So the new iPad ships Friday and I already know Im going to be standing around the house Friday morning waiting for UPS like an idiot. I ordered the 32GB WiFi one, white, the second preorders opened last week. $599. Didnt even think about it that long, which probably says something about me I dont want to examine too closely.
If you missed it, Apple did their thing at Yerba Buena on the 7th and unveiled what they are just calling "the new iPad." Not iPad 3, not iPad HD, just "new iPad," which is either refreshingly confident or a nightmare for anyone who has to write about it later and disambiguate which "new iPad" theyre talking about in, say, 2014. My money's on nightmare. Some naming intern is going to have a bad time.
The headline thing is the Retina display, 2048x1536, which is something like four times the pixels of the iPad 2. I dont think Ill notice a huge difference reading Instapaper articles, honestly, but Ive heard from a couple people who saw it in person at the demo units that text just looks like it's printed on paper instead of rendered. Thats the kind of thing you cant really judge from a press release, you just have to hold it. A5X chip, quad core graphics, 5 megapixel camera on the back now with actual optics instead of whatever potato they put in the iPad 2, 1080p video recording. All fine. Nice bumps across the board.
What I actually care about is whether my apps are going to look like garbage until developers update their icons and art assets for the higher resolution. Ive been burned by this before, going all the way back to the iPhone 4 Retina jump in 2010, when half my home screen looked blurry for weeks. Expecting the same thing here for a while. Some big apps will update fast, some indie ones will sit there fuzzy for months and nobody will care but me.
Also worth saying, because nobody else seems to be saying it loudly enough: the 4G LTE models are $629 and up, and thats before you get into a data plan with AT&T or Verizon. Thats a lot of tablet money for something Im mostly going to use on my couch, on my own wifi, ten feet from my router. I get why it exists. I just dont think I'm the customer for it, and I suspect a lot of people buying the LTE version are going to use maybe three gigs of data a year and feel very smug about having the option.
Unrelated but also this week, SXSW just wrapped up in Austin, and from what Ive been reading it was one of those years where half the interesting news wasnt on any stage, it was just people at bars talking about their startups. Instagram apparently told people there that an Android version is actually coming, which, if youve been on Android and jealous of every iPhone friend's square photos for the last year and a half, is a pretty big deal. No date yet as far as I can tell. I'll believe it when the APK shows up.
And Angry Birds Space came out last week too, which I did not need in my life but downloaded within about four hours of it hitting the store anyway. Ten million downloads in under three days according to Rovio, which is an absurd number for a physics puzzle game about slinging birds, but here we are. I got stuck on one of the zero gravity levels for like twenty minutes on the train Tuesday and missed my stop. Not proud of that.
Anyway. Ill probably do a real writeup once the new iPad actually arrives and Ive had it for a few days, once I know if the LTE antenna thing on the 4G models is as awkward looking in person as it is in photos (it kind of is), and whether the extra weight is noticeable holding it up in bed for an hour, which is genuinely most of my iPad usage if Im being honest with myself. My iPad 1 is getting demoted to kitchen recipe duty, propped up against the toaster, which feels like a fitting retirement.