Okay so it's been a week since the new iPad came out (March 16th, if you were living under a rock, or like me, at work and unable to get to a store until that evening) and I've had one sitting on my desk for a few days now courtesy of my brother-in-law who upgrades every single year no matter what and then hands the old one down. This time the "old one" being handed down is an iPad 2 that's about ten months old, which tells you something about how that guy manages money, but anyway.
First thing: the name. Apple did not call this thing the iPad 3. They called it "the new iPad." Just that. I get why, marketing-wise, they want something that ages gracefully instead of getting to "iPad 7" and sounding like a printer model, but do you have any idea how annoying this is going to be in about fourteen months when there's a NEWER new iPad and everyone on every forum has to type out "the 2012 new iPad" or "new iPad (the first one)" like we're doing citations. I complain about this and my brother-in-law just shrugged and said "everyone already calls it the iPad 3 anyway," which, yeah, fair, that's exactly what's going to happen, Apple's naming scheme is going to get quietly overruled by the entire internet within a month.
The screen though. I'll give them this one without any snark at all. The Retina display is not a marketing word this time, its 2048x1536, which is more pixels than my parents' HDTV in the living room, and reading actual text on it is a genuinely different experience than the iPad 2. Not "oh that's nicer" different. More like the first time I saw a Kindle Paperwhite prototype at a friend's place and thought paper itself was in trouble. Photos in the Photos app look like something is wrong with your old iPad in retrospect, which is a weird feeling, being retroactively disappointed in a device you were perfectly happy with six days ago.
Now the complaint, because there's always a complaint. This thing runs warm. Not "warm like a laptop on your knees," but noticeably warmer than the iPad 2 got, especially if you're doing anything graphics-heavy or its charging while you use it. I had it propped up watching a video with the charger plugged in Monday night and the back edge, right around where the battery sits, got genuinely toasty, enough that I moved it off my leg. There's already chatter starting about this online and I suspect by the weekend there'll be a dozen blog posts with thermal camera photos of the thing glowing like a stove element. Probably fine! Probably just the LTE radio and that bigger battery they needed to push the Retina screen. But it's the first iPad where I'd think twice about leaving it charging under a pillow or whatever, which past iPads never made me think about at all.
Also can we talk about the battery itself for a second, because it's a 42.5 watt-hour battery, almost 70% bigger than the iPad 2's, just to get the same ten-hour runtime while pushing four times the pixels and running LTE. That's an enormous battery to cram into something this thin. Genuinely impressive engineering, even if the side effect is a slightly heavier tablet and apparently some extra heat to deal with.
Am I buying one? Probably not this month, not on a freelance writer's budget, the cheapest one is $499 and the LTE models start at $629 which is a whole lot of a whole lot for a thing my brother-in-law is going to hand me a replacement for by next spring anyway. I'll just keep borrowing his. Works out well for both of us honestly, he gets an excuse to buy the new thing and I get to try it without touching my bank account.