It doesn't matter if you've been living under a rock or have taken refuge in a cave far removed from civilization, chances are you probably still knew today is the day Apple's new iPad goes on sale. Love or hate all things Apple, the Cupertino company is a master at marketing and creating frenzied product launches. But we're not here to stroke Apple's marketing genius, we want to give you a heads up that iFixIt has torn into the new iPad, laying bare all of the internal components.
It's going to be a madhouse at Best Buy retail locations this Friday, March 16, starting at 8 AM when Apple's new iPad goes on sale. Actually, it will be nuts even before then, because it's always a safe bet dozens and, in some locations, even hundreds of people will line up outside way ahead of time. That's the way it goes with Apple product launches these days, but even with the rabid fan base in place, Android tablet shipments will overtake iOS by 2015, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts.
If you caught any of the coverage of Apple's iPad launch event yesterday -- and you couldn't have missed it unless you boycotted Facebook, Twitter, Google+, tech sites, and the Internet in general -- then you would have seen the Cupertino company puff out its chest as it talked about the new iPad's A5X processor, a mighty chip with supposedly four times the graphics performance of Nvidia's Tegra 3 processor. There's only one problem with that: Apple's scrumptious claim was served up without a side of benchmarks.
The latest data from market research firm comScore underscores the old adage 'The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.' In terms of mobile market share, Google and Apple are the two fat cats living high on the hog, while Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Symbian fight over the leftover scraps, and there were less to go around in January 2012.
After weeks of rumors and mouth breathing from the techorati, Apple just confirmed what everyone already suspected: Another year, another new iPad. Say what you want about Apple, but at least they're consistent. Earlier debate swirled around the new tablet's name: would it be called the iPad 3 or the iPad HD? (Because that's vital information!) Neither, as it turns out. The new iPad is called simply, well, the iPad. Some other rumors turned out true, however.
All the rumors and speculation over Apple's iPad 3 tablet will either be put to rest or come to fruition tomorrow when the Cupertino outfit unveils the much anticipated slate at a press event in San Francisco. The most likely additions will be that of a 'Retina Display' that packs twice as many pixels as the iPad 2, and a 4G LTE radio. Everything else is a crapshoot, minus the usual rabid demand that accompanies most Apple product launches. This one is no different.
The late Steve Jobs was adamantly opposed to the idea of a 7-inch slate and called them "tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad." Due to his untimely death, Jobs never had a chance to see Amazon's 7-inch Kindle Fire device rapidly rise in ranks to become the world's second best selling tablet behind the iPad, but if he was alive today, would he change his stance?
Technology bigwigs Hewlett-Packard and Dell are keeping a watchful eye on the labor situation in China, the one in which Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, Ltd.) has doled out major wage increases to workers who build Apple devices in an attempt to improve much criticized working conditions, and may end up hiking prices if labor costs go up across the board.
Computer companies need to step up their game. Temkin Group set out to rate the customer experience of 206 large companies across 18 industries, and computer companies didn't exactly impress. Collectively, they fell to the bottom of the pack, receiving the fourth-lowest average, edging ahead of health plans, Internet service providers, and TV service providers.
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