The reason I didn't buy an iPad is the danged pixelation on the eBook fonts annoyed the hell out of me. If the resolution bump fixes that problem then I see an iPad in my future.
So at what point does having a largely or completely enclosed machine become less feasible?
I saw several suggest that perhaps the large speaker is actually a vent, however, phones and tablets rumored to have similar hardware to the proposed coming ipad 2 hardware do not appear to need cooling....
Just wondering where that comes to a head, or is the power consumption tech really moving that quickly...??
How warm does the ipad 1 get for those that own them here? Can you see the massive jump in processing power creating an issue with heat?
I don't imagine they'll have too much of an issue as long as they keep making it out of aluminum. I don't own one but based on how the iphone 4 almost never heats up, I'd guess it is not an issue in the ipad which has a much larger surface area.
The only thing that's remotely 'straining' on the iPad (for the reader) is the excessive weight after holding it for extended periods- IMO.
I can not help wondering at the totally unfit crowd in the US that complains at the negilable weight of an iPad. I carry one everywhere and it doesn't bother me at all.
WIMPS
You may be interested in my new For Dummies Book, "How to Increase Your Strength to Hold a 24oz iPad in Just Forty Days"
It's gonna look awesome. And no amount of opinions from people with zero technical knowledge of the situation is going to affect that.
Can't wait. Hoping for a Feb. 15th announcement.
Stop making fun of the people fixiated on Android as a viable solution to mobile devices.
It is bad enogh when I look at them and think "Why would you spend your money on any mobile OS given away by an advertsing company to lock you into their advertising?"
The software is free why would you have paid anyone for it and why would you pay any Internet provider at cellular rates good money to see these ads which consume vast amounts of data on your dime?
IMHO they have made clowns out of themselves by not thinking it through.
Below notice the leaders of Germany are not clowns.
Personally, a retina display on the iPad will be the single biggest reason for me to upgrade from the original device. I do a ton of reading on my iPad, but after a while, the 1024x768 pixels begin to strain my eyes. The text will look so much more crisp on a retina iPad. I think it will be easier to read over time.
I got the Kindle DX for that reason - I like the iPad screen size, decided I like not having the books lying around, but wanted a crisper screen. I'm very interested to see how a double-res iPad looks, and will definitely upgrade for that alone if it's finally comparable for reading. That said, the iPad already does everything else better than Kindle, it's really just for reading it wasn't quite there yet.
Mmmmm, Retina display.
And as an aside, the Atari ST DID have square pixels if you used the monochrome monitor - 640x400, higher res than the Mac at the same time, and you could run a full Mac emulator on it at a higher speed than a Mac at the time. Uh... so I hear, I mean, because I was a student at the time, and students have never done anything dubious like that.
Anyway, the GEM GUI wasn't too bad either until Microsoft killed it by making Digital Research have fixed windows instead of a real desktop on the PC side, which effectively killed it. There's some irony there - MS killing a windowing competitor that was nicer than Windows at the time, while they were stealing stuff from Apple. Fun times.
Ooops, missed you post. Exactly my point. It was a nice machine with an excellent monitor if you picked up the monochrome one. And programming the later models (Mega 2...) in assembly and using prodding the blitter chip into action was great fun too.
I actually moved from the Mega 2 to the NeXT slab, and tried doing assembly to directly manipulate the frame buffer. For whatever reason it wasn't overly successful... maybe because I didn't know the first thing about how to work with real multitasking, having other tasks updating UI elements at the same time and screwing with the frame buffer at the same time, etc. Live and learn.
Personally, a retina display on the iPad will be the single biggest reason for me to upgrade from the original device. I do a ton of reading on my iPad, but after a while, the 1024x768 pixels begin to strain my eyes. The text will look so much more crisp on a retina iPad. I think it will be easier to read over time.
I read all the time as well and have no issues with it due to the Rez.
I would much rather they start with a more sensative light sensor and some kind of light matte coating for the glass to reduce glare before hitting the rez issue
"when Apple introduced the iPad and its 9.7 inch, 1024x768 screen, it did not simply deliver a bigger version of the existing iPhone interface. Instead, it created a distinct user interface that took advantage of its physically larger screen real estate"
No It Didn't, and there's very little that visually or functionally differentiates the manner in which IOS works/looks on the the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.
What makes the iPad user experience different are the apps/physical size, and little else.
You've probably already buggered off under the impression that you were somehow 'right' on this one, but I'll bite anyway.
The point you are trying to make is that the iPads homescreen and launcher haven't changed at all between the iPhone and the iPad (which is true), and that this somehow equates to the iPad not having 'a distinct user interface that took advantage of its physically larger screen real estate', the quote from the article you tried to to disprove.
Maybe you're just being ignorant, or maybe you simply don't know about it, but iOS *does* have 'iPad-specific' UI elements that 'take advantage of the physically larger scren real estate'. There might be only two of them, but that's not the point, the popovers and split-view controls downright replaced the navigation and tab bar controllers used on the iPhone. You might think it's somehow required to 'drastically alter' the iOS UI frameworks to get a 'true' tablet UI that makes use of the screen real estate efficiently, but it's not. What matters is that the new UI elements make it dead-easy for developers to mix and match all the already existing UI elements inside split-view controllers and popovers, in ways that would not make any sense on a small iPhone screen. You said you were waiting for Android 3.0 because that would 'at least be developed from the ground up with tablets in mind', well: the fact that the iOS UI only required two relatively minor additions to make it absolutely perfect for tablets goes to show how iOS was already 'built from the ground up with tablet support in mind' before the iPad was even announced. You really think Apple first created iOS and the iPhone, only to find out by surprise they could also use it for a tablet? They've been planning the iPad, the iPhone and iOS for years, and people who work or used to work for Apple actually stated that initially, Apple wanted to release a tablet before they even released the iPhone, but that all the prototypes were just not good enough to meet their standards.
What matters is not how drastically you change your phone UI frameworks, but how well the changes and additions you make work for developers. The dearth of iPad specific applications that have a completely reworked UI compared to their iPhone counterparts show that. The SDK makes it so easy to decouple the UI from the rest of the app and bundle the iPhone and iPad versions in a single binary, that there really is no way any developer that takes his work seriously will settle for an upscaled iPad version, or one that simply adds some bigger fonts and more spacing to the iPhone layout and call it a day. Applications made that way will simply be ignored because there are nicer alternatives.
On the topic of the scalability of the Android UI: I think you're really missing the point here, which goes to show you don't really know what you're talking about, or you are just being dense on purpose. The only thing Android does to account for different screen resolutions, is re-layouting the same user interface automatically. That means adding more spacing and picking larger fonts. It doesn't automatically introduce split view controllers or popovers (Android 2.x doesn't even have those), it doesn't automatically scale up bitmap assets, and it doesn't automatically fill the extra space with useful UI bits. It also doesn't even scale up applications properly beyond the maximum supported resolution of 800x480 of applications made before Froyo, and worst of all: it doesn't provide any SDK support at all to create universal binaries that allow completely different user interfaces on different devices. The only thing it does is re-layouting applications the way a Windows program would do, but that's all. If that's your perception of a 'good tablet UI' that scales better than iOS, I'll take iOS any day of the week. Go find yourself some screenshots of (for example) the IMDB application on the iPad or the iPhone and see how different they are, they're really incomparable, and that is *only* because the iPad version can do so much more with the UI framework because of the simple fact it can use split view controllers and popovers.
Sometimes it's simplicity that makes genius and not complexity. Designing a UI framework that works so well and is so flexible just by adding 2 new view controller is genius in my book. Re-implementing your whole phone OS just because manufacturers want to hijack it to build tablets without having to write their own OS, that's pretty dumb if you ask me.
If we're talking about resolution independence, then surely there is no longer a need for @2x images? The UI should scale properly the image nominated for a purpose. The image should be of the resolution preferred by the developer.
I agree. What we would end up with with is every developer providing @2x as the only image, and the OS has to scale each image for non-retina devices. But the problem is that it's adding an extra performance penalty to the devices that are older and slower, making them even slower, than newer devices.
I get your point tough, however the @2x scheme is not a solution for resolution independence - it's a solution for backwards compatibility, to prevent giving older devices more work to do.
Hidden option? Guess I've been in the dark on this. Could anyone clue me in?
It's in the Quartz 2D app in the developer tools. But be warned - it only serves to test an app you are developing. You will quickly see most apps, including many of Apples's are not ready for resolution independence.
I use both my iPad and my iPhone4 on a daily basis, and again... the APPS are what are optimized, the UI is essentially the same in both look/function, even down to the (rather wasteful) icon spacing utilized on the iPad.
I agree with you that the UI is pretty much the same. We get more icons on the screen than we do with the phone, and we get more apps in folders, a lot more. That's worthy of looking different. I don't agree that it wastes the screen to not have even more. The screen looks less crowded than does the screen for the phone. Too many icons would look terrible. I'm sure Apple had a number of units on the table in front of them and decided that this looked best, while giving us a significant increase.
It's only meant for developers to test their apps against. I've tried it, and don't recommend it. While the UI looks great, and some programs do to, most do not. A lot look terrible to the point of being difficult to use. FCP for example, is horrible. I had to go back quickly.
You're obviously unfamiliar with various Android devices, and how they actually function.
The advantage is that those apps already 'scale' very easily to all manner of (higher) resolutions, so virtually all existing apps will run perfectly on the newer OS, without becoming an unsightly mess.
Apps written specifically for the newer OS stand to benefit that much more from the larger displays/higher resolutions, just as those written specifically for the iPad do on iOS.
Actually, they don't scale. Google has made this point very clear. Developers have to specifically indicate in the app to look for a specific screen Rez. There are no Android apps in the Google Marketplace that will work properly with 1024x600, for example, because it's not a Google allowed Rez. Unlike with the iPhone, where the Rez is doubled, and all apps using the lower Rez look at least as good, or even better, that's not always the case for Android. When it comes to the tablet, Apple does have that problem with low phone Rez apps. Hopefully, we will soon get the ability to see high Rez iPhone apps at that Rez on our tablets. But apps that are written for the tablet look great, as expected.
Honeycomb apps don't seem to able to be written in a universal package from what I see. Possibly that's wrong. But if it isn't, it won't be good. We've had complaints that people's phone apps have to be purchased again if the developer decided to not have a universal app. But most apps that are available on both are now universal. How will Android phone owners react if that's never the case for them?
I appreciate your explanation but if there were true resolution independence then there would only be a need to supply one set of assets for a project. The ui could take the higher resolution image and scale it for the lower resolution display. Clearly that is not the case here
Agreed. As far as I can tell, this is not RI. Apple specifically tags different display resolutions. There isn't a need for RI. RI is needed when Rez isn't known, and can be almost anything. That's not likely going to be the case here. We'll have two rez's for the screens, and it's really not likely that Apple would go higher than 2x what we have now. What would be the point?
Likely same thing for the phone, though some company has a screen that's even higher Rez than what the iPhone has.
First I assume you mean iWork. The first benefit to the user is crisper text and graphics. Presentations and other documents can have a far more beautiful rendering of the compositions.
Second is iPhoto which should be vastly improved on such a screen. Mainly because most cameras still outstrip the abilities of the screen to display the images generated. IPhoto and this screen would go together like peanut butter and jelly. In fact such a screen would justify an Aperture like program for iPad 2 if it comes with enough RAM.
It's interesting to look at something Adobe has been looking into. Right now, there are two Adobe apps for the iPad. Both are pretty good at the limited things they do. Adobe, through John Nack's blog, issued a survey as to whether photographers wanted an app for the iPad that would do more than their app does now as far as organizing photos went.
What they got, was photographers saying that no, they didn't want that. What they wanted was Lightroom. I was one of them. But right now, an app like that can't be written. One reason is RAM, but more importantly, Apple is sandboxing RAW images in such a way that doesn't allow that work to be done. I hope that with the new iPad, they will open that up, as it's in very big demand. At least, do it in the summer, with iOS 5.
I agree. What we would end up with with is every developer providing @2x as the only image, and the OS has to scale each image for non-retina devices. But the problem is that it's adding an extra performance penalty to the devices that are older and slower, making them even slower, than newer devices.
I get your point tough, however the @2x scheme is not a solution for resolution independence - it's a solution for backwards compatibility, to prevent giving older devices more work to do.
You can't make raster images (=bitmaps) resolution-independent anyway, they're called bitmaps for a reason, which is because they are exactly that: a grid (map) of pixels (bits). It's a fundamental basic concept in computer graphics, just like scalable vector graphics.
It's exactly like you said: the @2x scheme serves only a single purpose: conserving memory and decreasing GPU load and memory bandwidth requirements on devices that don't benefit from the higher resolution images. It is not a solution to resolution independence, because no solution for resolution independent bitmaps exists. If you want 100% resolution independence, you have to use only scalable graphical elements, and bitmaps are not among them.
And then we have sprockkets, another boorish toll trying to suck the air out of the room. Keep on sucking sprock...
Let's try to keep personalities out of this, shall we? Some of these guys do speak on both sides, which you will see if you read their posts more carefully.
Yes. And they will still be low-balled. I'm not even convinced that Apple is deliberately guiding margins lower than should be - I'm beginning to think that they just are mis-factoring the economies of scale spread out across a number of different products.
Apple is conservative. With today's investor, companies need to be. I remember that when a company came in at the bottom of projections, their stock would go up. Then it had to be the middle. Then the top. Now it has to be over the top. Citigroup just came in with a pretty good report, and their stock got slammed. This is happening all over. It also just happened to intel, despite a great report.
Soon, a company will need to be way over the best projections to keep at the price they were at. It's nuts! It's also partly responsible for all the cheating some companies do, such as stuffing the channel. So if Apple thinks the gross margins might be 39.5%, they might say 39% instead. I don't blame them.
Comments
A room to get bored in.
Not unless you bring an iPad with you, and play games with it..
(with mute turned on of course)
The best place for the iPad is the boardroom, the plane OR the home. Especially the home. It's not meant to be taken 'everywhere' like your phone.
wow, amazing how one little letter cleared that whole post up...
I was thinking, what the heck does "the plane of the home" mean? lol.
So at what point does having a largely or completely enclosed machine become less feasible?
I saw several suggest that perhaps the large speaker is actually a vent, however, phones and tablets rumored to have similar hardware to the proposed coming ipad 2 hardware do not appear to need cooling....
Just wondering where that comes to a head, or is the power consumption tech really moving that quickly...??
How warm does the ipad 1 get for those that own them here? Can you see the massive jump in processing power creating an issue with heat?
I don't imagine they'll have too much of an issue as long as they keep making it out of aluminum. I don't own one but based on how the iphone 4 almost never heats up, I'd guess it is not an issue in the ipad which has a much larger surface area.
The only thing that's remotely 'straining' on the iPad (for the reader) is the excessive weight after holding it for extended periods- IMO.
I can not help wondering at the totally unfit crowd in the US that complains at the negilable weight of an iPad. I carry one everywhere and it doesn't bother me at all.
WIMPS
You may be interested in my new For Dummies Book, "How to Increase Your Strength to Hold a 24oz iPad in Just Forty Days"
It's gonna look awesome. And no amount of opinions from people with zero technical knowledge of the situation is going to affect that.
Can't wait. Hoping for a Feb. 15th announcement.
Stop making fun of the people fixiated on Android as a viable solution to mobile devices.
It is bad enogh when I look at them and think "Why would you spend your money on any mobile OS given away by an advertsing company to lock you into their advertising?"
The software is free why would you have paid anyone for it and why would you pay any Internet provider at cellular rates good money to see these ads which consume vast amounts of data on your dime?
IMHO they have made clowns out of themselves by not thinking it through.
Below notice the leaders of Germany are not clowns.
They are using iPads to run the government.
Personally, a retina display on the iPad will be the single biggest reason for me to upgrade from the original device. I do a ton of reading on my iPad, but after a while, the 1024x768 pixels begin to strain my eyes. The text will look so much more crisp on a retina iPad. I think it will be easier to read over time.
I got the Kindle DX for that reason - I like the iPad screen size, decided I like not having the books lying around, but wanted a crisper screen. I'm very interested to see how a double-res iPad looks, and will definitely upgrade for that alone if it's finally comparable for reading. That said, the iPad already does everything else better than Kindle, it's really just for reading it wasn't quite there yet.
Mmmmm, Retina display.
And as an aside, the Atari ST DID have square pixels if you used the monochrome monitor - 640x400, higher res than the Mac at the same time, and you could run a full Mac emulator on it at a higher speed than a Mac at the time. Uh... so I hear, I mean, because I was a student at the time, and students have never done anything dubious like that.
Anyway, the GEM GUI wasn't too bad either until Microsoft killed it by making Digital Research have fixed windows instead of a real desktop on the PC side, which effectively killed it. There's some irony there - MS killing a windowing competitor that was nicer than Windows at the time, while they were stealing stuff from Apple. Fun times.
and Atari ST
"Other graphical desktop operating systems, including the Amiga, Atari ST and Apple's IIGS, used non-square pixels"
NOT TRUE.
Atari ST, beside TV output, have Atari SM 124 (12" black and white monitor with 640x400 resolution) which was even sharpen than Mac monitor.
btw I own them both even todat! take a look: http://milan.kovac.cc/sr/oldschool.php
Ooops, missed you post. Exactly my point. It was a nice machine with an excellent monitor if you picked up the monochrome one. And programming the later models (Mega 2...) in assembly and using prodding the blitter chip into action was great fun too.
I actually moved from the Mega 2 to the NeXT slab, and tried doing assembly to directly manipulate the frame buffer. For whatever reason it wasn't overly successful... maybe because I didn't know the first thing about how to work with real multitasking, having other tasks updating UI elements at the same time and screwing with the frame buffer at the same time, etc. Live and learn.
Personally, a retina display on the iPad will be the single biggest reason for me to upgrade from the original device. I do a ton of reading on my iPad, but after a while, the 1024x768 pixels begin to strain my eyes. The text will look so much more crisp on a retina iPad. I think it will be easier to read over time.
I read all the time as well and have no issues with it due to the Rez.
I would much rather they start with a more sensative light sensor and some kind of light matte coating for the glass to reduce glare before hitting the rez issue
"when Apple introduced the iPad and its 9.7 inch, 1024x768 screen, it did not simply deliver a bigger version of the existing iPhone interface. Instead, it created a distinct user interface that took advantage of its physically larger screen real estate"
No It Didn't, and there's very little that visually or functionally differentiates the manner in which IOS works/looks on the the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.
What makes the iPad user experience different are the apps/physical size, and little else.
You've probably already buggered off under the impression that you were somehow 'right' on this one, but I'll bite anyway.
The point you are trying to make is that the iPads homescreen and launcher haven't changed at all between the iPhone and the iPad (which is true), and that this somehow equates to the iPad not having 'a distinct user interface that took advantage of its physically larger screen real estate', the quote from the article you tried to to disprove.
Maybe you're just being ignorant, or maybe you simply don't know about it, but iOS *does* have 'iPad-specific' UI elements that 'take advantage of the physically larger scren real estate'. There might be only two of them, but that's not the point, the popovers and split-view controls downright replaced the navigation and tab bar controllers used on the iPhone. You might think it's somehow required to 'drastically alter' the iOS UI frameworks to get a 'true' tablet UI that makes use of the screen real estate efficiently, but it's not. What matters is that the new UI elements make it dead-easy for developers to mix and match all the already existing UI elements inside split-view controllers and popovers, in ways that would not make any sense on a small iPhone screen. You said you were waiting for Android 3.0 because that would 'at least be developed from the ground up with tablets in mind', well: the fact that the iOS UI only required two relatively minor additions to make it absolutely perfect for tablets goes to show how iOS was already 'built from the ground up with tablet support in mind' before the iPad was even announced. You really think Apple first created iOS and the iPhone, only to find out by surprise they could also use it for a tablet? They've been planning the iPad, the iPhone and iOS for years, and people who work or used to work for Apple actually stated that initially, Apple wanted to release a tablet before they even released the iPhone, but that all the prototypes were just not good enough to meet their standards.
What matters is not how drastically you change your phone UI frameworks, but how well the changes and additions you make work for developers. The dearth of iPad specific applications that have a completely reworked UI compared to their iPhone counterparts show that. The SDK makes it so easy to decouple the UI from the rest of the app and bundle the iPhone and iPad versions in a single binary, that there really is no way any developer that takes his work seriously will settle for an upscaled iPad version, or one that simply adds some bigger fonts and more spacing to the iPhone layout and call it a day. Applications made that way will simply be ignored because there are nicer alternatives.
On the topic of the scalability of the Android UI: I think you're really missing the point here, which goes to show you don't really know what you're talking about, or you are just being dense on purpose. The only thing Android does to account for different screen resolutions, is re-layouting the same user interface automatically. That means adding more spacing and picking larger fonts. It doesn't automatically introduce split view controllers or popovers (Android 2.x doesn't even have those), it doesn't automatically scale up bitmap assets, and it doesn't automatically fill the extra space with useful UI bits. It also doesn't even scale up applications properly beyond the maximum supported resolution of 800x480 of applications made before Froyo, and worst of all: it doesn't provide any SDK support at all to create universal binaries that allow completely different user interfaces on different devices. The only thing it does is re-layouting applications the way a Windows program would do, but that's all. If that's your perception of a 'good tablet UI' that scales better than iOS, I'll take iOS any day of the week. Go find yourself some screenshots of (for example) the IMDB application on the iPad or the iPhone and see how different they are, they're really incomparable, and that is *only* because the iPad version can do so much more with the UI framework because of the simple fact it can use split view controllers and popovers.
Sometimes it's simplicity that makes genius and not complexity. Designing a UI framework that works so well and is so flexible just by adding 2 new view controller is genius in my book. Re-implementing your whole phone OS just because manufacturers want to hijack it to build tablets without having to write their own OS, that's pretty dumb if you ask me.
If we're talking about resolution independence, then surely there is no longer a need for @2x images? The UI should scale properly the image nominated for a purpose. The image should be of the resolution preferred by the developer.
I agree. What we would end up with with is every developer providing @2x as the only image, and the OS has to scale each image for non-retina devices. But the problem is that it's adding an extra performance penalty to the devices that are older and slower, making them even slower, than newer devices.
I get your point tough, however the @2x scheme is not a solution for resolution independence - it's a solution for backwards compatibility, to prevent giving older devices more work to do.
Hidden option? Guess I've been in the dark on this. Could anyone clue me in?
It's in the Quartz 2D app in the developer tools. But be warned - it only serves to test an app you are developing. You will quickly see most apps, including many of Apples's are not ready for resolution independence.
I use both my iPad and my iPhone4 on a daily basis, and again... the APPS are what are optimized, the UI is essentially the same in both look/function, even down to the (rather wasteful) icon spacing utilized on the iPad.
I agree with you that the UI is pretty much the same. We get more icons on the screen than we do with the phone, and we get more apps in folders, a lot more. That's worthy of looking different. I don't agree that it wastes the screen to not have even more. The screen looks less crowded than does the screen for the phone. Too many icons would look terrible. I'm sure Apple had a number of units on the table in front of them and decided that this looked best, while giving us a significant increase.
I wasn't aware of that either!??!?!?!
It's only meant for developers to test their apps against. I've tried it, and don't recommend it. While the UI looks great, and some programs do to, most do not. A lot look terrible to the point of being difficult to use. FCP for example, is horrible. I had to go back quickly.
You're obviously unfamiliar with various Android devices, and how they actually function.
The advantage is that those apps already 'scale' very easily to all manner of (higher) resolutions, so virtually all existing apps will run perfectly on the newer OS, without becoming an unsightly mess.
Apps written specifically for the newer OS stand to benefit that much more from the larger displays/higher resolutions, just as those written specifically for the iPad do on iOS.
Actually, they don't scale. Google has made this point very clear. Developers have to specifically indicate in the app to look for a specific screen Rez. There are no Android apps in the Google Marketplace that will work properly with 1024x600, for example, because it's not a Google allowed Rez. Unlike with the iPhone, where the Rez is doubled, and all apps using the lower Rez look at least as good, or even better, that's not always the case for Android. When it comes to the tablet, Apple does have that problem with low phone Rez apps. Hopefully, we will soon get the ability to see high Rez iPhone apps at that Rez on our tablets. But apps that are written for the tablet look great, as expected.
Honeycomb apps don't seem to able to be written in a universal package from what I see. Possibly that's wrong. But if it isn't, it won't be good. We've had complaints that people's phone apps have to be purchased again if the developer decided to not have a universal app. But most apps that are available on both are now universal. How will Android phone owners react if that's never the case for them?
I appreciate your explanation but if there were true resolution independence then there would only be a need to supply one set of assets for a project. The ui could take the higher resolution image and scale it for the lower resolution display. Clearly that is not the case here
Agreed. As far as I can tell, this is not RI. Apple specifically tags different display resolutions. There isn't a need for RI. RI is needed when Rez isn't known, and can be almost anything. That's not likely going to be the case here. We'll have two rez's for the screens, and it's really not likely that Apple would go higher than 2x what we have now. What would be the point?
Likely same thing for the phone, though some company has a screen that's even higher Rez than what the iPhone has.
Current movies yes but they can be up scaled.
Let's take a look at these:
First I assume you mean iWork. The first benefit to the user is crisper text and graphics. Presentations and other documents can have a far more beautiful rendering of the compositions.
Second is iPhoto which should be vastly improved on such a screen. Mainly because most cameras still outstrip the abilities of the screen to display the images generated. IPhoto and this screen would go together like peanut butter and jelly. In fact such a screen would justify an Aperture like program for iPad 2 if it comes with enough RAM.
It's interesting to look at something Adobe has been looking into. Right now, there are two Adobe apps for the iPad. Both are pretty good at the limited things they do. Adobe, through John Nack's blog, issued a survey as to whether photographers wanted an app for the iPad that would do more than their app does now as far as organizing photos went.
What they got, was photographers saying that no, they didn't want that. What they wanted was Lightroom. I was one of them. But right now, an app like that can't be written. One reason is RAM, but more importantly, Apple is sandboxing RAW images in such a way that doesn't allow that work to be done. I hope that with the new iPad, they will open that up, as it's in very big demand. At least, do it in the summer, with iOS 5.
I agree. What we would end up with with is every developer providing @2x as the only image, and the OS has to scale each image for non-retina devices. But the problem is that it's adding an extra performance penalty to the devices that are older and slower, making them even slower, than newer devices.
I get your point tough, however the @2x scheme is not a solution for resolution independence - it's a solution for backwards compatibility, to prevent giving older devices more work to do.
You can't make raster images (=bitmaps) resolution-independent anyway, they're called bitmaps for a reason, which is because they are exactly that: a grid (map) of pixels (bits). It's a fundamental basic concept in computer graphics, just like scalable vector graphics.
It's exactly like you said: the @2x scheme serves only a single purpose: conserving memory and decreasing GPU load and memory bandwidth requirements on devices that don't benefit from the higher resolution images. It is not a solution to resolution independence, because no solution for resolution independent bitmaps exists. If you want 100% resolution independence, you have to use only scalable graphical elements, and bitmaps are not among them.
And then we have sprockkets, another boorish toll trying to suck the air out of the room. Keep on sucking sprock...
Let's try to keep personalities out of this, shall we? Some of these guys do speak on both sides, which you will see if you read their posts more carefully.
Yes. And they will still be low-balled. I'm not even convinced that Apple is deliberately guiding margins lower than should be - I'm beginning to think that they just are mis-factoring the economies of scale spread out across a number of different products.
Apple is conservative. With today's investor, companies need to be. I remember that when a company came in at the bottom of projections, their stock would go up. Then it had to be the middle. Then the top. Now it has to be over the top. Citigroup just came in with a pretty good report, and their stock got slammed. This is happening all over. It also just happened to intel, despite a great report.
Soon, a company will need to be way over the best projections to keep at the price they were at. It's nuts! It's also partly responsible for all the cheating some companies do, such as stuffing the channel. So if Apple thinks the gross margins might be 39.5%, they might say 39% instead. I don't blame them.