With the speed of how word spread nowadays, its very easy to get sucked into so much hype via the internet. One such hype is the rumour that the new iPad will feature a high resolution screen that is double what the current iPad is churning out.
When we first heard about this, we were split between two camps — the believer and the skeptic. The writer of this post is the later, and true enough, Daring Fireball presents a very convincing case on why a 2048×1536 resolution (incidentally, a full HD TV run 1920×1080 pixels) iPad is not entirely feasible in the next version of the tablet.
And here are the reasons why (excerpts for the Daring Fireball post presenting arguments against a “Retina Display” iPad.
A 2048 × 1536 iPad display would seemingly be cost prohibitive today. Not just for the display itself, but for the RAM. The current iPad has 256 MB of RAM, which is shared between the CPU and GPU. I don’t think 512 MB of RAM would be enough for an iPad with a 2048 × 1536 display. That’s almost as many total pixels as on a 27-inch Cinema Display (resolution: 2560 × 1440).
There’s also a footnote in the article saying that for Retina Display to work on the iPad it will need to up its RAM from 256MB now to a PC like 2GB of RAM to have enough memory to support such a high resolution display.
More from Daring Fireball:
I asked around, and according to my sources, is is too good to be true: the iPad 2 does not have a retina display. I believe the iPad 2’s display will remain at 1024 × 768. Its display may be improved in other ways — brighter, better power consumption, thinner, perhaps. Maybe it uses the new manufacturing technique Apple introduced with the iPhone 4 display, which brings the LCD closer to the surface of the touchscreen glass — making it look more like pixels on glass rather than pixels under glass. But my sources are pretty sure that it’s not 2048 × 1536 or any other “super high resolution”.
Although a double resolution count on the upcoming iPad will be something of a wish come true for all of us, its not looking like its something feasible for this round of updates. Like us, John Grubber of Daring Fireball feels that the upcoming iPad will be more of an iPhone 3G to iPhone 3GS kind of update than anything else. So expect to see improvements in processing power, better battery life, more RAM and better graphics but also expect much to be similar to the current version.
What are you thoughts on this?
Read all about it on Daring Fireball.
