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Apple releases Ipad 3

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Re: Apple releases Ipad 3

#151

Post by brudgers »

ugh wrote: post #113
samstave wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what happened to me after I bought a MyTouch 4G which allowed wifi hotspotting for my laptop. While I was not charged overage fees, my data rate was crippled to 57Kbps. The thing sits in the drawer and I NEVER use it because its useless. I am paying $100 a month for it. They want $400!!! to cancel it. Fuck these carriers.

I’m not really sure why you are angry at the carriers. Knowing about the limits and how much you need is kinda your job. I know that I need at least half a terabyte per month when I’m using my laptop and I know to always check how much bandwidth I can get from the carriers. Your responsibility.

I think anger is justified to the degree the plan is structured to cost significantly more than a reasonable person would expect - i.e. caveat emptor should not be the approach of reputable companies.

While it is perhaps somewhat legitimate to criticize an HN'er for failing to calculate the rate at which a data plan will be consumed at a given bandwidth, it is of questionable appropriateness in regard to the general public.

Re: Apple releases Ipad 3

#152

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

samstave wrote: post #68
kacy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you could legitimately use 2GB by simply purchasing a movie that they discussed in the presentation. A 720p version of "Drive" on iTunes is 3.17GB. Soon it will be upgraded to 1080p, which would be at /least/ 5GB. That's at least $50 in data for one movie, assuming the data plans stay the same.

Someone needs to do exactly this, then sue the balls off these carriers for such draconian plans and rates.

Go for it!

Re: Apple releases Ipad 3

#153

Post by rdl »

ugh wrote: post #120
joejohnson wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Apple's definition of a retina display, the MacBook Pros are already very close: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/03/01/retina-display-macs-ipads-and... You hold your laptop significantly farther from your face than an iPad, thus a lower PPI is sufficient. However, a 9.7" display with the iPad's PPI is getting close to acceptable sizes for small laptops, like the 13" MacBook Pros.

But the other thing is quality. Viewing angles and color gamut tends to be horrible on laptops. Not so on the iPad.

There was a single plant which made big laptop IPS panels (15-17") which got shut down; they were used in IBM FlexView on the Lenovos up to the T60p (2006). IPS is still rare between iPad size and small high-end monitor size (20").

I'm still sad that even the MBP 17 comes with a 6-bit PVA panel. It's a nice panel, but dramatically inferior to an 8 or 10 bit IPS.

Re: Apple releases Ipad 3

#154

Post by woobar »

jevinskie wrote: post #18

No mention of bumping the RAM from 512 MB to 1 GB. Even my TF101 Tegra 2 tablet has 1 GB of RAM. I wonder how much the 4x larger retina display assets will increase RAM usage. Edit: I guess it does have 1 GB of RAM. http://chronicwire.com/the-ipad-3-has-1gb-of-ram

The comparison to the amount of RAM in TF101 doesn't make any sense. It runs different software.

Re: Apple releases Ipad 3

#155

Post by schiffern »

tomkarlo wrote: post #85
guelo wrote: post #60

The world of LCD panels baffles me. For some reason Apple can sell an iPad with a 2048x1536 IPS screen for $500 but your average $1,000 laptop comes with a crappy 1366x768 TFT screen or maybe 1920x1080 if you're lucky.

I believe folks have already seen evidence in OSX that Apple will be doing "retina" displays for laptops and desktops. Continued movement towards a resolution-independent OS.

Actually, I see this as the abandonment of resolution independence. Apple has always been about pixel-perfect graphics, and that's quite hard to do with vector assets. Fonts have to have all sorts of hinting to get single-pixel risers and joins to look decent. That's one of the reasons that fonts are so costly – now imagine that all your graphics require that level of care. Making pixel-perfect "@2x" graphics is much easier.

Then again, maybe those hints are only necessary because of the limitations of low resolution displays. If each pixel is barely large enough to be discerned by the naked eye, single-pixel accuracy may not matter so much. Clearly resolution independence is still desirable for accessibility reasons, even at the end of the pixel density road.

Re: Apple releases Ipad 3

#156

Post by lepht »

guyzero wrote: post #82
Aloisius wrote: post #10

It should be noted that the limited data plans for both AT&T and Verizon mean that at the max 4G speed of 73 Mbps, you could use all your bandwidth for the entire month in less than three and a half minutes (2 GB plan). The overages of $10/GB per month on both services mean once you go over your plan, you'll be looking at a little over $5/minute in new charges. It is possible (though highly unlikely) to rack up over…

Let's not be silly. Existing LTE phones on Verizon get a real-world top performance in the 20Mbps range. Now, that's great and all, but no one will ever get even 50% of what's basically the signaling rate of 73Mbps. Also, your download patterns are unlikely to change a lot. It'll still be email, web surfing and some youtube. LTE makes netflix possible while not on wifi, but that's about the most data-hungry thing an…

Sooo... 25 minutes of watching Netflix then?

Re: Apple releases Ipad 3

#158

Post by tybris »

Aloisius wrote: post #10

It should be noted that the limited data plans for both AT&T and Verizon mean that at the max 4G speed of 73 Mbps, you could use all your bandwidth for the entire month in less than three and a half minutes (2 GB plan). The overages of $10/GB per month on both services mean once you go over your plan, you'll be looking at a little over $5/minute in new charges. It is possible (though highly unlikely) to rack up over…

Apple should really use their vast piles of cash to buy one of the major carriers.

Re: Apple releases Ipad 3

#159

Post by ugh »

veyron wrote: post #149
ugh wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not really sure why you are angry at the carriers. Knowing about the limits and how much you need is kinda your job. I know that I need at least half a terabyte per month when I’m using my laptop and I know to always check how much bandwidth I can get from the carriers. Your responsibility.

What are your thoughts about AT&T crippling unlimited data customers going over a specified limit (iirc 3GB)?

Depends. I don’t care about it if it’s clearly stated just how much bandwidth you get. I’m not in the US but in Germany carriers will often tell you they have unlimited flatrate plans but also state that if you go above a certain bandwidth use you will be throttled to GPRS speeds. I have no problem with that. It depends on how clearly it’s communicated.

I can see how others may be misled by that marketing, though, so it’s no super great. No reason to get angry, just reason for concern. Some German carriers are much more upfront about that (they might say “1GB of data, throttled to GPRS speeds above that”) and I obviously prefer that kind of marketing. It’s less confusing and more honest.

Re: Apple releases Ipad 3

#160

Post by kenrikm »

jevinskie wrote: post #66
kenrikm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a test a 1024x768 PNG vs the Same PNG at 2048x1536. 299k vs 664k. So for raster images it more than doubles the footprint, however if you use vector assets there should be little impact.

But you don't store compressed PNGs in RAM for display by the GPU. Does the GPU even support lossless texture compression? I would imagine it supports lossy texture compression. Edit: It is also interesting to see that the ~ 2x increase in the size of the PNG can be explained by PNG's run length encoding. When you double the pixels in each direction, RLE should readily compress the horizontal pixel replication but no…

It seems Apple uses a "modified" png standard for iOS (enabled by default) that compresses the images even more when they are added to the App Bundle. http://iphonedevwiki.net/index.php/CgBI_file_format#Decoding
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