Apple prepping 4K resolution 12.9-inch MaxiPad – report New rumors that Apple will release a 12.9-inch "MaxiPad" to join its iPad Air and iPad mini lines have surfaced in Asia, with the added wrinkle being that Cupertino will likely offer two models of the big fella, one having a Retina-popping 4K resolution. According to a report on Monday in the Chinese-language website PadNews ( …
It's vapourware and, given their recent offerings, by the time it does become tangible it'll be 6+ months old tech-wise. But that won't stop the faithful from buying it. You can knock Apple all you like but they consistently manage to shift old technology at premium prices. When you think about it, it's startling that they can continue to do this.
That's just ridiculous. So who has the first 64 bit processor in a mobile phone? How about a proper fingerprint reader (not the cr@p we had before). What about fitting PCIe flash on their latest laptops when most people are not even fitting SATA SSDs. Retina screen on laptops - need I go on.
It's the other than are 6-12 months behind and all they can do is make the same but with a larger screen and bigger and bigger batteries as they need faster CPUs to keep up whereas Apple go for making the CPU and OS more efficient.
>That's just ridiculous. So who has the first 64 bit processor in a mobile phone?
That doesn't benefit the customer directly now, but does mean the transition to higher RAM in the future will be smoother - for application developers, especially. Apple have a financial interest in their application marketplace, in a way Android phone vendors don't in theirs.
The ARM64 instruction set does benefit the consumer now, and increasingly so since iOS apps are built to native code so there's a bit of delay in there. None of the improvements are much to do with being 64-bit in the abstract, but 64-bit pointers help with Objective-C's traditional stance that everything is on the heap as they allow suitably small objects to be packed directly into the pointer and passed about effectively by value. That doesn't cost addressing space because valid pointers have to be aligned anyway — Apple has just adding meaning for unaligned pointers.
Apple's is also a reference counted environment, and they've built a few bits of the count directly into the pointer. Previously the rule was that once retain count goes above 1, the runtime explicitly stores it in a hash table somewhere. I think they may actually have forfeited some addressing space for this improvement though.
"It's the other than are 6-12 months behind and all they can do is make the same but with a larger screen and bigger and bigger batteries as they need faster CPUs to keep up whereas Apple go for making the CPU and OS more efficient."
Indeed. It has always cracked me up that Android fans point to their bigger screens as THE indicator of technical superiority. Apple makes devices with screens ranging 2.5 inches to 27 inches, but I guess they just don't have the engineering talent to crack 5 inches. Sure.
>4k res in a 12" tablet seems pointless, the battery life will suffer and the GPU would need a massive upgrade to actually do much at the full res, so we'd see a lot of up-scaled stuff totally negating having the 4k res in the first place.
Pointless?
We don't know anything about this rumoured device.... it might be that it is designed to be used mainly in the studio as a graphic design / Photoshop tool, for example. In this case use, the battery wouldn't be a too big an issue. There is a market for this, albeit a currently small one, since Wacom will sell you a 13" tablet ('Companion'), as will Modbook (based in a gutted Macbook Pro)... and Apple could easily undercut the price of either of those models, spec for spec. Adobe are looking into this area too, with their first foray into hardware (see Mighty Pen and Napoleon Ruler)
Instead of lazily downvoting me, can someone please point out which of my assertions they believe to be factually incorrect? To make it easy for you, you can merely post a number, or several. Thanks!
1. It's premature to call a product feature 'pointless' when it is just a rumour and the intended use of the device is yet unknown. A desk-based machine might not require as long lasting a battery as a more mobile device.
2. Wacom make very expensive Android and Win8 13" tablets
3. Modbook make 13" OSX tablets based on Macbook Pros
4. Apple could easily undercut the Modbook Pro spec by spec - because the Modbook is the full price of Macbook plus extra parts and labour.
5. Adobe are making hardware to allow iPads to be used more productively.
7. The market is not currently that big, but it does exist.
None of those statements is wrong. However the issue is your linking them to a 12.9" 4K screen.
It's the 4K screen in that form factor that's ridiculous and that's what the article is referring to.
Modbook do make a v.expensive tablet based on a macbook pro, they haven't felt the need to stick a 4K screen in it and if Apple wanted to compete with them they wouldn't have to either.
Tim & Steve have both been on stage trumpeting the Retina display like preachers. It is the best you ever need. Period. They said so. They can't just suddenly say here's our new screen it's the same size as the previous retina screen but has 4 times as many pixels. Seriously don't buy the old retina it's trash.
I've no doubt they'll do 4K and beyond, but it will be at bigger screen sizes.
>I've no doubt they'll do 4K and beyond, but it will be at bigger screen sizes.
Bigger screens, i.e monitors used with mice and keyboards, are used further away from the eyes than tablets are, so a 4K 13" tablet would be roughly on par with a 4K 27" monitor. If Apple are targeting the market that Wacom have traditionally played in, it makes sense. The fact that such products are already sold despite their high price tag, and other established players are looking to get into that market, should suggest that it is at least plausible.
Here is a picture of some sketching on paper, so you see how such a product might be used:
http://image.lowridermagazine.com/f/features/1107_lrmp_air_ink_master_artist_fonzy/32736208/lrmp_1107_10_z%2Bair_and_ink_master_artist%2Bsketching.jpg
After all, making the iPad 13" does nothing for it's portability, and there are studies that suggest a good proportion of full-size iPads rarely leave the house.
If you are doing graphic / design photoshop work in an actual "studio" on a 12.9" laptop (stupid in itself) and think you need 4K to do it then you are "pointless". Utterly pointless.
As others have pointed out Apple do sell a lot of "why??" hardware, but this one sounds ridiculous and I think the source is wrong. A 17" or bigger laptop at 4K, maybe. A 21" laptop/all-in-one, fold up, ultra-slim, wrapped in titanium and sealed with Steve Jobs sanctified preserved tears - I can see them queuing round the block to sell their grandma's to buy it.
But 12.9" 4K? Tim would look like an arse trying to justify that.
I see some "jaggies" on my Nexus 7's much smaller 1920*1080 display, even though my eyesight is past its peak. The main offender is Google Earth and it could probably be addressed via antialiasing, however it could be addressed even better by upping the physical resolution. I bet the average user would benefit from increased text clarity, even though they might not conciously notice the difference. So yes, 4k on a relatively massive 12" tablet makes sense.
It's a story with "Apple" and "4K" in the title, guaranteed to get clicks. A higher-resolution iPad would have to be 3072x2304 (298ppi @ 12.9") or 4096x3072 (397ppi @ 12.9"). The first of which is possible, but only the second could be called 4K. If they do the second one, that's a much higher PPI than anything in their current lineup, which would mean that a "Retina" display isn't enough, and I can't see Apple admitting that, since their current claim is pixels are already invisible. Changing the resolution to something that's not a multiple of 1024x768 would cause pain for developers, especially when you're significantly changing the aspect ratio as well. Sure, they changed the iPhone, but there were bars in a lot of things and that was only going from 3:2 to 16:9, and the resolution was only changed across one dimension. Going from 4:3 to 16:9 would be a much more drastic change.
>A higher-resolution iPad would have to be 3072x2304 (298ppi @ 12.9") or 4096x3072 (397ppi @ 12.9").
Only if it runs iOS, and even then it's not a given - anti-aliasing tricks can be played with the graphics system, for example.
>which would mean that a "Retina" display isn't enough, and I can't see Apple admitting that, since their current claim is pixels are already invisible.
They claim the pixels are invisible to someone with 20/20 vision, but the average person has better vision than that.
http://www.cultofmac.com/173702/why-retina-isnt-enough-feature/
Not at all sure about that. I have no idea what the distribution curve across the population is, and one would need to know that in order to state that "the average prson has better vision than that"
Was 20/20 based on a sampled average originally?
What are the visual accuity variations across racial boundaries (do chinese have better vision than africans)?
I don't know the answers, but it might be worth googling a bit to know.
You might have written "many people have ..."
20/20 is purely a measure of one's ability to identify letters in a certain typeface and of a certain size from a distance of twenty feet.
> You might have written "many people have ..."
I might have, but I didn't. What I wrote was less vague and just as accurate. The average person does have better than 20/20 vision:
...both Snellen and Donders noted that acuity levels of better than 20/20 were common in normal individuals, and both cautioned against a conclusion that their norm values represented normal visual acuity. Unfortunately, these cautioning remarks have rarely been heeded..."
- http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00413146#page-1
he significance of the 20/20 standard can best be thought of as the lower limit of normal or as a screening cutoff. When used as a screening test subjects that reach this level need no further investigation, even though the average visual acuity of healthy eyes is 20/16 to 20/12.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity#Normal_vision
Neither of the quotes you have supplied supports your assertion that the average person has better than 20/20 vision.
"Common" just means not rare, and could well be far below average.
The second (Wikipedia) quote refers to the average acuity of healthy eyes. You appear to have forgotten a huge number of people requiring corrective lenses and assumed everybody has healthy eyes.
I rather suspect the "many people have..." amendment would have been more accurate.
>Neither of the quotes you have supplied supports your assertion that the average person has better than 20/20 vision.
In the first quote, Snellen, the man who developed the eye test chart that bears his name, warns not to confuse his base value of 20/20 for a population average, yet you persist in doing so. And I haven't seen any links from you support that 20/20 is average, either.
I have better than 20/20 vision when I'm wearing my spectacles.
Here is yet another link supporting the assertion that Steve Jobs was guilty of hyperbole when introducing the Retina Display:
Analyst Challenges Apple's iPhone 4 'Retina Display' Claims
- http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364871,00.asp
Apple doesn't explicitly announce its motivations, obviously, but I think the explicit constraints system it introduced in iOS 6 via NSLayoutConstraint is supposed to buy them much more flexibility in screen ratio and proportions. I even suspect that via dynamic type in iOS 7 (you set the base font size, everything else is meant to size around that) they possibly even want to be able to change to non-integer multiple pixel densities.
I agree that a multiple of 1024x768 is inevitable, and thus the @3x 3072x2304 is the easier, and more logical, resolution to aim for in a 12.9" tablet. It will be less stress on the GPU (being around 2x the pixels instead of 4x the pixels), and possibly would be doable with an plain old A7 with a much faster GPU, or an "A7X" with 50% more GPU (and faster GPU) instead of 100% more, and faster, GPU (and a 200% faster, same speed, GPU is not really an option).
I don't think the retina name is an issue. There's more to eyesight than pixel detection at certain distances and DPI - there's angular resolution as well, for which retina is still not enough.
I'm guessing iOS is a given, due to the touch interface and lack of suitability of Mac OS X in such a device.
> You could more productively have spent that half hour installing e.g. FileBrowser
Why would it take half an hour to install an iPhone app? Is this some kind of Plex or AirVideo nonsense where you need a special proprietary app running on the PC on the other end? The Android version of this just browses common CIFS shares with no extra special configuration required beyond the app install on the tablet.
"You could more productively have spent that half hour installing e.g. FileBrowser (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/filebrowser-access-files-on/id364738545) and grabbing the files from a network share."
ThomH could have spent his time more productively realising that was not the point! W O W!
If I had to install an app and then put files on a network share JUST to get them onto my phone I would go mad... and 25Gigs.. .I can plug the phone into any computer that is not a mac and just transfer files without a problem (macs are always arsey about android phones)
And when I need to I can always carry multiple microSD cards, very handy if I am away for a month in another country, beats carrying a hefty HDD around!
The fail of apple is thinking they know best... the fail of them all is trusting the cloud...
To all of the apologist comments above, you perfectly illustrate my point of what an arse it is.
1) iTunes - hahaha - do you think I'm letting that shit anywhere near one of my PC's ?
2) I have to install an app to do something over wireless that only slightly addresses the shortcomings of Apples deliberate design flaws. PS ES file explorer in android is free and yeah excuse my while I chuck 25gb over the wireless.
Apple needs to address this by either providing usb OTG or a card slot, the competition does.
Heh, 4K is a horizontal measure of pixels, not vertical like all previous resolution labels. Those who want to remain sane will say it refers to a class of resolutions similar to 3840x2160 (2160p), but also including 4096x3072 (4x 1024x768 - the 4K that this article refers to) and some others.
(Those that want to get annoyed and have an argument will state it's 3840x2160 only, and that's not even 4K and RAGE, etc.)
I think it should be called 16:9 2160p or 4:3 3072p, but it appears that many humans can't deal with such large numbers, so we've wrapped around to 4K for some reason (movie related).
You can tell from that alone that the story is a complete fabrication, or such a poor translation that almost nothing in it can be relied upon.
I still think if Apple is ordering 12.9" Retina panels (whether 4K or not) that they're for the 13" Macbook Air. If they do a 12.9" iPad, well, I fail to see the market for a larger, heavier tablet. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the success of the 7" iPad Mini, and the near total lack of success almost all 10" Android tablets have seen compared to their smaller brethren, that the demand for tablets above 10" will be rather tepid, and not worth Apple pursuing.
Think back to 2008-2010, when the rumors of an "iPhone Mini" were rather strong, suggesting a 2.5" or 3" screen. How many times did we read one was being worked on and release was imminent? That was before phablets took over, and analysts still remembered how phones had become smaller and smaller in the past, or perhaps compared with iPods, and assumed there was a market for smaller touchscreen phones. Today analysts can't help comparing tablets to phones and maybe TVs and seeing the trend towards bigger and bigger screens, and assuming tablets will work the same way.
Stupid analysts, incapable of original thought, all they know how to do is plot two points on a graph "yesterday" and "today" and draw a line through them to tomorrow. Took those idiots over two years to figure out that PC sales were in a long term decline.
Back when I was doing my degree, these curves were all the rage. (15 years or so ago)
I remember about 4 different ways to take one point in the past and one in the present in order to calculate the future. (adding years was just adding accuracy)
It was total bollocks obviously as following these curves would show that by 2022 30% of the US population would be Elvis impersonators.
All we know so far is that Apple is testing some 4k 12.9 inch screens.
Next month the original MacbookAir released in January 2008 will be 6 years old and the redesigned version released in October 2010 close to 3.5 years old.
The screen will probably be used in that MBA replacement which is also rumored ro repalce both the 11.6 and 13.3 current models.
Indeed.
The whole 4K thing is marketing wank as far as consumer devices are concerned. The same goes for 4K tvs. Nobody will be able to tell the difference between a 1080p and 4K screen at normal viewing distances unless they fork out for an enormous screen with a price tag far exceeding almost everyone's budget and wall space.
You're probably also one of those people who zooms in on photos to test the Retina display...
I can definitely tell the difference between old iPad and retina iPad as well as MBP and rMBP when displaying photos and can honestly say that more dots would be better. Currently neither device is even close to what my DSLR outputs, or even my iPhone camera, and I am sure the photos would look better for it whether I can see the dots or not.
A good example I have is a photo of a marina. Without the Retina display some of the yacht rigging is invisible and some has jagged edges. With one, more of the rigging is visible and it is smooth edged. With a 4K resolution I would expect all of the rigging to be shown smoothly regardless of distance. Whether you can see the difference or not isn't important, it's whether there are enough people who need/want the device who can see the difference and are willing to pay for it.
As for the rumour, I'd be surprised if that resolution is used as it's just too different, forcing a change in form factor which is rare for Apple.
I suspect you don't place your eyes as close to your 2560 x 1440 monitor as you likely would with a tablet device. And with the greatest respect, what has your personal inability to distinguish pixels on your screen got to do with acceptability to the world at large? There is a huge range in visual acuity among humans.
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