Apple’s going to come out with two new devices this year that will make huge waves in the mobile industry. One of them is the third generation iPad, the other is the sixth generation iPhone. Traditionally whatever chip Apple put inside the iPad would eventually end up in the iPhone. Case in point, the A5 made its debut in the iPad 2. Several months later we found it inside the iPhone 4S. Will the same thing happen this year? It’s too early to tell, but more importantly there are conflicting rumors flying around the internet. Some folks say that the iPad 3 will have a quad core processor called the A6. Others say that no, the iPad 3 will come with a chip called the A5X, which has the same amount of cores as the A5, but that the X connotes a new and improved graphics processor. According to the folks at 9to5Mac, who went digging through the latest beta of iOS 5.1, Apple is working on both chips at the same time.
Now let’s be honest here. People who buy the iPad and the iPhone don’t do it because of what’s under the hood. The first few iPhones were actually inferior to what the rest of the industry was offering at the time. The iPhone 3GS started changing that, and the iPhone 4 definitely put Apple in the lead in terms of the spec race. These days everyone has pretty much the same specs, so instead they’re fighting over screen sizes. Over the past 72 hours we’ve seen the LG Vu, Panasonic Eluga Power, and Viewsonic ViewPhone 5e get announced. Know what they all have in common? Massive 5 inch screens.
So hey, dual core with a faster GPU, quad core with an insane ability to multitask, who the hell cares, right? What we really want to see is iOS 6 and how Apple plans on making their mobile operating system look less … how should we put this nicely?
Old as hell.