The Apple iPad 2 Review
by Brian Klug, Anand Lal Shimpi & Vivek Gowri on March 19, 2011 8:01 PM ESTIndustrial Design & The Future
The original iPad was a device followed by so much hype and anticipation that inevitably, upon launch, it became one of the most polarizing products to launch in the last few years. It also became a huge hit, infusing life into the previously flatlining tablet market, and that's where the iPad 2 comes in.
The industrial design changes are very much in line with what we saw with the 4th generation Apple handhelds. The design language used for the iPhone 3G/3G-S and iPod touch 2G/3G was based on accelerating curvature continuity (known as G3 continuity in industrial design terminology), in contrast to the tangentially continuous design (G1 continuity) found on the original iPhone. What this meant, basically, is that the first iPhone had a relatively flat design, whereas the 3G/3G-S had a gently crowned back that aimed to fit the contour of one's hand.
The original iPad foretold the future of Apple's design language, using a similarly curved back but dumping the blended G3 curvature on the sides for hard edges that met the front face in a perpendicular manner. The iPhone 4 went a step further, with a flat back in addition to the sides. The front profile kept the same rounded corners that every other Apple device has, but the top and side cross-sections end up being rectangles, with all four faces meeting perpendicularly. I'm thinking Apple chose to do this to accomplish two things: being able to use glass for both the front and back faces, as well as to give the iPhone line some separation from the iPod and iPad lines.
The fourth generation iPod touch reaffirmed the notion that Apple was moving back to flatter, more rectangular designs. The use of aluminum instead of glass meant that there wasn't a need for a completely flat back; the predominantly flat back of the iPod tapers to meet the front face at the edges using a short continuous curve.
After seeing the newest iPod touch, I guessed that the second generation iPad would carry rather similar lines. I definitely didn't expect the iPad 2 to be so thin, but overall, it was pretty much in line with what I was expecting.
Another significant aspect to the industrial design changes is the addition of a white-bezeled iPad. The back of both black and white models are the usual anodized aluminum, though the texture of the anodizing on the iPad 2 (as well as the latest MacBook Pros) seems to be a different, smoother one than on previous aluminum Apple devices. Apple seemed to have moved to black bezels on almost all of its products, other than the vaporware-esque white iPhone 4, but between the iPad 2 shipping in white and a promised spring release for the white iPhone 4, it shows that Apple is trending back towards white devices.
The interesting question to ask here is how much we can read into Apple's future designs given the iPad 2, and unfortunately, that isn't a whole lot. It's always difficult to tell with Apple, but it wouldn't surprise me if the iPhone 5 ended up using a very similar design to the iPhone 4. Since the antenna problem is mostly solved (see the antenna diversity on the Verizon iPhone 4), Apple probably doesn't need to do a whole lot to the design for the next generation iPhone. Other than the signal attenuation issues, the iPhone 4 was an amazing piece of hardware, one that Apple spent a lot of money developing. It doesn't make sense for them to turn around and dump it on another ground-up redesign, especially when the 4 is still very competitive from a hardware standpoint. And at this point, I doubt they would focus so much on releasing the white iPhone in spring if they weren't planning on using a very similar chassis for the iPhone 5 that should launch in June.
Given past history, if the iPhone doesn't get a redesign, neither will the iPod touch. Both of the generation 5 handhelds will probably get some form of the A5 SoC, potentially underclocked like the A4 in the iPhone 4. What is more difficult to predict is the 3rd generation iPad. Since we don't really have an established cadence for the iPad, it's hard to say anything about the iPad 3 without reading too much into the iPad 2 launch. I'd say its safe to assume there will be a 6th generation Apple SoC (presumably named the A6), and if I was a betting man, my money would be on at least some form of redesign or at least an ID refresh, but again, with Apple, you really never know.
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Azethoth - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
No! 22 seconds is not fast enough. That is 20 seconds wasted each time you do that in a day.benonemusic - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
Excellent writing and content as usual. As a longtime reader (this is my first post) with an editorial eye, I had a suggestion for future articles such as this with multiple authors but in which the main review is written in the first person singular. It was slightly disorienting to see three authors (Brian, Anand, Vivek) but then much of the article written with "I" (presumably Anand), you might want to avoid listing all three authors as "ands" in that case. One idea would be make the first author the one who is speaking in the first person voice (presumably Anand in the case) and the other two to be listed as "with." If the review is written as "we" then having all three of the authors as "ands" makes sense. There are multiple solutions. You can simply keep the "ands" and then indicate who the "I" is in the first instance. You could obviously say "one of us" in the first instance and indicate "Anand" in parentheses. And so on. Sorry for going on this long, but I'm big on bylines. Keep up the great work with the articles!embeddedGPU - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
Can you clarify the floating point precision for your GPU GFLOPS figures ? You mention 20-/32-bit for nVidia, but I think the SGX is only 16-bit precision. If so, it's not a totally fair comparison...wellortech - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
"If you fell in love with the original iPad, the iPad 2 is a significant upgrade."Really? Since when is thinner and a crappy camera a significant upgrade?
mcnabney - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
You guys missed noticing something when documenting the huge step forward with the iPad2 GPU power.We now have iOS fragmentation.
The entire iPad1 generation was obsoleted in the graphics department. Now developers have to choose between writing for the iPad1 or iPad2. There is far too large of a gulf between the two platforms. To benefit from the GPU advancement, the massive installed base of the iPad1 will have to be written-off.
kmmatney - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
I don't think this is true. First, we are only talking about 2 models, and second, they can just enable more graphics features for iPad 2. I can see where some truly advanced games might only be written for the iPad 2 in the future, but there is really no way to avoid that.Azethoth - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
There always was and always will be iOS fragmentation since the 2nd iDevice shipped.As for what it means in a practical sense: check out Infinity Blade on multiple devices (iPhone and iPad). See, not a big deal, content providers are used to scaling artwork and design.
Furthermore, iOS will suffer less from this than Android (fewer device specs). It is one of the aspects of the competition at this form factor that makes me think that Apple will do better than it does at the PC level. (Not that Apple PC profits are not insanely good for their industry: over 50% of entire industry by some accounting).
araczynski - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
if you're after a notebook/pc replacement, you're kidding yourself with any tablet.if you're after a gaming device, you're golden :) especially if you think gaming on phone sized screens (this includes psp/ds/etc) is plain stupid.
mine is filled to the brim with games, no room for audio/video/etc, just pure games.
i love it, my daughter loves it, even my technophobe wife loves it.
its for entertainment, nothing more.
Azethoth - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
It is for more than entertainment:You can amuse your cat with it as well!
coolio68 - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
Great review Anand,regarding this comment though:'The real competition for the SGX 543MP2 will be NVIDIA's Kal-El. That part is expected to ship on time and will feature a boost in core count: from 8 to 12. The ratio of pixel to vertex shader cores is not known at this point but I'm guessing it won't be balanced anymore. NVIDIA is promising 3x the GPU performance out of Kal-El so I suspect that we'll see an increase in throughput per core.'
Worth bearing in mind a couple of things:
SGX 543MP can already incorporate 2 to 16 cores
The even higher performance SGX 554MP cores have also been announced in December
Power VR Series 6 (Rogue), the next-generation, can scale from 210 GFLOPS to 8 TFLOPS , and is already licensed by the usual suspects.
The A9600 chip announced by ST-E at MWC ,containing Rogue, is sampling in H2 2011.
Nvidia are gonna have their work cut out methinks, but the competition is great for the industry and consumers.