Apple delays 'retina display' iPad 3 to 2012
Screens still too costly
Don't expect an iPad 3 with a "retina display" this year: Apple's screen supplier(s) - LG and Samsung - can't make enough 9.7in, 2048 x 1536 panels to ship the tablet before 2012, it has been claimed.
Making such a screen is no small technological achievement, and there's a price to be paid for being at the leading edge: low production yields and sky high prices.
Anyway, they're too out of line for Apple's bean counters, according to moles from within Taiwan's component industry who have told DigiTimes that Apple has cancelled production orders for the tablet itself.
The throats say Apple had previously specified production volumes of 1.5-2m units in Q3 - or, rather, the quarter's final month, when the product was expected to ship - rising to 5-6m units in Q4.
Not any longer, say the moles.
Incidentally, the alleged iPad 3 numbers are rather smaller than iPad sales in Q4 2010. Apple sold 7.3m iPads back then and will undoubtedly sell a whole lot more in Q4 2011. If only five-odd million of them were to be iPad 3s, Apple must be have been planning on selling the iPad 2 alongside it.
Indeed, DigiTimes source(s) say it has ordered 28-30m iPad 2s for H2 2011.
If the moles' mutterings are true, we won't now see the iPad 3 until 2012, presumably as a year-on successor to the iPad 2, though we can't rule out the latter living on as a cheaper alternative to the new, premium tablet. ®
COMMENTS
HiRez
Whoa! Now that's a high rez display! I'd seriously consider getting an iPad3 for that reason alone.
I'm also wondering whether the Samsung tablet injunction war would prevent Samsung from doing their best to get this product to market too soon?
Umm....
It's strange how people claim the iPad is expensive when the competition seem to be incapable of producing anything with similar specs at a cheaper price. At launch all competitors seemed to be the same price or in some cases more expensive and it's only recently, having realised that they aren't shifting any, that they are lowering prices.
So Apple may not be cheap when it comes to desktop or laptop computers, but it seems that they are very competitively priced for tablets (assuming similar specs).
Resolution
I was going to get one when it comes out and because of the resolution. A lot of photographers now carry iPads around with them too (and I'm sure would welcome the resolution).
The resolution of the current iPad is like looking at a photograph printed with an Epson FX80 dot-matrix printer. If you want to review / show photographs, you need more resolution. When people look at a photograph, they rarely look at the photograph as a whole; their eyes move over it and hence the old calculations about the resolution needed for viewing moving pictures on a TV are flawed IMHO.
But wait a minute...
I thought thise was all a fad that would disappear soon ???
