So tonight, Apple launched their new iPad so undoubted mass hysteria from the Apple fans but is it interesting?<\/p>\n
Well of course it is – whatever the specifications, it is going to sell in huge numbers and have quite a big influence on the IT landscape. But ignoring that, what has changed ? And is it all good ?<\/p>\n
The big change is the use of a high-density screen – 2048×1536 in a 9.7″ screen. The use of a high-density screen might seem like it is excessive given that each individual pixel is getting towards being too small to see. But it does make the overall effect better – text (when scaled appropriately) becomes clearer, etc. After all one of the reasons that reading paper is easier on the eye is that the greater density makes things clearer.<\/p>\n
Software that does not scale the display is going to look a bit odd – after all this screen is very roughly the equivalent of an old 1280×1024 screen (commonly a 20″ screen) in 9.7″. But I dare say Apple has a trick up its sleeve to deal with that.<\/p>\n
But it is a bit odd that this is still not a wide-screen format screen – most other slate makers use the wide screen format so films can scale up to the full size of the screen. But Apple wants black bars! Or letter-boxing if you insist although as a film fan I hate that.<\/p>\n
With any luck the new iPad’s screen resolution should trickle into other products – whilst I’m not that keen on the iPad to go out and get one, I do<\/em>\u00a0want to see a high-density screen on my desktop at some point. And why not? Screens on the desktop have been not just stuck at the same resolution for a decade now, but actually decreasing<\/em>\u00a0in resolution – before HD TV became popular, 1920×1200 was a popular resolution on flat screens; now it is 1920×1080. Except if you have very<\/em>\u00a0deep pockets<\/a>\u00a0(although even that monitor does not have the density of the new iPad).<\/p>\n But what else ? Well, except for the new screen, it’s all a bit “Meh” … nothing shines out as a dramatic improvement.<\/p>\n For instance, it has a new processor. But it is only dual-core when some Android slates are getting penta-cores – usually advertised as quad core, but the many are using a processor with four high speed cores, and a single slow speed (and low power consumption) core.<\/p>\n And the rest of it looks pretty much the same as the old iPad – no memory slot for adding additional media, a\u00a0proprietary\u00a0dock connector and no micro-usb so you have to make sure you have the right cable with you. And so on.<\/p>\n And I still find it odd that the camera pointing towards the face is of a lower quality than the camera facing out – doesn’t the front facing camera get used more for video conferencing than the other ?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So tonight, Apple launched their new iPad so undoubted mass hysteria from the Apple fans but is it interesting? Well of course it is – whatever the specifications, it is going to sell in huge numbers and have quite a big influence on the IT landscape. But ignoring that, what has changed ? And is […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[15,19,703],"class_list":["post-2167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it","tag-apple","tag-ipad","tag-slate","category-4-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-yX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2167"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2168,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167\/revisions\/2168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}