Despite the fact that we are only one day away from the official announcement, we speculate why there could be a delay than usual between the announcement and launch of iPad 3. It is pretty much expected that Apple would embed a Retina Display into the next generation iPad which would feature twice the resolution of iPad 2. Last to last year, Apple did the same with the iPhone 4 and the outcome has been simply amazing and praise worthy. Perhaps, this is the only reason why the iPad 3 could be named ‘iPad HD’.
Anyways, let’s recede to know why the iPad 3 may not be available a week after the announcement. The first iPad was announced on 27 January 2010, pre-orders started on 12 March in US and the product hit the market on 30 April 2010. It took so long for Apple to make the product available in the market because a whole new category was introduced and they had not enough applications to enhance the user experience. Now, let’s talk about the iPad 2. It offered a dual core processor, a revamped design and dual cameras. However, the actual gap between the announcement and the launch was reduced to only 9 days, the is, almost a week.
From the developer perspective, it had nothing to be redesigned. All those application which worked on iPad 1 were meant to work on iPad 2 as well. However, a high resolution display was expected, but it never made its way into the actual product. Now, if Apple introduces a Retina display in addition to a quad core processor and LTE, developers would be in the same situation as that of iPhone 4. The iPhone 4 was announced on 7 June 2010 and launched on 27 June. It means that Apple needed a span of 17 days for the developers to make their applications ready until the device is available for purchase.
Undoubtedly, all these efforts were made to keep the user experience intact. When the Apple would announce iPad 3 on Wednesday in San Francisco, obviously the information about the launch date would be revealed and that doesn’t seem to be soon enough. Apple would certainly want to give developers a chance to upgrade their iPad optimized applications to catch up with Retina display. Needless to say, there’s a difference between the iPhone and iPad simulator in iOS SDK which defines how both of them are altogether different from each other.
So we expect iPad 3 to be launched on 23-24 March 2012 in US. Though the things would be more clear tomorrow. Let’s know your thoughts in the comment section.