So tomorrow morning the third-generation iPad, which Apple is just calling "the new iPad" (a genuinely bad naming decision that's going to make search results a nightmare for anyone trying to google support questions in six months), officially goes on sale. There are already people camped outside the Fifth Avenue store in New York, and somebody posted a photo of the line outside the Regent Street store in London wrapping around the block. Doors open at 8am tomorrow like always.
I'm not going. I bought an iPad 2 back in July and it still does everything I need it to do, and honestly the retina display pitch, 2048x1536, which is a genuinely absurd number of pixels for a screen you hold in your lap, isn't enough to get me standing in a line for two hours on a Friday morning. Online pre-order stock sold out days ago anyway, so if you didn't reserve one already youre waiting in that line whether you want to or not.
What actually interests me more is that Apple dropped the iPad 2 to $399 for the base 16GB wifi model when they announced the new one last week. Thats a genuinely good price for a tablet that cost $499 six months ago, and I'd bet real money more people end up buying iPad 2s this year than the new one, just because $399 is a psychologically different number than $499 or $499-plus-tax-plus-a-case. Apple is very good at that particular trick.
SXSW wrapped up in Austin a couple days ago and I spent way more time this week reading recaps than actually working, which I am a little embarrassed about. The app everyone kept mentioning was Highlight, this thing that buzzes your phone when someone you sort of know is physically nearby. Depending on which post you read that day its either the future of meeting people or the single most invasive idea anyone's had in months. Path and Instagram both had a moment down there too, though Instagram's been building for a while now so it felt less like a breakout and more like confirmation of something everyone already suspected.
The thing from SXSW that actually stuck with me wasn't an app at all. It was the "Homeless Hotspots" stunt some ad agency ran, where they had homeless residents of Austin wearing Verizon MiFi hotspots and t-shirts with their names and a suggested donation amount, so conference attendees could pay a few bucks to use them as walking wifi hubs. People are furious about it online and I get why. Its genuinely uncomfortable to read about, and I don't think whoever pitched it thought it through even a little. But I'd also bet that in six months nobody remembers Highlight and everybody's still arguing about that one, because it's the kind of thing that actually says something about where we are right now, not just another app icon.
One more small complaint while I'm at it: every single tech blog this week has run some version of a headline calling the new iPad screen "impossible to notice a difference from across the room" as if that's a criticism, when the entire point is that you hold the thing eight inches from your face. I dont know who these people think is using a tablet from across a room. It's a weird complaint dressed up as insight and I've read it four times now from four different sites.
Anyway, if you're one of the people standing outside a store tomorrow morning, enjoy the new screen, I mean that. I'll be over here with my slightly-lower-resolution iPad 2, which cost a hundred dollars less than it would cost you right now, and I don't feel even a little bad about that.