Read this before you buy the new iPad | Hacker News Reader

Read this before you buy the new iPad

extremetech.com

12 pointsmrsebastian23 comments

Waste of a click. There's a reason Apple is just calling it the new iPad. It's just the new iPad - better screen, better camera, faster. "Read this before you buy the new iPad" sounds like a warning to me. I expected to hear some expose equal to that of Antennagate. Instead, I get an article talking about how this is just an upgrade to the iPad. Seriously? You just used up your one "read this before" for the year, extremetech.com.

what's bizarre about the article is that they're admitting that it is better than the iPad, they're just upset that it's not SO MUCH MORE AWESOMELY BETTER.

And that's supposed to give me pause? If I go out and get one of these, it is in fact specifically to have an iPad with a better screen, camera, and battery.

Sounds like the stock market.. "Microsoft's earnings only increased by 1% yoy!! Stock is tanking!!"

Turns out they still made a billion in profits.

* not real numbers, just for example.

Thanks for the warning comment. I'm glad that I didn't have to give them another page view just to come to the same conclusion.

Sure, it's evolutionary, not revolutionary. Who cares? What's wrong with it being an incrementally better version of an existing product? Does every product release have to utterly blow away everything in the history of computing in order to be worthwhile?

Personally, I'm not going to buy one because of the caché of owning something amazingly innovative, I'm going to buy one because I think it will be useful. I don't own an iPad yet because I was waiting for one with the retina display, and I know a few other people who've done the same. Seems to me Apple gauged the market pretty well with this release.

There's nothing wrong with incremental upgrades until you remember that Apple markets nearly everything they sell as 'revolutionary' (or 'resolutionary' in this case) and act as if now that they are using a technology (4G, quad core, high-res) it is finally cool.

I've been using Apple products since the Apple II, so I guess at this point I've learned to take the hype with a grain of salt or two.

Is the resolution not revolutionary? I don’t think you can seriously argue with that.

As a first-gen iPad owner I gotta say, two "increments" and it sure looks revolutionary. The same $500 I spent two years ago would now buy me a radically improved device.

Sloppy linkbait.

I'm not an Apple fan boy but when he complains that the performance of GLBenchmark is the same:

> The most likely reason for this is that apps must be written to take full advantage of all four GPU cores, much in the same way that only a handful of apps make full use of Tegra 2 and 3

He seems to forget that theres four times the number of pixels on the screen.

That's a good point actually. Normally in benchmarks, though, the same resolution is used across the board.

I don't know how this applies to tablets, though. I suspect the iPad 3 would be upscaling to 2048x1536, but not actually rendering four times as many polygons (or whatever).

GLBenchMark does run at the screen resolution unless you run the offscreen test.

I think we can't even being to imagine how f'ing difficult it must have been to get the ipad 3's screen resolution to work.

Up until now screens with this pixel density were not available at this size at all, so even just getting the screens produced must have been a challenge.

And four times the pixels also means that a lot more computation power will be needed to actually make use of them.

Of course, with more computing power, there's the issue of both heat and especially battery life.

In my opinion it's amazing that Apple managed to squeeze nearly double the capacity of the old ipad's battery into a new battery which is only 50g heavier than the old one.

Considering that battery life still is about the same than in the old iPad, I really think that doubling the capacity was surely needed or we'd all be pissed about poor battery life.

Yeah. It's "just" a screen update, but a huge amount of work must have gone into making this happen.

Remember last year when everybody wanted the bigger display, but "all" we got was a faster CPU? People were equally pissed back then.

This article completely misses the point of why people buy iPads. Nobody buys an iPad because of the specs, or the innovation, or how many graphics cores it has. People buy iPads because they are awesome little computers that are easy to consume content on and because they are affordable.

Click bait title with absolutely no new information or insight. Not sure why it was upvoted so high on HN.

The crowd that reads HN already knows the specs of the new iPad and is capable of judging whether or not they're worth the outlay.

Unsurprising. Apparently, the author doesn't realize that Apple only upends entire industries every decade or so.

I wish they had added the original iPad to the chart. As an original iPad owner (and one that really enjoys the device), the new iPad looks pretty enticing.

Saying, "it's just an iPad 2 with a better screen" sounds pretty great to me.

$500 great? Considering that not all developers and content will even take advantage of the screen?

It's safe to say that most developers will take advantage of the screen resolution. Just not three days after it's released.

I just moved from the first generation to the third generation and I'm pretty happy with it. It's faster in every way, same great battery life and the screen is much nicer for reading. One unexpected benefit is that Siri's voice annotation works decently enough.

If $500 isn't hard for you to swallow I say you should get one.

If you distill it down part by part, one can always say it's not 'revolutionary' – but you gotta look at the whole sum. (Btw, how often does a same product 'revolutionize' itself? It'd be a new/different product?)

*Not saying iPad 3 is or isn't revolutionary, but the author isn't giving enough credit and isn't looking at the bigger picture.

When you inevitably unbox your new iPad, though, just remember that Apple has done little more than cram a bunch of bits inside a slick tablet chassis; bits that, except for the display, aren’t very exciting at all.

I feel this statement makes little sense since the display is the thing you're going to be interacting with the most.

it might not be amazing, but Apple is the first manufacture to put the screen into a real product. That is an accomplishment by itself. How long will it take android tabs to come out with similar screens? It's interesting that samsung is the manufacture of the screen, yet it's on an apple product, instead of samsung tablets!

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