Edible Apple

Late last week, This is My Next added some more information to the growing snowball of iPad 3 related rumors. Echoing previous, albeit speculative, reports, TIMN writes that Apple this Fall will be releasing a new iPad model that might be dubbed iPad HD.

”The idea behind the product”, Joshua Topolsky writes, “is apparently that it will be a “pro” device aimed at a higher end market — folks who work in video and photo production possibly — and will be introduced alongside something like an iPad version of Final Cut or Aperture.”

So aside from the reported inclusion of a Retina Display, we have to imagine that it’d come with upgraded hardware as well. I mean, for as cool as a Retina Display is, it’s not, by itself, enough to justify the rollout of a completely new iPad model.

Notably, the report notes that this won’t exactly be the iPad 3 (guess we spoke too soon), but rather a premium piece of hardware that falls squarely within the iPad 2 family.

Meanwhile, the DisplayBlog speculates that this upgraded iPad 2 device will be dubbed the iPad Pro.

Why? Well, first Apple isn’t Samsung. The com pany doesn’t add pre fixes and suffixes except for ‘i’ and ‘Pro’. This next iPad looks to be a higher-performance model than the current iPad 2 and by that very definition it falls neatly into the Pro category.

Interesting point.

Playing devil’s advocate, DaringFireball’s John Gruber astutely chimes in:

But Apple still can’t make the existing iPads fast enough, and none of their competitors on the market seem to be making any dent in the market. So even if Apple could do a retina-display iPad this year, I’m not sure there’s any reason they should.

Good point, but Apple saw how quickly competitors were able to catch up to the iPhone, and though the smartphone market is markedly different from the tablet market, Apple may simply not want to take any chances and may very well work to further it’s already impressive, and arguably insurmountable, lead in the nascent tablet market by upping the ante with a completely new model.