Originally Posted by Mark Smith:
“Didn't the 3rd gen have retina display? I believe that's the reason it didn't hang around for long because the iPad 2 was still a lot cheaper to produce because of the poorer display and the 4th gen quickly replaced it when Apple started going for autumn ipad launches.”
Yup, the 3rd generation iPad also had a "Retina Display".
Many people think that it was effectively just a "stop gap" model due to the "Apple A6" (used in the iPhone 5, and a variant used in the 4th generation iPad, later in 2012) not being ready in time.
The 3rd generation iPad actually struggled graphically in some areas, due to having 4x the pixels of the iPad 2 but only 2x the number of GPU cores. Some iPad games have fewer graphical effects when run at "Retina" resolution on a 3rd generation iPad compared to when run on an iPad 2, as the 3rd generation iPad could not handle the effects *and* the resolution.
Originally Posted by psionic:
“Agreed 'The New iPad' was an extremely confusing name. I seem to recall some were capitalising on it and dumping old stock of 'the new iPad' at premium pricing, when the retina model came out.”
Yup. I'm surprised that Apple didn't anticipate the confusion from using such a stupid name.