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'iPad 3 with Retina Display coming in 2012' rumors won't die

The iPad 2 has only been available for three months but this isn't enough to kill off the rumors that Apple is preparing to release the iPad 3 this year, and that this iPad will feature a 'Retina Display' screen.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

The iPad 2 has only been available for three months but this isn't enough to kill off the rumors that Apple is preparing to release the iPad 3 this year, and that this iPad will feature a 'Retina Display' screen.

This batch of rumors seem to have been kicked off by a TechUnwrapped tipster who came across mention of 1,536 x 2,048 resolution images in the iOS SDK for the new Twitter and Newsstand .framework.

The thinking by Techunwrapped is that because the high-resolution images are found in the Twitter and Newsstand parts of the iOS SDK, which are new to the iOS codebase, it means an iPad 3 will come out at around the same timeframe as iOS 5.

This doesn't make for a number of reasons:

  1. Why release another iPad within months of the iPad 2? I'd understand this knee-jerk move if Apple was under pressure from other tablets in the market, but it's not.
  2. Why restrict the high-resolution 'Retina Display' to certain aspects of iOS (like Twitter and Newsstand) rather than making it available across the whole OS?
  3. Supply chain contacts say that there is no iPad 3 incoming any time soon.
  4. It's not the first time that people have used 'evidence' gathered from the iOS SDK to convince themselves that a 'Retina Display' iPad is imminent. Remember all the speculation before the iPad 2 was released?
  5. A 'Retina Display' panel the size of the iPad's would be a serious number of pixels to move about and it would need some serious hardware. The cost doesn't justify the benefit. Yes, sure, a 'Retina Display' panel might be nice and 'cool' but what's the point when HD movies would run windowed or need upscaling?
  6. How do you explain this?
    15-06-2011-13-47-40.png

I'm putting this rumor firmly into the 'wishful thinking' file.

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