The Best Time to Get a Deal on iPad 3? 6 Months From Now

[eklipz330]

seriosuly? telling people to wait on a tech site? you know it's a losing battle, especially when you mention apple.

i dont hate against apple, but most people do. they have great solid products, and they drive competition in the industry. won't ever buy their crap though! and 6months is already half way through the life cycle, so consider it like this: is using the ipad3 6 months early worth an extra $50? for most people, the answer is YES. its like waiting a processor to drop $20, only to realize you waited 7 MONTHS for it to drop 10%. sometimes, it's just not worth the wait. get it, enjoy it, realize it will be outdated in less than a year.

 

[watcha]

[citation][nom]aaronstyle[/nom]It seems like Apple has been churning out refreshes of their products, but lately I've noticed that the steps that they take have increasingly diminished. The Iphone 4s isn't THAT big of an improvement over the Iphone4. The premiums seem large, which is expected for a new product. It's unfitting that the components don't scale equivalently. Maybe it's just me. I've owned several Ipods, 2 or 3 nanos, and a couple of itouches. My girlfriend has had an iphone 3gs, and now has an iphone4.The jump from the 3gs to the 4 was pretty large, and is definitively noticeable, which justifies the price tag. (albeit a particularly hefty one) The updates from the generations of other ipods have always scaled fairly well, in my opinion as well.Is this just a marketing trick to dupe uninformed shoppers? I think it's possible, but anyone who does a little research will find that apple products are quite pricey. I always hear "but they last longer" or "they don't get viruses" or something like "they're better than...."Anyone that has made the switch from pc to apple has always praised apple, and shunned pcs, but the majority of the time, the pc that they had was never maintained properly. Poor ventilation, from dust build up, and very few ever ran diagnostic tools, to identify and fix compounding problems.I can agree that they're fairly reliable products, but the price v performance ratio is way off track. ( I'm sure every Tom'sHW member knows this) /rant.[/citation]

I disagree. The iPhone 4S is a major, major improvement over the iPhone 4, performance wise. So much so that it's got the fastest CPU/GPU in any phone ever made, even right now, 5 months later.

Look here for the jump from iPhone 4:

http/images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4971/41962.png
http/images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4971/41956.png
http/images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4971/41964.png (7x faster graphics)
http/images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4971/41965.png (7x faster graphics again)
http/images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4971/41966.png

The gains in CPU and GPU speed aren’t simply academic. The 4S is noticeably faster than its predecessor and finally comparable in its weakest areas to modern day Android smartphones.

Then factor in the camera:

he improvements don’t stop at the radio, Apple significantly upgraded the camera on the 4S. It’s not just about pixel count, although the move to 8MP does bring Apple up to speed there, overall quality is improved. The auto whitebalance is much better than the 4, equalling the Samsung Galaxy S 2 and setting another benchmark for the rest of the competition to live up to. Sharpness remains unmatched by any of the other phones we’ve reviewed thus far, whether in the iOS or Android camp.

Then network reception and speed:

Performance at the edge of reception is not the only thing that’s improved. If you’re on a HSPA+ network (e.g. AT&T), overall data speeds have shifted upwards. As our Speedtest histograms showed, the iPhone 4S is about 20% faster than the 4 in downstream tests. Best case scenario performance went up significantly as a result of the move to support HSPA+ 14.4. While the iPhone 4 would top out at around 6Mbps, the 4S is good for nearly 10Mbps

Overall:

From a hardware perspective, the iPhone 4S is a great upgrade to the iPhone 4. If the 4 was your daily driver, despite the lack of physical differences, the 4S is a noticeable upgrade. While not quite the speed improvement we saw when going from the iPhone 3G to the 3GS, the 4S addresses almost every weakness of the iPhone 4.

The iPhone 4S has actually been a far bigger leap than most Android manufacturers have achieved in their iterative releases.

While I agree with you to some extent that the huge differences are arguably not as perceptible from 3GS to 4 as from 4 to 4S - that doesn't do justice to the actual jump in technology they achieved which has still yet to be matched by any Android phone.

Then of course you factor in the release of Siri and iCloud - which you may or may not like but they are big selling points for some people.

 

[watcha]

Oh and also I agree that some Apple products are overpriced. Like Macbook Pro's or Mac desktops. Macbook Airs, on the other hand, are arguably the best value high performance ultrabook you can get right now, all factors considered.

 

[ap3x]

A bunch of new hardware features internally does not sell new products though, people have to see the advancement. Retina will help but really there has to be something compelling with the software.

 

[ap3x]

[citation][nom]sairasie[/nom]I prefer to have ipad 2 which has some good apps than ipad 3[/citation]

huh? Just in case this was a serious post. iPad 3 has the same Apps as the iPad 3 with the exception that iPad 3 may have Siri as well.

 

[10tacle]

[citation][nom]soldier37[/nom]Apple haters lol. 99% of them never used one touched one or could afford one. But yet still come to bash on something they have no clue about just like to hate on something popular makes them feel...well complete. Complete waste of everyone's time here. Fail at life.[/citation]

First of all little iAnus fangirl, this is a PC-based website mostly. Go to your little iPantywaste websites to read pro-Apple drool. You can take your overpriced proprietary crap, spread it with organic pesto, and shove it up your bum.

 

[EightyFour]

lack of care, wont buy.

//thread