Today at Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) the company refreshed it’s lineup of laptop computers. The company also introduced a brand new addition to the lineup which will surely set the performance and feature bar for future Ultrabooks. Apple annoyingly is calling this the ‘Macbook Pro with retina display’, despite that it is smaller, lighter, and uses a totally different chassis than the Macbook Pro (it’s almost as thin as the MacBook Air, actually). The screen is 15.4″ and a whopping 2880×1800 resolution, but the unit is still fairly light at 2.02kg and thin at 18mm. Step inside to learn everything there is to know about Apple’s new MacBook Pro with retina display.

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ASUS could be in trouble with those Zenbooks. LG with the Xnote. The Acer S7, Gigabyte X11, Dell XPS and others could be at risk too because Apple just secured a patent on a wedge design.

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It looks like Ultrabooks may indeed be catching Apple’s attention. Bloomberg reports that Apple will be launching refreshed versions of the MacBook Pro which will use Ivy Bridge processors, have a slimmer body, high resolution retina display, and include “flash memory to cut startup times and extend battery life”. Read the full story

If Apple launches a 15” MacBook Air this spring it will send a strong message to everyone that the time for traditional laptop designs is coming to an end. A report at Apple Insider says it’s likely to happen. Personally, I’m not surprised at all. We’ve already seen Samsung and Acer launch 15” ultra-thins and if the Ultrabook methodology is as cheap as I think it is, traditional style laptops for gamers could get more niche, and more expensive. The same will be true of traditional MacBook Pro.

A launch of the new MacBook Air models hinges on Intel’s Ivy Bridge platform availability so the reported ‘April’ launch could be well towards the end of April with devices being available in May although with Ultrabooks also lining up to use the platform, it will be interesting to see who get’s the first batch.

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Well this is odd. No doubt you’ve heard by now that Apple has just announced the latest refresh of the iPad, but for some reason they aren’t calling it the ‘iPad 3’. This update includes nothing particularly revolutionary, but that’s not to say that they didn’t just up the bar.

See the new iPad tracking page in our mobile product database for full specifications, links, gallery, and more.

Everything major added to the ‘new’ iPad can be summed up in one sentence: it’s got 4G LTE, a 2048×1536 ‘retina’ display, an improved backside-illuminated 5MP rear camera, and an updated A5X chip which has quad-core graphics. Doesn’t sound like all that much really, right?

Why Not iPad 3?

Maybe that’s why Apple isn’t calling this the ‘iPad 3’. I’ve scoured the official marketing material and haven’t found one mention of ‘iPad 3’. Instead, Apple is insistent in using the term ‘the new iPad’. This is a really weird move because no doubt ‘iPad 3’ has way more SEO value than ‘new iPad’. For months those in the tech industry have been exclusively talking about this release as the ‘iPad 3’, but Apple is clearly avoiding that name. Why?

Maybe Apple doesn’t think that the new iPad is deserving of the iPad 3 title? While the retina display a pretty amazing feat which currently outclasses any other tablet on the market (and likely will for the next year), iOS wasn’t overhauled, and the improvements to the CPU, camera, and data options were pretty much demanded by the market at this point. Maybe Apple is finding it tough to follow their own act over the last few years of taking the market (and customers) by storm with impressive additions to the mobile ecosystem.

The closest mention of iPad 3 that I could find is contained in a summary paragraph about the new iPad on Apple’s website:

Pick up the new iPad and suddenly, it’s clear. You’re actually touching your photos, reading a book, playing the piano. Nothing comes between you and what you love. To make that hands-on experience even better, we made the fundamental elements of iPad better — the display, the camera, the wireless connection. All of which makes the new, third-generation iPad capable of so much more than you ever imagined. [my emphasis]

I called out Samsung just the other week for causing senseless customer confusion with the nomenclature of the Galaxy Tab series. I have to do the same thing for Apple and the new iPad. If this release is being called ‘the new iPad’, what happens when the next model comes out? Will the new iPad become ‘the old iPad’? Or maybe the next model will be ‘the newer iPad’, then followed by ‘the newest iPad’. If Apple is really going to stick with ‘the new iPad’ as the name for the current release, they’d better be ready for some confused customer support calls down the line — “Yeah I’ve got a problem with my new iPad,” says the customer. “Are you talking about the old new iPad, or the latest new iPad?” goes the customer support rep.

And to get back to the SEO point… when the next iPad is released, searches for ‘new iPad’ are going to turn up results for the model that was just released, rather than whatever new model Apple releases in the future.

All of this could simply be avoided by calling it the iPad 3. Of course, this probably isn’t news to Apple. I’m willing to bet they had more than one marketing meeting about this, and somehow they came to the conclusion that ‘the new iPad’ was the best name. Exactly what benefits this could have are beyond me at the moment. Hypotheses are welcome in the comments below.

No Siri on the new iPad?

An updated A5X CPU, 4G LTE, improved camera — we could say we saw this all coming. But there’s no Siri! If one thing seemed for sure for the new iPad, it was integration with Siri. Oddly, Apple has left Siri out of the new iPad, meaning that the iPhone 4S is still the exclusive vehicle for the virtual personal assistant. Apple did say that Siri was in beta when they announced it for the iPhone 4S, and it seems it will remain that way until Apple decides to deploy it to other devices. Maybe Apple isn’t ready for the volume of Siri queries that would accompany millions of new iPads?

A sliver of Siri did make it into the new iPad — as with the iPhone 4S, you can use the dictate button on the keyboard to speak and your voice will be converted to text. Why a mere sub-routine made it to the new iPad rather than the whole thing is perhaps even more confusing than if there was no Siri functionality at all. Without Siri, new iPad users won’t be able to send messages, emails, check the weather, check their calendars, set alarms, and more, via voice command.

Why the Huge Battery?

So what’s up with that battery? 42.5Wh means nothing to most people but to me it means that Apple have just secured some amazing battery technology. You simply can’t increase a battery capacity by 70% and keep the same weight without doing something special. A few thoughts come to mind. Firstly, this could be a breakthrough in battery technology that has significant impact on the mobile ecosystem. 42.5Wh in a product that weighs 652gm? I’ve never seen anything get close to that.

Expect the MacBook Air to get a huge battery life increase based on this.

The problem is that Apple may well have just locked-up the most significant advance in mobile technology ever. If they haven’t bought the company already they will have negotiated a deal for supply of batteries for all mobile products. It includes iPhone, iPod, MBA and MacBook. If there are patents on the technology, where does that leave alternative product suppliers?

There’s another issue here too. Why does the new iPad need a 70% bigger battery for the same battery life? Apple are quoting 10hrs for Wi-Fi usage so it’s nothing to do with LTE. Is the A5X that much bigger amore powerful? I’m suspecting much bigger clockrates and many more cores across the CPU and GPU resulting in this huge increase in power requirements. Or is it the display? The display controller is now driving 4 times the number of pixels.

We’ll be looking for confirmation of the 42.5wh battery in teardowns and keeping an eye on heat and battery life.

Right on cue with recent reports from “insiders” and “people familiar with the matter”, Apple has gone ahead and sent out invitations to media outlets announcing a March 7th media event where the company will unveil the iPad 3.

Of course Apple had to announce it in the middle of one of the largest annual mobile tech trade shows, Mobile World Congres, which is going on right this very moment in Barcelona. Most major TV news outlets in the US are likely to be entirely unaware of the event, but I’m willing to bet there will be several mentions of Apple’s event announcement (read that again: you’ll see news covering an event announcement rather than a huge event in itself, just because the announcement is from Apple).

To honor the folks that, no doubt, spent a good deal of time and trouble preparing and reporting on all of happenings at MWC (from those who designed devices, to PR people, marketers, journalists, etc.), I’m going to open this post first with a list of all the exciting stuff we’ve seen so far from MWC. If you want coverage about Apple’s event announcement, it’s tucked neatly away at the end of this article.

Exciting Announcements from MWC!

• Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 – Quad Core Krait Demo
• ASUS Padfone 2012. Hands-on with Phone, Dock and James Bond Pen!
• Mirasol Transflective Displays. Faster, Brighter, Touch-Enabled. (Product Update Video)
• Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Brings Digital Inking and Photoshop to the Big Screen!
• Previously Leaked Asus Transformer 300 Revealed, Asus Taking the Transformer Prime Mainstream?

And now on to your regularly scheduled content:

The high resolution iPad 3 retina display (2048×1536), that made the rounds a little more than a week ago, has all but been confirmed at this point; any iPad original or iPad 2 owner will be able to tell you that the text and icons as seen on the iPad shown in the invite is far sharper than that of any iPad released thus far.

Apple’s typical clever symbolism is also present in the invite photo; you can see the date on the calendar icon as March 7th, the location with the map icon is (as always) Apple’s famous 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino address (though the event is actually going to be at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), and the Keynote icon is obviously a reference to the presentation that will be given. The time for the event is 10 AM PST (1PM EST) as usual.

We don’t know much more about the iPad 3 than the high-resolution display and that it will have a similar case to the iPad 2 (possibly slightly thicker). Some accounts say it will be running a new quad-core A6 CPU, while others contest that it will be an updated dual-core ‘A5X’. I speculated back in July of 2011 that the iPad 3 would be the first iPad to include 4G LTE and I’m still sticking with it. I also recently prepared a list of what Apple would need to include in the iPad 3 for me to justify adding a ‘third device’ to my life — I doubt we’ll see much of what’s on the list, but you never know!

If you’re looking for rampant speculation (always popular with Apple topics), let’s take the invitation text, “We have something you really have to see. And touch,” out on a ridiculous limb: Something we have to see? Well, we wouldn’t be able to tell if it is a glasses-free 3D display from a 2D photo, so perhaps that is in store in addition to the retina display? And something we have to touch? Maybe Apple has come up with some revolutionary tactile display technology that allows you to ‘feel’ on screen elements?

In all likelihood, this will be an incremental increase, without anything too wild, which will further solidify the leading tablet on the market.

For the last few weeks photos of purported prototype iPad 3 displays were floating around the web. Now, MacRumors actually got their hands on one and actually examined it under a microscope to confirm the resolution.

Their findings show pretty conclusively that the screen has twice the pixel density as the screen on the iPad and iPad 2:

The original iPad and iPad 2 both have a 9.7″ 1024×768 IPS display with a total of 786,432 pixels at 130.61 PPI. At twice the density, the screen that MacRumors got their hands on would be 2048×1536 (presumably also IPS), which amounts to a whopping 3,145,728 pixels at 261.22 PPI. Compare this to 1080p HDTV resolution which is 1920×1080 and 2,073,600 pixels total. Although this screen has an impressive resolution, it’s actually not all that pixel dense. The iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S retina screen is 960×640 at 329.65 PPI.

Doubling the size of the screen on the iPad will do a lot for the aesthetics of the UI. Going from an iPhone 4S screen to the current-generation iPad screen really reveals how much sharper the iPhone’s screen is. I’ve heard a number of people say that the iPad would make a far better e-Reader if it had a more pixel-dense screen.

Rumors about a retina display on the iPad have been around ever since the original iPad launched. But is this really the iPad 3’s screen? I trust that the folks at MacRumors have been able to correctly identify this as an iPad screen, but are we sure it’s for the iPad 3? We’ve seen lots of evidence about of Apple products attributed to prototype parts that may or may not ever make it into the final product. Recall all the rumors surrounding the ‘iPhone 5’ (which turned out to be the iPhone 4S) launch. It’s even possible that this particular screen is part of ongoing work on the iPad 4.

For now, all we know for certain is that this is an iPad screen, and it’s definitely 2048×1536. Will it make it onto the iPad 3? Apple is expected to announce the iPad 3 at the beginning of next month… only time will tell.

Apple now have a series of patents for the MacBook Air ‘ornamental design’ and we’re wondering just how much this could impact Ultrabook design in the future. When you see approvals for layouts such as the one below, you have to wonder!

Yes, you’re looking at a featureless rectangle that was approved two days ago as Patent US D654072.

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