Be Excellent To Each Other

Rumours abound that the iPad 3 is nearly upon us. March 9th or February 29th are the dates I have seen.
Dual core A6 blah blah blah, but the most interesting thing is the likelihood of the retina display coming to iPad, which will be very nice indeed

Mrs T gets the old iPad 1, I get the new iPad 3, everyone is happy

I might get one of these.

I thought the retina display thing had been dismissed because the resolution it would have to render would be outrageous. Or has this changed now?

It has changed now, what was outrageous a year ago is looking likely this time round

That doesn't seem far away enough for the slavering pre-order hype to have much time to snowball.

Apple doesn't usually work like that though do they? It's usually an announcement and the product available to buy the same day, or a week or so later. In the US at least.

Ah ok. I've never bought any Apple kit and I'm not about to start now

I think it's still outrageous. If Apple manages to pull off a Retina display in an iPad (which in context will essentially mean doubling res horizontally and vertically), it'll end up with a display that's 2048-by-1536. By comparison, my 27-inch iMac is 2560-by-1440, and 1080p is 1920-by-1080, which is what the 21.5-inch iMac uses. There's going to need to be some seriously amazing engineering to get that kind of display working while also retaining battery life and enabling devs to shift graphics round at speed.

And even if Apple manages all that, people will still say the iPad 3 sucks, if it doesn't have some crazy new form factor.

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/02/09/ipa ... ng-screen/

Samsung had a demo of a tablet screen of that resolution 8 months ago.

It should be dismissed because it's simply a certain resolution in existing technology given a management wanker's buzzword name rather than being anything that deserves a new name.

iPad 3 will have a better screen than iPad 2 and probably anything else out there. It doesn't need dressing up in bollocks. Besides, there's virtual retina displays which I initially thought it would be.

This may not be the thread for you, then.

£5 says it won't happen this time around.

You're on.

Awesome.

I'm with Grim on this one...
I bought an Eee transformer prime the other day, and it's lush, so big hairy nutsacks to the latest I(m-a-fashion-victim)Pad.

I am too. I saw some comments saying that this could be the iPad 2S coming in March, although there are apparently placeholders in iOS5.1 for the iPad3, I'm guessing that the naming standard in the firmware isn't this obvious. I'd venture that Apple don't need anything superfantastic to shift millions of units more at this point. In addition, the case leaks apparently show that the physical design is unchanged. All that together, I'd say that Retina display is the new thing for the iPad 3, not a 2S.

However, playing El Diablo Avocado, if Apple are in a position to release the iPad 3 with Retina display, they may have brought it forward (and let the 2S stories leak out to dampen expectations) to reignite excitement after the muted response to the iPhone 4S, and to prove there is life after Jobs.

AND it turns into a truck.

I'm not convinced what point a retina display is apart from a buzz-word.
Current rez is pretty damn crisp, and good enough to read pretty small text. the main problem a retina display brings is increased power consumption from the graphics hardware having to process & maintain 4x the data to display it all.
That's mainly having 4x the fillrate without the requisite increase in the backend processing power to match it, and the graphics engine programmer in me does a facepalm at this point. Even if they have doubled the grunt of the processor & graphics card (tho anything built by Foxconn is a bit ropey tbh), you still only getting half the graphics performance of the previous model.

I know apple like their incremental money grab upgrade path, so they tend to go to a 1xMoore jump (2x performance if you are lucky). Compare this with consoles who look at a ~3.2xMoore jump (10x performance) between generations (roughly 6 years - go & count em if you don't believe me. It's like bloody clockwork)

Difference is, hardware to push the graphics is not hard, it's more of a jump in energy efficiency that they need. They need a good doubling of battery performance across the board (smaller chip fab sizes, more efficient cores & OS) so that even after they double the CPU grunt, they have enough left over to push to 4x the graphics.
Next year, maybe, but tbh it really is just trading in performance (app speed or battery life) for pretties, which I suppose is the Apple way.
*sigh*

The reality is that Apple could do nothing at all with the iPad this year and it'd still sell, primarily because for the vast majority of users it's still way ahead of the competition in most areas, not least app support (and I'm not talking in terms of numbers, but in terms of decent software). But I wouldn't pay any attention to the stories. We've seen so many times before people boasting about some 'new' Apple part that proved something was or wasn't going to happen, only for that to turn out to be bullshit.


The same was said with the iPhone—everyone thought the display was great, but the iPhone 4's display just blew it away. Comparatively, the iPad is now quite pixelated, especially for text (although it helps that the iPad's designed to be used further away from you). But the power issues you mention are why I'd be surprised to see such a display this year.


Hardly. Each generation of iPhone has been far stronger in performance than the last.

I'd definitely appreciate a higher resolution display on an iPad, it's noticeably lacking when looking at photos etc. Also it seems a bit daft to dismiss a good display as "pretties" when more or less the whole point of the device is looking at things.

Yes, approx. double the performance - they follow Moore's law very closely.
My point was, the jump to 'retina screen' now would be a significant departure from Moores law in one area, and this would inevitably lead to other parts having to have a smaller improvement, but then qualifying this by saying that overall performance is not necessarily that important to Apple.
If it works at exactly the same speed for browsing the web & playing Angry Birds, has a bit less battery life as the iPad2 but the screen looks nicer - then that would be enough for the press & fanboys to gush enthusiastically about its awesomeness.



'photos etc.'? You diiirty man!


If all you want to do is look at 'things', buy yourself a digital photo frame.
If you want to interact with it, then you have to deal with moving graphics around.
If you want to play a game, then you need to deal with CPU load, and even larger amounts of graphics data being thrown around.

I disagree with many of Mr Dom's claims.

For one, Moore's Law states that the transistor count doubles, not the CPU grunt. But that's often misquoted so I'll let him off It also states that the doubling is once every 18 months, so talking about "one Moore every year" makes my brain hurt.

More importantly, though: the evidence doesn't bear it out. Going from the iPad 1 to the 2, the CPU slightly more than doubled but the GPU got nine times faster (borne out by benchmarks, not just Apple PR). The same bump happened between the iPhone 4 and 4S. A similar increase was observed between the 3GS and 4 (not quite as much GPU as 9x, but still far more than double).

Some specific nitpicks:

What? This would only be true if the CPU and GPU consumed 100% of the power budget. Clearly, in fact, the screen, wireless interfaces, RAM, etc etc draw proportionally far more juice. So even if Apple exactly doubles the power consumption of the chipset, it doesn't need to double battery capacity to compensate -- far from it.

It's certainly a marketing term, but it's not devoid of meaning. It's defined as "a screen where the individual pixels are invisible to the naked eye of an average user using the device at a typical distance away from their eyes".

A doubling in performance every year gives a 64x performance improvement over six years -- that's twenty times more than the increase in a console's power, according to your figure. That's an "incremental money grab" option? I'd say it's an "astoundingly fast upgrade path" option myself.

Why? Why does more pixels use up dramatically more battery life? Backlight intensity, wireless interfaces, etc are all unchanged. The GPU grunt might go up a bit, but it went up 9x between the iPad 1 and 2 without harming overall battery life. It might need an extra 64 MB or so for additional framebuffer space, but again, the iPad 2 went to 512 MB from the iPad 1's 256 MB and the world didn't end. I don't follow this logic.

Only games devs. There's easily enough GPU grunt in an iPad 2 to push "Retina display" levels around in non-graphically-intensive apps; it's only the game devs that would suffer... if they supported retina graphics in their games at all, of course (it is optional after all). Now, Craig: do you really think Apple are going to not upgrade the display because it might inconvenience a subset of its developers? I contend the answer is a big fat "hell, no".

I don't know that a Retina display isn't happening. I do know I've yet to hear a convincing argument against it.

According to devs I've spoken to, games aren't actually necessarily the biggest problem, since many will just use lower-res textures. 2D graphics could actually be a major concern regarding RAM. A couple commented on my post earlier.


I agree—to some extent. Bear in mind the massive hard-on Apple had for Infinity Blade II, for example. Gaming is a good example of "LOOK AT THE POWER!" and if it turns out the iPad 3 is somehow shit for games, that won't reflect well on Apple at all.

As noted elsewhere, I'm not saying there's zero chance of a Retina (as in 2048-by-1536) iPad, but it'll only happen if it won't compromise the overall performance of the device, unless something's seriously changed at Apple.

Massive apologies for the wall of text & mini-quotes, but DrG started it


The basic Moore's Law states transistors-on-a-chip doubles every two years, this was further refined by Intel to be an 18 months doubling in performance, as the two are related. In fact most aspects of computing expand at the same rate, and I believe a large part of this is due to hardware devs using Moores law as a target in their planning (from talking to AMD & Intel chip dev relations guys a few years ago, and nothing I have seen since makes me think they have changed). Their planning is done 5 years or so in advance of chips hitting the streets, so using a baseline & multiplier is how they make the targets for future development. In effect, they make Moores law a self-fulfilling prophecy for most aspects of electronic kit.
Ok, it's not the strict Moore's law as stated by Moore, but it is very similar, and much more widely applicable in its current form. It is Moore's Law ++


I didn't say battery capacity - I said battery performance. i.e. do the same for less watts. This applies to the things you mention, like wifi/3g/GPS. These need to draw less to leave more watts for the CPU & GPU to use. Batteries do not follow Moores Law++ sadly, and it gets increasingly tough to improve current lithium cells. they can squeeze a bit more juice into them, but they will not double the power available unless they make the battery much bigger. With shrinking electronics there is room for a small size increase, but after all this you are talking a 10-20% boost in capacity at best.
So with 120 'units' of power in the new beast, the 'rest' of the kit may drop from using say 50 units to 45 units. That leaves the CPU from having 50 units to now have 75 units - enough to double in processing power.
However - a new screen throws a massive spanner in the works. It will be drawing more power, and the real kicker is the bus speeds that you now have to support from the GPU to the screen controller and then to the screen.
To maintain the screen at that rez at 60Hz, you need 800Mb/s minimum just for the pixel data (up from ~200Mb for the iPad1 & 2) - Just one screen of pixel data would be 12MB - that is a huge amount.
Quadrupling your bus speed is a hefty increase in power consumption.


Neither the original or modified Moores law say it doubles every year. the revised figure is around 18 months (1 1/2 years). In 6 years, that gives 8x, which with a bit of drift (some bits will do better, some worse) it is close enough to 10x, which is the goal for a 'generation' in consoles.
That's the non-incremental money grab option - wait for a seismic (order of magnitude) upgrade for the same money before you change. Apple go for tiddly upgrades between generations, which gives them more money as hipsters with more money than sense users are encouraged to upgrade every 2-3 generations to stay 'with it'


9x? Yeah right...
Even Apple only claimed 7x in the end, and most benchmarks are strangely biased...
It went from a PVR-SGX535 (250 Mpx/s) to a PVR SGX543MP2 (500 Mpx/s) - double the fill rate at best.
The Gflop rate went from 1.2Gflops->3.6 Gflops which at best you can read as 3x the actual computational power.
The 'benchmark' proofs are mostly evidence that the first iPad was fairly unbalanced, and had serious issues with bus performance that crippled the graphics, and they ironed out some of the issues to make the iPad2 work more like how it should have done in the first place.
But, all the benchmarks I have seen concentrate on triangle throughput & vertex shader performance (GFlops), not fill rate which has always been PoorVRs problem due to the way the render stuff.
i.e. you can have more detailed opaque characters but all your particle effects stay exactly the same.

Fixing cock-ups gives you a Moore-beating headline, but only cos the kit was sub-standard to start with.

Also, they jumped from 1 core -> 2 cores. This does give a nice boost - nearly double. But, the jump from 2->4 cores does not give quite as much boost sadly - more chance of idling a core from thread starvation.


4x rez = 4x fill rate. All the triangle pushing in the world won't get you away from that. PoorVR chips don't do fill rate well. Always been their achilles heel.
4x rez = 4x the data through the bus.
4x rez = 4x memory & processing by the screen controller (big increase in power drain)
This isn't games we're talking about. That will use up the vertex processing, but tbh rendering text uses up a fair whack of that anyway. The polygons/sq-inch on small text is comparable to rendering a low poly model, and text has to be rendered as a transparency. A web page with a picture as the background and text on top counts as a fairly high poly scene with 2x overdraw.
Asking a PoorVR card to do this at 4x the resolution while using almost the same power as last years chip is asking for trouble.

Bottom line - I'm not saying the can't do it, but there are some very serious issues with power consumption & the sheer amount of data you need to chuck around that would penalise other aspects if they did it now. Due to their propensity in releasing every couple of years, you are more likely to get a 2x increase now. They may still claim it as a retina display tho, as it might technically count if you hold your arms stretched out or something.

Yeah whatever.

Anyway, I've had some tax back (from 2007!) and am considering what to do with it - I can square my debts and get a toy, and it might be an iPad seeing as the music software on it makes for quite a powerful instrument and composition tool relative to anything else at that price.

I've got a few questions though, and the other threads seem to be for apps or games apps.

1: There's a new one coming out so there's little point me getting the current one as I'm in no rush, amirite?

2: When a new iPad gets released, does it fit into the same pricing structure as current ones?

3: I've got a hard drive full of xvid, divX and h.246 films and TV shows. I also have many thousands of drm-free .mp3 and .flac files. Can I drag/drop these onto iOs devices yet and will they play when/if I do? This could be a dealbreaker because Fuck iTunes on my PC and fuck running any software for file transfer, basically.

4: Backing up shan't be a problem because of the cloud, I hope. How is Google Docs/Mail etc on iThings?

5: I'm trying to get onto the app store from my PC browser so I can price up the software like FLStudio Mobile that I'd definitely want on day 1, as this could add an extra hundred quid or so to my expenditure. I keep getting routed to the iPhone shop or a download link for ITunes (fuck iTunes). So, is this even possible. I remember browsing the app store from my PC in the past.

6: I hear rumours that some unwanted apps can't be deleted and some even force their way onto the home scren, like the magazine client. Is this true?

7: Fuck iTunes.

8: iPad tethered to Android phone using 3G - I find that even if my phone isn't loading web pages that fast, tethering my netbooks to it sees pages render like shit off a shovel over 3G. Does anyone have similar positive reports about the iPad? I'm not having a 3G one, see.

LOLZ

No iPad 4 u

I could run as VM as a walled garden for the wretched thing, I suppose.

/edit What about this? http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-ti ... c-windows/

1. The Magic 8 ball says 'probably'



2. The Magic 8 ball says thats what they did before so 'probably'



3. The Magic 8 ball laughs so hard it falls off the desk and breaks - you can use some software to transfer these files to your device , and there are programs which will play xvid / divx / etc but it doesnt 'out of the box'



Cloud backup is limited (5gig?) , however docs / mail etc is good on these



It will always try to funnel you to Itunes however you should be able to search apples pages just for the software and get a price - e.g. http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/fl-studi ... 50144?mt=8 is FLStudio which costs £10.49



Yes , apple hates you



Yip



I've not used tethering so i dont know.

Yeah, you're still forced to use and install iTunes to do basically anything involving an iOS communicating with a PC, as far as I am aware. There maybe be some new stuff that iOS 5 supports that doesn't require iTunes, but I've not updated my iPod touch to iOS 5 because doing so involved installing iTunes.

It's so stupid

As of iOS 5, you don't need iTunes for anything much. Any content bought from iTunes is accessible on the iOS device, and you can also use apps to communicate with your PC in various ways.

To answer GovernmentYard's queries:


I would wait, yes. It's very likely we'll see a new iPad within the next eight weeks.


Possibly, but if the iPad 3 has, say, a Retina display, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the iPad for the first time follow the iPhone model, keeping the old device for an entry-level model. It is, however, quite rare for Apple to hugely amend pricing structures.


In the case of video, I use the Air Video app. This is a client that pulls video across the network from a PC, converting it on-the-fly if it needs to. So H.264 stuff on my Mac's HDD plays as-is, but the Air Video server converts many other media formats perfectly well. Streamtome does pretty much the same but also works with music.


For music, things are different. You would need iTunes to get music locally on the device. There might be a workaround in terms of sync if you were prepared to use and pay for iTunes Match. However, you can sync wirelessly as and when you need to. There might be alternative music players were you can use drag-and-drop and the likes of iExplorer, but I've not used anything like that myself.


Mail is fine. Back-up, as zaphod79 said, is a 5 GB maximum, but I know plenty of people happily running multiple devices off that, and you can always pay for extra space. Google Docs is variable, but there are tons of apps that work with it, and also plenty of other tools for such work (such as iA Writer for writing).


As zaphod79 said, this is true, but you can always bung them (bar Newsstand) into a single folder, which can be shoved elsewhere on the home screen.


If you're talking music, the iPad is pretty close to being fucking awesome. Animoog is wonderful (doubly so since I got the thing at 69p!), NanoStudio is a decent DAW for sketching out ideas, and there are tons of other apps that work really well on the device. I've also grabbed one of the (stupidly named) Camera Connection Kits and found many of the audio apps work fine with my USB MIDI keyboard that I'd quit using a few years ago. Hell, even GarageBand for iPad suddenly became useful at that point. (I love the Mac version, but the iOS one… has issues.)

Reliance on iTunes is much reduced in iOS 5 but still non-zero. If iTunes is a deal breaker, don't get an iPad; don't tell yourself it'll "be OK" because you'll end up hating it.

To supplement what Craig said above, Google Docs is ropey but sort-of works. I certainly wouldn't want to use it for any length of time though. It may be better on a faster new iPad than my ageing, underpowered iPad 1.

Note that the Air Video converting app that Craig mentions also relies on having the HDD with your media connected to a powerful-ish PC that does live transcoding to serve a compatible file to the iPad. That may be a problem for you, or you may not care. Native support for audio and video files on the iPad are restricted to mp3, AAC, and mp4. You can't put arbitrary files on it and expect them to work (and you can't put any files at all onto it without iTunes).

It really depends what you want to do with those files - I didnt consider you would want to sit at home and watch them on your ipad - however I use mine to watch TV stuff elsewhere and VLC (no longer available) will play virtually everything and there are other DivX / Xvid players (aceplayer? and CineXplayer) which have both been free in the past - they do also have a wifi mode where you can transfer files to them via a webpage (or Itunes)

It won't play MKVs due to a lack of CPU grunt in the iPad, which is a problem for me as I only download hidef things these days. The iPad 2 may do better but my understanding was that it's a bit hit-and-miss at 720p and not possible at 1080p.

Last I looked, none of these apps supported AC3 audio, which means any DVD rips with surround sound in don't work. This isn't a problem if you're ripping for the iPad, but it can be a pain if you have lots of files lying around already that you want to use.

With regards to music apps, I can vouch for GarageBand. Very intuitive and quite powerful considering it can be used on a flippin' phone. However, it is limited to eight tracks and you can't move individual notes after recording. You can stamp in and out though. I use the official Apple camera kit USB connector to record vocals. It would sound better if I had a decent mic and/or singing voice.

I realise its not consistent but I've had MKV's play on mine (it really did *not* handle 'scrubbing' through the file though) and this was an ipad1 , my answer for these was either download both a high def version and a standard def for the ipad or download the highdef one and run it through handbreak to get it to a more friendly format although neither is that great a solution :-(



CineXplayer now handles AC3 http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/id384098375?mt=8

Really? I used to watch 720p MKVs on my phone, and that doesn't have the CPU POWA of an iPad (it did stutter a bit with 1080 ones but 720 ones were okay).

I was being glib. The more technically accurate answer is: because VLC didn't use the iPad's GPU acceleration for video codec work very well (or at all, maybe; I forget), and the CPU alone wasn't enough. I'd imagine your Android phone had better video playback software.

Dunno. I wouldn't do it out of the box, but There Was An App For That.

That's the one thing that really pisses me off about GarageBand. I guess Apple thinks no-one needs that (or should edit notes on the Mac version), but: gah.

Just do it right first time like I do.

So the advantage of having one of these over my current mobile platform, an EeePC 1000H is that it's lighter and turns on quicker?

I really appreciate all the feedback, however it has convinced me that literally none of thing things that I'd want it for would be any better than they are on the EEE, it's purely a broken implementation of things I'm used to 'just working' (ha!) for the sake of portability. The usb and SD adapters for £25 extra is pretty insulting as well, considering the Raspberry Pi will cost less that that and has both, plus an entire rest of a computer.

I'll wait and see what the new one is like. I'm still quite taken with the idea of sliding it into my satchel and hardly noticing I'm lugging it about. If it won;t do anyhting properly though, I might as well wait for some decent Android music apps and go from there.

They're also really swish, and have some neat games on them.

I'm sure I use mine more than I'd use a crappy little netbook thing, however I'm not sure I'd have been able to justify buying one if I already had a crappy little netbook thing.

I pretty much use mine all the time since Ange got a laptop and relinquished ownership of it. So much so that I'm thinking of trading it in for a 3G iPad 3 when they're announced, as it being wifi only is becoming a tad annoying.

I must admit that it's tempting. If the better screen turns out to be true I might crumble. Not fussed about 3G, though. I don't travel on a daily basis and when I do tethering to my phone is more than good enough.

And it has a touchscreen that can be used to control hundreds of innovative pieces of affordable software. It's more about the dev platform and the interface than anything.


I suspect you'll be in for a long wait.

I guess it is in part down to what you're used to, but I've literally never used my laptop outside of the office since getting the iPad, because there's just no point. The iPad is the better device for reading, surfing the web, writing up quick thoughts, composing odd little sketches of music, and that's purely because of the focus it affords. Also, while its not a powerful device when you look at the specs, it certainly feels fast (faster in many cases than any laptop I've ever owned, let alone a netbook), and that responsiveness for me really seals the deal. Pretty much the only thing I hate about the ecosystem is iTunes being a steaming piece of shit.

I've said it before and I'll say it again... There's nothing wrong with iTunes! It's fine! God!

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8068&p=618779&hilit=+itunes#p618779

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7027&p=545660&hilit=+itunes#p545660

See?