Apple never has been a company to go for a "bells and whistles" approach to design. The first iPad, released in 2010, was a literal blank slate, with only a single button on the front. The 2011 iPad 2 lost some weight and gained a new outfit, in the form of the Smart Cover, but aside from under-the-hood improvements was mostly unchanged.
This year's iPad is so similar to last year's, they didn't even change the name. It's just "the new iPad," with new and improved ... specs. But it has the option for a 4G instead of a 3G modem, and it has an interesting new headline feature that you may not notice at first.
Introducing the Retina Display"Retina Display" isn't a technical term; it's a trademarked term owned by Apple. And Apple uses it to refer to a screen with pixels so tiny you can't tell them apart with your unaided eye.
Optometrist Gary Heiting was interviewed by Mashable's Peter Pachal to clarify. According to him, it partly depends on how close you hold the screen to your face; the iPhone's higher pixel density lets you hold it about a foot away before you can see the pixels, while the iPad needs about 15-17 inches of clearance. Obviously, it depends on how good your eyesight is; someone with 20/10 vision might be able to make out the pixels anyway.
What's the point of a Retina Display?
Heiting said that the Retina Display may reduce eyestrain, especially while reading on the iPad. Reviewers, meanwhile, have compared it to an HD TV (and it's possible to watch HD movies on the new iPad). The improvement in image quality is dramatic ...
But only on apps that support it
An app has to be designed to take advantage of the Retina Display in order for it to display at its full resolution. Plain text may look sharper (in most apps), but pictures and 3d graphics in games won't.Apple's first-party apps, including the new iPad version of iPhoto, are all (naturally) designed to take advantage of the Retina Display. Other developers, like Netflix and Amazon, have been getting their apps ready for it. Depending on which apps you use, you may not notice much of a difference for awhile.
Non-optimized apps will still run
And Retina Display-optimized apps probably won't look much different, aside from being sharper. That's because the Retina Display on the new iPad (and the iPhone 4 / 4S) is exactly twice as many pixels across on each side. So older apps can be scaled up (and look fuzzy), while newly-optimized apps don't need to look completely different.
