Summing up Apple’s event, the new iPad has:

• A Retina display (2048 x 1536)
• Cameras like the ones in the iPhone 4S (including 1080p video)
• Optional LTE (and worldwide 3G as back-up)
• Voice dictation
• Serious technical grunt to push all those high-res graphics
• The same price tag
• The same battery life

Apple has also:

• Released a new 1080p Apple TV for the same price as the old model
• Updated its iPad apps for the Retina display
• Released iPhoto for iPad, which looks really lovely
• Kept the iPad 2 for a low-end model

So, here’s what I predict idiots are going to mostly write about:

• The name (just ‘iPad’, with no version number)
• The slight increase in weight and thickness
• The lack of additional storage
• The LTE fragmentation
• The lack of a price drop
• The lack of a smaller model
• Features in one or two Android tablets that no-one really gives a crap about

If you’re in the idiot camp, please go and watch this before spewing your word vomit all over the internet. Thanks.

Note: I’m not saying here that the new iPad is perfect. I would have liked to have seen more storage, and I think until the iPad 2 vanishes, the new naming convention has the potential to confuse customers. However, the tech press has a habit of banging on about small negatives when it comes to Apple, sidelining the big positives. Personally, I think everyone else in the industry now has a massive challenge to compete with Apple’s revised iPad.

My predictions about the iPad 3/iPad HD event and subsequent coverage:

• The new iPad will, objectively, be a decent upgrade regardless of what Apple adds to it.
• Immediate coverage will be mostly subjective, based in part on what Apple ‘left out’, despite never giving any indication such things were going to be added anyway.
• Apple will be slammed in the press for not including features that were dreamed up by hacks misinterpreting a single invite and trying to get hits with IPAD 3 CONFIRMED TO WARP SCREEN JUST LIKE T1000 headlines.
• A few sensible people will note that the update looks “pretty good actually”.
• Said people will be slammed as Apple fan-boys.
• The tech press will spew out a vomit of articles, explaining that the new iPad will be a sales disaster and 2012 will now be the year of the Android tablet.
• The new iPad will not be a sales disaster.
• 2012 won’t be the year of the Android tablet.
• 2013 will then roll around and we can all repeat the same bullshit yet again. HURRAH!

Google:

Starting today, Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore will become part of Google Play.

Google creating a media hub to compete with iTunes is smart. Google too often fires out numerous projects and they rarely mesh and gel. To be competitive when it comes to stuff you can shove on to a device, centralising everything makes a lot of sense. But Google Play? It’s an odd piece of branding. Apple’s ‘App Store’ and ‘iTunes Store’ are pretty dry but they’re also balanced brands used as a container for disparate things. With Google, however, you get:

Store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new tracks

You ‘play’ songs—fair enough. And music is fundamentally a leisure activity. There’s also the well-known play icon, so the brand works well here.

Download more than 450,000 Android apps and games

Fair enough for games, but for apps? I’m not thinking ‘play’ when I use iA Writer, Brushes or many of the other productivity apps on my iPad. It seems strange to use ‘play’ as a descriptive word for housing Android’s apps.

Browse the world’s largest selection of eBooks

Do you ‘play’ a book? Reading is typically split between education and leisure, and ‘play’ is often very much the wrong word for the former.

Rent thousands of your favorite movies, including new releases and HD titles

This works similarly to songs, in the sense that you ‘play’ movies, although it’s easy enough to argue that this isn’t necessarily the best branding for movies that are research- and education-oriented.

I realise I’m overthinking this and many people simply won’t care nor think much about Google’s brand for its centralised resource for downloading apps and media; but to me the brand smacks of something that would be used for entertainment purposes only, and it isn’t suitable for apps that aren’t games and books/movies that aren’t primarily intended for fun.

EDIT: Sam Radford on Twitter makes an excellent point:

Though iTunes makes no sense for buying books, apps, movies, games, magazine, etc.

Of course, iTunes itself has mushroomed from an MP3 player into a media hub, but he’s right that the branding no longer makes sense—and it hasn’t for a while. Perhaps, then, it’s more about what we’re used to, in which case Google’s challenge will be in ‘training’ people to realise that Google Play encompasses everything—not just leisure apps and media. (Mind you, Google’s other challenge, judging by its past, will be in sticking with something for the long-term, too, and not axing/reworking its offering on a whim.)

Vlad Savov, reporting for The Verge:

Acer Global President Jianren Weng has been quoted at CeBIT today reiterating something he said at the beginning of December: ultrabooks will drop to the crazy-low price of $499 in 2013 and compete directly against Apple’s iPad.

Wow. That’s pretty bold. I guess the ultrabook thing’s worked out great for these guys, and they’re making money hand over fist, in order to make such dramatic price-cuts!

Speaking with Christoph Pohlmann of Acer’s laptop team, we learned that the current $799 / €699 price for the Aspire S3 is too low for Acer to actually generate any profit from it. The company is merely breaking even when selling its entry-level ultrabook model and the venture is only made worthwhile by the higher-specced SKUs pulling in a surplus.

Oh.

You’ve got to hand it to the DVD guys. Clearly responding to the kind of dickishness I wrote about recently, they’ve now set upon a course of action that will—shock!—enable you to unlock your DVDs and format-shift them to digital. Hurrah!

What’s that? There’s a catch, you say, Michael Weinberg, reporting for Public Knowledge?

The program, which would have merely been ill-advised had it been announced ten years ago, today stands as a testament to the ability of movie studios to blind themselves to reality.

*popcorn*

The entire program is designed to give consumers a way to take movies they already own on DVD and turn them into more portable digital files.

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me…

As reported by the LA Times, the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store

Sorry, what was that?

As reported by the LA Times, the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store

Right. I thought I’d gone insane for a moment and you’d said the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store! That would be bonkers!

As reported by the LA Times, the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store

Oh.

that will handle the digital conversion. Tsujihara described this process as allowing consumers to convert their libraries “easily, safely and at reasonable prices.”

If only there was a way for people to convert their libraries easily, safely and at reasonable prices at home, with, say, a PC or a Mac and a copy of Handbrake or similar software. Although, clearly, that wouldn’t help regarding the ‘safely’ bit, because, as we all know, Handbrake has a little-known ‘fire shuriken from your display’ feature that is randomly activated. [SUB: PLEASE CHECK THIS INFO PROVIDED BY A DVD GUY]

Oh, but hang on! This is about money, isn’t it? These guys want you to pay again for the content you’ve already bought and have therefore finally figured out a typically inept industry means of having you do so. Those scallywags! But really: taking your DVDs to a store? Waiting while the conversion is done? Waiting for some unspecified point in time where “Internet retailers like Amazon.com will email customers to offer digital copies of DVDs they previously bought”? Saying that ‘eventually’—presumably when cars fly through the air and meals are consumed in exciting sci-fi pill form—consumers will be able to put DVDs into PCs that will upload a copy, like how, um, Handbrake works right now?

If only there was a business model in a similar field that already existed, that wasn’t totally stupid, and that these guys could use as the basis of their own.