Cold Water on the iPad 2 Retina Display Hype | Hacker News Reader

Cold Water on the iPad 2 Retina Display Hype

daringfireball.net

38 pointsdave161956 comments

Every time I read one of these articles I wonder, "who is Gruber?" Not in the, "who is this hack?" sense, but in that there must be more in his relationship with Apple than is immediately apparent. He's very much Apple's style, continually has insane access considering Apple's intense culture of secrecy, and essentially acts as extended PR when Apple won't say something directly.

There's definitely a "Steve Jobs is fake Gruber" side in Daring Fireball, as Gruber constantly tries to take Apple's point of view in any situation.

As for his supposedly "insane access" to secret informations, I don't know if he knows that much. He's not often wrong in his predictions, but that's just mean he's more cautious than the average tech-related website. He certainly has connections, but since he's a reliable guy and well-respected Apple evangelist, there's nothing really strange in it.

Not much of a mystery, I think.

No, he does have insane access. he tends to get earlier and more accurate scoops than the tech blogs. Sometimes dropping it nonchalantly in the comments of a linked list entry, ex:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/29/wsj

As I recall it, no one was running any rumors about a display res like that at the time Gruber called it, or the front-facing camera.

And he gets scoops on things that are not happening, despite reports from other tech blogs, just as often (as in this example). If you did some digging, you'd find that his source was right almost every time.

Gizmodo leaked the whole thing in january.. everyone knew about the display, cpu and front-facing camera.

Link?

(I can't find any such thing with Google. That may merely indicate my ineptitude or a shortcoming in Google's indexing or searching. I didn't have the patience to look through every article in Gizmodo's archives for that month.)

If you're talking about the bar leak, that happened in April.

oh you're right, guess he did have some inside knowledge afterall.

I think he's simply cultivated a group of trusted contacts inside Apple over his years as (let's face it) a pretty well regarded tech blogger. It'd be hard to be in the business as long as he has without getting at least one or two inside contacts.

I think he is simply insightful and intelligent, with an excellent grasp of Apple philosophy. He understands, embraces and explains Apple better than anyone else.

I sometimes do not understand the anti-Gruber, anti-Apple sentiment here on HN, wondering to myself "Have we read the same article? Am I becoming an Apple fanboy?".

He's simply a guy who's been in Apple's sphere for a very long time (he worked at Bare Bones Software from 2000 to 2002), quite obviously likes the company and has cultivated a strong suit of knowledgeable contacts.

At this point, Gruber is basically an extension of Apple's marketing department. Someone at Apple said "people are going to be disappointed when iPad doesn't have double resolution, leak some info to gruber to tamper down expectations".

I'm going to go ahead and take this one as fact. Retina iPad would be great, but that'll be in a year or 2.

Gruber, of course, has some interesting comments in that area:

>From an official PR perspective, Apple, famously, says nothing regarding what it will or will not be announcing before a major keynote. But they do, somehow, seem to occasionally manage expectations quietly behind the scenes.

-On the pre-MacBook Air hype

http://daringfireball.net/2008/01/macworld_expo_prelude

So Gruber is well aware that he is a tool.

Name calling aside, all journalists depend on their subject for news and all subjects have a interest in being reported in a positive light. Of course there are degrees to which that relationship is a two-way relationship. A war correspondent doesn't want war, but yet without it, they don't have a job. And the politicians waging the war are considering the impact of media portrayal. Are they using the media as a tool? They sure will if they can.

Movie critic? Game review blog? Local news reporter? They are all being "used".

In fact, it is disappointing. iPad's readability is nowhere near the iPhone 4.

A screen update, for a device whose primary purpose is reading, is really needed IMHO.

The iPhone 4's display density at it's size had precedent. A high volume, remotely affordable, production 260+ PPI panel anywhere near as large as the iPad doesn't exist anywhere.

Quite so. Firstly, it wasn't a very high total pixel count, it's still smaller than XGA which is considered the modern absolute minimum acceptable resolution for desktops and laptops. Secondly, it wasn't that much of a bump over the existing highest resolution displays of that size. The Motorola Droid used an 854x480 display at 265 pp and was released a year before the iPhone 4. A 50% bump in total pixel count and a 23% bump in linear pixel resolution is impressive, but hardly a quantum leap in engineering.

In contrast, the equivalent leap for the iPad would be to resolutions that only extremely high-end, very large LCD monitors display today (such as 30" displays) at pixel densities for the display size far beyond what anyone is producing in commodity hardware.

To add to the list: The HTC Touch Diamond2, which was released in Oct 2009, had a 480x800, 3.2" display. The HTC Touch Diamond, which was released in May 2008, had a 480x640, 2.8" screen. Both of those screens are around 300PPI.

What's remarkable is that Apple is able to use perfectly normal engineering advances to generate the sort of awe of the company's abilities that then causes people to imagine that very large leaps in technology should be routine and expected from them. I'd imagine that this could pose a problem but in practice it hasn't before.

Apple picks technologies and features that only enthusiasts would normally appreciate, and educates consumers on why these features mean something. Their products are an embodiment of an up-sell.

I was getting excited about the hype around the super high resolution screen on the next iPad. But John Gruber makes some good points and is very convincing. It would make sense that the next iPad is just faster, maybe thinner, adds camera, etc. (like the 3gs was to the 3g). Oh well... maybe for 2012.

What good points? He vaguely references his sources, makes an unsubstantiated claim that there couldn't possibly be enough RAM to drive a 2k display, and makes an unsubstantiated claim that such a display would be cost prohibitive.

I agree that cost and performance would be two huge obstacles, but the iPhone 4 seems to have overcome similar obstacles. Also, those double resolution graphics seem pretty telling.

Of course, I've been planning on buying a new iPad if the display rumors are true. I'm probably exhibiting some wishful thinking. (An iPad at its current resolution and size will never interest me.)

Retina display on iPad is 5x more pixels than retina display on iPhone. That takes significantly more processing power and RAM to deal with. Since the iPad is a $500 machine, the math doesn't work. It's prohibitively expensive.

I do not understand what's wrong with the current resolution. Maybe I'm getting old, but I am myopic, so I have better near vision than most, and I do not see pixels and only very occasional staircasing (e.g. When zooming in on 'w' characters) on an iPad display.

I think iPad 2 will be fine at the current resolution, especially if it can drive HD television at 1080[pi], even if programmers have to do work when they choose to support it.

Apple really ought to put 1 GB of memory in the iPad. 512 MB will not cut it for very long, and the current 256 MB is laughable.

  ...and the current 256 MB is laughable.

Except to the 15 million people who bought it last year.

Especially to those people. I bought one, and the lack of memory is very annoying, particularly when browsing (constant reloads).

No, it's worse for them. This is even noticeable when using Safari: the iPad can hardly keep a pair of pages in memory, it refreshes them all the time (very similar to the experience on a 3G). The iPhone 4's experience is much smoother as it has enough RAM to keep web pages cached as you switch between them.

It's pretty annoying, Atomic Web is always running out of memory

Here's my concern: my iOS game runs the iPhone at a nice warm temperature.

At the retina resolution, either frame rate will drop or the iPad will get hot. It will need horsepower, but if doesn't get the horsepower, it might just run slower. It's hard to say.

256MB of RAM is fine for most types of games.

Apple is ahead of the game much of the time, but not all of the time. They seem to have this weird, innate ability to know when its best to be first, and when its best to be... well, best. This issue (iPad resolution) is a good example.

My guess? Apple will wait for the BlackBerry Playbook, which has close to the specs Gruber mentions Apple will need to support the "iPad retina display", and see how it affects (1) the price and (2) the battery life of the Playbook. I expect screen size and resolution to be a big differentiator if we ever start seeing the plethora of Android tablets we've been promised as well, which will lead to fanboyism criticizing Apple's decision to leave the iPad's resolution at its current state until 2012.

But, if the iPad 3 does have a 'retina display', I expect it will also have battery life and system performance that will make its competitors look silly by comparison.

I think Apple, having been first into the tablet market will wait to do that tablet's resolution right.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_PlayBook

> Apple will wait for the BlackBerry Playbook, which has close to the specs Gruber mentions Apple will need to support the "iPad retina display", and see how it affects (1) the price and (2) the battery life of the Playbook.

(1) is a trivial lookup in a spreadsheet somewhere in Apple (2) is likely the same; if not it's about half a day's work to do the calculations.

Do you really believe figuring out (1) and (2) is so complex they have wait for somebody else to do it first?

I don't think these are technical problems for Apple (at least in terms of the question "do we include this feature"), but I have to believe Apple is interested in how successful those differentiators are once their competitors attempt to use them on the market.

I believe the rumors. Gruber's reasoning is sound enough but I'm thinking back to the iPhone 3GS where Apple lost some momentum by not pushing the hardware platform aggressively enough. The iPad is such a huge part of Apple's future it seems to me if there's any possibility of pulling this off they will go for it along with a very significant iOS update. That would go a long way towards crushing this first generation of competition from HP, RIM, Android devices, etc. It will be expensive but let's assume the sales of the iPad 1 surprised even Apple and they priced it out projecting 5-8M sales. They may have a pretty decent profit margin here to offset the costs. If they're producing 30-50 million of these displays in 2011 I don't think price will be a major concern come 2012 and beyond.

The argument is very well made.

Apple will defer retina display until ram/cpu and battery issues will not cause any issues. I agree that the display is not as crisp as an iPhone 4, but given that one usually looks at an iPad from a greater distance, it is simply not needed at this point.

From a marketing point of view, given that there are no serious contenders to iPad after almost one year, I would think Apple would leave a few weapons like this unrevealed until seriously challenged.

The major differences in this version will be a ram/cpu upgrade, and addition of cameras.

The argument about RAM is just plain wrong. It only takes 12 megabytes 2048 * 1536 * (32 bits per pixel) = 12 megabytes to store the display. 24 megabytes if it needs to double-buffer.

There's actually quite a bit of overhead at the CG* and Core Animation layers of the SDK that bump that up substantially. In the current iPad, it takes just a bit over 10 MB to store the image data for 1024x768 and have the necessary system stuff loaded into memory. I suspect that extra bit would not increase substantially on a 2x screen, but I'm sure it would some.

That's just for the framebuffer. All the intermediate textures flying around will need four times the memory too, and could easily eat up several hundred megabytes.

The math on increasing the pixel density for iOS touchscreen devices is such that it only works out perfectly if the resolution doubles, like when the iPhone and iPod Touch went from 480 × 320 to 960 × 640. Trust me, it’s double or nothing.

That's interesting. Can someone explain why this is the case?

Developers use bitmaps for many visual elements. Bitmaps will appear blurry when scaled unless they are enlarged by double.

Since UI elements often include one-pixel lines, blurriness would be unacceptably noticeable.

Ah, I see. Thanks!

The obvious thing would be to rotate things sideways and display full iPad 1 resolution apps on screen with maybe 33% screen real estate left over for a menu of some type, or a second type of app, or tabs, or just blank space, and then to allow developers to make new iPad 2 apps if they really want.

1362 x 1024 would be feasible with current CPU tech, battery, and 512MB RAM, and would be a nice bump. Since the iPad works well in either orientation, I don't think this would be a big hit at all. They could also go for another non-standard resolution with a border around another dimension if 1362x1024 were not desirable. But, 1024x768 with 1024x594 left over for something novel seems like it wouldn't be the end of the world for ipad 1 apps, and then an easy way to expand to full screen for safari, mail, and any recoded apps.

The problem with that is that unless the screen size is increased proportionately, the apps will be physically smaller. On a laptop this doesn't matter, but on a touchscreen device it would make buttons on the screen harder to hit.

They key point here is… who cares?

What's knowing what the iOS resolution is going to be in advance really going to get for you? It's not like you'll be able to take advantage of it any earlier.

You might say that it will allow app developers to design for the larger resolution now. However, one thing app developers should already realise is that the resolution will change over time and it may not be a simple, doubling of the pixels. Good developers are already using vector-based images, at least as their source images, for apps anyway - or they just don't care.

What's the point of wasting all this time on conjecture?

It's going to be interesting to see what Apple does here.

Prior to the iPhone 4's release, Android competitors were poo-poo-ing the 3GS for its pitiful 480x320 display, which by then looked dated against the (up to) 800x480 (iirc).

In hindsight, Apple's move was both farsighted and brilliant. In doubling the resolution they provided a seamless user experience.

In light of this I was a little surprises theipad introduced both a new aspect ratio and resolution, a resolution not even fully capable of 720p.

It really makes me wonder what Apple will do. Will they repeat the iPhone 4 trick and double it this or next year? 2048x1536 does seem rather high.

It's possible there will be an altogether different resolution but I rrwally think developers would need 2+ months notice of that to update their appsand get them approved. It wouldn't be as drastic change as the original iPad as that was a totally new form factor but it'll still be a change.

So the choices seem to be no change, doubling or new resolution. All have downsides so Apple seems to be in somewhat of a corner.

If the iPad 2 is just a CPU/RAM bump to the iPhone 4 and camera, even if a little thinner, I will be disappointed at this point.

The originalipad was a huge gamble and I believe it paid off beyond Apple's most optimistic estimates. Perhaps there'd is room for a big hardware bump given a concrete track record.

At this point, I'd be a little disappointed too, if iPad 2 doesn't have the doubled display. But the article is definitely convincing.

I'm a nerd, so it would disappoint me. But I think in general, Apple already still has such an enormous lead in the tablet "market". I don't expect them to rest on this for iPad 2, but I also don't think it would be devastating for iPad 2 to keep the same resolution as the original.

iPad's display only started to look lacklustre to me after spending a few weeks with iPhone 4.

One of the regular occurrences preceding an Apple launch is all the rumors, and the eventual disappointment that half of them did not come true. You can see Apple trying to control that these days, with the controlled releases to NYT and WSJ, and through gruber.

I personally believe that if Apple had released the iPad with the same aspect ratio as the iPhone, developers would have simply treated it like a giant iPhone and not bothered trying to build interfaces that took advantage of the larger area (which is actually important, leading to a few new widgets).

(That said, I'd imagine the actual key reason for the aspect ratio change is that existing "classic" aspect ratios, like 320x480 and 1024x768 are the sweet spots on pricing at these various sizes.)

Apple demoed the iPad with a set of apps specifically designed to take advantage of the larger area. Apple also released the necessary tools, allowing developers to follow their lead, long before the iPad was available. I don't believe that the aspect ratio would have matter so much as long as Apple set the proper example.

That said, some developers still haven't built interfaces taking advantage of the larger area, despite the different aspect ratio. One popular jailbreak app cough Cydia cough still loads an apologetic PSA almost 9 months after the release

The reason for that PSA is that there is very little third party software that targets it. Most of the jailbreak iPhone developers see the fractional marketshare (it is really really tiny, to be honest: the iPad users are vocal, but they were less than 5% of the userbase last I checked) and therefore don't bother targeting their applications to support that platform.

This small marketshare, to be honest, afflicts the device generally: there still isn't an official Facebook application for the device, despite the fact that if you force the current Facebook iPhone application to work as a fullscreen app (which I do on my iPad) it works 100% perfectly: even little funny corner cases render well.

And with that app it involves a two-line config file change, with no code modification. If you also said "and, by the way, iPhone applications are first class citizens on this device, but use slightly weird interface components", I seriously doubt you'd see anyone changing their mind on that regard.

To whit, I will cite tablet PCs: the difference between a Tablet PC and a normal PC is nearly nothing, except it is also everything. Microsoft's own applications and development tools actually provide a lot of interesting added value on those devices, and when you start getting used to having a magic pen that you can draw onto surfaces and then /full text search/ that handwriting it is kind of difficult to go back. Meanwhile, however, no one other than Microsoft: NO ONE, has ever bothered to pen-enable their applications.

Of course, you can say that Apple is amazing, Steve Jobs is a god, their App Store is the second coming, and their marketing is like evil juju that would have cut through development value tradeoffs (and to some extent I believe that: when I go to developer conferences I get into some really weird conversations where people don't seem to have thought through their strategies), but by and large I think you'd see many more "iPad apps" that were just iPhone applications scaled up at 2x or 4x: that black border of shame means something.

I think the small marketshare is a more agreeable reason that the different screen ratios. If a developer can't be bother to make a "two-line config change" then surely s/he wouldn't have targeted the iPad even if it had the same screen ratio.

I don't believe that Steve Job's godhood, nor the Rapture sparked by the iPhone App Store, would have prevented some developers from taking advantage of an iPad with a similar screen ratio to pass off upscaled iPhone apps. However in addition to the carrot of robust iPad development tools, Apple was also wielding the stick of restricted access to the App Store. Don't forget that the period between the iPad's announcement and release was nadir in iOS censorship where Apple banned cross platform development tools. I'm sure Apple could have provided sufficient discouragement to developers if the iPad been the same screen ratio.

P.S. The lack of an iPad Facebook app is a poor example, in my opinion, as I'm guessing that the development cost is something Facebook could easily afford. I believe Facebook would probably not rather an iPad app encroach on the website usage and inadvertently end up ceding control of ads and analytics compilation to Apple.

Those are some interesting observations about the Windows Tablet PC. I initially assumed they've always received bad reviews simply because the core product wasn't any good but I've recently been surprised to discover passionate adherents of the OneNote app for tablet pcs (while reading up on the One Note app released for the iPhone). Makes one wonder why none of the iPad's new competitors have incorporated a stylus...

And yes, I would like you to stick the Cydia iPad disclaimer right next to the iOS 4.2 warning instead of taking up half the screen ;). I am glad though to see some of the innovations from the Rockapp finally seeping into Cydia.

I wonder how would android tablets affect "tablet market"

the best think i liked about the article was that : "its gonna be double or nothing". and from the past records of the company i cal clearly say that its gonna be double and all the credit will go to Mr. jobs.

Dunno about everyone else's math, but going from 1024 x 768 to 2048 x 1536 is FOUR times larger, not double.

Given that 'mistake', 1024 x 1536 seems more 'doable'.

I know this is the pedantic (and correct) response, but the idea of pixel "doubling", in this sense, is a doubling of height/width, even though you get quadruple the area. The general public, being not super-duper mathcores, understand this concept as "pixel doubling", for better or for worse.

I don't know about you, but my ipad is mostly collecting dust and acts as a repository of finger prints.

In other words, I'm not exactly going to upgrade to get more pixels! This all looks like a moo point.

Gruber should call it saliva, not cold water.

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