News - iPad 3 with quad-core CPU and 4G support?

[Funkstar]

*granted, there's been more innovation in tablets from Apple than phones over the last year or so.. however I strongly suspect we're entering the phase (as happened with phones some time ago) where Apple are playing catch up instead of innovating.

And this was bound to happen. Apple have two product lines, with two release schedules. With a historical 12-15 month gap between generations it wouldn't take long for the competition to jump ahead of them with the latest technology.

With phones you have 3 or 4 main players with perhaps 3 or 4 release dates throughout the year, all trying to usurp the other with their flagship handsets. Handsets tend to be updated ever 9-12 months. Although it seems that flagship handsets are closer to Apples 12-15 months these days.

The tablet market is even wilder, as you have both phone manufacturers and PC/laptop manufacturers in the game. Lenovo, Toshiba, ASUS and Samsung all have interesting things out or in the pipeline at the moment. Apple will have to work hard to keep up with this, although I actually think thats about all they need to do these days. They have a truely massive user base that is incredibly loyal and tied in far more deeply to the iTunes ecosystem than they probably realise.

[crossy]

Retina display and quad core is actually more than I would have expected. Actually I guessing that it would be either one. Anyways this would once again be a pretty huge step in front of the competition.

Erm, no it's certainly not a "huge step in front of the competition" - the Asus Transformer Prime (quad core - or is it actually penta-core?) is due on the shelves at my local Curry's in under two weeks. Asus and others showed "HD" versions of their tablets at CES last week (see http://hexus.net/mobile/news/tablets...-prime-tablet/). On the other hand - the article is covering rumours of what the iPad3 will be like when it goes on sale in March. So yes, Apple is ahead in as much as they're planning to ship quad+HD tablet at the end of March, but the only thing they're ahead of is with that combination. I've no doubts however that iPad3 will be quad-core+retina-display in which case it'll undoubtedly get the commercial success that it deserves.

I don't see much point in a tablet with 2GB of more of RAM. You are still ultimately limited by the performance of the CPU and GPU. This is an area in which performance is increasing exponentially between generations (e.g. GPU in iPad 2 seven times faster than in iPad 1), so you'd still need to upgrade to stay near the top of the performance curve and run the latest apps.

Check the comments above and you'll see that folks are wanting the ability to upgrade - so their expensive tablet isn't rendered useless by - for example - a bloated future OS release. In addition, as I've pointed out above, if you've got an Android tablet with these kind of "desktop" sized memories then the OS will load apps into it, which in turn makes the tablet feel more responsive.

Isn't that still a truism of computer resources - that what you've got now is okay, but more would be better?