Other manufacturers might as well pack up everything they have in their manufacturing plants right now and throw it all in a landfill. It will be cheaper than spending more to produce their products only to have them sit on store shelves.

As an advanced/expert developer/consumer, I found the announcement, like most Apple announcements, tame. Sort of "meh" and nothing unexpected. The retina display was supposed to premiere last year with the iPad 2 but was post-poned due to production difficulties. There's nothing here that was not expected. It's all about bumping specs, nothing jumps out as brand new or revolutionary, like say the rumored tactile feedback.

Don't get me wrong, a 9.7" 3MP display will be a sight to behold, but it's still just more of what we already had.

A great upgrade for someone who has a first gen iPad, but I wouldn't hurry out to get one if I already had an iPad 2. The biggest differentiator is going to be, as always, apps. It's what the competition has none of. It's what will push the new hardware beyond what's capable on the old.

The event is still in progress so it remains to be seen if there's "one more thing" with regards to software from Apple.

Biggest personal disappointment so far is that they didn't start the models with a 32GB and top out at 128GB with the same price points. There's no reason for them to do this in terms of competition (they have none) but it would have been a great asset to consumers what with a bigger focus on content creation and management (artwork, movies, photos). Stuff that's going to take up so much room you don't want to push it all to iCloud.

It has been a somewhat boring announcement. But I really don't care, the retina display is going to be such a step up, it trumps anything else they could have added.

I'll be ordering mine just as soon as the store comes back on line.

Here comes something new.... iPhoto.

It's got to be better than the Photo capabilities the iPhone and iPad had before, because it was simply atrocious and useless. But I really don't like iPhoto very much on the desktop, so I won't hold my breath. Hopefully it's the kick in the pants a third party dev needs to do something better.

Personally, I need to be able to view RAW images, not just JPEG. And pulling them off a local network in addition to iCloud (or other online depot) would be needed too.

So far the iPad iPhoto looks more impressive than the boring update to Lightroom 4 we saw yesterday. But we can't really expect anything from Adobe. They have a knack for making a 20 year development cycle look like 12 months work.

How long before a screen of comparable resolution is available on a non-Apple tablet?

(Amusement: Wikipedia helpfully offers a list of displays by pixel density, which already includes the iPad 3. When are we going to get this kind of pixel density on desktop computer monitors?)

We already do get very close to the same pixel density on desktops/laptops, if you take the viewing distance into account.

There have been a couple of good articles on the subject recently:

http://www.tuaw.com/2012/03/01/retina-display-macs-ipads-and-hidpi-doing-the-math/

http://appcubby.com/blog/os-x-at-2x/

My 27" display is the same resolution and my viewing distance is at most 24" when I'm typing normally. Sometimes as little at 17-20 depending on how I'm sitting. I'm estimating the distance of course and didn't whip out a tape measure.

I don't think anyone will touch the iPad 3's resolution for at least another year or two. The iPhone still has the best display on the market after more than 1.5 years.

They've still done nothing to address how one will ever get their photos (from other cameras) ONTO the iPad without the clumsy SD card reader attachment.

Of course you can do it with iPhoto on a Mac, but then you're using TWO different iPhotos and using a Mac when you should be using just this Post-PC device. You can take all the images with the iPad itself, but it's hardly something you're going to carry around with you everywhere, such as to a night on the town.

It's these details that I think have been very problematic for Apple for years and why I have firmly believed that they lack attention to the finer points. Even though compared to their competition they may seem obsessive about the smallest of details. They just keep missing out on parts to complete the whole puzzle.

Are we supposed to use iCloud exclusively to store all our photos and videos in this post-pc era? Because the megabytes add up quickly. We need to see a sort of storage locker appliance like a time capsule for storing all these goodies locally and allowing easy backups. Big huge piece of the puzzle right there that's missing.

If Apple can source a display with this resolution, then so can somebody else. Presumably, it was fabbed by Samsung or LG. We'll see comparable displays elsewhere.

Also, the iPhone screen is good, but the various Samsung AMOLED screens are as good, maybe better. My Galaxy Nexus is gorgeous.

Not if Apple have bought up all the capacity they can't, or used their cash reserve to secure an exclusive period.

Fair enough. The closest that's (almost) on the market is the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity 700 (Engadget comparison), with a 1920x1200 pixel screen. That's almost but not quite in the same league. I suspect that the Asus spec, if not higher, will be standard on all tablets by Christmas.

Like the iPhone display, this isn't an off-the-shelf part. No one else will be able to buy it unless Apple gives the green light for them to do so. Andy mentioned supply constraints due to Apple's large volume purchasing, but it's more than that and he hit the nail with the exclusivity.

Even if other manufacturers found other sources for a similar display, that's not going to change the landscape with regards to sales. I expect the iPad will still eat everyone's lunch and only increase its market share this year. The apps aren't perfect by any means, but are definitely getting better.

There's really no reason so own any other tablet, and money spent on one is done so foolishly, since none of them have any kind of future as a platform. Sure, they might be OK for simply checking email and browsing the web where they won't likely ever need a software update. Or as a dedicated eBook reader like the Kindle Fire. But then we're talking about $200 products which will never have specs that compare to $500 products. Or $400 products because Apple is still going to continue to sell the iPad 2.

An HD display has only 2/3 of the pixels of the new iPad. That's a pretty significant difference.



Not according to reviews.

I try not to be a fanboy about this. I've held my dad's iPhone 4S and my Galaxy Nexus side by side. You can't declare an easy winner in screen quality.

As to tablet market share, Apple certainly took off. The Android competitors will grow in strength, just like they did with smartphones. And then there's Windows 8. Yeah there are mixed reviews, but you can't exactly ignore Microsoft.

I don't think anything is going to change in tablets over the next 12 months. Phones and tablets are like Oranges and Orangoutangs. Can't compare one market to the other.

What I'm most thankful about this new iPad event is that it's finally over. It never fails, but the few days of the week leading up to an Apple event, hits and sales on my web site always suffer pretty dramatically. And then as if by magic, everything goes back to normal. Yeah, odd.

It would be nice if we could get Ultrabooks with displays like these tablets. But noooooo: laptops can only have 1600x900 displays, despite the fact that they're 3" bigger.

Not even that - in most cases 1366x768 is the "norm" unless you pay stacks for something like a Sony Z.

Higher res like 1920x1080 was my primary criteria when buying a laptop recently and ended up with Dell XPS 15z. I wanted smaller but not possible for reasonable money.

Note that the new iPad is 72% NTSC colour gamut, vs 50% NTSC on all previous iPhones/iPads.

That's pretty much what the OLEDs hit. Would be good to see these things side by side...

I suspect it's because no one, probably including Apple, has the economy of scale to make designing and producing such a display economically feasible for a notebook that's supposed to cost around $1000.

Most manufacturers are having a hard time beating Apple's pricing for the Air without even matching its year-old specs.

Looks like a nice yearly increment to the iPad, and I may pick one up since it can also double as an LTE hotspot. I'm pretty curious to see the display in person.

Also released today was iOS 5.1, where Apple caved, and changed the iPhone to show "AT&T 4G" in the status bar. With my 4S, indicating "4G", I'm not seeing any speed difference with the tower near work compared to my older iPhone 4. I was hoping it would at least only say 4G when on a proper HSPA+ tower with more speed, but it's just a blanket rename of their 3G network. *sigh*

What does that mean?

I had to look it up

The old iPads could display 50% of the colors the human eye can discern, the new ones up that to 72% of the colors the eye can see.

Thanks I was thinking of the NTSC TV standard

You'd be correct. The NTSC gamut probably doesn't include every colour that the eye can see, either.

I thought it just related to lines per inch and refresh rates. How does this compare to the RGB "16.7 million" colours then? Are we talking squillions of colours nowadays?

16.7M colours requires 24-bit (8 for each of R,G,B). That's only in video RAM though. Older LCD panels used dithered 18-bit.

Either way, that 16.7M colours may not be able to represent all of the colours visible to the human eye, and the human eye may not be able to distinguish between some of those 16.7M colours.

You have the gamut that the eye can see and the gamut that the computer can represent and the gamut that the device can render. They only overlap in a subset of the three colour spaces.

Checking the local coverage. AT&T is showing full LTE speeds, while Verison is showing mostly 3G speeds all over Manteca. This despite the fact that Verison owns all the landlines in the city.

Preordered a Verizon unit, mostly for the hotspot ability. They have LTE coverage in Colorado, AT&T has none so far. And Verizon has hotspot day one at no additional cost, AT&T is "working with Apple" and hasn't confirmed either way if it will cost extra. Guess I might as well give money to both evil bells instead of just one.

The hotspot ability (I was guessing it was Verizon that had it based on AT&T's draconian practices that I've seen) and the larger data plan available was why I ordered the Verizon one also.

Edit: On that note, which GPS Turn-By-Turn app would you folks vote as the best? Since I never used a GPS before (OnStar works great for my car) I really don't know which one would be the best (a lifetime Maps/Traffic subscription would be great, but probably unrealistic).

Tom, has Verizon confirmed that the free hotspot feature will be free in the long run? In the past, they've offered free hotspot capability on their phones for an unspecified promotional period. I don't want you to get bitten later on.

My preference is to get the hotspot in my phone, and not have to worry about multiple contracts or pay more initially for the device.