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Apple Adds Sharper Screen and Speed to New iPad

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, introduced the new iPad on Wednesday.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple updated the iPad on Wednesday with a high-definition screen, a faster wireless connection and several other refinements, all packaged in a device without any major design changes.

As recent history has shown, though, Apple may not need a bold overhaul of the look of its tablet computer to attract waves of new buyers.

The company said the new iPad would go on sale on March 16 at a starting price of $499, unchanged from the last generation of iPads. The product will have a screen that provides a comparable level of clarity to the iPhone’s “retina display,” with higher resolution than conventional high-definition televisions, according to Apple executives.

“That is distinctive and is a kind of leapfrog above existing and announced products,” said A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

And in a sign that Apple intends to more seriously protect its share of the tablet market, which is expected to get more competitive this year, the company said it would continue to sell its second-generation iPad, dropping the price to $399 from $499.

At a company event, Apple also showed a new version of Apple TV, the company’s $99 set-top box for accessing Internet video, which streams movies in the sharpest of the high-definition video formats, called 1080p.

The initial reaction to the tablet computer was mixed, as has frequently been the case of late with Apple’s new iterations. Apple’s stock price was about flat in regular trading, ending up 43 cents higher, at $530.69, a 0.1 percent gain.

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The new iPad has a high-definition screen, a faster wireless connection and several other refinements for the same $499 price.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The new tablet, called simply the new iPad, with no numbers or letters after the name, is an effort to keep growth chugging along in a two-year-old business that has turned into a major franchise for the company. Apple’s $9.15 billion in iPad sales over the holiday quarter was almost double the amount of revenue Microsoft reported from its Windows software and not far from Google’s total revenue as a company during the same period.

Speaking from the same stage where Steven P. Jobs, the company’s late chief executive, introduced the second-generation iPad almost exactly a year ago, the company’s new chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said the iPad last quarter outsold the number of personal computers sold by any individual manufacturer.

“In many ways, the iPad is reinventing portable computing and outstripping the wildest predictions,” Mr. Cook said.

The new iPad, the third generation of the device, is nearly indistinguishable from its predecessor, though it is slightly heavier and thicker. The most visible of its changes is the screen, which can display text and images that appear as sharp as they would on a printed page. The company said the screen has more than 3.1 million pixels, or four times more than the current iPad.

It will also operate on the fourth-generation cellphone network technology known as LTE. In the United States, the new iPad will work on AT&T’s and Verizon’s networks to get data.

The iPad will also allow users to dictate e-mail, though Apple did not introduce an iPad version of Siri, a voice-command virtual-assistant feature that proved popular on the iPhone 4S.

Last fall, Apple disappointed some pundits and enthusiasts by making mostly incremental enhancements with the iPhone 4S. That product ended up squashing doubts to become a smash hit, leading to record sales over the holidays. During that time, Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., solidified its lead as the most valuable company in the world, with a market capitalization of almost a half-trillion dollars, well ahead of its nearest rival, Exxon Mobil.

At times, Apple has wowed people by radically rethinking the design of its products. Several years ago, it overhauled its MacBook Air with a drastically thinner case. It gave the iPhone 4 a novel, hard-edged case that looked very different from the design of early iPhones.

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The personal technology editor for The New York Times discusses what's new with the latest version of Apple's iPad, which goes on sale in mid-March.

Charles Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company, said those kinds of radical redesigns did not happen every year, partly because the smaller components and other underlying technologies that made them possible did not change at that pace. Mr. Wolf said he believed that more of Apple’s innovation was happening in software because it was not as encumbered by the development of outside technologies in that area.

“I always look at Apple as a software company,” he said.

The new iPad may show how durable Apple’s hold on the tablet market is. For most of the two years the iPad has been on sale, Apple has faced a phalanx of competitors from Hewlett-Packard, Research in Motion, Samsung and Motorola, yet none has established a firm beachhead in the tablet business. A few of those competitors, like H.P., gave up.

In a recent survey of American consumers with tablets by Forrester Research, 73 percent said they owned an iPad. That is a sharp contrast to the smartphone business, where Apple’s market share has steadily eroded as phones based on Google’s Android operating system have swept the market. Phones with Android software accounted for 51.6 percent of smartphone shipments worldwide in the fourth quarter, compared with 23.4 percent for the iPhone, according to Canalys, a research firm.

Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester, said the iPad had maintained its grip on the market because most consumers bought it through retail stores rather than wireless carriers. “Android smartphones are selling like hot cakes because that’s what the carriers push,” she said. “With tablets, carriers are not the main destination for tablets.”

The new iPad, though, is likely to face more serious challenges to the product’s dominance than in the past. Over the holidays, Amazon is estimated to have sold more than five million of its Kindle Fire, a smaller tablet that has attracted a new group of consumers to the category with a $199 price tag.

Later this year, the first tablet devices to use Windows 8, a new operating system from Microsoft, are expected to hit the market. The software has been redesigned by Microsoft to take advantage of touch-screen devices.

Apple sold 15.4 million iPads over the holiday quarter and has sold 55 million iPads in total since they first went on sale in 2010.

Mr. Cook told the audience Wednesday that Apple had sold 315 million iOS devices through the end of 2011 and that iPads, iPhones and iPods were now responsible for 75 percent of the company’s revenue. The chief criticism that some stalwarts of the PC industry have leveled at the iPad is that the device is not well suited for creating content, even if it is good for consuming it.

Apple, though, sought to undermine that argument with a number of new apps. Those include a new version of its Mac software for editing digital photographs, iPhoto. A new version of Apple’s GarageBand music software lets up to four people play together in a virtual band with iPads that are connected wirelessly.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Apple Adds Sharper Screen and Speed to New iPad. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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