A lot has been said about the new iPad’s Retina Display. At a resolution of 2048×1536, it has an unbelievable level of clarity, with an unprecedented 3.1 million pixels filling up the tablet’s display.
What hasn’t been as clear though is the fact that apps meant for a screen of those gargantuan proportions will need to be significantly upgraded to not look terrible on a large, crystal clear screen.
Think of it in this way – remember trying iPhone apps on your iPad 2? Those apps were meant to be run on the iPhone’s 960×540 Retina Display, but in the 9.7 inch, 1024×768 iPad 2 screen (and a 2X mode), it’d be an understatement to say that they looked outright terrible.
As it turns out, a Vietnamese site (Tinhte) got their hands on the new iPad and made it a point to find out how the apps optimized for the new iPad fared with respect to their predecessors. As it turns out, every app so far has been roughly 3 times as large as its iPad 2-based prequel. In their own words:
“These applications are developed by Apple has been upgraded to support the Retina screen, for example with Keynote (iWork software sets), this application previously only 115MB capacity but its latest version is 327MB. Numbers from 109MB or 283MB up to, from 95MB to 269MB Pages, iMovie from 70MB to 404MB.”
If you remember, one of the lesser noted announcements made in Apple’s March 7 event was that the over-the-air download limit of iOS had been upped to 50 MB, and it probably had this factor in mind. It might be a natural progression of sorts, but it certainly doesn’t help iPad users who have strict data limits on WiFi usage, or live in areas where either or both Wifi and LTE aren’t ubiquitous.
[via Macrumors]
