It is fairly surprising. There's no doubt Apple are prototyping such an iPad and that it will get here eventually, but even with this news, I'm still mildly skeptical Apple can pull it off for the iPad 3.

It does make things a lot easier for developers that it's an exact quadrupling of the screen resolution, but this comes at a penalty of having to push around four times as many pixels. Bear in mind that this resolution is larger than the resolution of any display Apple have ever shipped - and they are doing it on one of their least powerful devices.

It's not just the raw processing power either. It makes things easier for app producers in one way, but it makes it harder in another way. How do you suppose graphic designers are going to cope when they have to design content for screens charger than the computer they are designing on? How do you expect developers to work on laptops when they can only show a small section of the app at any one time?

Some of these things are of course solvable by increasing the resolution of the Mac displays as well. This is also on the cards, as evidenced by HiDPI artwork in the new Messages beta. But most of the current version of OS X isn't currently decked out for HiDPI yet.

There's also the cost consideration. This will raise the cost to produce iPads considerably. Why would Apple do that? iPad 2s are currently selling just about as fast as Apple can make them, and they are still vastly outselling the competition. Apple don't need to throw money away by reducing their margins yet. They can produce a slightly improved iPad 2S and still stay ahead of everybody else.

My guess would be that HiDPI Macs will be introduced alongside Mountain Lion as a flagship feature. Once that's seen some market penetration, they can introduce the iPad 4 or whatever with the tools in place to properly support them.

this website might harm your computer

To be fair, it does host Microsoft software ;)

how is apple going to get me to upgrade it?

Why do you think that's a priority for Apple? The number of people who don't have an iPad is far greater than the number of people who do. The more people using an iPad of any version means more money for them through iTunes, the App Store, etc.

If you look at their historical behaviour, they tend to support devices for at least a couple of major iOS revisions. When the iPad 1 was first launched, it was running iOS 3.2. They released iOS 4.2 towards the end of the year, and they've not long released iOS 5.0. Presumably iOS 6 won't run on your iPad.

When iOS 6 is released, people with iPad 2s and 3s will upgrade. When enough of them have upgraded, developers will start to drop support for iOS 5.0. That's when it will start affecting you - there will be apps you won't be able to run, updates to your existing apps won't install, your options will slowly become more and more limited.

Apple also removes support for legacy versions of iOS from their SDK fairly quickly too, so when iOS 7 rolls out, all the developers that have been supporting you won't have the choice any more. At that point, which is probably 2-3 years away, you'll get very little out of the App Store, several of your existing apps will have stopped working, and you'll be eyeing up the iPad 4 or 5.

Apple's business model doesn't rely on people upgrading every year or two. It's true, vast numbers of people do so, but they can quite happily sell new devices to newcomers without relying on you upgrading.

Chiming in here to agree with spac.

This is another annoying grey area with Apple's rules. When you submit an app to the App Store, it asks you if you use encryption, and if you do, you have to have an export license from the USA government. I don't believe there's anything that specifically addresses SSL/TLS in Apple's documentation. If you contact Apple, they usually tell you that you need a license for it, even if you use the features built into iOS. If you don't contact Apple and say that you don't use encryption, sometimes you can get through the approval process. I think it's a case of the Apple employees who you contact playing it safe while reviewers can be a bit sloppy.

I've personally been involved with an app that transmits personal information including GPS coordinates, names and telephone numbers, and it does so without using SSL/TLS for precisely this reason - the company wanted to release as quickly as possible without waiting to get an export license. I didn't like that, but unfortunately, the decision was out of my hands.

I think the best thing Apple could do, assuming that there is no way around the law, is to make it more clear to developers that this is required in their rules, to automatically scan apps for SSL/TLS use to reject apps without a license consistently, and to reject apps that don't use SSL/TLS to transmit personal information.

There's a big difference between threats or statements that might endanger the safety of others and someone stating their feelings towards a religious figure.

Okay, so let's use an example other than that. The USA invented the concept of an illegal number.

I find it hard to believe they would do something as stupid as introducing a third chipset (Intel, A4/A5, ARM)

Apple didn't design the A4 from scratch. They licensed ARM. The A4 and A5 are ARM processors. What you are seeing is Apple ensuring that their own operating system runs on their own processors. Still sound stupid?

Famous Open Source project leadership is 99.9% male. It IS news, what other distro has woman leading?

Albinos are even rarer project leaders than women. If an albino happened to become project leader of a "famous" open source project, would you expect to see similar "Holy shit, an albino!" news stories with prominent mention of it in headlines? I don't think that would happen. Certainly in the comments, but not in the headline. This isn't just about how rare female project leaders are.

it gives them confirmation that government no longer supports that viewpoint

What more confirmation do you need from the government than the fact that they changed the law so it is no longer illegal?

A pardon is pointless posturing. It doesn't change anything. Changing the law was what they needed to do, and they already did it.

The Skype app crashes all the time, and it's almost always iOS's fault. If you go through the diagnostic logs, you'll see that almost every time that Skype "crashed" it's because it's either using "too much memory" or because it "didn't respond fast enough."

I wouldn't call that iOS' "fault". Mobile devices have very limited resources. This isn't like a desktop machine where you've got several gigabytes of memory to play with. If an application is badly behaved and it uses too much memory, that has an effect on the rest of the system. There's only so much memory to go around. Also, if using lots of memory becomes normalised, there's pressure to add more memory to newer models, which will result in lower battery life.

I'm an app developer, and if I ever see that one of my projects is killed for not responding fast enough, I know that there's something very, very wrong somewhere. Usually it's a sign that a junior developer decided to do something processor or network intensive synchronously on the main thread, which is a big mistake. You do what is necessary to get an interface up, and you push everything expensive into the background and update the UI when it finishes. There's no excuse for an application not responding quickly enough, it's easy to do.

If you really think Skype is not at fault, how do you explain the fact that it crashes all the time on other platforms as well?

iOS is very aggressive in killing misbehaving apps, while Android seems content to let them carry on until it simply can't continue. I wonder how much of the difference can be attributed to Android giving apps more leeway rather than a difference in app quality?

On a side note, that was a horribly written article. It sounded like somebody who wasn't familiar with technology was repeating something they didn't understand. GPS, cameras, and language support can crash apps? What?