

Read this before you buy the new iPad - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/122645-read-this-before-you-buy-the-new-ipad

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marknutter
Waste of a click. There's a reason Apple is just calling it the new iPad. It's
just the new iPad - better screen, better camera, faster. "Read this before
you buy the new iPad" sounds like a warning to me. I expected to hear some
expose equal to that of Antennagate. Instead, I get an article talking about
how this is just an upgrade to the iPad. Seriously? You just used up your one
"read this before" for the year, extremetech.com.

~~~
knowtheory
what's bizarre about the article is that they're admitting that it is better
than the iPad, they're just upset that it's not SO MUCH MORE AWESOMELY BETTER.

And that's supposed to give me pause? If I go out and get one of these, it is
in fact specifically to have an iPad with a better screen, camera, and
battery.

~~~
garyrichardson
Sounds like the stock market.. "Microsoft's earnings only increased by 1%
yoy!! Stock is tanking!!"

Turns out they still made a billion in profits.

* not real numbers, just for example.

------
compay
Sure, it's evolutionary, not revolutionary. Who cares? What's wrong with it
being an incrementally better version of an existing product? Does every
product release have to utterly blow away everything in the history of
computing in order to be worthwhile?

Personally, I'm not going to buy one because of the caché of owning something
amazingly innovative, I'm going to buy one because I think it will be useful.
I don't own an iPad yet because I was waiting for one with the retina display,
and I know a few other people who've done the same. Seems to me Apple gauged
the market pretty well with this release.

~~~
thekungfuman
There's nothing wrong with incremental upgrades until you remember that Apple
markets nearly everything they sell as 'revolutionary' (or 'resolutionary' in
this case) and act as if now that they are using a technology (4G, quad core,
high-res) it is finally cool.

~~~
ugh
Is the resolution not revolutionary? I don’t think you can seriously argue
with that.

------
edderly
Sloppy linkbait.

I'm not an Apple fan boy but when he complains that the performance of
GLBenchmark is the same:

> The most likely reason for this is that apps must be written to take full
> advantage of all four GPU cores, much in the same way that only a handful of
> apps make full use of Tegra 2 and 3

He seems to forget that theres four times the number of pixels on the screen.

~~~
mrsebastian
That's a good point actually. Normally in benchmarks, though, the same
resolution is used across the board.

I don't know how this applies to tablets, though. I suspect the iPad 3 would
be upscaling to 2048x1536, but not actually rendering four times as many
polygons (or whatever).

~~~
edderly
GLBenchMark does run at the screen resolution unless you run the offscreen
test.

------
pilif
I think we can't even being to imagine how f'ing difficult it must have been
to get the ipad 3's screen resolution to work.

Up until now screens with this pixel density were not available at this size
at all, so even just getting the screens produced must have been a challenge.

And four times the pixels also means that a lot more computation power will be
needed to actually make use of them.

Of course, with more computing power, there's the issue of both heat and
especially battery life.

In my opinion it's amazing that Apple managed to squeeze nearly double the
capacity of the old ipad's battery into a new battery which is only 50g
heavier than the old one.

Considering that battery life still is about the same than in the old iPad, I
really think that doubling the capacity was surely needed or we'd all be
pissed about poor battery life.

Yeah. It's "just" a screen update, but a huge amount of work must have gone
into making this happen.

Remember last year when everybody wanted the bigger display, but "all" we got
was a faster CPU? People were equally pissed back then.

------
benihana
This article completely misses the point of why people buy iPads. Nobody buys
an iPad because of the specs, or the innovation, or how many graphics cores it
has. People buy iPads because they are awesome little computers that are easy
to consume content on and because they are affordable.

------
crusso
Click bait title with absolutely no new information or insight. Not sure why
it was upvoted so high on HN.

The crowd that reads HN already knows the specs of the new iPad and is capable
of judging whether or not they're worth the outlay.

------
mml
Unsurprising. Apparently, the author doesn't realize that Apple only upends
entire industries every decade or so.

------
fredleblanc
I wish they had added the original iPad to the chart. As an original iPad
owner (and one that really enjoys the device), the new iPad looks pretty
enticing.

Saying, "it's just an iPad 2 with a better screen" sounds pretty great to me.

~~~
thekungfuman
$500 great? Considering that not all developers and content will even take
advantage of the screen?

~~~
sarvinc
It's safe to say that most developers will take advantage of the screen
resolution. Just not three days after it's released.

------
justjimmy
If you distill it down part by part, one can always say it's not
'revolutionary' – but you gotta look at the whole sum. (Btw, how often does a
same product 'revolutionize' itself? It'd be a new/different product?)

*Not saying iPad 3 is or isn't revolutionary, but the author isn't giving enough credit and isn't looking at the bigger picture.

------
nicksuan
_When you inevitably unbox your new iPad, though, just remember that Apple has
done little more than cram a bunch of bits inside a slick tablet chassis; bits
that, except for the display, aren’t very exciting at all._

I feel this statement makes little sense since the display is the thing you're
going to be interacting with the most.

------
heifetz
it might not be amazing, but Apple is the first manufacture to put the screen
into a real product. That is an accomplishment by itself. How long will it
take android tabs to come out with similar screens? It's interesting that
samsung is the manufacture of the screen, yet it's on an apple product,
instead of samsung tablets!

