Photo: Tomohiro Ohsumi


"An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment."

That's my favourite line in any of the Apple-related tech stories I read. Apple's trademark, self-perpetuating marketing machine is doing all the work for them. With so many people claiming to be close to a source, it's as if the whole tech journalism industry knows the one guy who has it "on good authority".

My regular readers, all three of you including the Chief Editor, the Dept. Editor and my best friend, will know that I'm a bit of an Apple devotee. But even I'm becoming disillusioned with the whole 'leaked' information facade. More of the same, more or less.

So pardon me for perpetuating the process myself as I mention three of the rumours that are circulating right about now:

Quad core processor
Yes, it's going to be faster. How much faster? How many cores have they squeezed in now? It doesn't actually matter to the average person... all your apps will run smoothly on it. If they don't and you paid for it, then you got ripped off.

Retina display
OK, this rumour is the only real news so far. If it proves to be true, then iPad 3 is going to win and win big. Apple is allegedly testing 2048 x 1536 displays. That's bigger than the average resolution on a desktop computer (anywhere between 1024 x 768 and 1600 x 1200) and bigger than HD video (1920 x 1080). It will have the guts behind it to push those high res graphics... expect big things for iPad if this is true.

Bigger battery
If you ask me, battery life is the holy grail of mobile computing at the moment. We have the tech to build small, powerful mobile computers, but we can't power them for too long. While the iPad 2's battery life could be described as decent, it isn't outstanding. A bigger battery combined with a Retina display is all that's necessary for iPad 3 to maintain its market lead.

There are other rumoured features such as fatter form factor, LTE (think 3G +1), Thunderbolt, iOS5.1... blah... But really, who cares? There can't be that many people who're currently in the market for a tablet computer and who don't already know whether or not they'll get an iPad. That's as clear cut as it gets right now.

ANOTHER RUMOUR
iPad 3 is rumoured to be releasing sometime in March... could be early, could be late. OR April... probably early, but you don't want it to coincide with the impending persecution of Jesus. I'm betting March.