So Apple did the thing on Wednesday. New iPad, except its not called the iPad 3, its just "the new iPad," which is without a doubt the dumbest naming decision Ive seen from them since they called a laptop the MacBook Air and then never actually made it lighter than a MacBook Pro for like two years. Try googling "new iPad problems" in six months and tell me how thats going to work out. Anyway.
I watched the stream from the Yerba Buena Center event (well, "watched" - Apples live text feed on their site kept dying every ten minutes so I was mostly refreshing MacRumors) and the headline thing is the Retina display. 2048x1536, 3.1 million pixels crammed into that same 9.7 inch panel. Phil Schiller stood up there and said its got more pixels than an HDTV and I did the math later and yeah, it actually does. Thats a genuinely wild spec for a tablet that starts at $499.
Under the hood theres the new A5X chip, dual-core CPU but with quad-core graphics bolted on to actually push all those extra pixels around, because apparently the old A5 would've choked trying to render that many pixels at a decent frame rate. Theres also a 5 megapixel camera now (finally, the iPad 2 camera was a joke, like a webcam from 2006 taped to a tablet) that does 1080p video, and theyve added LTE support through Verizon and AT&T.
That last part doesnt matter to me even a little bit because I dont think either carrier has LTE anywhere near where I live yet, so Ill be buying the wifi-only model like a caveman. $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32, $699 for 64 - same pricing tier as the iPad 2 launch, which I guess is Apple being consistent if nothing else. Preorders opened right after the keynote and by the time I got around to actually trying to order one that evening (around 9pm, after dinner, sitting on the couch half paying attention to a rerun) the shipping estimate had already slipped to 2-3 weeks. I ordered anyway. 16GB, wifi, white, because I always regret going black within about a month from all the fingerprint smudges.
The thing thats sort of funny to me is how unnecessary the iPad 2 suddenly looks now, except its still for sale (Apple dropped the price to $399 for the 16GB) so now theres basically three current iPad models running around if you count the still-lingering 1 in refurb bins. Thats a weirdly cluttered lineup for a company thats supposedly obsessed with simplicity, but I guess $100 cheaper than the new one and still perfectly usable is a real selling point for a lot of people who dont care about pixel density.
Also worth mentioning, sort of buried under all the iPad noise this week, Google quietly rolled Android Market, Google Music, and Google eBooks together into one thing called Google Play. Havent poked around it much yet myself, I mostly use Android Market for the occasional app and thats about it, but consolidating three separate store brands into one makes sense on paper. Whether it actually feels unified or just like three stores wearing a trenchcoat is a different question, Ill report back once I've actually used it for something.
Anyway, the new iPad ships March 16th, which is a Friday, which means Ill probably be sitting by my door like an idiot waiting for a UPS truck instead of doing literally anything productive that day. Last time I did this (iPad 2, last year) the driver showed up at like 4:45pm and I had rearranged my entire afternoon around a box. Not proud of it, doing it again anyway.
One thing I do actually wonder about: does anyone need a Retina display on a tablet the way people needed it on the iPhone 4 screen? Text at arms length on a 9.7 inch panel already looked fine to me on the iPad 2. Maybe Im just not the target audience for this one and its really aimed at people doing photo editing or reading dense PDFs all day. Either way Ive already paid for mine so I guess Ill find out firsthand in a couple weeks whether the upgrade is actually noticeable or if Ive just thrown $499 at FOMO.