IPad 2 33% Thinner, 2x Faster, iOS 4.3 1118
Steve Jobs was on hand today deliver a speech at Apple's iPad 2 event. The
new iPad will feature dual-core processors, 2x faster CPU, and 9X faster
graphics, front and rear cameras. And it's 33% thinner. Prices range from $499 to $829 depending on if
you want 3G and 64 gigs, and it ships March 11. iOS 4.3 will ship at the same time.
So thin you could break it in half... (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean, unless you need to use it to shimmy a door handle because you don't want to ruin your credit card...
Only 3G? (Score:1, Insightful)
So, yet again not bleeding edge...
Units (Score:0, Insightful)
64 gigs
What the fuck is a gig? Does it consume 64 gigawatts of energy?
Resolution? (Score:2, Insightful)
As an iPad owner the main upgrade incentive would be a higher resolution screen. I see there's no mention of this spec?
So can we take it the iPad 2 will be the same as the original iPad?
No SDHC reader! (Score:2, Insightful)
Do we hv to wait for iPad 3 then? Or never ever?
Re:The only thing that hasn't changed (Score:3, Insightful)
The iPad is still assembled by cheap Chinese labor who sometimes get suicidal and jump off the Foxconn factory roof so they installed nets. But hey, it's 33% thinner!!!!!
BTW, I did the numbers a while back...
Foxconn's employee suicide rates are 1/3 the suicide rate of the general U.S. population. We should send people over there to figure out why their employees are so happy and healthy.
tick - TOCK (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not entirely convinced this is aimed at upgraders, apart from bleeding edge users but seems to be more for drawing in the second round of buyers. Those that wanted the camera feature, those that have seen what competitors have produced and are now making their purchase decision. There seems to be a minor price reduction on the existing IP1 too, £329 for the 16Gig is showing at time of writing on the UK store, though the IP2 is not listed there yet. No doubt there's so much stock of the IP1 that a price drop will cause more fence sitters to buy in at the older model if they decide they don't want the newest.
It's a nice tactic and these guys really are the pro marketeers. They could sell water to fish.
This follows (loosely) Intel's tick - tock model and doesn't overwhelm the consumer too much allowing production methods to be refined to lower cost for the next tick product whilst still staying in a good market position with the tock item.
Re:Not bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's not like you can make a chip faster without increasing its clock speed.
meeting the wish list (Score:5, Insightful)
Things normal people wanted and didn't get: USB port, wireless syncing, lower price, 7-inch version
Things normal people wanted and did get: faster, more powerful, same battery life, white body, two cameras, FaceTime
Things geeks wanted and didn't get: oh, hell, I'll be here all day. The geeks can go buy a Xoom to hack instead.
Haters gonna' hate. (Score:5, Insightful)
No flash. Less features than a XOOM. Lame.
When are they going to cripple my iPad 1? (Score:5, Insightful)
I really dig my iPad, and have no reason to get this new one.
Except..Apple is going to make me download the new OS, making my iPad 1 slow to a crawl. Just like they did to my iPhone 3G.
Yes I know I could never update. But, that doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to ask your customers to do.
Re:So thin you could break it in half... (Score:2, Insightful)
Everybody I know who wants Apple products wants it because it's thin and pretty.
Everybody I know who has Apple products say they want things like longer lasting batteries, but they're already locked into the UI and cult of Jobs or whatever you want to call it so they're not going anywhere and ohh look! The new one's so pretty!
That's a lot less of a dig than it probably appears. Apple does what it does very well.
User replaceable? why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The device is under 9mm thick. Making the battery replacable means you have to add two more layers of thickness around the battery module itself, another layer inside the battery bay, a little space for fit tolerance, all adding up to non-trivial increase in overall thickness just so a small percentage of users can actually replace the battery (most who say "I want a removable battery" won't actually do it). Never mind the extra space/weight needed for the connector, interface circuitry, and other stuff. In addition, the replacement battery would have to be almost as wide as the iPad, only ~3mm thick, and somehow strong enough to not bend & break. Solving all that just isn't worth the problem being solved.
The 10+ hour run time is real. Are you REALLY not going to have a chance to recharge, using a 2 cu in charger, during that time?
In a year of heavy use, I've drained my iPad battery at most a half-dozen times, maybe twice when having a charger nearby wasn't a viable solution.
Re:No SDHC reader! (Score:5, Insightful)
Forever. It is a strategy tax. Adding SDHC would make the lower end models compete with high-end models, and Apple prices the low-end models competively, but they make the profit on the high-end models that are much more expensive than expanding the low-end models would cost. 32Gbyte SDHC($50) plus a 3G modem($20) cost a lot less than the $330 price difference.
If they added SDHC-readers they would either have to raise prices on the low-end, or reduce the profit margins on the high-end.
Not that that makes it okay, I still resent them for it, but it makes perfect business sense, and this is no point in dreaming unless they are put under more customer pressure.
Even my Nook comes with a replaceable HD card slot (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless I missed something, it still only comes with an embedded hard drive, forcing you to shell out $$ for a larger hard drive. Even my NookColor has an SD slot (and is also rootable on Android [dkszone.net]). I feel pretty much about this as I did the first one--looks cool, but considering it costs approx. the same as a laptop (except without Flash), it's an expensive toy.
Better than the alternatives then (Score:5, Insightful)
The iPad is still assembled by cheap Chinese labor who sometimes get suicidal and jump off the Foxconn factory roof so they installed nets.
Well if that bothers you I imagine you aren't buying electronics from any other hardware maker that hides the numbers Apple publishes and produces gear at factories that treat the workers even worse. How do you think a $300 Android tablet gets to be that cheap anyway...
Back to your cave now.
Re:meeting the wish list (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:9x 'faster' Graphics (Score:5, Insightful)
5.1 audio and 1080p via output- about time! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:User replaceable? why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Open Spec (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually Facetime is an open spec, anyone can implement a device that supports it...
Now how you find them from an iOS to non-IOS device, that part I'm not sure how easy it is to implement.
Well, you can still use Skype for video calls to everyone.
Re:User replaceable? why? (Score:4, Insightful)
He's talking about when the batter DIES not when it runs out of juice. Rechargeable batteries degrade significantly with age. After a year or 2 your Ipad2 is going to have a battery life of an hour or two and you're not going to be able to replace the battery.
Yes, except no ;-)
You just described lithium-ion batteries. Apple is using lithium-polymer, which degrade much more slowly, and are quite likely to outlast the device itself. There is really no need for a replaceable battery in the iPad.
Re:No SDHC reader! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why pay $30 for a dongle that does something that most every netbook ever made has built in?
Because the iPad doesn't. Your question is nonsensical. You might as well ask, "why pay $40 dollars for an external optical drive for a netbook when every other computer has them built in?"
Re:No SDHC reader! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why pay $30 for a dongle that does something that most every netbook ever made has built in?
Please, how do you expect Apple to charge $100 for 16 gigs of memory if they start throwing in SD slots all willy-nilly.
Re:Not bad (Score:1, Insightful)
Is it a huge leap to assume that Apple's marketing department feeds the rumor mill with truths, half-truths, and outright lies?
Apple brings out the crazy in people (Score:4, Insightful)
Love the Slashdot reaction, especially the comments about what 'normal people' think. The iPad has a fucking awesome, objectively great battery life. How does Slashdot react? "It's not user replaceable!". Whatever. I've had mine for nearly a year now and it still gets over 10 hours. Maybe in another 2-3 years it'll degrade but, honestly, like I give a care.
The iPad is incredibly cheap. This thing was widely expected to start at $1000+ last year and it started at half that. The iPad 2 is coming in at the same price points and is way cheaper than the competition. The Xoom 32GB goes for £499 in the UK. The iPad 2 32GB? £399. A fucking c-note of difference, and a sterling c-note at that. So what's the Slashdot reaction? "Too expensive!" and "lower the price!".
iOS devices have a track record of holding up well against new cycles of iOS for at least a couple of years. As someone said above, the original 2007 iPhone 4 held up well until iOS 4 in 2010, and is still faster on its pared-back iOS 4 than some other non-Apple smartphones I've seen. Compare that with Android phones released months ago that already have no prospect of ever even seeing any OS updates, let alone being able to handle them with grace. What's the Slashdot reaction, though? "So I suppose they're going to brick my iPad now to force me to upgrade!". Bull. Shit. It's amazing how, on Slashdot, completely make-believe, possibly-maybe-in-the-future downsides for iOS seem to outrank actual, major-fuck-up downsides happening right now for Android.
The iPad has a solid, very nice capacitive resistant IPS display. Let's not forget that some tablets are still coming out with horrible, piece-of-shit resistive screens that can only actually be viewed from one angle beneath a layer of plastic. No, the iPad 2 does not have a retina display (whatever that would mean in the iPad world), but then again the only people who ever speculated that it would have absolutely no fucking clue what is going on inside Apple, just like the rest of us. So, what's the Slashdot reaction? Do they satisfy themselves with what is already a display that is better than most and as good as any out there, but which fails to live up to a standard that only existed in the realm of fantasy? Fuck no they don't! "No retina display! Rip-off!"
"No 4G!". Okay, seriously, get out more. Yes, in a few years, greater cellular data speeds will obviously be needed for services we can't even fully imagine right now. But right now, 6-7mpbs on an iPad 3G should be enough for everyone (ho ho). What is anyone doing today on their iPad in mobile situations anyway? Browsing Flickr? Streaming Netflix? Can't these things be done perfectly well at 3.5G speeds? What about data caps? Besides, are there tablets out there that actually have 4G? Whatever '4G' even means. Do you mean LTE or WiMax? American LTE or Chinese LTE? The one available in some places in the US or in some places in Europe, and none of which is available in any true scale? Man, I can't imagine why Apple hasn't leaped head-first into this technology, which is so obviously ready for primetime!
"No 7-inch screen!". Fuck off. This from the same crowd that roared that the iPad was just a big iPhone. 7-inch screens are a cop-out by bullshit manufacturers who cannot price-match the iPad at 10 inches.
"No Flash!". Yeah okay. You get that one. I'm really missing those wicked banner ads spamming my eyes from all corners. What about iAd, you might cleverly retort? I have 200 apps and maybe 15 that I use daily or very often, and I have never - as in not once, ever - seen an iAd. Anyway it's true that, once in a blue moon, I come across a video that isn't playable via HTML5 video. Somehow I get by. If you're genuinely bothered by the lack of Flash, then I respect that. IMO this is as close to a genuine trade-off as the iPad comes. I have a sneaky feeling, though, that a lot of the uproar surrounding Flash and iOS is actually coming from people who are scrambling for something (anything!) that they can fire at Apple
Re:When are they going to cripple my iPad 1? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh really? You've already put this not-yet-available OS onto your iPad? And Apple has learned nothing from what happened last year? And updates are now mandatory? Fascinating. I'm really surprised.
Jeez, I can't believe what gets a +5 around here these days. For fuck's sake, it's not a whole new version (it's just a point release) and doesn't have any major new CPU-intensive features like multitasking.
Re:Lack of flash and usb (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I was totally going to buy that android tablet, but it had a USB port so I was like "no way".
It's why I love Apple so much -- Not having useful features is *awesome*
Re:Open Spec (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying you'll publish a spec doesn't make it open. Actually publishing it does.
And Apple has had plenty time to do it too.