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iPad 3: 128GB and maybe an SD?

G

GWestphal

Golden Member
With the education announcement by Apple today and books tipping the scales at nearly 3GB (mostly from videos I assume and interactive applications), is the next iPad all but guaranteed to have more storage and maybe even expandable storage?

16GB iPad= 4-5 text books, though maybe these examples are super heave on extra content, most ebooks I've seen of textbooks are less than 50MBs.

Assuming, 1-2GB for apps, 2-4GB for photos, 8GB of music, and 4*2GB texts and you're needing at least the 32GB for typical use.
 
Uh... nope.

Apple has never had a 128GB option... for any iDevice. Plus iBooks is also for iPhone, so that makes no sense. My guess is that it'll stay at 64GB max.

Also no SD. Apple has the camera connection kit if you want SD, but generally, no...

The way I look at it, it's more likely that textbooks would weigh in at roughly 100MB range. Never seen a 3GB book. That's more like an app than a book.

Edit: Sorry if that sounded harsh, but honestly, I don't think you should expect too much and try to draw shadows. Bigger books is really not an implication that Apple should expand storage capacity. Biggers apps and movies have always weighed in to the equation, but Apple has always refused to expand beyond 64GB.
 
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runawayprisoner said:
Uh... nope.

Apple has never had a 128GB option... for any iDevice. Plus iBooks is also for iPhone, so that makes no sense. My guess is that it'll stay at 64GB max.

Also no SD. Apple has the camera connection kit if you want SD, but generally, no...

The way I look at it, it's more likely that textbooks would weigh in at roughly 100MB range. Never seen a 3GB book. That's more like an app than a book.

Edit: Sorry if that sounded harsh, but honestly, I don't think you should expect too much and try to draw shadows. Bigger books is really not an implication that Apple should expand storage capacity. Biggers apps and movies have always weighed in to the equation, but Apple has always refused to expand beyond 64GB.
Click to expand...

Apple's hasn't refused to expand beyond 64GB out of some sort of stance. It has to do with the availability of really high capacity single chip NAND. The iPhone only went to 64GB this year because it was only last year that the first single chip 64GB NAND was available and it wasn't until the iPhone 4S came out that it was in sufficient quantities. I recall reading once (cannot find the source, sorry) that Apple consumes something on the order of 25-40% of the world's NAND Flash supply.

Looking at iFixit's teardown, it appears that the iPad 2 has (up to) 2 NAND chips, which means that it could conceivably support up to 128GB assuming there is the production capacity for it.

As for the size of the books, if you look into the announcement that was just made from Apple about iBooks 2, and the textbooks available, they weigh in at about 1-1.5GB, with the Biology textbook apparently being 2.77GB in size. And those are general texts. These are not big 800pg long text files, they are fully interactive rich apps essentially. They are big, and if you want to keep old ones on the local device for future reference, you will need a lot of storage.
 
It's just one interactive book that's 2.77GB. My guess is that most textbooks following this aren't as interactive, unless content providers choose to provide them so.

Even then, at 2GB per book on average, a 16GB iPad 2 should be able to hold 5-6 interactive textbooks easily. One semester may only use so many books unless a student decides to take more than 6 courses concurrently and all of them happen to require interactive textbooks. I don't think that's a realistic scenario at all.

A 32GB iPad 2 can hold up to 12 interactive books, and a 64GB can hold up to 20-24 books in that case. Unless all of them have to be used all at the same time, I don't think it's so bad just holding the books that are needed and either delete the rest that aren't needed, or store them on a computer?

Edit: and that's assuming all texts going forward are interactive, that is. I get that Apple is trying to promote it, but it's not like any text-only book can be made into an interactive experience over night, and the cost for any author to make such a textbook is obviously higher than a regular text-only book, so the incentive is just not there.
 
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As much as I would love to see the iPad support SD cards officially, it's not going to happen. Apple wants you to buy the more expensive model. I do consider it to be one of the major drawbacks the iPad has over Android tablets. I may give it a whirl when it comes time to replace my iPad 1.

You can use the camera kit for additional storage but it comes with some big caveats. You have to be jail broken (which makes iBooks unusable), it can only store media files (movies, photos and music), and you can't charge the device while using it.
 
You can just buy a external hard drive (believe its the seagate) that you can access media files from it via your iPad. Expanding your storage, technically.
 
Atty said:
You can just buy a external hard drive (believe its the seagate) that you can access media files from it via your iPad. Expanding your storage, technically.
Click to expand...

I don't think you've got a choice of where to stick most files in iOS unless it's jailbroken.

Even then, the cost of that wifi drive + 16GB Ipad is just short of a 64GB wifi only Ipad.
 
A 128GB is more likely than an SD iPad version. What users will have to do is choose what books they want to keep on their iPad and keep the rest in iTunes.
 
TheStu said:
Apple's hasn't refused to expand beyond 64GB out of some sort of stance. It has to do with the availability of really high capacity single chip NAND. The iPhone only went to 64GB this year because it was only last year that the first single chip 64GB NAND was available and it wasn't until the iPhone 4S came out that it was in sufficient quantities. I recall reading once (cannot find the source, sorry) that Apple consumes something on the order of 25-40% of the world's NAND Flash supply.

Looking at iFixit's teardown, it appears that the iPad 2 has (up to) 2 NAND chips, which means that it could conceivably support up to 128GB assuming there is the production capacity for it.

As for the size of the books, if you look into the announcement that was just made from Apple about iBooks 2, and the textbooks available, they weigh in at about 1-1.5GB, with the Biology textbook apparently being 2.77GB in size. And those are general texts. These are not big 800pg long text files, they are fully interactive rich apps essentially. They are big, and if you want to keep old ones on the local device for future reference, you will need a lot of storage.
Click to expand...

Yea I'd really like to see them go to a multichip storage system, then they could increase performance by striping read/writes, just like standard SSD's do now. One of the slower components in the iPad is storage right now. I'm guessing cost is the limiting factor for them doing something like a 4x8gig or 4x16gig system.
And yes, the only reason iDevices haven't gone beyond 64gigs is a simple cost/technical limitation. Its not like they are scared of 128gigs.
 
That's silly. Video files for an interactive textbook should be hosted, with local storage as a secondary option.

And most of them will probably end up being closer to 2-300 MBs, not GBs.
 
I don't know how most schools do it, but I know the school my gf works at bought a whole bunch of 16gb iPads for only the science department. That means the iPads have the biology, chemistry, and physics books on them. They are not allowed to put apps and music on them.

I think the only time you might run into trouble is if you had an iPad for every student, and they had to put all their books on it. Even then, I couldn't see you needing more than the 32gb even with notes and stuff.
 
mmntech said:
You can use the camera kit for additional storage but it comes with some big caveats. You have to be jail broken (which makes iBooks unusable), it can only store media files (movies, photos and music), and you can't charge the device while using it.
Click to expand...

iBooks 1.5 works fine on my untethered 5.0.1 iPad 1. I used the iBooksFix2 cydia file to make it work.

I'm gonna try iBooks 2 later today.
 
mmntech said:
As much as I would love to see the iPad support SD cards officially, it's not going to happen. Apple wants you to buy the more expensive model. I do consider it to be one of the major drawbacks the iPad has over Android tablets. I may give it a whirl when it comes time to replace my iPad 1.

You can use the camera kit for additional storage but it comes with some big caveats. You have to be jail broken (which makes iBooks unusable), it can only store media files (movies, photos and music), and you can't charge the device while using it.
Click to expand...

If you use the latest version of redsn0w, it fixed iBooks.

Also JailbreakMe never had any problem with iBooks. It was mostly the tethered jailbreaks that had problems.
 
iCloud is the reason why Apple with not make 128GB iPads or iPhones anytime soon. Its more profitable selling cloud services than adding extra flash chips on a device.
 
gevorg said:
iCloud is the reason why Apple with not make 128GB iPads or iPhones anytime soon. Its more profitable selling cloud services than adding extra flash chips on a device.
Click to expand...

Except that with the exception of iTunes Match, they aren't selling anything. MobileMe used to cost money, iCloud is completely free.
 
most apple folks don't realize when you mount the sd card or eject it on android, all the apps crash badly; including apps not running on the sd but storing (Cache/files) etc.

it is a blessing having one linear 16GB (close to it) rather than 2gb /mnt and 14gb /sdcard or 2gb /mnt and 14gb /sdcard and 32gb sdcard-external and having to use links to hotwire apps so you don't run out of space.

i prefer network access myself - they should expand on the personal "at home" cloud aka time machine as well as icloud itself.
 
TheStu said:
Except that with the exception of iTunes Match, they aren't selling anything. MobileMe used to cost money, iCloud is completely free.
Click to expand...

Wrong, only the first 5GB is free, the rest has annual costs:

roces.png


PrayForDeath said:
That wouldn't be very practical with the current download caps on 3G/LTE.
Click to expand...

Dunno, seems very practical for the wireless provider's bottom line. :whiste:
 
And some backups are dead heavy. My iPhone 4 (32GB) and iPad 2 (16GB) alone take about 2GB each, so I'm down to a staggering 620MB on iCloud just with backups!

The problem is that... everything that an app stores on the device is backed up. So documents, PDF files, spreadsheets, even FLAC music in dedicated apps and MKV files in apps that do support them get backed up like no tomorrow. 5GB goes... very fast! Especially more so with photos.
 
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