“Apple’s surprise unveiling of a new ‘fat’ iPad 4 model equipped with 128 gigabytes of storage expands the company’s tablet platform offerings into premium territory, a feat its competitors will have trouble duplicating,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider.
“The introduction of a new high-capacity iPad is significant in several respects. First, Apple appears to have successfully ‘doubled down’ in securing secrecy as its chief executive Tim Cook promised to do last summer,” Dilger writes. “The first inkling of the new fat iPad was first floated over the weekend, just one business day before it was officially announced. ”
Dilger writes, “Perhaps more importantly, the surprise announcement also demonstrates how quickly (and unpredictably) Apple can shift direction… At first glance, Apple’s 128-gigabyte iPad doesn’t seem like much of an advance. After all, the company’s competitors won’t have too much difficulty in adding more memory to their own tablets. However, they’ll have a very hard time selling such a high end product, particularly at the same price Apple can charge.”
Much more in the full article here.
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Really?
BTW where does this 128Gb storage module come from? Or is it 64Gb X 2?
And if the competition puts out window surface rt tablets with the same size storage. The will lose so much of the hard drive to the operating aystem.
16 gigs is roughly what I have heard.
Considering a windows 7 install is around 20 gigs they didn’t save much space with the ARM port
Pretty cool. I hardly touch my full sized ipad now that I have the mini, but cool none the less.
Makes sense. I agree that as long as Apple is making the lions share of profits, unless it pulls a Micro$oft, it is very very well positioned to capitalize on it’s current share of mobile. While clearly there is a long way to go and Google will be a tough adversary, the road Apple is on is certainly smoother and straighter.
I wish the term “ultimate” would not be used to refer to the 128 GB iPad. Doesn’t 128 GB iPad suffice? Ultimate sounds like a Dell or Windows OEM marketing term.
Apple doesn’t, just the brain-dead press.
Besides, I’m pretty sure “ultimate” won’t kick in until 1TB.
Sure going to be able to consume a lot of content with this capacity. Probably not too much content creation, right?
Why do we need such a large memory when we can stream most content from the net or iCloud? There are precious few things other than apps that I need to store on my iPad. I use Apple TV to stream content from iCloud and all my iDevices sync over iCloud so what am I missing? Why do we need a huge memory?
Because some of us use the iPad as a mobile recording studio. Just because you have no use for the extra storage does not mean that other people don’t.
=:~)
True- my iPad purchase must take into account its use for music and video content creation. The extra storage won’t hurt. Plus, it would be nice to have much of my original and iTunes music in one place without relying on a cloud.
@3l3c7ro
While you may trust a mega-huge corporation with your data, I don’t. The last thing I want is to have unknown parties going through my data looking for marketing opportunities they can sell off or government agencies poking around my private information. There may not be large scale abuse of privacy being done today, but once that information is out there it can be used against you in the future.
Your aluminum hat isn’t working well enough. I think you need another layer. They are out to get you!
Think so, huh? Suppose in 25 years you want to be elected Senator of your state. But then your opposition some how got hold of one of your private photos that was never shared on the internet and used it to discredit you. Even if you never did anything wrong, maybe there was a picture of you shaking hands with someone who did, then suddenly you’re “associating with terrorists” and your career is over. Call me paranoid if it makes you feel good, but I’m not handing anything over to people who would harm me.
I guess that fact that it is encrypted and not identifiable with the individual doesn’t reassure you. The fact that Apple is an honourable company doesn’t assure you. The fact that you are wanting to be a politician explains volumes.
Honor has nothing to do with it. Our society is ruled by money, and money alone and if it is in Apple’s monetary interest to sell off our private files, they will do so.
I think Apple is awesome and the amount of money I’ve spent on Apple products has proven that. But Apple is run by people and some people can be corrupted. I have see Apple do things in the past that I didn’t like, i.e. pulls apps from the app store I wanted (VLC player) and secretly remove apps from my Mac during an update (RealPlayer Downloader).
At any time, Apple can change the rules. Your data is MAY be safe today, but that does not mean it will always be so. I have no way of confirming that my files were not accessed by other parties and neither do you. It is not conservative to hand over every byte of your privacy when you can’t prove that it is 100% safe. And, sorry, Apple’s honorable promise just isn’t good enough for me.
“I guess that fact that it is encrypted and not identifiable with the individual doesn’t reassure you. The fact that Apple is an honourable company doesn’t assure you. The fact that you are wanting to be a politician explains volumes.”
Bwaa, ha ha ha ha ha! Stop it, my sides are splitting!
Are you so completely out of touch with the various attempts by governments, the US, Canada among them, to have access to every scrap of digital information you have stored, in the interests of prevention of ‘copyright violation’, prevention of acts of terrorism, etc?
Christ, I live in England, and I’m continually reading news feeds via Flipboard from Boingboing and other sources about what the US Government is trying to force onto other sovereign governments in order to gain access to private data. My own government has been trying to introduce legislation to force networks to keep every text, tweet, email, and web search carried out by everyone who has web access.
And you think cloud storage is safe from being pried into?
You really are bloody naiive!
I suggest you start to look at what’s going on around you, and get a little less trusting.
I would have put it a bit nicer, but you are correct and I agree with you completely, Rorschach.
you comment utterly stupid with zero thought, just a copy cat improve.
how does it feel living in such a small box up in your head you trusting sap.
Just because you never move out of your mom’s basement, and always have free, fast wifi always available, does NOT mean everyone has it. Data capped at 1Gb/month on mobile contracts, my home broadband has a 10Gb/month limit; unlimited if I pay three times as much, and plenty of public places have little or no free wifi. On vacation last year, where I was staying for a week I had no cellular connection, unless I walked 100m up a steep lane to the crossroads where I might, just, get three bars of a 3G connection, and there was no wifi except for the pub in the village four miles away.
Ubiquitous cloud storage and access, easily and cheaply, is a fantasy that only the deluded, or the city-dweller who never goes further than the nearest fucking Starbucks or McD believes in. I gave up believing in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy decades ago, and I don’t believe in free, always-on data everywhere either.
Big business won’t allow it, they’ll control access and charge as much as they damn well can for whatever meagre bandwidth they allow their customers to have.
I download shows from my TiVo onto my iPad mini (employee gift). It has only 16 GB.. I wish it had a lot more.
Having a lot of local storage is definitely good.
Can’t you store it in iCloud? Do you delete them after you watch them?
I got a 128 gig SD card at Fry’s for $89 that I use in a Sony flash drive laptop so as to hold iTunes for my wife’s 64-gig iPhone.
The enterprise market matters.
toss in a free USB2 or firewire dongle and professional photographers would come running.
Order quickly it will be backordered 3 or 4 weeks within 3 days of release.
Ah, the memories…
It was 29 years ago when Apple announced the first Macintosh, equipped with an astounding 128 KB of memory. yep, that’s kilobytes. Now the “fat iPad comes with two orders of magnitude more memory at – what? – one fourth the cost?
Umm, 6 orders of magnitude..
Love these predictions of products that won’t sell & the whys… Only slightly better than anal-ysts
Anyways good luck to everyone if they think cloud stuff can’t be “legally acquired” for one reason or another…
The thought does cross my mind, though … how is this hard to duplicate? Samsung has made its business to copy everything Apple does in a matter of weeks.
It won’t be too long and some player will offer a 256 GB “ultimate” tablet. Did anyone not see this coming? Perhaps that’s why Wall Street is so unimpressed with Apple. Cook provides no product guidance for the future and rolls out incremental updates to existing products. No wonder tablet market share has steadily FALLEN under his watch. I don’t think upping memory is enough to stave off the competition, and certainly nowhere near enough to justify Apple’s continued high profit margins. Cook had better offer something more, and soon.