Former Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs
Apple has summoned the press to an event Wednesday at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. And there’s an image of the iPad on the invitation.
So it doesn't take Columbo to figure out that a new iPad is almost certainly coming.
That won’t mean that there aren’t plenty of surprises in store, however.
And many of them won’t be revealed Wednesday.
That will come later, when people like Miro Djuric, director of technical communication at iFixit — a Southern California firm known for its detailed guides to repairing gadgets of all kinds — rip the new iPad’s guts out to search for features Apple hasn’t disclosed, identify vendors Apple won’t name, and even find hints about where Apple is going next.
Just getting into the device will be a tale. Apple has confounded hobbyists who want to repair the iPad 2 themselves by gluing the latest version of the tablet’s LCD screen to its glass cover, making it difficult to separate them without shattering the screen. Djuric is hoping Apple will opt to make its next iPad more serviceable.
Once inside -- with screen intact, hopefully -- perhaps the most important item iFixit will examine will be the tablet’s application processor. iFixit isn’t in the business of making predictions. However last year Apple put the dual-core A5 processor now used in the iPhone — an Apple design based on the ARM Cortex A-9 – into the iPad 2 first. So there’s a good chance iFixit will find something new here.
Analysts are already speculating that Apple will either upgrade its existing A5 processor -- perhaps it will be called the A5X -- or move to a new quad-core processor. A shift to a quad-core processor would come as tablets and high-end handsets from other companies are adopting four-core processors, such as Nvidia’s Tegra 3.
Another major item iFixit will be looking for: the device’s communications chips. Wireless industry analysts expect the iPhone will include chips from Qualcomm later this year that will provide support for the high-speed 3GPP Long-Term Evolution (LTE) standard. It’s possible the iPad will get those chips first.
The most widely anticipated new feature: a higher resolution screen. iFixit may have even gotten a sneak peek. Apple blog Mac Rumors sent a display they had obtained to iFixit for analysis. While its size is comparable to the screens used in the iPad 2, Djuric says a close look reveals it has a much, much higher pixel count.
Sadly -- thanks to the screen’s very different connection than the one used in the iPad 2 -- iFixit wasn’t able to connect the screen to an existing iPad to turn it on.
Finally, there are the parts that every iPad needs to be an iPad. There may not be any major surprises here, but since everything counts in large amounts, changes to seemingly small parts can make a big difference for the vendors supplying them — although, of course, Apple may choose to use different vendors for various parts during the course of the tablet's production run.
In the past, Apple has relied on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips from Broadcom, flash memory from Toshiba, and gyroscopes and accelerometers from ST Micro.
