Retina iPad: confirmed. Also, I really doubt they are showing that iPad in landscape mode, which means that most likely the home button is gone. Not sure how I feel about that one.
I noticed that the bubbles had a unique-looking arrangement in the march 7 announcement photo, so I (crudely) compared it to an iPad 2 with that wallpaper in both landscape and portrait modes. Doing so seems to indicate that it is indeed oriented in portait mode: http://imgur.com/a/gbjyr
For me, removing the Home button would turn an automatic upgrade into a wait-and-see. I've had too many bad experiences with capacitive buttons on everything from smartphones to laptops to keyboards.
Not to mention the inherent problem of a capacitive button that lives on a bezel that people use to grasp the device. There'd be no grazing the home button while turning or moving your hand positions without possibly-activating that button. Absent some bullet-proof pressure-sensing technology, it would be incredibly frustrating.
So mark me down for hoping that the "touch" bit is either an allusion to some haptic feedback technology, or some pressure-sensing technology, or even just an ad-copy play off "see" that people are reading too much into.
The iPad presents a unique problem though: you can use the iPad in any orientation. For example, when using it in landscape mode, the home button can be on either the far left or right: it's a huge moving target, and with a screen the size of an iPad, it's often outside your peripheral vision (unlike the iPhone).
What if the home button moves depending on screen orientation? i.e. the home button is always at the center of the bottom-most bezel edge? It's not a particularly usable solution without the best capacitive button ever made, but it's interesting to think about.
In all likelihood, multitasking is probably a 'swipe up' gesture from the bottom of the screen now, similar to what Apple is doing with the trackpad in Mountain Lion's notification system.
I'm imagining a WebOS-style gesture, but the swipe action is from the screen edge, not the bezel.
</speculation>
I agree, though. Capacitive buttons are awful, especially on an iPad where there's so much room for an accidental press.
iPad already does that (off by default): four-finger swipe up shows the list of apps, and four-finger swipe left or right takes you to other apps.
Edit: and I think four-finger pinch takes you back to the home screen. The only real use for the Home button on an iPad now is for taking screenshots (remapping double-click the Power button could probably replace this)
Trouble with the pinch gesture is the iPhone. The gesture is impossible to use with one hand, and even with two hands, it's still rather awkward on a small (sub-7") screen. Remove the iPhone home button in favor of this gesture and you ruin the user experience. Leave the home button and now we've broken consistency with the iPad (which is one of the main selling points on the iOS ecosystem). Not saying they can't drop the home button, they'd just need a more practical way to do it (for example, webOS/BBX/Win8-style edge swipes)
Have you tried the gestures? There would be no capacitive buttons, only gestures. I don’t know when I last used the button but it was a long time ago. Once I turned the gestures on I couldn’t go back, they are very useful and won’t be wrongly recognized.
Their article ends with:
"We tried to match the portrait iPad 2 and iPad 3, but we couldn't. The spacing is wrong no matter how many icons you put on the dock. The reflection intersect the icon's edge in the wrong place no matter where you position it."
And after studying my own iPad, I concur. It's definitely closer in portrait than landscape, but there are still enough differences that clearly more variables are in play. (The wallpaper has likely changed, the dock's background image has likely changed, the spacing has changed, etc.)
Why do people insist on using Apple marketing terms for what are commodity components? It's a ~300DPI LCD. Apple didn't invent it, they just bought it from someone. Ditto for all the people talking about the performance of the "A5 CPU".
Apple actually made a worthwhile distinction with "retina display" - it's the resolution at which the human eye can't discern different pixels from the distances it will be used at. Simply noting the DPI doesn't capture this. Some argue that since the iPad is often held further away, it could have lower DPI than the iPhone and still have indiscernible pixels.
"300dpi iPad confirmed" would have been clearer, more correct, less marketing polluted, and fit within the same number of message bytes. Believe it or not there are people in the world outside Apple's products who understand dots per inch but not what a "retina" display is.
Say what you will about Apple polluting the landscape with marketing speak, but I think there's semantic value in thinking of it as a simple high-res display instead of a "300dpi LCD". Talking about it as a 300dpi display focuses on the technical implementation; calling it "retina" shifts the focus to the practical advantage, which is "it looks a lot better".
Unless you're a developer, it doesn't make a lick of difference to you whether it's 300dpi or 302dpi. What matters is that the display is either "pixelly" or "not pixelly". "Retina" may be a silly-sounding name, but I think the idea is just fine.
Would you apply it to other devices then? Do the Galaxy Nexus or Droid RAZR have "Retina Displays"? Clearly not, because that's an Apple trademark. So I don't see what your point is. The apple-only term would be better than the generic if it wasn't an apple-only term. Well, sure.
I just don't understand the desire on the part of Apple fans to embrace what are transparent attempts at rebranding generic components. In a non-technical environment sure. But on Hacker News? Really?
There are two issues here: leaving out levels of technical implementation detail ("I don't care about the specific DPI of the display, just that it's higher than before"), and using Apple-coined phrases to do so ("retina" rolls off the tongue much more nicely than "very high-density").
I'm not sure whether you were originally taking offense at the first, the second, or both; how would you feel if instead of talking about 'retina displays' people just said that the iPad 3 would have a 'higher-density screen'?
(as a sidenote, Android technically does have an equivalent shorthand for the various pixel densities the OS supports, but I don't know of any Android manufacturers who actively advertise a "XHDPI" display)
Switch brands to escape the reality distortion field and maybe it will be clearer: Do you call your wireless networking adapter a "Centrino"? That was also a very successful (at the time) attempt to rebrand a generic standard into something that was sold by only one manufacturer. Lots of people in the early days of WiFi walked into stores asking for one of those "Centrino" computers that could get to the internet without wires. And they'd refuse to buy one without the sticker even if it had a perfectly good radio.
See the damage this nonsense can do? And you'd never buy into it from any vendor except Apple, where for reasons I can't understand otherwise smart people get suckered into thinking Apple designs innovative CPUs and LCD panels.
