A No Holds Barred Review of the (3rd Gen) iPad (2012)

Apple called its first iPad tablet "magical," as if owning one would turn flatulence into a flowery fragrance and unlock the mystery of double complete rainbows. Instead it entranced millions of people into buying one, even though it lacked basic amenities like expandable storage, built-in cameras, and Flash support (back when people still cared about Flash). In that way, it truly was magical. A year later, a feeble-looking Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad 2 with a "completely new design" and several upgraded parts, including a dual-core A5 processor and both front- and rear-facing cameras, which were sorely missed on the first iPad. It would turn out to be his swan song. This year it was Tim Cook who took to the stage to introduce the world to Apple's "new iPad" -- not the iPad 2S, iPad 3, or iPad HD, just iPad -- with what Apple is billing as a "resolutionary" upgrade.


Let's talk a moment about Apple's decision to drop the numerical moniker from its third generation iPad, which has caused a bit of angst in the blogosphere and in social media circles. The prevailing wisdom is that it's a pompous move by Apple that will ultimately lead to customer confusion, as if someone's actually going to stroll into Best Buy and pick up a discounted iPad 1 or 2 thinking it's the new iPad. Forgetting for a moment that return policies are the ultimate safety net in these situations, it's just not going to play out that way, just as no reasonably intelligent person buys the wrong Kindle e-book reader, which is still called the Kindle after four generations dating back to the original release in 2007. Stores just aren't set up that way.

As to the actual hardware, one of Apple's big reveals is the Retina display. It was long rumored the new iPad would ship with a higher resolution display, and Apple made it happen by packing 3.1 million pixels into the same 9.7-inch panel, now with a 2048x1536 screen resolution, a big upgrade from the iPad 2's 1024x768 display and even beyond the boundaries of your Full HD 1080p giant screen TV. No small feat, it takes quite a bit of engineering ingenuity to cram four times as many pixels as the iPad 2 into the same screen real estate while ensuring pixel signals don't get crossed, which can lead to distorted colors and fuzzy images. Pushing all those pixels is an Apple A5X SoC, still a dual-core 1GHz chip but now with a quad-core graphics engine that Apple claims is four times faster than NVIDIA's Tegra 3 processor. That's a mighty big claim we'll put to the test, but first, a rundown of the spec sheet.

Apple iPad (third generation) Specifications Specifications & Features