New iPad screen, same old bad choices.

So the new iPad was announced yesterday. I'll post more about that later but for now I wanted to address the one thing that people will be making a big deal about. The new screen.


With the new iPad, Apple has finally improved on the iPad and iPad II's pitiful 1024x768 screen resolution. The new "Retina Display" has a resolution of 2048x1536. You should have noticed that this is an oddball resolution that really hasn't been used before. The reason is that Apple has essentially just doubled the vertical and horizontal resolution of the previous display in each direction. The obvious question is why didn't Apple just use a standard size like 1920x1080?
Well, I think there are two reasons. 


1. iOS
   The Operating System of the iPad and iPhone relies on a fixed screen aspect ration of 1.33 or 4:3 just like an old tube television. Because it wasn't originally designed to scale for other aspect ratios, straying from 4:3 screens would make the OS look pretty ugly as the icons and other user interface elements would become distorted (ie squeezed or stretched). Rather than fix iOS to properly and automatically handle scaling to various aspect ratios, Apple instead sticks to 4:3 screens. This allows them to cheat and simply "blow up" existing apps and UI elements to fit new screens.


2. Marketing
    Apple loves marketing smoke and mirrors. Heck the company is built on it. In this case, while competitors choose more useful and more sensible screen resolutions, they can claim a false advantage with the old "Ours is bigger" argument.  So while the competition moves to more sensible and more functional 16:9 format screens (1920x1080 and 1280x720), Apple will confuse the issue simply by using the specious argument that "bigger is better".


So why isn't Apple's screen choice better?


Well, mainly it's this matter of aspect ratios. Apple's main focus is delivering multimedia content. These days that means High Def. After all, you aren't still watching a tube TV are you? And even if you are, you're wasting most of the screen with black bars to fit the wide screen content onto it, or worse, you're chopping of the sides of the picture to make it fit. Yet that's exactly what Apple gives customers with all the iPads. A tube TV 4:3 experience.


Here's a diagram to help explain what I mean.

• Cyan area (I) - The new iPad screen's 2048x1536 screen with it's 4:3 aspect
• Black area (II) - Area III scaled to the full width of the iPad screen
• Gray area (III) - A proper HD screen at 1920x1080
• Reddish area (IV) - Common anamorphic movie ratio screen (2.39:1)

As you can see for viewing HD content, the iPad screen is a terrible waste of screen real estate that doesn't work well for the now almost universal HD content. Even worse, viewing high quality cinematic content (reddish area) will leave almost half the total screen space (1.54 million pixels out of 3.1 million ) of the iPad wasted as unused black bars. 

Conclusion

Apple's new iPad screen resolution was mostly chosen for them by their previous poor design choices. Choices that were made long ago during their original tablet product development. This is something they should have fixed in iOS before they started making tablets. Instead they have forced themselves and their users to live with their mistake. Now iPad users pay for Apple's mistake by being forced to live with a tube TV style screen in an HD world. This is unforgivable for a company who's business model is content delivery.

By comparison, watching the same HD content on a device like the Asus Transformer 700T (or actually most any current Android tablet) will  actually give you a better viewing experience as HD content will fill more of the screen space without requiring the scaling that reduces quality and performance.

Overall, the new screen resolution adds little to the appeal of the iPad as a multimedia device. It's only impressive when compared to the fact that the previous iPad's had embarrassingly poor screen resolutions for a tablet format device.