“Disappointing” iPad 3 speculation

I think we see this "disappointing" talk from many of the old-timers because they've spent 25 years writing about specs and that's the lens they use to look at the iPad. "It's not getting a quad-core processor? Android tablets have quad-core chips. How disappointing."<p>They don't care that Apple and third parties ship software that utilizes both cores (iMovie, GarageBand) and that hardly anyone ships Android software that utilizes more than one core, much less all four. They don't care that Apple may have tweaked last year's dual-core chip to get better performance and better battery life. According to them, since 2=2 and 2 &#60; 4, the iPad 2 is a lackluster upgrade and is empirically worse than an Android tablet.<p>Meanwhile, 50 million people could care less what's inside an iPad. All that matters is that the hardware and software work well enough for what they want to do.

If someone created a teleportation device that could beam you to any location within a 1000 miles it would cause mass hysteria. When the next version was released a few years later, extending the range to 2000 miles, it would be "meh".

From one of the reviews of the original iPad linked to in this post:<p><i>The iPad is not the transformational device so many Apple enthusiasts were hoping for. It won’t turn all the content industries upside down, it won’t be your primary computing device, and it’s not even a bigger, better iPhone.</i> (<a href="http://mashable.com/2010/01/27/apple-ipad-downsides/" rel="nofollow">http://mashable.com/2010/01/27/apple-ipad-downsides/</a>)<p>Still seems true to me today.

The pundits also panned the iPhone 4S for the first couple days when it came out. And then, after it'd been out for about three days, they changed their tune and started raving about how great it was.

I'm interested in how the iPad's cameras square with the general sentiment that Apple "does things right or doesn't do them at all". They're not purely for FaceTime, as the general Camera app is also a top level choice, with garbage results.<p>Also, we're told that Apple are "beyond specs" in marketing, yet I've seen several official Apple banners (online and physical) that lead with devices having X cores and Y megapixels.

There are enough fans of the brand and the device that they will lap up even a marginal improvement over an existing product.

Yeah, whatever. Find me one person that doesn't want a super high resolution digital tablet.<p>This stuff was Science-Fiction just 5 years ago. If Apple didn't bring it to use we'd be using desktop GUI computers forever.