So Apple had their thing on Wednesday. "It's Showtime," they called it, which is a weird name for an event where you announce a tablet, but whatever. The new iPad is out (well, announced, it doesn't actually ship until the 16th) and I have Opinions about it, chief among them: they didn't call it the iPad 3.
Its just "the new iPad." No number. No suffix. Apparently some Apple exec actually said in an interview that this is intentional, that they want the naming to be simpler going forward. I dont buy it. I think the internal roadmap probably has this thing slipping a little from wherever it was supposed to land, or the marketing team just panicked about how "iPad 3" sounds slightly less exciting than "iPad 2" did a year ago, and "the new iPad" was the compromise. Either way its going to be a nightmare for anyone writing about this stuff six months from now. How do you even search for "new iPad" once THAT one is old too? I give it two years before some tech writer has to invent the phrase "the iPad formerly known as the new iPad" unironically.
Complaints about naming aside, the actual specs are hard to argue with. Retina display, 2048x1536, which is more pixels than my laptop screen has and my laptop screen is like four times the size. Quad-core graphics (still dual-core CPU, so dont let anyone tell you this thing is some kind of monster, its an evolutionary bump not a reinvention). 5 megapixel camera on the back finally, which the iPad 2 badly needed and didnt have. And 4G LTE if you want to pay for the cellular model, though good luck actually getting LTE coverage where I live — my phone still cant hold onto a 4G signal past my own driveway.
Pricing is the same as last year, which I guess counts as generous in Apple-world: $499 for 16GB Wi-Fi, up to $699 for 64GB, and cellular models tack on another hundred bucks at each tier. I already know at least three people who preordered one within the hour of the announcement going live, and every single one of them owns an iPad 2 already. That's the part that gets me a little. I'm not trying to be the guy who complains about upgrade culture on his own blog (too late probably) but there is something a little absurd about a device that came out eleven months ago being obsolete enough that people are lining up to replace it already. My iPad 2 works completely fine. It does everything I need it to do. Im not against nice screens, Retina displays are genuinely gorgeous in person, I saw one briefly at a friends place who has an iPhone 4S. But I dont think Im going to be first in line for this one. Maybe by Christmas.
Meanwhile, entirely unrelated but happening at basically the same moment, SXSW Interactive kicked off in Austin this week. Which is its own little bubble of chaos every March — a few years back it was the thing that put Twitter on the map, and every year since then there's some breathless "is THIS the next Twitter" conversation happening in badge lines and bar patios down there. I'm not down there this year (never have been, honestly, the crowds alone sound exhausting to me and Im someone who doesn't love crowds even before you add South-by into the mix), but Im half paying attention to the Twitter chatter about it, because thats sort of become the tradition. Somebody always announces something at SXSW that six months later either changes everything or that nobody remembers at all, and there's no way to tell in the moment which one youre looking at.
Anyway. New iPad. Same naming headache Apple's had before with other products but somehow more annoying this time. Retina screen looks incredible. My wallet is staying shut for now, but ask me again in a few months when I've actually held one in a store.