Alex Watson
Apple has followed a yearly update cycle for its key mobile and iPod products, and it has also proven to be quite willing to take a successful product (such as the iPod mini) and to take a chance that changing it will lead to even greater success (as with the iPod nano). Given this, there’s no reason not to expect an iPad 2 around April 2011. The question is, what on earth does Apple do with it?
The first three generations of iPhones show a team that began with a radical product that was very different from the competition and Apple clearly listened to the users in terms of pushing the iPhone to be more successful in the direction it chose. With its metal case, the original iPhone was a thing of beauty, and priced as a premium product – there were problems though, from slight oversights such as the recessed headphone jack to technical limitations such as the lack of 3G. These were largely addressed with the iPhone 3G, and it was the design which took the iPhone mainstream.
The 3GS was really the first ‘app phone’ – while the original iPhone and 3G shared the same CPU and memory, the 3GS featured double the Ram and a faster CPU as Apple, and then independent developers, started to rapidly expand the software it could run.
The iPad has clearly been designed with the benefit of three years of iPhone design knowledge, and it’s hard to see many obvious issues that Apple needs to address. You might be sitting there reading this and saying its lack of Adobe Flash support, USB ports and standard AV outputs all need to be sorted, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and suggest no-one in Cupertino sees those as ‘issues’ that get in the way of the iPad’s mission. Flash can go hang, since Apple likes the fact that content all goes in via iTunes, and if you want to watch stuff on your TV, get an Apple TV and use wireless streaming.
So what might Apple do for iPad 2 then? An obvious start would be to double the amount of Ram. The iPad has only 256MB, half that of the iPhone 4. At the moment, this is a non-issue for iPad users, but once iOS 4.1 is released, complete with multi-tasking, the benefits of more memory will be clear. As welcome as more memory will be, it’s not exactly a benefit most consumers will be easily able to grasp, so while I expect it to happen, it may not even get a mention in the iPad 2 keynote.
The iPad’s lack of a camera is the second obvious area for improvement, especially given how hard the company is pushing FaceTime. We’ve seen it added to iPod touches and now Mac OS X, so a front-facing camera will likely be a key part of iPad 2. Putting a camera on the back is, I think, a decision Apple will have debated a lot more. You could just put one there because ‘you may as well’ – after all, the lens and the sensor are cheap enough, and rival tablets include them. Apple doesn’t do things because that’s what everyone else is doing, though. You’d probably feel quite silly and uncomfortable waving around a device as large as the iPad in order to take a photo, and Apple’s designers care about ergonomics.
My sense of the iPad is that it’s not an ‘always carry’ device in the same way as the iPhone is, and even if people do have it with them, it tends towards a more restrained, more in-depth type of usage. You’re not going to whip out your iPad to take a few pictures, in part because of its size, but also because I don’t think that iPad users get the device out to glance at emails or tweets in the way people do with phones.
We also know that Apple watches the pennies – it wants to make money on its hardware, as its devices are not loss-leaders for its software (that’s a Google thing; for Apple, it’s vice-versa). The latest iPod touch doesn’t have the high-quality camera the iPhone 4 does, for instance, and the camera didn’t make it across to the new iPod nano.
That being said, leaving the iPad without a high-resolution rear-facing camera is essentially leaving the device blind. Every revision of the iPhone has increased the number and accuracy of the device’s sensors, from GPS to an accurate compass. If a camera is going to be added to the iPad, then it’s not, primarily, going to be for taking photos, it’s to give the iPad, and its apps, eyes. Augmented reality, location based services, games, eCommerce – there are many areas where a tablet will benefit from being able to take in information visually.
Will there be a new version of the Apple A4 CPU? Possibly, although getting the Arm technology that it’s based on to the 1GHz it currently runs on took a special hardware R&D effort. Pushing it faster will therefore have a significant development cost, and also have an impact on battery life. Apple could make the leap to a next generation multi-core chip – Arm has the designs – but it depends whether Apple feels the iPad needs to be vastly more powerful. There seems little that’s beyond the iPad right now, but if iOS 4.1 starts to seem a bit slow then that will be a big indicator that a faster chip is coming inside the iPad 2.
Manufacturing issues also need to be weighed up here. Apple has had real problems producing enough iPads to meet worldwide demand (even giving this as a reason for not quite meeting analyst expectations for iPad sales). Consolidating around a CPU that’s easy to make might appeal.
If the iPad had a higher resolution screen there might also be some call for a quicker CPU. In the company’s most recent earnings call Steve Jobs caustically said: ‘[7in screens are] not enough for good tablet apps. You’d also need to include sandpaper so people could make their fingers smaller. We think 10in screen size is minimum to create great tablet apps.’ We’re not going to see a smaller iPad anytime soon – and we might not also see a higher resolution one either.
The iPhone’s screen resolution has changed only once in its three-year lifespan, and it has created a lot of work for app developers. If you have an iPhone 4, you’ll already know that even now, several months into its lifespan, not every app has been re-developed for its Retina display. For the iPad, my sense is that apps are even more important to the device – out of the box, it does less than the iPhone – and so while Apple won’t want to think of itself as beholden to app developers, the reality may be that it makes more sense to go cautiously when it comes to fragmenting the iPad as a platform.
