Sounds like a good plan Sean. Plus you got to be getting a good (hand me down) path soon. What I mean is your kids are getting close to that age about a year from now? ?

Kaimana has so far gotten 4 iPods, an eMac, lamp shade iMac and when I get a new iMac, she will get my outdated 20 inch aluminum iMac first rev. Since we don't want her to have a phone yet, we got her a iTouch, which we can send her text messages, works great for us.

iPad won't be getting a retina display any time soon. At least not 300+ ppi like the iPhone. Packing the pixels of a 30" cinema display into a 10" screen would drive the price up dramatically, drain the battery much faster, and require a GPU with power of a current gaming PC to push that many pixels.

Right Zwei

Still the chassis of the iPad is much larger than an iPhone - I would think it could hold a much larger battery to make up for the extra draw? ?

It's already got a massive battery in it now, that's why it's as heavy as it is …and the battery is probably the low man on the totem pole as far as the issues go.

My guess, the only difference between the current iPad and the next rev will be a faster A4 processor, larger HD options, and a front facing camera for Facetime.

A faster processor would help. Multi-cores would be nice, towards addressing power management as well as performance. I don't expect them to play catch-up anytime soon, though, as it's good enough as is, for the moment.

Really needs a USB port, and as Reboot mentioned, not having a wireless sync is ridiculous.

You'd think they'd keep pace and go all on silicon, then they could dump that ridiculous two-tiered pricing for wifi and wifi-3G, and throw in GPS, 1080P HD encode-decode, etc, when they do go for faster processing.

But Apple can afford a slow fuse, as they've got media consumption, apps and ads all to themselves with no competition on the near horizon; with Marvell moving on education, healthcare, e-readers and the services-apps ecosystems for those ( well, it seems a natural, too, to later leverage into business use ), while all the other OEMs have zero clue what's going on, waiting for Microsoft to get its sorry arse together.

If the other OEMs had a clue, they'd fuk Microsoft and dump Intel ( over-milking and too damned slow keeping pace ), go the Moby platform ( it's the best of breed, anyway, going forward a long way ), Android or Ubuntu, and build and bundle their own OEM services and apps platforms, instead of twiddling their thumbs.

Ed