RUMORS ARE FLYING ABOUT IPAD NEW…
That iPad New has serious overheating issues. Are we talking AntennaGate II here?
DELTA: iPAD NEW VS iPAD2
One of the improved features seems to be the Retina Display: Apple says on their page that Retina provides a mindboggling 3.1 megapixel display.
I was instantly curious about two things: –
- What is inside the box that processes and renders all these pixels?
- How was this tested?
I got on Bing and found this site, iFixit which details the disassembly of the iPad New.
picture courtesy of the iFixit.com site (unedited)
displaying the Apple A5X GPU for iPAD New
SEGUE:
What does a GPU do? In a nutshell it takes over the complex processing required to render graphics from the CPU. Basically though the more you use it and the more power it consumes to do it’s work the hotter these things get. That’s why many PC GPU’s or graphics cards have an onboard fan
BACK:
What is keeping the iPad and other mobile devices GPU cool when they start rendering and processing their megapixels?
One would assume that the Apple 5X (comparable to NVIDIA’s Tegra 3) is designed for optimal performance and yet there are the reports of extreme levels of heat.
Is this why Microsoft are coming late to the party? Not because they are waiting for a primetime version of Windows 8 but because a bulkier yet cooler tablet running Windows is no competitor for iPAD or Android Tablets. Are Microsoft working with the GPU producers to ensure more efficient heat dispersal?
More importantly why wasn’t this issue caught at testing? I can only speculate but several things come to mind:
- The image I have of the testing lab at Apple is of a chrome and black lab where devices are tested on lab benches and held by specially designed clamps .. there is little if any hands-on device testing.
- The number of devices this bug was found in was decided to be within acceptable thresholds and so the bug wasn’t fixed .. expect a patch for the GPU firmware to resolve this.
- In the past I have joked about Apple engineers walking into bars implying that I partially believed this to be part of Apple’s marketing plan to surreptitiously get a test device into the hands of Beta tester / Blogger. This didn’t happen with the iPAD New and so no hands-on beta testing.
ANTENNAGATE II
The iPhone4 suffered from an issue of contact with the in-the-frame antenna producing call droppage. Apple decided to acknowledge the flaw and even sent a free bumper case to consumers that was meant to resolve the direct contact issue of fingers to frame-antenna. My suggestion for Apple here is along those lines…
Tongue-in-cheek suggestion to Apple Marketing
If you have ideas or opinions about this I would love to hear them. Meanwhile I’m hoping my friends who have ordered their iPAD New tell me this bug doesn’t occur with them.