iPad 2 iPad 2 w/ 'Retina Display' = resolution of 27" iMac

I believe that apple won't change screen sizes or reselutions until the non retina devices are out, apple doesn't want there devices to be fragmented like android. Fragmentation has severely hurt android(googles powering it so it can't die). Also there is no way the ipad 2 could handle it would have to be as powerful as a high end desktop. Also since the screen is bigger you don't need such a high pixle density. After the 320x480 devices are forsaken by apple THEN apple can START to think about another resolution. Apple all ready jumped the gun when they released the iphone 4 without killing the 320x480 devices. What does make sense is that every few years apple will introduce a higher resolution for every device. Also at some point the resolution on every device wil be high enough that your eye won't be able to see the pixles. The retina display is close. A ppi of 356 might be enough to make the pixels un see able. After we actieve pixles that can't be seen, then apple will move on to other aspects of the screen to improve: Color, gamma, viewing angles, etc.

I remember this convo months back =p
If they can keep the same price, I say go for the iPad retna. But I don't see that coming until at least 2012. If they did do the iPad retna wouldn't it be like $999... Apple does know the iPad sold well so why not just bump it up a few hundred for the better screen + features.

We all know apple products are made in china, they probably market it for ALOT more than it costs to make. Even if it costs them more with a retina display, its still worth their while given the ipads selling history

Its pretty impossible and damn expensive...just like inception.

If not retina perhaps something else?

A plasma LOL

(sticker at the bck of ipad 'keep me upright at all times') what we have to say? Bullsh*t.

What jobs has to say? Revolutionary. It changes the way you use a Tablet.

Jobs doesn't like the touchscreen-on-a-upright-screen idea.

Actually, ARM CPUs are more advanced than x86 by now. ARM has more data-optimization techniques being bi-endian rather than little-endian like x86. Bi-endian means ARM doesn't have to re-convert data of a different nature from what it supports. It can just read things directly. Many network protocols still use big-endian rather than little-endian. Games also prefer to be in big-endian format rather than little-endian.

That actually makes no sense to someone who doesn't do programming, I guess, but just the fact that the ARM architecture is bi-endian means that sometimes, it can be many times faster than a comparable x86 processor.

Plus you are buying too much into the x86 marketing scheme. x86 is powerful, but it's not the most-optimized platform ever. Case in point, look at Intel's Atom and look at how Windows 7 runs on that platform. Then I think we'll have something to discuss.

Nope. Not bandwidth. Capacity. 256MB of RAM is just barely enough to display 1080p, but not enough if you want to run an OS and other things as well.

Eh... I think you need to study up more. A mobile device is starkly different.

AGP or PCI-E or not doesn't matter because those are merely interfaces to connect an external card to a motherboard. In a mobile device, in the case of ARM, those interfaces aren't necessary because the GPUs are often integrated directly onto the motherboard, so you're only limited by system bus width. Which, by the way, is not that slow.

Intel GMA 500 is a rebranded PowerVR SGX 535 GPU (it's the other way around), but you can't use it as a metric because that chip still doesn't have proper drivers. Intel licensed the chip, but didn't license the drivers, and instead, opted to outsourcing the drivers to Tungsten Graphics. The end result is that even though the chip is perfectly capable of more than what Intel is letting on, its performance has been dismal. Therefore, it's not really a good metric for you to compare.

Plus I have a new MacBook Pro 2010 model, and I know exactly how powerful it is. Thank you very much...

Moving beyond that, you're comparing 166MHz of DDR against 200MHz. Whether it is dedicated or not, it's still DDR, and the same rule applies: 200MHz is just faster than 166MHz. Dedicated only means that it's RAM specifically for use by the GPU.

I think that's for another day to discuss, but the point is... GeForce 2 MX is weaker than what the iPhone 4 has. GeForce 2 was able to drive resolutions beyond 1080p sufficiently. Thus the iPhone 4 should be perfectly capable of at least driving 1080p. Whether it does that smoothly or not remains to be seen, but it's not a problem with the CPU or GPU. How powerful the GeForce 320M is is irrelevant to the discussion.

And case in point, Intel GMA 500 with its latest drivers can do 1920 x 1080 just fine. Just not for gaming.

Those games aren't dropping frames because they are too much for the GPU to handle. Nope... they are dropping frames because they use up too much RAM all at once. RAM in iOS is shared between CPU and GPU, and the GPU can reserve any amount at any time. When the GPU asks for RAM, the CPU has to do garbage collection on unused memory and free up as much as possible, thus creating that "lag" or frame drop situation. The end result is that devices like the iPod Touch 4 and the iPad with minimal amount of RAM experiences severely degraded performance as the CPU constantly tries to balance RAM usage. The iPhone 4 runs the game much smoother than both the iPad and iPod Touch 4 because it has more than enough RAM for those games.

I don't doubt that that's the case. I'm merely pointing out that you don't need better hardware if all you want to do is display something on a higher resolution display. I'm not talking about gaming, though. Let's put gaming aside here.

Because Windows 7 doesn't scale well with higher-resolution displays at all. The OS was designed with dpi of 72ppi in mind. Many if not all of its applications were also designed with that dpi in mind. You can scale the dpi up, but not all applications support that, and many will still continue to display at 72ppi regardless.

In retrospect, that means that with a screen with the same pixel density as the Retina Display, contents displayed while running Windows 7 would be almost 5x smaller than they are now. Imagine reading texts 5x smaller.

So it's not a problem with the hardware. It's just that the software doesn't scale, and there's a concern with text legibility.

If you want to know more, go ask anyone who owns a Sony Vaio P, or an older Fujitsu u820 UMPC and ask how they're doing with those tiny screens.

This is not true. Most current integrated chips can handle the load of Windows 7 effects at 1080p just fine. Save for when they run into driver problems, most GPUs currently wouldn't have any problem running Windows 7 at 1080p or even higher... provided they have enough RAM to store that interface.

The only problem is that Windows 7 requires certain hardware features that some GPUs don't support... and that's why the glass interface is not available to some GPUs. But technically, any GPU supported should run fine. That means anything that is faster and newer than an Intel GMA 950 would run without any major issue provided they have proper drivers.

Yep, price is a concern. But I'm not talking about whether or not the next iPad should have a higher-resolution display. I'm only tackling the issue of whether or not current hardware is capable of displaying an interface at higher resolution. Disregarding games, of course. Please keep in mind that not everyone who uses an iDevice does so for gaming.

Edit: and just to make a point, my MacBook Pro 2010 can run a lot of games at 1920x1080 just fine. Though I'm not a gamer for the most part.

The GT 330M is actually a much faster GPU than the 320M. Despite the difference in only +10 codename, it's sort of a shrunk version of a past generation desktop GPU. It doesn't really have much to do with the memory performance rather than with the GPU itself. Case in point, the GeForce 320M GPU is much faster than the GeForce 9400M used in the older generation, but they both share RAM with the CPU and the RAM speed is the same.

That aside, the MacBook Pro 13" doesn't have a GT 330M, and... the MacBook Pro 15" doesn't have a 320M... The 15" and up models have an Intel HD graphics that processes everything else in the interface of Mac OSX (complete with hardware acceleration) until it doesn't have enough power and the GT 330M has to chime in. When does the GT 330M chime in? Good question... I think almost any time anything requests 3D. I've seen it fires off even for a twitter client, so it's a bit finicky. That was why I went with the 13" model. Just one GPU, no switching, longer battery life, and peace of mind.

1080p on a GMA 950 or GMA 3100 doesn't work because they don't have a dedicated video processor like other modern GPUs. They'd be hard-pressed doing 720p. The GMA 500 or PowerVR SGX 535, on the other hand, does have a video processor that can handle 720p with ease and some 1080p with effort.

Gaming on Android is not that bad in itself. The only difference is that iOS has more games... But otherwise, Android still has quality 3D titles from GameLoft and EA and other publishers.

I am fairly certain I am able to run a lot of games at 1920 x 1080 and some at 2560 x 1600 on my MacBook Pro 13" with the GeForce 320M. This is from real experience, not some online chart. What games can I run at 1920 x 1080 on the MacBook Pro? Street Fighter IV for once... or Counter-Strike Source. I've been able to run WoW, The SIMs and SimCity at 2560 x 1600, too. But I don't game that much.

Even if you have 40 - 50MB left, the game or other processes may still do their own garbage collection that can cause frame drops. Like I said, Infinity Blade, Real Racing 2, and Rage HD, and other HD titles run extremely smooth and almost lag-free on the iPhone 4. The iPad shouldn't even run into those GPU issues because... Infinity Blade on the iPad has a lot of shading effects turned off, and the iPad runs Infinity Blade a lot smoother than the iPod Touch 4.

Edit: oh, and GameCenter might be causing lags of its own. Some games implement a weird way to detect GameCenter presence, and they were known to cause lags during the beta of 4.2...