So today's the day. The new iPad showed up in stores and about four separate people I follow on Twitter posted pictures of the line outside the Fifth Ave Apple Store in Manhattan like it was a war zone dispatch. Hundreds of people, overnight, in March, for a tablet. I love this hobby and even I think that's a little much.
I want to talk about the actual device though, not just the line theater, because I've had mine since about 9:40 this morning (ordered day-one, picked up in store, no regrets) and there's stuff worth saying.
The screen is the whole story. 2048x1536, they're calling it Retina like they did with the iPhone 4, and honestly the marketing isn't lying this time. I opened a PDF I'd been reading on the iPad 2 and it was like somebody had cleaned my glasses without telling me. Text has actual edges now instead of that slightly-soft antialiased look every tablet screen has had up to this point. I showed my mom, who does not care about tech specs even a little bit, and she noticed immediately without me pointing at anything. Thats usually my bar for whether a spec bump actually matters or if its just numbers on a spec sheet nobody feels day to day.
The name is dumb and I will die on this hill. It's not the iPad 3. Its just "the new iPad." Apple, I get what youre doing, you did the same thing with "the new MacBook Pro" back when, but it makes writing about this thing a nightmare and it's going to be even worse in eighteen months when there's a newer new iPad and everyone has to say "the 2012 new iPad" like an idiot. I've already seen three tech blogs just call it iPad 3 in the headline and iPad HD in the body copy because nobody can agree on what to call it. Pick a number. Numbers are free.
Pricing didn't move, which honestly surprised me a little. $499 for the base 16GB WiFi model, same as the iPad 2 was on day one, same $100 jumps up the ladder to $829 for the 64GB LTE model. The iPad 2 sticks around too at a discounted $399, which is probably going to be the actual volume seller for people who don't care about Retina and just want a cheap-ish tablet for the kids or the couch.
LTE is here but good luck finding a market for it that matters yet. Verizon and AT&T both, and it's genuinely fast where it works, but "where it works" is still a pretty short list of cities depending which carrier you're on. I tried it walking to the coffee shop this afternoon and got what felt like real broadband speed for about six blocks and then it dropped back to regular LTE... which, fine, still fast, but the hype cycle on this stuff always runs ahead of the actual coverage maps.
One thing that's bugging me a little: still no Siri. The new iPad has a beefed up dictation button that works pretty well, actually better than I expected, but it's not Siri, and after watching everyone lose their minds over Siri on the 4S last fall it feels like a weird thing to leave out of the flagship tablet five months later. Maybe theres a processing reason, maybe theyre saving it, I dont know. It just feels like an omission people are going to keep bringing up.
Also, small unrelated thing since I'm already talking Apple: I noticed Google quietly renamed the Android Market to Google Play last week and folded the music and books stuff into one storefront. Nobody's really talking about it because the iPad ate all the oxygen this week, but it's a bigger structural move than it looks like on the surface, one shopfront instead of three separate ones. I'll probably write more on that once I've actually poked around it, I only glanced at it on a friend's Galaxy Nexus for like five minutes.
Anyway. Battery's at 61% after a day of me poking at it way more than any reasonable adult should on a Friday, camera's a real upgrade from the iPad 2's genuinely bad one, and I'm glad I preordered instead of trying my luck in that line. Going to spend the weekend actually using the thing instead of just staring at how sharp the icons look, which, six hours in, is still basically what I've been doing.