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No Dramatic Changes
Ironically, Apple’s reputation for secrecy means that the press pays attention to it as with no other company. Apple has used its megaphone to broadcast some strong hints about where the iPad 2 might be headed.
The strongest hint has to do with the new iPad’s size—which is, after all, the major feature, or burden, of a tablet device. Apple’s Steve Jobs has dismissed the 7” form factor, even though such a device can easily be cheaper and more convenient. Jobs claims that Apple is not going to shrink the iPad just to, as he puts it, “hit a price point”—and that you can’t make a “great tablet” in any size much smaller than the iPad’s 9.5” diagonal screen.
If the overall “footprint” of the iPad is unlikely to change, there’s not that much else that would really make a night and day difference in the device. The iPad runs the same system software as the iPhone, and runs the same or similar apps, so any changes to the iPad can be seen as belonging to one of three types:
- Adding features to the iPad that the iPhone software already supports
- Adding features to the iPad that the iPhone doesn’t support yet
- Changes to the iPad that don’t make much difference to the system software.