What Apple hopes you didn't notice about iPad2 | Hacker News Reader

What Apple hopes you didn't notice about iPad2

cnn.com

16 pointsBlankwood28 comments

> How much memory will the new iPad have? We don't know, because Jobs didn't tell us. Given that he ticked off all the other major specs of the device

Not really. He said the CPU was dual-core (not even sure he said it was 1GHz) and he said the GPU was much faster. That's about all he did.

> But given the standard pace of technological improvement, one would expect a 128-gigabyte hard drive by now. Could tablet design have reached some kind of inherent size limit?

God, can't these people learn to look up information?

It's at the limit of wide-availability NAND. That's why all flash pmps on the market also top out at 64GB. Toshiba demonstrated a 128GB chip in 2009, which at the time was supposed to reach production by the end of 2010, clearly that has not come to pass.

> Contrary to what the rumor mill had been expecting, there was no improvement in screen resolution -- meaning the iPad 2 is already lagging behind the iPhone 4, with its much-touted retina display. (An iPhone 5 is expected later this year.)

Except, of course, last time I checked the iPad's resolution (1024x768) is bigger than the iPhone 4's (960x640). And if you want to go "but... he's talking about density!"... the iPad already lags behind the iPhone (not 3G or 3GS, just iPhone) as well as the 2010 macbook air (11") or the nanos (since the first generation).

And why the iPhone 5 reference? Is he expecting an other bump in iPhone resolution? ('cause it's not going to happen)

> And while Jobs told us how many frames per second of video the new iPad's cameras would shoot, he didn't mention megapixels. This is not a spec he has been shy about announcing when it came to iPhone models.

I'm pretty sure he said "VGA" and "HD". You can argue that "HD" can be 720p or 1080p (it's the former), but that's hardly "didn't mentioning megapixels" and the iPad specs page was put up on Apple's website during the announcement. It has the camera specs.

Finally,

> Cloud sync?

Is not a hardware feature, it was not in the iOS 4.3 betas, and Jobs was definitely not expected to demo iOS5, why mention it in relation to iPad?

Does anyone care about any of these points?

Wires? Yea, we still need wires for some things. Apple doesn't do stuff that's not going to be a good experience.

Memory? ...don't know, don't care how much memory is in my original iPad - I only care that it performs well - and it does.

Screen resolution? Don't know what rumors they were following, but it's completely impractical today to put a retina display on an iPad-sized screen. Wait for it.

Megapixels? ...pointless fluff marketing numbers.

Storage space? I bought a 32gb and wish I had saved the 100 bucks. All my content is on my Mac which has many hundreds of GB of storage.

These all seem deep in nitpick territory. This is a consumer device - like your TV or your microwave. Post-PC, remember?

> Wires? Yea, we still need wires for some things. Apple doesn't do stuff that's not going to be a good experience.

Having to plug crap in and out is not a very good experience though. In fact, Apple seems to agree. See AirDrop in Lion.

> Memory? ...don't know, don't care how much memory is in my original iPad - I only care that it performs well - and it does.

Disagreement, Safari is a pain to use on more than two different page (outside the issue of not having tabs or anything simple) because it keeps reloading the fuck out of them due to lack of RAM (iPhone 4 has far less issues there, with a similar resolution)

> Megapixels? ...pointless fluff marketing numbers.

Yeppers.

> Storage space? I bought a 32gb and wish I had saved the 100 bucks. All my content is on my Mac which has many hundreds of GB of storage.

Well yeah but not everybody's is, and iPad would be even better if there never was a need to tether it to anything (but a wall outlet for charging).

This is not the case currently.

On the other hand, storage space — as screen resolution — is a technical problem: you can't find 128GB NAND chips on the market, not in the amount Apple needs anyway. That's also why the iPod Touch still has only 64GB NAND and the iPhone finds itself lagging at 32.

> Having to plug crap in and out is not a very good experience though.

I was thinking the same way you were until a year ago when I spoke to a colleague who has a Droid that got an OTA upgrade to Froyo (2.2)... what a clusterf*ck... he lost battery during the event, it torched his device, and he couldn't even re-flash the firmware, he had to take it into the Verizon store, where they simply replaced it.

All the settings and hacks he put it? Wiped. (Backup is optional in Android... my colleague hadn't done it).

This made me understand why Apple is so old-school when it comes to iPod/iPad sync and upgrades. It's not just the wireless bandwidth, it's about avoiding disastrous edge-cases that ruin customer experience.

A wired sync or upgrade can guarantee backups, power availability and reasonable bandwidth.

I'm not saying doing everything wireless is ideal, and updating your firmware is one of those things I believe are OK wired, I generally want my machine to be plugged in when I update the OS or firmware.

But syncing your contacts, your browser favorites or some music should not require that the phone be plugged into the computer. That's just annoying.

Wired sync isn't exactly a great experience with iOS, either. iTunes db different from your iPod's? Get ready for some work.

Some additional points:

On storage: But given the standard pace of technological improvement, one would expect a 128-gigabyte hard drive by now.

Has this person not followed Apple before? The same company that has not bumped the entry level iPod touch from 8GB since it was introduced in 2007? No one cares, because the entry iPod touch still sells like hotcakes to kids who use their touch for gaming.

On screen resolution: meaning the iPad 2 is already lagging behind the iPhone 4, with its much-touted retina display.

The next best tablet screen on the market (Xoom's 10.1") is 1280x800. That's only 17 ppi more than the iPad. Why would Apple push its tablet to 300+ ppi and decrease their margins when no one else has gone that far?

Agreed. And on the resolution point, as mentioned several times by daringfireball[1] and others, the only way Apple will up the density is if it's doubled. Why? Because it's the only thing that makes sense. Less than double = terrible scaling or forcing apps to supply apps with yet another resolution in mind.

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/cold_water_ipad_retina_dis...

I love my iPad, but I think memory is a pretty big deal, especially if you want to do real multitasking. The numbers might not matter to the average consumer, but the experience will.

Open up several tabs in your browser and look at the memory that's being consumed, then tell me you won't care about 256MB vs 1GB of memory on a tablet that most people are going to use to surf the internet.

Not having to constantly reload pages was probably the most eye-opening thing for me using the XOOM (tabbed) browser versus the Browser in my original iPad.

Memory is conspicuously absent from the specs page (http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/)

Are you saying that connecting a device to a computer to sync is a better experience than automatically syncing OTA? And you like tabs reloading if you leave the page?

Nitpicks are important. Good enough is the enemy of excellence.

I'm saying that when they can make those things a good experience, they do. They add memory when they can get it in sufficient supply and it doesn't increase the price too much. They add OTA such-and-such as they have appropriate methods of doing it that don't negatively affect the customer.

Copy/paste is a great example. They didn't have a decent implementation, so they just sat on it and released it when it was ready. I think, when it comes to consumer electronics, this is exactly the right approach.

Agree with the above points, especially the memory. You might think the memory is adequate until you have more of it, but once you do, you will wonder how you lived with less.

That is what happened when I upgraded from my iPhone 3G to my iPhone 4. Months later, I'm still getting over the difference.

Of course. I definitely agree memory is good. All I'm trying to say is that Apple's typical consumer customer doesn't care about the numbers. They need enough memory to have a good experience, Apple attempts to supply that experience without sacrificing other areas (such as price, battery life, or availability).

Actually, reports suggest it now has 512MB RAM just like the iPhone 4.

Apple doesn't like talking hardware specs, they feel it distracts from the overall package that is both the hardware and software. They give vague numbers like 2x better CPU performance due to dual core CPU but they didn't mention how fast each core runs. They didn't mention the RAM for the iPad1 and they didn't now either. I'm not sure why people are surprised by this.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/03/apples_a5_cpu_...

Apple never mention how much RAM is in their iOS devices. If I had to guess why I'd say it forces more consumers to compare based on things other than specification. The tech savvy know what they're reading and where to get the data, most other consumers don't care, but there is a group who know where to get the data and don't know how to interpret it, who may be fooled by numbers which don't actually affect their use of the device.

As for having features missing in the first version, that's also been the Apple way. Release early, release often. See what the consumer actually wants and complains about and include that in the next version.

I do think that the sync cable still isn't very Apple though. I've been hoping that will vanish ever since iOS devices first had wifi capability across the board.

Apple really does need some serious competition soon, if only so that people will stop writing irritating articles comparing Apple's product line with figments of their imagination.

It would be one thing to read an article saying "the iPad has X amount of RAM, but Tablet Q has Y amount of RAM, and that's probably why Tablet Q is so much better at tasks A and B." But instead we get "the thing that you can buy right now at a store offers X, but it really doesn't hold a candle to the thing I saw on Star Trek last night".

Real engineers ship, people. There are a lot of constraints. You can't wish them away, so you can't compare a real thing with an imaginary one. You can only compare two real things. And you can't part them out, imagining an animal with the vision of an eagle and the reach of a giraffe and the speed of a cheetah and the fecundity of E. coli. That can't happen. Maybe you can design it on paper, and maybe you can build a very scary-looking prototype, but that animal can't be shipped.

The only actual comparison I see here is one sentence about a RAM spec: The Xoom has 1GB, and that's bigger. What this means in real life, however, I do not see here. Yeah, I know the number is bigger, but tell me why I care. Tell me why it's worth every other compromise that I'll have to make, just to get that RAM.

Okay, it has less ram than the Galaxy tab.

And honestly, the iPad 2 hasn't shipped yet.

Good catch! They should have shipped the iPad 2 first and announced it later.

The article didn't once mention the Galaxy Tab. You missed the parent's point.

I pointed out that his facts was wrong. I don't care about his point.

Then I think you responded to the wrong post because your reply talks to neither his facts nor his point.

The author has completely missed the whole point of the iPad, which is to make personal computing simple. Consumers do not need to know how many GHz or how much RAM their iPad has, they just need to know that it'll run apps, play games, videos and edit documents. If you feel so inclined, Apple lists most of the specifications on their website.

I know a lot of people who are literally scared of the old-fashioned PC, because of all the jargon associated with buying one. The iPad is revolutionising by simplifying.

The funniest thing is that Jobs said that the processor is dual core, and that it's 2x faster. Now this seems to imply that 2x cores = 2x faster, which is absurd, if they didn't increase the clock speed there is no way they could get a definite 2x speed up.

The problem with multiply cores is that they have to access memory among other shared resources which really hurts when one core blocks out the other one. Modern operating systems try to be smart about multiply cores, but still twice the core count does not mean twice the speed.

While you are correct that simply adding a core would not result in a 2x speedup you missed the fact that there are other significant differences between the A5 SoC compared to the A4.

* DDR2 vs DDR1 memory (1066 vs 800Mhz)

* possibly dual-channel i.e. 2 64-bit buses instead of one but this is hard to get solid info on atm.

Even so the speed up probably wouldn't be exactly 2x, but it would be close in some applications and make his claims a lot more reasonable simplification for the target market.

Further the cache is 1MB vs 640kb. And the GPU way faster. This is a system on a chip, not a desktop CPU. So your statement is pretty inaccurate. In various real world benchmarks non-graphics stuff has seen a 1.5-2x improvement and graphics oriented stuff has seen over 7x improvement. I think that justifies the 2x statement enough.

"we are selling overpriced products for rich people". apple hopes you didnt notice that.

Apple showcased something in that context yesterday. Namely, that 5 out of six models in iPad matrix were cheeper than Xoom.

Future presidential candidates would also do well to note that the GarageBand presentation was overlong and tedious, just like the iPhoto presentation was when they unveiled the new MacBook Airs.

3 downmodders didn't read the article...

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