Rumours are saying October now
Bit disappointing... I was hoping to have the Retina iPad Mini by March
Then they have the iphone and pad/mini all around the same time. You would think they would want more spread than that. Limits their sales because of a spend all in one quarter.
I was hoping for a new pad in march/april
They've only just released the 4th gen and you want another one?!
They need to have a quantifiable improvement in at least one way.
They got away with the iPad 3 having the same performance as the 2 by introducing the retina display (even with the added weight). Now that the 4th one was released just six (ish) months later the 3rd was obviously a stop-gap.
They're limited by how quickly they can iterate on the A*x chips to determine performance.
They're limited on battery technology for increasing life.
They're limited by the display technology as to whatever minor improvements they can eke out of there.
And so keeping that in mind, I don't think we'll see another generation until the next A*x chip (and the bump in performance and efficiency that will bring) is ready. And I doubt that'll be until summer at the very earliest.
Maybe having new iPhone (5S), iPad (proper 5th gen) and iPad mini (proper 2nd gen possibly with retina (we can hope
)) in the same quarter will be too much for our wallets and they'll want to spread them out a bit. Even so, I only see the iPhone and iPad mini as being able to be brought forward by virtue of the vanilla A* chips being developed before their X counterpart.
Yikes
I've been keeping that rant in for a while and certainly didn't think that this thread would be the one to prompt me to get it out