The launch of the new iPad brought with it the welcome, yet not entirely unexpected, news that the new device would be Retina Display enabled and, as such, developers were tasked with making their iPad apps Retina Display compatible in order to use the full capabilities of the new device. However, the Vietnamese website Tinhte has somehow managed to get a hold of a new iPad early and has noted some rather interesting findings for apps that are now Retina Display enabled.
The primary difference between an original iPad app and a Retina Display enabled iPad app, aside from the obvious visual improvements, is that the size of the Retina Display enabled apps are substantially larger than those designed for the original iPad or iPad 2. For example, the size of iMovie before the upgrade was around 70MB but with Retina Display enabled, it is bumped up to over 400MB. Similarly Keynote is now almost 330MB whereas previously it was around 115MB. These are not insignificant increases.
So what difference will this make to the average iPad owner? Well, depending on your usage, if you have apps that occupy approximately 7GB or around half of the available space on your iPad 2, those apps could, in theory, hit around 16GB on your iPad 3 (assuming of course that you upgrade, and that all your apps are given Retina Display capability).
So before you dive in and drop $499 on a new 16GB Wi-Fi third generation iPad, consider how much space you are using on your existing device, and think about a 32GB or even 64GB version because, soon enough, 16GB is clearly not going to be enough.
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