Right on the heels of HP announcing the death of WebOS and the TouchPad, there’s new evidence today that Apple will be coming out with its third-generation iPad in early 2012. Better yet, the rumors that this will be an “iPad HD” appear to be true. According to The Wall Street Journal (via MacRumors) the new iPad is “expected to feature a high resolution display – 2048 by 1536 compared with 1024 by 768 in the iPad 2.”
An HD iPad brings with it a number of interesting implications. Apple mobile device users love their video, and high-def content ups the ante for both content and broadband providers. For the content folks, there’s likely to be increased anxiety around content security, and fears of greater piracy. For the ISPs, this is one more way subscribers can bog down their networks. That’s good for getting users to sign on for higher-tier Internet packages, and it’s a potential way to push the metered billing agenda. But it’s bad for operators who are already facing a bandwidth crunch, and need to open up their wallets for further network upgrades.
HD Video resolutions are already set (1080i/p and 720p), so just because the iPad’s resolution increases, doesn’t mean that video resolution will increase. It’ll be the same as it is today. Some use 720p and some use 1080p. Both will need to be scaled up to the iPad 3’s resolution if viewed full screen.
I don’t see the logic in the whole second paragraph of Mari’s post here.
Why does higher pixel density on iPads have to do with ISP bandwidth usage? Do you think streaming video providers started sending higher bandwidth streams to iPhones and iPods once they got “retina displays”? Cuz I don’t. And I’m not sure why things would be different on tablets.
Further, from what I’ve read, most of the bandwidth that Netflix and Hulu ship ends up going to lean-back uses, no?
And I don’t get the security or piracy implications either.
Sorry for the dissent, and happy to be corrected if I’m wrong.
I read about this on Gizmodo and my thought was that this fits right in line with when the iPad 3 would be coming out, in any case.
Sorry not to be more clear. I do think we’re going to see higher-res video coming, at least within the iTunes video ecosystem. (see http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/07/08/apple_could_test_limited_itunes_hd_1080p_movie_service.html) Not higher than 1080p, but higher than most of what’s available on the web today. There’s bound to be a tension between content owners wanting to make that level of quality available for a fee, and fearing that piracy could undercut other revenue channels where HD video is delivered securely (VOD, Blu-ray, etc.)
“Sorry not to be more clear. I do think we’re going to see higher-res video coming, at least within the iTunes video ecosystem”
OK. Now I see what you’re talking about, but I think Apple’s “HD+” will mainly serve the lean-back market, rather than the iPad market, given the bandwidth and/or local caching size issues, no?
(And we all know that bandwidth is going to be a issue if lean-back OTT ever starts going trying to go mainstream.)
“There’s bound to be a tension between content owners … fearing that piracy could undercut other revenue channels where HD video is delivered securely (VOD, Blu-ray, etc.)”
But this part confuses me. I don’t purchase iTunes video, since I prefer doing business with Amazon, so I’m not up on the topic. But I thought iTunes video had adequate DRM. It certainly can’t have weaker DRM than Blu-Ray.
Chucky- Agree about the lean-back market, but I also believe it’s no coincidence that Apple’s bringing HD+ and a higher-resolution iPad to market around the same time.
Regarding security- I think Apple is going to have to provide greater assurances to content owners when asking them to provide video that’s closer to the quality available in offline media. It may be purely a perception issue on whether iTunes DRM is adequate compared to say Blu-ray, but the content guys are very skittish. And to many of them, the Internet is still a scary place, not to be trusted with their high-def content.
Why would you have such a high resolution on such a small screen? I could see a slight increase in resolution but 2048 by 1536 would be overkill . The vast majority of people don’t even have a PC monitor with such a high resolution.
Doesn’t matter why, I want it. ;) The current resolution is too low, the rumored one is probably too high. But they can market their “retina” displays and maintain app compatibility.
Reading the comment about why you’d have such a high resolution reminded me of nothing more than “who needs more than 640k”.
The TV is never big enough. The screen is never good enough. The audio will never have enough channels. The hard drive is never big enough. Etc. This is never going to be not true except for people who would be satisfied with anything.
I’m all for higher resolutions, but on a display where I can see the advantages of it. Which is not a little ten inch screen.
If you can’t see the advantages, then we’re looking at different screens. It’s my biggest complaint about the iPad by far.
Yeah, I’ll pick my Kindle 2 or iPhone 4 over the iPad for many applications due to the iPad’s grainy resolution. It’s not bad, but it’s very obvious when surfing the web, reading ebooks or email, etc. Ironically, video is where it shines because very few people are going to offer 1080p anyhow and the material is constantly in motion with softer edges than say text. But I still want higher res anyway.
Okay, higher-res display will be nice, but I’d rather see Apple switch from 4:3 to 16:9 displays so that video content could be viewed without black bars. I’m not optimistic that will happen since all iApps are 4:3.
“Yeah, I’ll pick my Kindle 2 or iPhone 4 over the iPad for many applications due to the iPad’s grainy resolution. It’s not bad, but it’s very obvious when surfing the web, reading ebooks or email, etc. Ironically, video is where it shines because very few people are going to offer 1080p anyhow and the material is constantly in motion with softer edges than say text.”
No irony involved. That’s a goodly part of why I disagreed with Mari’s conclusions about a “retina display” iPad having anything to do with ISP bandwidth issues.
But higher pixel density in small form-factor devices certainly is a plus for text.
“Okay, higher-res display will be nice, but I’d rather see Apple switch from 4:3 to 16:9 displays so that video content could be viewed without black bars.”
Just zoom in on your video. Voila. No black bars.
The general consensus is that the ergonomic advantages of 4:3 in the tablet form factor massively trumps the advantages of blindly matching the TV HD ratio.
@Scott Cantor
The ipad could do with a higher resolution than 1024×768 but 2048 by 1536 is over kill for such a small screen. 1920×1080 would be more than enough or even 1680×1050 would make more sense. That used to be the common resolution for 20″/21″ monitors.
If I could have a 180″ TV in my living room instead of 61″, I’d do it. There just is no such thing as overkill for some of us. And for others, anything will do. You’re in the middle, that’s all.
Note that I am not commenting on sales or economics. I’m saying I want, that’s all.
Looks like I’ll be selling my iPad 2 and using the funds towards an “HD” ipad.
Good thing they really hold their value pretty well.
@cypherstream–yup, that’s what I did when the iPad 2 came out. Sell the old one EARLY on gazelle.com before the price drops too much, and you can almost pay for the new one if its in decent shape and you have cables and such.
@aaronwt–the expected resolution of the ‘retina display’ iPad HD is exactly double the current 1024×768 resolution of the current iPad. Agreed that we may not really need this much resolution, but doing this exact doubling means that all of the existing applications will look NO WORSE than they do now. If Apple did anything else, like increase the resolution by 50% say (any non-integer multiple), then you’d end up with some kind of weird jaggies which would sometimes look awful. As it happens you wouldn’t notice this problem with video, where the frame changes every 1/29.97th of a second, but it would be VERY apparent with text. Try setting your LCD screen to a non-native resolution and see what it looks like yourself. You won’t be happy. This doubling is EXACTLY what Apple did with the iPhone 4, so its what everybody expects them to do with the higher resolution iPad, whenever that comes.
Personally I doubt you’ll be able to tell the difference between 1080p and 720p content in most cases on an iPad at the 10″ size. Lots of 42″ 720p plasma and LCD displays are still being sold because you really can’t tell at smaller screen sizes. On a big screen driven by an Apple TV though, you’re more likely to notice. I’m far more interested in 1080p support in a FUTURE Apple TV than I am in 1080p support on a future iPad where it’ll take a bigger chunk of my limited storage. Unless Apple starts ramping up the gigabytes of flash per dollar spent ratio any time soon.