On the iPad 3 and a Retina display
Most of the techie portion of the internet is talking about the iPad 3, after the usual rumour sites starting posting components of what might or might not be bits of the next Apple tablet. One of the most common rumours is that the next-gen device will get itself a Retina display, and Wired today started talking about the apps Apple should demo.
In the context of the iPhone and iPod touch, a Retina display means a display where it is—for people with standard eyesight—more or less impossible to resolve single pixels on the screen. Instead of jagged text and graphics, the 326ppi screen provides print-like imagery. By contrast, the current iPad is 132ppi—better than most computer displays, but lacking when directly compared to current iPhones and iPods. With the next iPad, the hope is that Apple would up the resolution to 2048-by-1536, and while this wouldn’t have the same pin-sharp qualities as the iPhone and iPod, it would nonetheless be tricky to resolve individual pixels unless holding the iPad closer than is sensible and comfortable. So no playing Sniff the Angry Birds for you, if you want to keep that illusion of smoothness in the graphics.
But here’s the thing: 2048-by-1536 is a massive display size. It’s bigger than 1080p (used by the 21.5-inch iMac) and wouldn’t even fit on the display of a 27-inch iMac. Think about that for a moment: a 1:1 recreation of an iPad Retina display would not fit on the largest display Apple currently ships. But said display is driven by a powerful computer, not a svelte tablet that doesn’t have the graphics grunt of a Mac or PC.
I’m quietly hopeful that Apple has some kind of genius/magic/pixie dust and will reveal an iPad 3 with a Retina display within the next two months. But this is dependent on various factors: the screen actually being of a high enough quality and possible to manufacture quickly enough in large numbers; such a display not adversely affecting performance (after all, it will require some serious GPU clout); battery life remaining very close to the existing seven-to-ten hours you can get from reasonably careful usage. Apple is not a company for bullet points—it leaves out technology if the rest of the device would be compromised. We’ve seen this in the iPhone with 3G on the original model and now with 4G. There’s every chance we could see the same on the iPad, which could end up with a rather more conservative refresh, along the lines of the iPhone 4S (perhaps getting a RAM and speed bump, Siri, and a better camera).
I’m sure if this happens, most of the tech press will use this as proof once again that Apple is doomed, Tim Cook is some kind of blundering fool who should immediately be fired, and that Android tablets will soon grab 99.9 per cent of the tablet market. Me, I think that an iPad 2S would sell like hot cakes, and that Apple should only bring in cutting-edge technology when it’s ready. If that happens to be this spring, great; if not, I’m more than happy to wait.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been a Siri update for iPad myself.
As you say, there is only a need to increase the resolution of the display if it doesn’t affect the performance.
Oh, and there’s a dirty little secret the columnists seem to have forgotten… your old device will keep working even when the company release a new one…
I can’t envisage Apple Inc. releasing the iPad 3 with a retina display, it doesn’t need it. As you said Craig, if the iPad 3 was released with retina display, the graphics would be better than a HD display which means that you’ll need a good GPU to run the graphics, better battery etc etc.
Also, I can’t see iOS game developers developing games to cater for that resolution. Adding another resolution in to their development workflow will only complicate things.
In addition to the restrictions you highlight, on a Retina iPad, graphics will take _four_ times the RAM they used to, presuming everything’s upgraded to the new screen resolution. That means that, especially for games where it’s not uncommon for the majority of memory usage to be for graphics and textures, the iPad will need much more RAM – ideally four times the current amount . although a little less than 4X would probably suffice..
In addition, to keep up with the current responsiveness, more memory bandwidth, used when copying all those graphics around memory, will be necessary; again, four times the current bandwidth if it’s to be seamless.
All this stuff will also, as you indicate, potentially also draw more power.
I’d /love/ to see an iPad 3 with a Retina display that has all these things. I really hope they don’t cut corners and deliver a device for which it’s impossible to develop experiences with the richness or responsiveness that is expected on the iPad.
Although the RAM limit is the biggest issue for a Retina Display iPad, I think the graphics chip issue is possible.
The iPad 2 has got a SGX543MP2 in it. This is a 2-core chip. “Fill Rate”, which is how many pixels a graphics chip can process, scales more-or-less linearly with the number of cores in an SGX. So a Retina Display iPad 3 with an 8-core version would have very similar effective grunt as the current iPad 2. I personally think a quad-core MP4 chip (like in the PS Vita) is much more likely, which would have about half the iPad 2 effective full rate (which is still higher than what we had with the iPad 1)
With 3D graphics, I’m not sure developers would need to provide retina textures. It’s very unlikely that you would ever see anything that close up – the higher resolution would simply reduce polygon aliasing (I.e “jaggies”) — indeed developers might even render to a much smaller size and then let the graphics hardware scale it up to display size “for free” (like how several Xbox 360 developers have done to get “1080p” output)
That said, all 2D assets would still really need @2x versions, which would cause a huge amount of RAM pressure. But with Apple’s push into textbooks, I can see them going Retina to make the text look “just like the printed page”. It’ll be interesting, whatever happens though.
To be honest though, while everything you say is right, it would take that high res display for me to actually buy an iPad 3. After getting a 4S I really don’t want to use anything lower res than that at tablet/phone distances.