We can only hope for the false leak. Like if Apple failed to keep the feature in secret, so they are intentionally leaking the opposite info to reset competitors from the alert mode.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
Or maybe they want the competition to think they will still be using the old LCD panels when in fact they are upgrading to new high res units.
Both these scenarios involve duping Gruber. That would be verboten, in my book.
Or making him complicit in a ruse, equally unthinkable.
Also, I would think they'd want to do a higher rez screen mostly because they could, technically and economically, and only secondarily for competitive reasons. The rear-facing camera will eventually demand a better screen, what with its 5 or more megapixels and HDR, like the iPhone. It will make a new kind of photography possible, as I'm fond of repeating here in this forum.
Both these scenarios involve duping Gruber. That would be verboten, in my book.
Or making him complicit in a ruse, equally unthinkable.
There could still be some kind of misdirection going on here, Perhaps, as solipsism has suggested, they introduce the higher-res screen on just a single high-end device - an iPad Pro, if you like. Doing so, it would still be true that the iPad did not get the improved screens.
I can't really see Apple doing that but you never know: it would help dealing with screen yields (while readying this as a standard feature next year) and reduce any margin hit.
Both these scenarios involve duping Gruber. That would be verboten, in my book.
Or making him complicit in a ruse, equally unthinkable.
Also, I would think they'd want to do a higher rez screen mostly because they could, technically and economically, and only secondarily for competitive reasons. The rear-facing camera will eventually demand a better screen, what with its 5 or more megapixels and HDR, like the iPhone. It will make a new kind of photography possible, as I'm fond of repeating here in this forum.
Good points. I guess we'll have to wait until one gets left on a bar stool.
As you increase the size of the panel, the chance of dead pixels goes up exponentially, reducing the yield and skyrocketing the price.
Yes... but... you're not increasing the size of the panel. A 9" Retina iPad screen is the same physical size as the current 9" screen.
Those astronomical HDTV costs you're tossing around are due primarily to SCALE. Huge sheets of glass. Oversized manufacturing techniques. Rejection costs. Limited production runs. And so on.
The only thing you said that made sense is questioning the existence of the part, itself.
Which makes me wonder why no one is calling around trying to see if a 2048 x 1536 9-inch screen even exists...
There could still be some kind of misdirection going on here, Perhaps, as solipsism has suggested, they introduce the higher-res screen on just a single high-end device - an iPad Pro, if you like. Doing so, it would still be true that the iPad did not get the improved screens.
I can't really see Apple doing that but you never know: it would help dealing with screen yields (while readying this as a standard feature next year) and reduce any margin hit.
A bit less concern for margin will see Apple win the tablet war. In any case it can be balanced - a lower level iPad 1 selling at $100 less and an iPad HD to test the waters selling at $800+
The explanations for the iBooks icons are not that satisfactory. Also what was it that Tim Cook was talking about when he said they spent $3B on some components and capital to expedite the building of said components. I say screens, and with that money you get it cheap.
As for memory costs, a 4x increase in memory requirements can be met by a 4x increase in RAM. The iPads ram is hardly remarkable at the moment. An increase to 1G is on the cards.
This is better reasoning than that which occurred to me last night. I thought -- last straw of optimism -- that maybe Gruber was being deliberately misled away from the 'reality' of a retina display.
But he is much too valuable as a voice of sanity and realism to be used as a vehicle for disinformation. Apple would never officially carry out such an operation, hopefully. So I take back my dark implication of last night, posted in another thread, where, incidentally, you'll find other late-night first reactions from other posters on the last page of the comments.
Gruber has been the victim of disinformation previously, at least it certainly appears that way. he has had some real stinker wrongs over the years. He has also had good info too.
It's almost like he is manipulated indirectly to keep him as a solid technical player, but kept from getting too influential by preventing him from always being right. Who knows? I agree with the pro/con analyses completely, but won't buy or discount his source one way or the other.
What's the upside for Apple in putting out such a ridiculously specced iPad at the expense of profit margin?
No one that I know of has complained about the resolution of the current iPad and when I checked it out, it looked perfectly fine to me. Apple has no competition of any note and a major head start in this huge market. Based on what we've encountered to date, is there legit competition anticipated this coming year for an iPad 2 that would feature the same resolution as the current model only with less weight, more battery life, more graphics muscle, more memory, and more all-round horsepower.
It seems to me that no one would expect Apple to increase the price of the iPad. In fact, it would not surprise me if the next iPad featured 3G as standard with the non-3G pricing we have now or at worst a modest $50 price increase that could be marketed as a decrease in that you'd get 3G for $50 less.
So Apple wants to kill the iPad retina rumor. Why?
One reason others have pointed out is that it's not coming. So lowering expectations is a good thing.
But another reason is that if you add the twin cameras, the reduced size, and other features, and then the retina display, iPad 2 is so compelling that sales of the current iPad would take a serious hit lasting a whole quarter.
Finally, the rumor takes the wind out of the product presentation. Apple hates that.
Gruber, in his post, ignores the part supplier completely. Yet if you follow the link you will see that the page was removed. So somebody at Apple bothered to get that supplier to remove it, something they don't bother with for false information.
The "overzealous designer" theory is totally bogus. At a company like Apple, the guy would have been asked to do it (Though that really only proves that they are testing prototypes, which Gruber admits).
So I am suspecting the two-tier theory. The retina iPad will be more expensive, and the old one will continue (or a new one with the old display). Gruber can credibly say that he was half-right.
It?s more than technically pushing the pixels to the screen, you also need to ensure the user experience is intact.
Ummm... you mean the same way the user experience was intact when the iPhone went to a Retina display?
People seem to forget that Apple already did this. iPhone 4 went Retina. Existing apps looked just like existing apps, albeit with sharper text. Apps that updated their graphics were sharper all around.
Why would the iPad be any different? At worst, an existing all-graphical app would look no worse than an app on the current iPad. The majority would be improved. Updated apps would look best of all.
For those arguing that a Retina display is likely, how do you reconcile the significant additional cost of Apple delivering it to the market (RAM, display without significantly increasing the price to the consumer? Do you believe Apple will increase the street price of the iPad considerably, or do you feel that it will assume a novel approach for the company and take a massive marging hit for the sake of growing its market?
Gruber himself argues that a 2048 × 1536 iPad display would be cost prohibitive given ths costs of both the display AND the RAM required for it (namely that even double the current iPad 256 MB of RAM would be insufficient to drive a 2048 × 1536 display). Who picks up these costs?
Moreover, who is manufacturing these panels in the numbers required to ensure there is no disruption in the supply chain to meet the anticipated demand? Apple will not expose themselves to such operational risk.
It's just not feasible. Lower your expecations.
The RAM increase cost for a iPad, even on the order of a couple GB is measured in a few dollars per unit because the RAM is in the same package as the CPU-SoC. It's not commodity purchased RAM. The iPhone A4 already had 512GB RAM, mostly because it shipped with full third party app multitasking from the beginning and had a larger GPU RAM requirement than the 3GS, iPad wasn't planed to have full third party app multitasking until 6-7 months after initial ship so Apple went lower power 256GB.
Power consumption and actual device need will drive RAM amounts far more than base cost (or specwhoring, which I know you didn't mention but it's always a factor with RAM).
What's the upside for Apple in putting out such a ridiculously specced iPad at the expense of profit margin? No one that I know of has complained about the resolution of the current iPad and when I checked it out, it looked perfectly fine to me.
One didn't hear all that many complaints about screen resolution of the 3GS either, did they?
As to why... competition. Many, many, many companies are going to releasing Android and WebOS and whatnot pads in the near future. But -- and this is a big but -- most will be spec'd to beat (or at least try to match) the specs for the CURRENT generation iPad.
Now Apple has a chance, with the screen, with speed, with form factor, with battery life, to blow ALL of them out of the water before most have even ENTERED the market.
What's the upside for Apple in putting out such a ridiculously specced iPad at the expense of profit margin?
No one that I know of has complained about the resolution of the current iPad and when I checked it out, it looked perfectly fine to me. Apple has no competition of any note and a major head start in this huge market. Based on what we've encountered to date, is there legit competition anticipated this coming year for an iPad 2 that would feature the same resolution as the current model only with less weight, more battery life, more graphics muscle, more memory, and more all-round horsepower.
It seems to me that no one would expect Apple to increase the price of the iPad. In fact, it would not surprise me if the next iPad featured 3G as standard with the non-3G pricing we have now or at worst a modest $50 price increase that could be marketed as a decrease in that you'd get 3G for $50 less.
But an ultra-high-res screen? Why?
Why? Utter market domination and past experience. Apple got skewered for 6-9 months by Android phone manufacturers fishing for specs that could snipe at iPhones in a way customers could sense immediately and the iPhone was vulnerable in screen resolution. if Apple doesn't change the screen resolution of iPad we can be sure that by late summer there will be a higher resolution competitor out there running Android 3.0 well enough to cause Apple marketing difficulty.
Since resolution doubling is really the only option that doesn't require the long lead time of developer coordination it tends to make the most sense. Also, once displays get to the "retina" standard, the spec ceases to have any upside to anyone. The best a competitor can say is me too, never I'm better, so that issue ceases to be a weakness until there is a form factor change.
Sure these are just reasonable justifications for best wishes, not proof by any means. But they do answer "why" taking both past and future marketing battles into consideration.
Ummm... you mean the same way the user experience was intact when the iPhone went to a Retina display?
People seem to forget that Apple already did this. iPhone 4 went Retina. Existing apps looked just like existing apps, albeit with sharper text. Apps that updated their graphics were sharper all around.
Why would the iPad be any different? At worst, an existing all-graphical app would look no worse than an app on the current iPad. The majority would be improved. Updated apps would look best of all.
What?s your point? That doubling the pixels on a 3.5? display is the same on a 9.7? display? That processing and RAM needs, the graphical performance and power usage needs going with 4x as many pixels on a 3.5? display or a 9.7? display are exactly the same because the scaling is exactly the same? Well that?s not even close to being true. Even now the iPhone 4 with 326 ppi uses LESS pixels then the iPad 1with 132 ppi.
As I have said before, to knee-cap the competition. Doing this would be like getting an additional 1-2 years jump in front of the competition. You would have a replay of the iPod phenomenon rather than the way the iPhone has played out.
The trouble is with all the recent focus on the screen, it's really made people realise how totally crappy the current screen really is. The iPad screen is probably the worst (to the eye) screen Apple makes on any product at the moment.
I use Pages on it every day all day and the characters are so jaggy on the screen it's pretty much a joke. You don't even have to look close, the side of an "O" in 18 point type looks like a staircase, even from two feet away.
Could that be because of over-simplified AA algorithm (in order not to put too much load on hardware for smoothing screen text)? If that is the case, Apple should be able to implement better font AA without performance impact when iPad 2 comes out with faster CPU and graphics. I don't have iPad, but in my opinion 1024*768 is not that bad resolution for 9.7" screen.
What's the upside for Apple in putting out such a ridiculously specced iPad at the expense of profit margin?
But an ultra-high-res screen? Why?
Well, it's a pretty poor reader with the resolution it has now. Text fonts are too rastery. Images, while not blurry, are hardly tack sharp. Apple wants in big with the publishing business. They want to have overwhelming advantages. Publishing is advertising, and advertising in double resolution is a definite plus. Think Tiffany or Mercedes.
It does not need double res for 3D games. But for the book and magazine business, it would help a great deal.
If they keep the 3D rendering layers at the old resolution, then CPU and RAM don't have to be that much better. All they need to do is handle double resolution 2D layers, which is well within reach.
I don't see a CPU/RAM problem. RAM will at least double, anyway. My only doubt is the display itself. A double-res IPS display? I have no idea if that adds too much cost. We will find out soon enough...
This is a very good thread with lots of opinions, pro and con, about whether Apple can/should increase the resolution of the iPad 2 -- the reasons given are technical, practical, competitive, strategic and financial.
I am enjoying this thread and learning quite a bit -- while trying to contribute as best I can.
What is noticeable, is that this thread is not being sidetracked and monopolized by the resident trolls and Apple haters.
We know they are out there -- I [almost] wonder why they have substituted silence for their normal MO of hijacking the thread.
...That processing and RAM needs, the graphical performance and power usage needs going with 4x as many pixels on a 3.5? display or a 9.7? display are exactly the same because the scaling is exactly the same? ...
Since we don't have access to the part, we don't know the power requirements, now do we? Then there's the whole thing about dual-core processors and improved graphics chips.
Apple doubled the resolution on the iPhone 4, added a faster processor to handle it, and INCREASED the battery life while doing it. As such, I'm not unilaterally prepared to say that they can't do the same exact thing on the iPad.
Comments
We can only hope for the false leak. Like if Apple failed to keep the feature in secret, so they are intentionally leaking the opposite info to reset competitors from the alert mode.
Or maybe they want the competition to think they will still be using the old LCD panels when in fact they are upgrading to new high res units.
Both these scenarios involve duping Gruber. That would be verboten, in my book.
Or making him complicit in a ruse, equally unthinkable.
Also, I would think they'd want to do a higher rez screen mostly because they could, technically and economically, and only secondarily for competitive reasons. The rear-facing camera will eventually demand a better screen, what with its 5 or more megapixels and HDR, like the iPhone. It will make a new kind of photography possible, as I'm fond of repeating here in this forum.
Both these scenarios involve duping Gruber. That would be verboten, in my book.
Or making him complicit in a ruse, equally unthinkable.
There could still be some kind of misdirection going on here, Perhaps, as solipsism has suggested, they introduce the higher-res screen on just a single high-end device - an iPad Pro, if you like. Doing so, it would still be true that the iPad did not get the improved screens.
I can't really see Apple doing that but you never know: it would help dealing with screen yields (while readying this as a standard feature next year) and reduce any margin hit.
Both these scenarios involve duping Gruber. That would be verboten, in my book.
Or making him complicit in a ruse, equally unthinkable.
Also, I would think they'd want to do a higher rez screen mostly because they could, technically and economically, and only secondarily for competitive reasons. The rear-facing camera will eventually demand a better screen, what with its 5 or more megapixels and HDR, like the iPhone. It will make a new kind of photography possible, as I'm fond of repeating here in this forum.
Good points. I guess we'll have to wait until one gets left on a bar stool.
Apple has a history of releasing high-res screens last among competitors. ... They like to maximize profit margins.
You mean, like the iPhone 4?
As you increase the size of the panel, the chance of dead pixels goes up exponentially, reducing the yield and skyrocketing the price.
Yes... but... you're not increasing the size of the panel. A 9" Retina iPad screen is the same physical size as the current 9" screen.
Those astronomical HDTV costs you're tossing around are due primarily to SCALE. Huge sheets of glass. Oversized manufacturing techniques. Rejection costs. Limited production runs. And so on.
The only thing you said that made sense is questioning the existence of the part, itself.
Which makes me wonder why no one is calling around trying to see if a 2048 x 1536 9-inch screen even exists...
There could still be some kind of misdirection going on here, Perhaps, as solipsism has suggested, they introduce the higher-res screen on just a single high-end device - an iPad Pro, if you like. Doing so, it would still be true that the iPad did not get the improved screens.
I can't really see Apple doing that but you never know: it would help dealing with screen yields (while readying this as a standard feature next year) and reduce any margin hit.
A bit less concern for margin will see Apple win the tablet war. In any case it can be balanced - a lower level iPad 1 selling at $100 less and an iPad HD to test the waters selling at $800+
The explanations for the iBooks icons are not that satisfactory. Also what was it that Tim Cook was talking about when he said they spent $3B on some components and capital to expedite the building of said components. I say screens, and with that money you get it cheap.
As for memory costs, a 4x increase in memory requirements can be met by a 4x increase in RAM. The iPads ram is hardly remarkable at the moment. An increase to 1G is on the cards.
This is better reasoning than that which occurred to me last night. I thought -- last straw of optimism -- that maybe Gruber was being deliberately misled away from the 'reality' of a retina display.
But he is much too valuable as a voice of sanity and realism to be used as a vehicle for disinformation. Apple would never officially carry out such an operation, hopefully. So I take back my dark implication of last night, posted in another thread, where, incidentally, you'll find other late-night first reactions from other posters on the last page of the comments.
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showt...=116954&page=5
Gruber has been the victim of disinformation previously, at least it certainly appears that way. he has had some real stinker wrongs over the years. He has also had good info too.
It's almost like he is manipulated indirectly to keep him as a solid technical player, but kept from getting too influential by preventing him from always being right. Who knows? I agree with the pro/con analyses completely, but won't buy or discount his source one way or the other.
No one that I know of has complained about the resolution of the current iPad and when I checked it out, it looked perfectly fine to me. Apple has no competition of any note and a major head start in this huge market. Based on what we've encountered to date, is there legit competition anticipated this coming year for an iPad 2 that would feature the same resolution as the current model only with less weight, more battery life, more graphics muscle, more memory, and more all-round horsepower.
It seems to me that no one would expect Apple to increase the price of the iPad. In fact, it would not surprise me if the next iPad featured 3G as standard with the non-3G pricing we have now or at worst a modest $50 price increase that could be marketed as a decrease in that you'd get 3G for $50 less.
But an ultra-high-res screen? Why?
So Apple wants to kill the iPad retina rumor. Why?
One reason others have pointed out is that it's not coming. So lowering expectations is a good thing.
But another reason is that if you add the twin cameras, the reduced size, and other features, and then the retina display, iPad 2 is so compelling that sales of the current iPad would take a serious hit lasting a whole quarter.
Finally, the rumor takes the wind out of the product presentation. Apple hates that.
Gruber, in his post, ignores the part supplier completely. Yet if you follow the link you will see that the page was removed. So somebody at Apple bothered to get that supplier to remove it, something they don't bother with for false information.
The "overzealous designer" theory is totally bogus. At a company like Apple, the guy would have been asked to do it (Though that really only proves that they are testing prototypes, which Gruber admits).
So I am suspecting the two-tier theory. The retina iPad will be more expensive, and the old one will continue (or a new one with the old display). Gruber can credibly say that he was half-right.
It?s more than technically pushing the pixels to the screen, you also need to ensure the user experience is intact.
Ummm... you mean the same way the user experience was intact when the iPhone went to a Retina display?
People seem to forget that Apple already did this. iPhone 4 went Retina. Existing apps looked just like existing apps, albeit with sharper text. Apps that updated their graphics were sharper all around.
Why would the iPad be any different? At worst, an existing all-graphical app would look no worse than an app on the current iPad. The majority would be improved. Updated apps would look best of all.
For those arguing that a Retina display is likely, how do you reconcile the significant additional cost of Apple delivering it to the market (RAM, display without significantly increasing the price to the consumer? Do you believe Apple will increase the street price of the iPad considerably, or do you feel that it will assume a novel approach for the company and take a massive marging hit for the sake of growing its market?
Gruber himself argues that a 2048 × 1536 iPad display would be cost prohibitive given ths costs of both the display AND the RAM required for it (namely that even double the current iPad 256 MB of RAM would be insufficient to drive a 2048 × 1536 display). Who picks up these costs?
Moreover, who is manufacturing these panels in the numbers required to ensure there is no disruption in the supply chain to meet the anticipated demand? Apple will not expose themselves to such operational risk.
It's just not feasible. Lower your expecations.
The RAM increase cost for a iPad, even on the order of a couple GB is measured in a few dollars per unit because the RAM is in the same package as the CPU-SoC. It's not commodity purchased RAM. The iPhone A4 already had 512GB RAM, mostly because it shipped with full third party app multitasking from the beginning and had a larger GPU RAM requirement than the 3GS, iPad wasn't planed to have full third party app multitasking until 6-7 months after initial ship so Apple went lower power 256GB.
Power consumption and actual device need will drive RAM amounts far more than base cost (or specwhoring, which I know you didn't mention but it's always a factor with RAM).
What's the upside for Apple in putting out such a ridiculously specced iPad at the expense of profit margin? No one that I know of has complained about the resolution of the current iPad and when I checked it out, it looked perfectly fine to me.
One didn't hear all that many complaints about screen resolution of the 3GS either, did they?
As to why... competition. Many, many, many companies are going to releasing Android and WebOS and whatnot pads in the near future. But -- and this is a big but -- most will be spec'd to beat (or at least try to match) the specs for the CURRENT generation iPad.
Now Apple has a chance, with the screen, with speed, with form factor, with battery life, to blow ALL of them out of the water before most have even ENTERED the market.
This could be epic.
What's the upside for Apple in putting out such a ridiculously specced iPad at the expense of profit margin?
No one that I know of has complained about the resolution of the current iPad and when I checked it out, it looked perfectly fine to me. Apple has no competition of any note and a major head start in this huge market. Based on what we've encountered to date, is there legit competition anticipated this coming year for an iPad 2 that would feature the same resolution as the current model only with less weight, more battery life, more graphics muscle, more memory, and more all-round horsepower.
It seems to me that no one would expect Apple to increase the price of the iPad. In fact, it would not surprise me if the next iPad featured 3G as standard with the non-3G pricing we have now or at worst a modest $50 price increase that could be marketed as a decrease in that you'd get 3G for $50 less.
But an ultra-high-res screen? Why?
Why? Utter market domination and past experience. Apple got skewered for 6-9 months by Android phone manufacturers fishing for specs that could snipe at iPhones in a way customers could sense immediately and the iPhone was vulnerable in screen resolution. if Apple doesn't change the screen resolution of iPad we can be sure that by late summer there will be a higher resolution competitor out there running Android 3.0 well enough to cause Apple marketing difficulty.
Since resolution doubling is really the only option that doesn't require the long lead time of developer coordination it tends to make the most sense. Also, once displays get to the "retina" standard, the spec ceases to have any upside to anyone. The best a competitor can say is me too, never I'm better, so that issue ceases to be a weakness until there is a form factor change.
Sure these are just reasonable justifications for best wishes, not proof by any means. But they do answer "why" taking both past and future marketing battles into consideration.
Ummm... you mean the same way the user experience was intact when the iPhone went to a Retina display?
People seem to forget that Apple already did this. iPhone 4 went Retina. Existing apps looked just like existing apps, albeit with sharper text. Apps that updated their graphics were sharper all around.
Why would the iPad be any different? At worst, an existing all-graphical app would look no worse than an app on the current iPad. The majority would be improved. Updated apps would look best of all.
What?s your point? That doubling the pixels on a 3.5? display is the same on a 9.7? display? That processing and RAM needs, the graphical performance and power usage needs going with 4x as many pixels on a 3.5? display or a 9.7? display are exactly the same because the scaling is exactly the same? Well that?s not even close to being true. Even now the iPhone 4 with 326 ppi uses LESS pixels then the iPad 1with 132 ppi.
But an ultra-high-res screen? Why?
As I have said before, to knee-cap the competition. Doing this would be like getting an additional 1-2 years jump in front of the competition. You would have a replay of the iPod phenomenon rather than the way the iPhone has played out.
Well, let's hope he's wrong. He's been so before.
The trouble is with all the recent focus on the screen, it's really made people realise how totally crappy the current screen really is. The iPad screen is probably the worst (to the eye) screen Apple makes on any product at the moment.
I use Pages on it every day all day and the characters are so jaggy on the screen it's pretty much a joke. You don't even have to look close, the side of an "O" in 18 point type looks like a staircase, even from two feet away.
Could that be because of over-simplified AA algorithm (in order not to put too much load on hardware for smoothing screen text)? If that is the case, Apple should be able to implement better font AA without performance impact when iPad 2 comes out with faster CPU and graphics. I don't have iPad, but in my opinion 1024*768 is not that bad resolution for 9.7" screen.
What's the upside for Apple in putting out such a ridiculously specced iPad at the expense of profit margin?
But an ultra-high-res screen? Why?
Well, it's a pretty poor reader with the resolution it has now. Text fonts are too rastery. Images, while not blurry, are hardly tack sharp. Apple wants in big with the publishing business. They want to have overwhelming advantages. Publishing is advertising, and advertising in double resolution is a definite plus. Think Tiffany or Mercedes.
It does not need double res for 3D games. But for the book and magazine business, it would help a great deal.
If they keep the 3D rendering layers at the old resolution, then CPU and RAM don't have to be that much better. All they need to do is handle double resolution 2D layers, which is well within reach.
I don't see a CPU/RAM problem. RAM will at least double, anyway. My only doubt is the display itself. A double-res IPS display? I have no idea if that adds too much cost. We will find out soon enough...
I am enjoying this thread and learning quite a bit -- while trying to contribute as best I can.
What is noticeable, is that this thread is not being sidetracked and monopolized by the resident trolls and Apple haters.
We know they are out there -- I [almost] wonder why they have substituted silence for their normal MO of hijacking the thread.
What is noticeable, is that this thread is not being sidetracked and monopolized by the resident trolls and Apple haters.
Shhhhhh!
It has been a great discussion.
...That processing and RAM needs, the graphical performance and power usage needs going with 4x as many pixels on a 3.5? display or a 9.7? display are exactly the same because the scaling is exactly the same? ...
Since we don't have access to the part, we don't know the power requirements, now do we? Then there's the whole thing about dual-core processors and improved graphics chips.
Apple doubled the resolution on the iPhone 4, added a faster processor to handle it, and INCREASED the battery life while doing it. As such, I'm not unilaterally prepared to say that they can't do the same exact thing on the iPad.
Are you?