Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
Apple has been alternating their phone releases between major CPU/GPU/RAM improvements with minor hardware adjustments and major hardware enhancements/additions with minor CPU/GPU improvements:
1) iPhone 3G added 3G, a major usability feature
2) iPhone 3GS bumped up the CPU/GPU substantially and doubled the RAM (although it also improved for camera/video, IMO this is a more secondary feature)
3) iPhone 4 slightly improved the CPU/GPU specs, while adding retina display, more motion controls, dual cameras, and glass display
4) iPhone 4S massively improved the CPU/GPU specs
All along the cellular and camera specs have been improving, but that's a pretty natural benefit of the industry's improvement cadence, unlike the SoC, display type, extra peripherals, etc which are more explicit design decisions.
This fits in line with what's basically a standard tick-tock schedule for Apple's SoCs and have been over several iterations now. Since iPhone and iPad are using the same SoCs it stands to reason that iPad will follow similarly. So I fully expect that iPad 3 will only have moderate improvements to its SoC via a shrink, although this could include more CPU cores w/o changing cache or bandwidth (which doesn't actually take up that much space because Cortex-A9 cores are tiny). To offset this, ie actually get people to buy it, Apple will need to improve the other hardware. So a 2048x1536 display makes perfect sense. It's not like this is some massive new precedent either. 1024x768 is getting small by 2012's tablet standards, just like 480x320 was small by 2009 standards.
1) iPhone 3G added 3G, a major usability feature
2) iPhone 3GS bumped up the CPU/GPU substantially and doubled the RAM (although it also improved for camera/video, IMO this is a more secondary feature)
3) iPhone 4 slightly improved the CPU/GPU specs, while adding retina display, more motion controls, dual cameras, and glass display
4) iPhone 4S massively improved the CPU/GPU specs
All along the cellular and camera specs have been improving, but that's a pretty natural benefit of the industry's improvement cadence, unlike the SoC, display type, extra peripherals, etc which are more explicit design decisions.
This fits in line with what's basically a standard tick-tock schedule for Apple's SoCs and have been over several iterations now. Since iPhone and iPad are using the same SoCs it stands to reason that iPad will follow similarly. So I fully expect that iPad 3 will only have moderate improvements to its SoC via a shrink, although this could include more CPU cores w/o changing cache or bandwidth (which doesn't actually take up that much space because Cortex-A9 cores are tiny). To offset this, ie actually get people to buy it, Apple will need to improve the other hardware. So a 2048x1536 display makes perfect sense. It's not like this is some massive new precedent either. 1024x768 is getting small by 2012's tablet standards, just like 480x320 was small by 2009 standards.
