iPad 3 Confirmed To Have 2048x1536 Screen Resolution 537
bonch writes "After months of reporting on photos of iPad 3 screen parts, MacRumors finally obtained one for themselves and examined it under a microscope, confirming that the new screens will have twice the linear resolution of the iPad 2, with a whopping 2048x1536 pixel density. Hints of the new display's resolution were found in iBooks 2, which contains hi-DPI versions of its artwork. The iPad 3 is rumored to be launching in early March."
4:3 comes back! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm looking forward to desktop displays getting increased resolution and 4:3 aspect ratios back some day. It's mildly ridiculous that we'll have the mobile device market to thank for it.
Re:Nice. (Score:4, Insightful)
My eyesight is too crappy to take advantage of that. I don't think I would personally pay extra for that resolution.
Confirmed by who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple sure as hell didn't confirm anything. So basically we have someone who looked at a screen, that may or may not be for the iPad 3, under a microscope and "counted the pixels".
Again Slashdot titles are redefining words in the English language.
whoa (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:4:3 comes back! (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is 4:3 such a useful aspect ratio? Just curious because I tend to prefer wide-screen monitors that I can flip on their sides or use in landscape orientation depending on what you're doing, and it seems to me that the monitor market is going that way. I'd have thought that square-ish monitors tend to be less comfortable given that humans have a greater horizontal than vertical field of vision (I feel a bit boxed in when using 4:3 CRTs, but that may just be the low resolution).
Re:Finally some screen advancements? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think operating systems have some work to do as well. Higher DPI often just means smaller widgets. Hopefully this makes its way to laptops soon.
Re:Give it a month (Score:3, Insightful)
And Apple will sue them for it.
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
If only you could get a desktop monitor at that resolution and price.
Ummmm (Score:5, Insightful)
There have long been higher res displays. However there's some serious limits to their usefulness, which is why they aren't widespread.
One big one is that until recently OSes didn't have good resolution independence, and still to this day many apps don't. Windows Vista got top notch resolution scaling but if apps don't support it they can break badly, or just fail to scale.
Another is video memory. More pixels = more VRAM particularly when you talk 3D. Now this is not a big deal, we have lots, but wasn't long ago that 256MB was considered "high end" and 64MB was common for cheaper stuff.
Along those lines there is GPU power. If you are just fiddling with 2D stuff this isn't a big deal but if you are pushing 3D, more pixels means more strain. Double the rez in each direction you need 4 times the ROPs to get the same framerate at a given detail level.
Then there's interface bandwidth. Gets to be a bit of a trick to push lots of data through inexpensive connectors. Dual link DVI was the only way to go, and that capped out at not all that high of a rez. DP 1.2 and HDMI 1.4 solve this, but are quite new.
Of course then to all that there is the cost. Pixels mean transistors and more transistors mean more cost. You can't just increase pixel density and expect pricing to be the same.
So it is a situation that only now are all the pieces falling in to place. Only once you have an OS (and apps) that support it, a readily available interface that can push the data, a GPU that can produce the data and has the memory to hold it and costs are low enough to make it economically feasible does it make sense to start pushing it on a larger scale.
However for all that, if you want higher rez displays you can have them. There are 2.5k 27" and 30" displays that aren't too bad price wise. You can have 4k displays too, but they are extremely expensive.
Re:4:3 comes back! (Score:5, Insightful)
Eleven years ago you could buy a 24" monitor that could do this resolution, and 21" monitors that did 1600x1200 were commonplace. Inch for inch a 4:3 monitor will have more usable space than an equivalent widescreen display, they got popular because companies figured out they were cheaper to make and gave more panels for a given investment. Marketing convinced people that instead of getting an inferior display with less usable space they were getting the Next Big Thing.
I've been waiting for resolutions and refresh rates to catch up to what they were a decade ago ever since we made the switch to widescreen flatpanels.
Re:Finally some screen advancements? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well the main purely practical use I see on a tablet PC is crisp clear text for reading. One might also use a tablet like this with technical documents, diagrams, maps. It's also aesthetically pleasing to have everything displayed with seamless clarity.
But what I'm praising is the effort to make better screens in general. A move to high resolution screens on tablets means the infrastructure gets a boost for better screens in laptops and desktops and various other displays. Have you used a 16" laptop with 1080p? Even that is great, but also rare. I got my sister one for graduation, and there weren't many to choose from. I want to see the DPI of this tablet on a 22" monitor for my desktop, and I'd like a decent selection of laptops with high DPI screens.
Are you SERIOUS?! (Score:2, Insightful)
"Asus are easily wiping the floor with Apple in the tablet market right now."
The iPad is so popular that it's outselling desktop PCs. Apple is #1 in the tablet market, with the only competitor even remotely in sight being the Kindle Fire due to price. Do people like you actually believe that Asus is beating Apple in the tablet market? For god's sake, the Transformer doesn't even run Android 4.0.
You're an Android shill. Plain and simple.
Re:After the service I got on the ipad1 to ios5 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure why your post was modded insightful either. If all ipad 1 were having problems and this was all over the net, then I could see how something like "apple cripples their old products, so screw them" would be a good argument against the evil company. A personal experience + a nonexistent widespread problem is not.
Re:Nice. (Score:3, Insightful)
No, Asus is not (Score:0, Insightful)
That's ridiculous. Apple is selling so many iPads that they could buy Greece. Like it or not, they're the #1 tablet vendor by an enormous margin. Your post is just shilling for Asus for some reason.
Apple has a huge parts supply advantage here (many seem to forget what Tim Cook was responsible for before becoming CEO). It's why they seem to be able to come out with technology that others aren't selling yet and sell it at a lower price than what others can sell. Remember when everyone expected the iPad to be $1000? They sold at $500, and it took like a year before competitors offered any halfway decent tablets for less than $800.
Re:4:3 comes back! (Score:5, Insightful)
> Why is 4:3 such a useful aspect ratio?
I don't know, but I agree with the question's implied premise (4:3's high utility).
It's a good question and I wish I knew the answer to it. I couldn't find any historical reference as to why 4:3 was originally chosen for televisions (the details behind the NTSC format are brilliant, but that's a separate topic). I don't feel anything like "boxed in" when computing on a 21" 1600x1200 CRT, and I don't want to give up vertical resolution for a widescreen of the same size. Lets speculate.
The closer the ratio is to square, the more usable area you have for the size of the device. If wider screens were better, why wouldn't we keep making them wider, why not 3:1 or 4:1 or 5:1 ratios? Maybe 3:4 is just a sweet spot for compromise between high area and our forward facing binocular vision. It's a mistake to even call them wider than conventional displays, as aspect ratio is independent of physical size. Have laptops really gotten wider, or have they gotten shorter? I think wider ratios are actually mis-marketed short-screens, with their prevalence reflecting cost (smaller area) in pushing HDTV sales, and not quality.
I know newspapers print in short columns for readability, as its easier to keep your place with short lines than with very wide ones, and computer screens were dominated by text long before graphics. Books too are mainly tall rather than wide ratios. Wider aspects are preferred for landscapes and juxtapositions of people in films, but whatever we gain in video game FOV we're losing in visible detail under our feet (and performance is lost to render peripheral objects you barely see, at increasingly skewed projection angles, versus more sky and ground in a taller ratio, which are virtually free performance-wise).
The bottom line is always useability. Do you really want to squeeze every vertical pixel out of an interface (browsers for instance), to deal with displays that are just too short? I sure don't, and I don't care to move a physical setup around when resizing display elements is sufficient. It may even just be tribalism or convention, but I know I like it. Long live 4:3!
Re:Nice. (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe it's the same people who insist on keeping their source code under 80 characters wide.
Re:so the last one (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Freedom to do what exactly?
Have actual ownership of my device that I paid for? Sounds crazy I know....
Have actually written anything for linux let alone Android? When I say "write", I'm not talking about downloading the source from some project SVN repo and doing a compile but rather writing something yourself.
All the time. It's my day job. Have not released anything as an open source project, but I am modest and most of my work is "work for hire" so I don't have that option. I have also modified quite a few open source projects to tweak it, or fix a bug that I did not feel like waiting for the developers to get around to taking care of.
I have not yet written anything for the Android platform specifically. Quite frankly I don't have as much time as I would like for personal projects.
You can also write something yourself with a mac and and a developer account. The advantage with iOS is that you actually have a chance to earn back your money and possibly make a decent living without selling your soul to advertisers.
With Apple I only have one choice. Apple. If I want their hardware I must accept their terms, drink the Koolaid, enter the walled garden, and become one the Shiny Happy People.
Blackberry is not an alternative anymore. Sad, the Playbook was pretty decent hardware and looked great. That platform is dead.
WebOS is on its death bed with constant rumors of it resurfacing in another company like a cancelled sitcom on another channel.
Android at least has more than one manufacturer. All it takes is one to offer a device that is, more or less, trivial to root. Android will allow me to not be part of a walled garden and I can do what ever I want. That includes be stupid and get malware installed, but at least I get to have actual ownership and responsibility over my device.
I don't pull punches about Apple. Their corporate culture and ideology is abhorrent. However, I will give respect where respect is due. They make some damn fine hardware that looks good. I really do want an iPad 3. Just not the walled garden.
Although I could jail break (I spelled it right this time Kell!) Apple hardware, I would still need to pay for it. The looks and the specs on the iPad 3 make it damn tempting to do so.
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
You called me out. Well Played.
Principles are just *so* highly over rated. Giving in and just buying the device is the easier path and I should just take that.
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally some screen advancements? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is such a high resolution needed on a 10 inch screen?
Because it's exactly 2x of the resolution on iPad 2, and iOS APIs do not have any good provisions for flexible, dynamic UI that can scale with resolution. This means that, when it comes to running apps made for past devices, Apple has to linearly upscale them, bitmaps and all. And bitmaps look very bad if you don't upscale them by a nice integer factor, like 2x.
It's the same exact story as iPhone 4. I bet Apple would have used 480x800, same as everyone else, if they could. But they couldn't, so they had to special-order screens to match their requirements, and came up with "retina" gimmick to explain it away. Same thing here - something like 1920x1200 would be plenty much for a 10" tablet, but it just doesn't work for them, so they have to push it higher - and you can bet they'll spin up some marketing story to justify it.
How do I? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are, of course, free to whatever you want to your iDevice after you've bought it.
I want to sync it to my Linux workstation. How do I do that?
Re:Preference != Principle (Score:5, Insightful)
If you root you iDevice, you void the warranty .
Why buy something I have to root, and void my warranty instead of something that does what I want it to?
You sound like some who is trying to make excuse for locking themselves in a cage.
The poster was simply answering a question. He din't come out and say that. It was a response. Civilized peopel have 'conversations' to exchange ideas and concept.
I have no idea why you bring the tasty, tasty Big Mac into this conversation.