<%= "Michael Frederick" -%>

The iPad 3 will be revolutionary. You don't have to be a genius to figure that out. It might not be as evolutionary as the original iPad or iPhone was, but I have no doubt it will be anything short of amazing.

A rumor about the LCD of the iPad 3 has been circulating for a while now (actually, it originated prior to the release of the iPad 2). The rumor suggests that the next generation iPad will come equipped with a higher-resolution 2048x1536 retina display. If the rumors are true and the iPad 3 does in fact have a retina display, it could be a turning point in the market for LCD displays.

You may have noticed that the supposed resolution of the iPad 3 (2048x1536) is higher than that of HDTVs (1920x1080). Since the release of the HDTV, there has been little innovation in the TV market (3D TVs? Eh, no thanks). Hopefully Apple will change that with the TV they are making, but I'll leave that topic for the future. None of the TV manufacturers have taken the innitiatve to create a for a TV that has a resolution higher than 1920x1080 (aka HD). It is easy to think HD is a great standard when you have nothing to compare it to. Spend a few days working on a 27" iMac and you'll know better. 

Part of the problem is that the average consumer doesn't really understand pixel densities or dimensions and so there has been little demand for something greater than HD. If you use a computer professionally you probably know better. It has always really bugged me that my computer monitors are smaller than my TV and yet they have higher resolutions.  A retina display would give the iPad a higher quality, clearer screen than the 50" HDTVs that you can find at Best Buy today. That is absurd. I am a bit skeptical on whether or not Apple will be able to pull off such a screen in the next 6 months. Part of the problem is that they rely on 3rd party manufacturers like Samsung to mass produce the LCD units and no manufacturer has mass-produced such a screen in the past. Battery life would be another issue as I'm sure a screen like that would be power hungry. We'll leave the details up to Apple.

If the iPad 3 does in fact comes equipped with a retina display, consumers are going to start looking down at their HDTVs. TV manfucturers are going to have to step up their game and release TVs with resolutions much higher than the HD standard. But there is more to it than that. High resolution TVs would mean that cable providers would have to provide channels at qualities higher than HD. It would also mean that Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and other content providers would have to start providing movies and other downloadable content in qualities that are higher than HD. If you haven't checked the size of a HD movie file, it's large. So large that I only keep SD movies on my computer and leave the HD ones on an external hard drive. If you have ever streamed an HD movie, you might have noticed that the movie can play faster than it can download. Higher resolution movies would mean even greater file sizes. If you check out the list of the 15 countries with the fastest internet, you will notice the United States didn't make the list. That is pretty terrible when you consider the fact that companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft are based out of the United States. My point here is that HD files are already too large for our current internet speeds. We need Google Fiber and Verizon Fios to spread across the country before we can handle HDx2.

Needless to say, it would be a slow process moving towards supporting content for such a high resolution display. Don't get me wrong, I would be ecstatic to have a retina iPad, it just seems like the markets surrounding the iPad would have some catching up to do.

Update

Just a couple of days after I wrote this, MacRumors reported that the next generation of Macbook Pro could be 2880x1800. It looks like the entire line of Apple products could end up with retina displays.