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The new iPad |OT|

1

123rl

Member
Will the Amazon Kindle app be at full res. for day one? I think that is the App I aim to use more than anything else. Kindle books at 2048x1536 will look phenomenal!
 
P

Polari

Member
I'm considering getting this for the glorious screen. Is there a good media player for iPad like VLC that I can use without jailbreaking though? Does Quicktime (or whatever it is iOS includes) play most things?
 
1

123rl

Member
There are media players available but they're hit and miss. I've tried a few and they range from audio dropouts, pixellation, to random crashes. The best way to do it is to convert to mp4 and copy it over to your iPad. Use Handbrake if you're on a Mac. The quality is so much better that way. Everything will work and will work perfectly with no loss in quality
 
M

mrklaw

MrArseFace
123rl said:
There are media players available but they're hit and miss. I've tried a few and they range from audio dropouts, pixellation, to random crashes. The best way to do it is to convert to mp4 and copy it over to your iPad. Use Handbrake if you're on a Mac. The quality is so much better that way. Everything will work and will work perfectly with no loss in quality
Click to expand...

Is there something that will copy over a network to the iPad?
 
1

123rl

Member
I don't know any that will do it. I guess you could store the videos in a folder and have iTunes sync to that folder for videos. Wirelessly sync your iPad and it should copy over those videos
 
S

SolidPain

Neo Member
I need to complete a course work which includes a lot of mathematical expressions. What is the best app to use that let me include complex expressions? I usually use Word on PC but I don't know if there is a special app that I can use on iPad.
 
B

BeeDog

Member
SolidPain said:
I need to complete a course work which includes a lot of mathematical expressions. What is the best app to use that let me include complex expressions? I usually use Word on PC but I don't know if there is a special app that I can use on iPad.
Click to expand...

Check out MathStudio.
 
M

MontTrain

Banned
Yep. Airvideo for streaming at home and AVplayer to drag and drop videos onto the device If you need a copy locally.

Either way it will play any format you can throw at it without having to manually convert anything.
 
E

elfinke

Member
So each year for the past few I have gone through the 'I really want/need(lol) one of these', then talked myself out of it. The toing-and-froing over the eventual refrain drives my partner mad. We've both had iPhones for many years now (either personal or business), but never an iPad, despite both seeing great use for them (insta-internet devices, as well as book and paper subscriptions).

Not this year though. A his and her, ebony and ivory, wifi+16gb pair are on their way.

22nd/23rd delivery date. Can't wait!
 
B

bgbball31

Member
Mine finally shipped, so pretty pumped about that. I know that I was going to get it Friday anyways, but it is nice to see it is on its way.

Is the recommended app thread updated? With this being my first iOS device, I have no idea what to download.
 
B

Blackhead

Redarse
Retina display-ready apps and the coming iPad storage crunch

Macworld said:
The new iPad's Retina display is its flagship feature; by all accounts from reporters who attended the third-generation iPad's unveiling this week, its 2048-by-1536 pixel display looks exquisite in person, with crisp text and vivid color saturation. But the much improved screen may severely limit how you use the tablet.

That's because in order to take advantage of that display, apps need to generate new versions of their graphical assets. The new iPad sports four times as many pixels as its predecessors, so for Retina display support, apps need new images that are twice as wide and twice as tall as before. The physically larger images, of course, wind up as larger files in terms of megabytes, too. And that's going to become a problem pretty quickly given that you can't upgrade your iPad's hard drive. It's unfortunate that Apple didn't double the new iPad's storage space options to 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB to better accomodate the larger app sizes endemic to Retina-ready apps.

How big is big?

Let's look at some of Apple's own iPad apps to see whether fretting about how Retina iPad graphics affect file size is a waste of energy. It's not a perfect comparison, since Apple also added some features to the apps it updated with Retina compatibility, but it's still informative:

Keynote went from 115MB to 327MB; Numbers increased from 109MB to 283MB, and Pages went from 95MB to 269MB. With the exception of iMovie (which also added in new support for iMovie Trailers as it ballooned from 70MB to 404MB), these apps increased their file sizes by a factor between 2.5 and 3. (iMovie is nearly six times larger than before.)

Suppose a new 16GB iPad owner wants to load up the tablet with Apple's Retina-display ready apps: the iWork suite, the iLife suite, iBooks, Find My Friends, Find my iPhone, iTunes U, and Remote. That's 2.24GB of apps before you've downloaded a single third-party app, or synced a single song, photograph, or video. Remember too that a 16GB iPad really only offers the user around 14GB of storage space; the other two gigabytes go towards the operating system and stock apps. So now your 16GB iPad offers you fewer than 12GB of storage space.

My colleague Serenity Caldwell already wrote about the impact of Retina-ready apps on Apple's freshly-raised limit (to 50MB) for downloading apps over 3G or LTE. In that story, she provides examples of other apps that swell in size with Retina-ready graphics. A smaller app like Tweetbot, for example, will reportedly grow from 8.8MB to 24.6MB. Larger, graphically intense games that weigh in between 300MB and 500MB today will likely require 750MB to 1.5GB once they update their art assets.

This doesn't just affect new iPad owners

And perhaps the most worrying effect of the new iPad's Retina display is its impact on older owners of both iPads and iPhones: Universal apps—that is, single apps that run on both devices—will become much larger even if you don't own a Retina-display iPad. When Apple pushed out its Retina-ready upgrades earlier this week, I couldn't successfully update my iPhone until I deleted my music and a few large apps. My iPhone can't take advantage of the massive graphics that those apps need to embrace the iPad's Retina display, but it gets no choice in the matter.

It's a bit like Mac apps that could run on both Intel and PowerPC processors. If your Mac has tons of free storage space available, it doesn't matter. But if your drive is close to full, you can use various third-party apps to remove any PowerPC-only code within your apps—since that code is useless on your Intel-based computer—to free up space.

Apple hasn't coded a means by which your iPhone could ignore iPad-only assets when it installs universal apps. In fact, most developers also will choose to keep art assets specifically for the first two iPads, in addition to new art exclusively for the third-generation iPad; trying to force the older iPads to show downscaled versions of Retina iPad artwork would slow things down too much, developers tell me.

So we end up with a situation where iPhones contain iPad graphics they can't use, iPads contain graphics for other iPads they don't want, and iPads hold onto iPhone-specific graphics they don't need.

Memory isn't free

The problem is that flash storage isn't free—hence the $100 difference in price between the current 16GB and 32GB iPad, and the 32GB and 64GB iPad. More storage costs Apple more money, and Apple surely doesn't want to raise the iPad's price tag.

At the same time, Apple is the only company around that could possibly drive down flash storage prices even further—by buying up millions of drives from suppliers to use in the new iPad. It seems, however, that Apple can't yet find a way to keep the iPad's current price point while increasing its storage, and considered the current state of affairs the best compromise.

If Apple's right that it can't yet drive down the price of flash storage further, that makes the software solution of letting iOS devices avoid storing in-app assets that they can't use even more imperative.

Two fixes

Really, then, I'm pushing for two separate but equally important fixes. Apple needs to bump the storage capacities on its iPads (and, frankly, iPhones). And it needs to devise a means by which in-app data that your iOS device can't use won't clog up your available storage space.

Coupling more storage with less per-app cruft will solve this storage crunch problem, and it's one that I suspect more and more iPad buyers will encounter in the months ahead.

My advice to people asking me which iPad to get today is to focus in on the pricier 32GB model, because once developers update their apps for the new iPad's Retina display, 16GB simply won't be enough.
Click to expand...

It's cheaper to get a secondhand 32GB iPad 2 than to buy a new 16GB iPad 2 from Apple. That's a no-brainer.
 
1

123rl

Member
And that's why I went for 64GB even though I stream all my music through Spotify. I was running out of space on my 16GB model and I don't think I had that many apps on there.
 
S

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Greyface said:
Retina display-ready apps and the coming iPad storage crunch

It's cheaper to get a secondhand 32GB iPad 2 than to buy a new 16GB iPad 2 from Apple. That's a no-brainer.
Click to expand...

As the article points out, the real solution to this is to debundle assets made for each of the four resolutions from each other. Download in iTunes? Get everything. Sync from iTunes to device? Automatically strip incompatible assets when syncing. Sync from device to iTunes? iTunes automatically downloads the other assets. Download on device? Only get device-specific assets. Ta-da!
 
B

bigwinnerx

Member
Stumpokapow said:
As the article points out, the real solution to this is to debundle assets made for each of the four resolutions from each other. Download in iTunes? Get everything. Sync from iTunes to device? Automatically strip incompatible assets when syncing. Sync from device to iTunes? iTunes automatically downloads the other assets. Download on device? Only get device-specific assets. Ta-da!
Click to expand...

Yeah this feels like a very non apple solution to an apple problem. Just throw storage at it!
 
C

cvxfreak

Member
Stumpokapow said:
As the article points out, the real solution to this is to debundle assets made for each of the four resolutions from each other. Download in iTunes? Get everything. Sync from iTunes to device? Automatically strip incompatible assets when syncing. Sync from device to iTunes? iTunes automatically downloads the other assets. Download on device? Only get device-specific assets. Ta-da!
Click to expand...

What are the chances of an iOS equivalent of OSX's Monolingual? :p
 
F

FreeMufasa

Junior Member
After reading more posts, I probably should have went with the 32 instead of the 16.

It is my first iPad so I guess i'll be prepared for next years edition.
 
Bboy AJ

Bboy AJ

My dog was murdered by a 3.5mm audio port and I will not rest until the standard is dead
I know I'll still be fine with 16 GB. I don't store any media locally. That article makes it seem like 32 GB is the minimum needed but I disagree.

I also suspect Apple will eventually decouple an app's assets to only include what that device needs.
 
B

bigwinnerx

Member
FreeMufasa said:
After reading more posts, I probably should have went with the 32 instead of the 16.

It is my first iPad so I guess i'll be prepared for next years edition.
Click to expand...

If its your first, don't worry about it yet. I have a 16gb 2 and it has 3 gb free on it right now, but i use my iPad constantly. Just depends what you're storing locally.
 
D

Deleted member 30609

Unconfirmed Member
I don't really store much on my iPad. I usually rent movies, watch tv shows one or two at a time and only keep the apps I use more than a handful of times a week. I rarely listen to music on this thing, but when I do, I have iTunes Match, so none of it is really stored locally anyway.

I try to "live out of a suitcase", digitally. I used to have giant collections, but in a world with unlimited bandwidth it just seems messy.
 
S

Sean

Banned
Stumpokapow said:
As the article points out, the real solution to this is to debundle assets made for each of the four resolutions from each other. Download in iTunes? Get everything. Sync from iTunes to device? Automatically strip incompatible assets when syncing. Sync from device to iTunes? iTunes automatically downloads the other assets. Download on device? Only get device-specific assets. Ta-da!
Click to expand...

This sounds like a nice solution, but I doubt Apple will implement it any time soon considering they benefit from users purchasing the higher-priced iPads (better profit margins I'm sure).
 
T

topramen

Member
Sooooo

What about that iPad Air? Does anyone think it will happen this year?

I have a old school iPad and am thinking of grading, but I really like the small form factor tablets, as reading is my primary activity.

Could we get a smaller version of the new IPad with the retina display and all the A5x goodness/LTE
 
Bboy AJ

Bboy AJ

My dog was murdered by a 3.5mm audio port and I will not rest until the standard is dead
topramen said:
Sooooo

What about that iPad Air? Does anyone think it will happen this year?

I have a old school iPad and am thinking of grading, but I really like the small form factor tablets, as reading is my primary activity.

Could we get a smaller version of the new IPad with the retina display and all the A5x goodness/LTE
Click to expand...

No.
 
B

Betta Lines

Member
topramen said:
Sooooo

What about that iPad Air? Does anyone think it will happen this year?

I have a old school iPad and am thinking of grading, but I really like the small form factor tablets, as reading is my primary activity.

Could we get a smaller version of the new IPad with the retina display and all the A5x goodness/LTE
Click to expand...
If there's gonna be a smaller version of an iPad anytime soon, it'll be iPad 2 resolution.
 
C

Cheebo

Banned
topramen said:
Sooooo

What about that iPad Air? Does anyone think it will happen this year?

I have a old school iPad and am thinking of grading, but I really like the small form factor tablets, as reading is my primary activity.

Could we get a smaller version of the new IPad with the retina display and all the A5x goodness/LTE
Click to expand...
Nope.

If they ever did a smaller one it will be the low end alternative, the iPod Nano/Shuffle to the Touch. It wouldn't use the latest chipset or retina. It would be for entry level consumers to compete against stuff like the Kindle Fire.
 
T

TheChewyWaffles

Member
Apple could have gone to 128GB and raised the base model to 32GB. They simply knew they didn't have to in order to sell them. It sucks, but that's what they do. Can't make the current iPad too compelling or suckers (like me) will not buy one next year.
 
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