes me wonder what Apple will do. Will they repeat the iPhone 4
trick and double it this or next year? 2048x1536 does seem rather high.

It's possible there will be an altogether different resolution but I rrwally
think developers would need 2+ months notice of that to update their appsand
get them approved. It wouldn't be as drastic change as the original iPad as
that was a totally new form factor but it'll still be a change.

So the choices seem to be no change, doubling or new resolution. All have
downsides so Apple seems to be in somewhat of a corner.

If the iPad 2 is just a CPU/RAM bump to the iPhone 4 and camera, even if a
little thinner, I will be disappointed at this point.

The originalipad was a huge gamble and I believe it paid off beyond Apple's
most optimistic estimates. Perhaps there'd is room for a big hardware bump
given a concrete track record.

~~~
jbrennan
At this point, I'd be a little disappointed too, if iPad 2 doesn't have the
doubled display. But the article is definitely convincing.

I'm a nerd, so it would disappoint me. But I think in general, Apple already
still has such an enormous lead in the tablet "market". I don't expect them to
rest on this for iPad 2, but I also don't think it would be devastating for
iPad 2 to keep the same resolution as the original.

iPad's display only started to look lacklustre to me after spending a few
weeks with iPhone 4.

~~~
megablast
One of the regular occurrences preceding an Apple launch is all the rumors,
and the eventual disappointment that half of them did not come true. You can
see Apple trying to control that these days, with the controlled releases to
NYT and WSJ, and through gruber.

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yhlasx
I wonder how would android tablets affect "tablet market"

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Harneev
the best think i liked about the article was that : "its gonna be double or
nothing". and from the past records of the company i cal clearly say that its
gonna be double and all the credit will go to Mr. jobs.

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leppie
Dunno about everyone else's math, but going from 1024 x 768 to 2048 x 1536 is
FOUR times larger, not double.

Given that 'mistake', 1024 x 1536 seems more 'doable'.

~~~
shaggyfrog
I know this is the pedantic (and correct) response, but the idea of pixel
"doubling", in this sense, is a doubling of height/width, even though you get
_quadruple_ the area. The general public, being not super-duper mathcores,
understand this concept as "pixel doubling", for better or for worse.

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keyle
I don't know about you, but my ipad is mostly collecting dust and acts as a
repository of finger prints.

In other words, I'm not exactly going to upgrade to get more pixels! This all
looks like a moo point.

Gruber should call it saliva, not cold water.

