iPad Do you think the next iPad will have a "retina display"?

[dorino]

The iPad, like the iPhone, will also need to stay ahead of the competition, though. Who knows what the competition will be?

[stustaff]

Originally Posted by dorino

The iPad, like the iPhone, will also need to stay ahead of the competition, though. Who knows what the competition will be?

Agreed but I feel cost battery and weight will be more of a selling point than a new display, the iPad already gets great feedback on it's screen.

[dorino]

Right now, sure. The screen though, is one of the most easily improved aspects of the device, and therefore, likely to be something the competition will take hold of. Apple will need to, too.

[WillAdams]

jbril, a bit of a history lesson:

Mac OS X is based on OpenStep which was based on NeXTstep for which Display PostScript was written (mostly by NeXT employees).

It doesn't have it now because Adobe refused to license it as promised and together w/ Microsoft whined about re-writing all their apps. So we got Carbon. Curious why that's Yellow Box? It's 'cause when Bill Gates was asked if he'd develop for NeXTstep his answer was, ``Develop for it? I'll piss on it.''

William

(who loathes the compromises Carbon apps have forced on the NeXT UI)

[wallcraft]

The next iPad will likely have a higher resolution, but the "retina" display came about because an exact doubling of resolution makes upscaling images very easy and because Apple could still get a good price on the screens. Then marketing came along with the retina sales pitch. Note that I am not saying that Apple does not care about screens way more than the typical device maker, just that quality isn't the only factor.

I assume the iPad has broken Apple's fixation (in software) on one screen resolution, so there is no need to do an exact doubling again. Apple will likely use the highest resolution that is economic and practical for a ~10" screen. Part of the "practical" will be whether the graphics controller can process that many pixels.

[nikkie]

I would be shocked if the next iPad had a retina display - at that screen size, the resolution would be slightly more than 2560x1600. While it would look fantastic, I agree with others who have mentioned that that is an unreasonably high burden on a processor attempting to last 12 hours on a battery charge and keep the heat to a minimum.

In addition, doing games at that resolution is not even done by the commercial desktop market, so most would have to scale down. And no one sells video that plays at that resolution; not to mention that selling and distributing movies of that size would require better bandwidth than hardly any people have available to provide a good experience for the user.

In short, it doesn't make good business sense yet to sell an iPad with a resolution of 2560x1600. While I don't doubt that it will be higher than the current resolution, it's not going to sport a retina display for at least a few more years.

[dorino]

Okay, thanks for clarifying what a "retina" display would entitle, nikkie.

I don't think it will be that high either.

[petermillard]

I think an iPad Mini (6" screen) with a retina display would be an interesting idea, if they could get it to cost out OK. A smaller, lighter-weight device but with a high-res screen might be just the ticket for folks who find the iPad is too big or heavy for everyday use e.g. commuting.

Pete

[charleski]

No chance at all.

The manufacturing issues involved scale with surface area, and the iPad has 9 times the surface area of the new iPhone.

3" LCD screens with ~166dpi have been with us for 8 years, but 10" panels at that resolution are still unobtainable (or rare as hen's teeth - I haven't seen one). So the manufacturers can't produce screens with even half the resolution of the new iPhone at this size.

[scottjl]

do you have detailed knowledge of the manufacturing process involved in the new iphone display?

[charleski]

Originally Posted by scottjl

do you have detailed knowledge of the manufacturing process involved in the new iphone display?

That really is a rather facetious comment.

If anything, I've downplayed the degree to which quality control issues make large, truly high-res displays extremely expensive.

[Kolenka]

Originally Posted by jibril

Hope it has an SD card reader then too. Problem is, no OS is based on vector graphics, so on a computer screen bitmapped based graphics appear too small, should be using something like postscript like the printers do.

I always wondered why monitors didn't move toward this instead of plateauing in the resolution department.

OS X (and by extension iOS) uses a form of Display Postscript with some PDF-style improvements they dub "Display PDF". There has been a lot of work towards resolution independence in the core OS over the last 3-4 years to allow the UI to scale to meet the dimensions of the screen, rather than the pixel size.

In the case of the iPhone, it also helps that they simply doubled the pixel count in both dimensions, makes it easier in the short term.

The problem with using Display Postscript for monitors is that monitors are still pixel based. Why not offload the work of figuring out the pixels to the GPU/CPU/OS which is already doing that work? It's completely possible to move away from pixels/etc without having to introduce a new type of monitor (and the tech that drives displays isn't moving away from using pixels anytime soon).

Originally Posted by stustaff

The same resolution would mane NO sense on a larger screen not to that level. a Bigger TV doesn't once you get to a point add more pixels they just get bigger. The iPad is already higher resolution than the new iPhone.

It's about the DPI/PPI.

iPhone 3GS - ~160PPI
iPhone 4 - ~320PPI
iPad - ~130PPI

Right now, the iPad has the least dense screen, which matters for things like text. The PPI for the iPad is lower than most eBook readers, and it does show.

Originally Posted by WillAdams

jbril, a bit of a history lesson:

Mac OS X is based on OpenStep which was based on NeXTstep for which Display PostScript was written (mostly by NeXT employees).

It doesn't have it now because Adobe refused to license it as promised and together w/ Microsoft whined about re-writing all their apps. So we got Carbon. Curious why that's Yellow Box? It's 'cause when Bill Gates was asked if he'd develop for NeXTstep his answer was, ``Develop for it? I'll piss on it.''

William

Will, nice to see someone try to give a history lesson, but this is woefully off the mark. OS X does have a variation of Display Postscript (see above), it's how the Quartz engine runs.

And the real history lesson is that Cocoa was the Yellow Box. Blue Box was the proposed emulation layer. When OS X became official (post-Rhapsody), Yellow Box became Cocoa, Carbon was added, and Blue Box became Classic.

[kjk]

I guess the other question is, does the iPad get used at the same reading distance as the iPhone...maybe the iPad can get by with a lower PPI. I am interested in the new glass fusing technology coming to the next iPad-from what I've heard, the new process makes the graphics look like they are on the surface of the display.

[WillAdams]

While Quartz can be described as ``Display PDF'', architecturally, it's a bit different and programs w/ DPS dependencies are not a recompile for Mac OSX. Losing DPS meant a lot of things were lost such as nxhosting, direct display of .eps graphics and .ps files (Mac OS X has to distill them to .pdfs) &c.

Thanks for catching the yellow box error --- always get those reversed.

[charleski]

Originally Posted by kjk

I guess the other question is, does the iPad get used at the same reading distance as the iPhone

I think 1 foot is a reasonable standard for close viewing. If I hold a book comfortably my elbow is flexed about 75° and the book is around 13" away.

If the text is too small then people will move the device closer, but I'm short-sighted (and, I suspect, slightly presbyopic) and with glasses on my minimum focal distance is around 9". Focusing on an object that close requires a clear conscious effort.