iPads using iOS 6, high-res displays showing up in Ars server logs

I think you might be ascribing too much to the marketing types. Regardless of the company, a "controlled leak" would probably be someone from PR (credible) talking to a single (or few) outlets. They almost certainly have no idea of (a) what a user-agent string is, (b) that it is logged to servers, and (c) that high-credibility news outlets are monitoring user-agent strings.

I'm putting my money on gaffe.

Basically what's happened here and elsewhere is Apple's profile is so big now and there is so much money to be made writing and breaking scoops about them that everything is under much more intense scrutiny then before.

Apple is like the country drifter who's been able to avoid the Barney Fifes at the local sheriffs offices but get's caught once the FBI forensic team is brought in.

The expectation I guess is more secrecy. When they're internally testing iOS 7 they sure as hell won't call it iOS 7 before the announcement. They may approach a number of these sites and offer payments for NDA, (this information is presumably more valuable to Apple then it is to Ars so they can just pay Ars). More intentional misdirection.

in both cases, the products didn't start showing up in logs until after the announcement of the announcement. the cat is out of the bag. there's no doubt at this point that there's going to be a new high-res iPad announced on march 7. it's not so much a controlled leak as it is apple just doesn't care anymore.

from inside the apple corporate IP block?

Pixel measurements in CSS are not actual physical pixels. I think that's rather silly, but on the other hand what can you except from web tech....

Yes, retina iPhones report their resolution as 320x480. And it's so ridiculously easy to forge a user agent. I don't understand why this is even news.

To be honest, I'm comfortable with websites publishing User Agent data. If I changed my UA to IE 5.5 for Mac and some sysadmin did a double-take and published it on her site, I wouldn't care as long as she didn't give away any personally-identifiable information like an IP address.

Sure this counts as something that would be a lawful business purpose.

If I remember well, last year we stumbled upon a similar case. We'll know after the announcement. As far as I know there have not been any iOS 6.0 rumors, so this is a high bet.

If 6.0 is unvelied next week, then Apple is doing that on purpose, as they know Ars checks their logs for that kind of content. However, if they stick to 5.1, then we'll know it's some kind of prank, and Ars will probably think twice before publishing the same article next year

or:

c) Of the few hundred employees with access to iPad 3s, at least one slipped up and visited public websites with it.

You think b) even though Apple printed and sent out hundreds of invitations featuring prominently an iPad3 with a clearly visible retina display?

None of the sources is what I would consider reliable. Multiple unreliable sources doesn't improve the reliability that much unless they are reporting independently.

This is news because no one really knows what Apple will release and not release.The rumors and chatter before the iPhone 4S indicated an iPhone 5 with a new design but that didn't pan out. That is the reason this is newsworthy and this is the reason for Apple's secrecy, to increase the speculation in the media.

thats iOS 7 running Safari 535.8 from iOS 6

from inside the apple corporate IP block?

They're probably adding a few new features to iOS 5.x to launch with the iPad 3. In years past they showed off the next major version in the March/April time-frame but this was when the iPhone was launching in June/July. With an iPhone release later in the year they don't really have to show off iOS6 until WWDC.

I don't think there's anything plausible about inferring anything from a UA string, but you make a good point here. 5.1 should come on Wednesday, hopefully for all current iOS devices and not just iPad 3.

I totally agree that it's awful losing 4:3 - and flat panel monitors have actually gone down in resolution since 1998.

Well, but there's the rub: you definitely can get high resolution flat panel monitors today. You just have to buy a huge monitor to get that resolution.

So it seems obvious to me that Apple's not going to increase the size of the iPad. ( http://www.tomsguide.com/us/iPad-iMat-iBoard-Joke,news-5968.... )

The rest of us can fight over the scraps. Apple is big enough to dictate the design specs on their displays.

They probably do have zero say if they don’t commit to buying ten million or so per quarter.

I don’t think you quite understand how big that difference is. Lenovo sells half as many laptops as Apple sells iPads per quarter. That’s not laptops with one screen size and resolution, that’s six million laptops with wildly varying screen sizes and resolutions.

Apple has one iPad with one model of screen†. They sell millions per quarter and consequently need millions of identical screens per quarter. They have billions of Dollars with which they can pay upfront. Apple can pay LG one billion Dollars per quarter (that’s about as much as ten million iPad screens cost) upfront and wouldn’t even notice it all that much. Lenovo has less revenue, a lot less profit, a lot less cash reserves than Apple.

Lenovo sells many different laptops with many different screen sizes and resolutions. Many people probably do want 16:10 or 16:9 screens. They could probably sell substantially less than one million laptops with a 4:3 screen to a few weird nerds – and they would probably need 4:3 screens in different sizes and resolutions. That is certainly harder than what Apple has to do.

Apple can because Apple is unique. Their position allows them to do stuff like that.

—

† After next Wednesday they might have two.

Because Apple has a billion or so dollars to throw away for getting a factory started that will build the said screens for them. And that all PC Manufacturers are fighting a dog fight for the razor thin margins at end of sale spectrum.

It is very easy, yes. As is faking the user agent.

This is a great idea for a free web service.

Select/Insert user-agent and use cloud farms to hit a website randomly with it.

Yep, it is advised to never trust client-side input for a reason.

They did say that the iOS 6 requests were coming from Apple-owned IP addresses.

The screen resolution was not tied to the IP addresses because it showed up in Google Analytics.

Btw, checked and found some "Safaries" - 535.8+ with a screen resolution of 1024x600 (operating system version not set, some with Flash support...)

Same here - 12 visits with Chrome for Windows last month with this resolution

If the visits are from Apple's block of IPs, the argument is not really crapish. It can be that Apple employees are trolling Ars, but there's a better chance they are testing pre-release devices.

There are a few 2048x1536 monitors. But that's not the only line of evidence the article's conclusions hinge on. There's also the OS, the version, and the source of the connections from apple's corporate IP block. Given all that, and given what we already know about the iPad 3 (it will have a higher resolution display) Occam's razor leads to the conclusion that these are pre-release iPad 3 devices. The 2nd most likely conclusion is that this is an intentional hoax on the part of someone within Apple, which is hardly a more credible idea.

My wife's computer LCD monitor is a Samsung that uses this resolution natively (I think), so maybe it isn't that rare.