Retina Display iPad 3 Will Be 8% Thicker Than iPad 2, 4-Inch iPhone 5 Coming Next Summer [Rumor]

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There have been rumors of Retina iMacs practically since the day Apple announced Retina display was coming to iOS in 2010. Most of them have been complete nonsense, and Mac fans have had year after year of seeing their ultra-high-res hopes dashed whenever Apple would announce a new Mac product. Unlike pretty much every other item on this list, however, it looks like a Retina iMac may finally be happening, courtesy of recently discovered code in Apple's OS X 10.10 Yosemite beta. But maybe that’s just the optimism speaking...

There have been rumors of Retina iMacs practically since the day Apple announced Retina display was coming to iOS in 2010. Most of them have been complete nonsense, and Mac fans have had year after year of seeing their ultra-high-res hopes dashed whenever Apple would announce a new Mac product. Unlike pretty much every other item on this list, however, it looks like a Retina iMac may finally be happening, courtesy of recently discovered code in Apple's OS X 10.10 Yosemite beta. But maybe that’s just the optimism speaking...


Take this with a grain of salt, but a “reliable source” speaking to iLounge has three inside scoops on Apple’s 2012 product line-up. Their veracity? Offhand, we’d say one of them’s a certainty, one of them’s probable and the last one is nutty.

Here’s what iLounge’s source has to say:

• The iPad 3 will be slightly thicker than the iPad 2: 0.77mm thicker, or about 8%. This is necessary to install the twin light bar system needed to illuminate a 9.7-inch Retina Display. Makes sense to us, as does iLounge’s claim that the iPad 3 would be released in March but shown off for the first time in January: that would give devs plenty of time to update their iPad apps to the new Retina Display.

• The iPhone 5 is still coming as a 4-inch device, but won’t be the teardrop version that everyone was talking about before the iPhone 4S’s debut. It will be 8mm longer than the iPhone 4S and come in a metal casing. We’re just not buying it: Steve Jobs was worried about fragmenting the iPhone marketshare with two different display types before he died, and 3.5 inches is perfect for one-hand operation. The 4-inch iPhone is a pipe dream, we think.

They also say the iPhone 5 will be released next summer, which I also seriously doubt: a September/October timeframe for the iPhone makes a lot more sense, in that it is closer to Christmas.

• Finally, iLounge uncontroversially claims 2012 will see the MacBook Pro line finally get a redesign, though they don’t say what that will look like. I’d say this is a no brainer: the MacBook Pro line hasn’t seen an update since late 2008, and they are ripe for a MacBook Air-like redesign, abandoning their optical drives and gaining ubiquitous SSDs.

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