The new iPad runs a little warmer than the old one, but is it actually “hot” by comparison to other tech gear we use every day? The answer would seem to be no, although nobody can quite agree by how much.
It seemed like the perfect point of criticism for Apple’s 3rd generation iPad when a number of users reported it running rather warm, or as some put it, exceptionally hot. Anecdotally, I only noticed the warmth after it became an “issue”, which makes me think that a lot of it was the power of suggestion rather than the 3rd generation iPad being a replacement toaster oven. But anecdotal evidence isn’t exactly scientific, and while there have been plenty of iPad heat measurements made over the last week, there hasn’t been much of a frame of reference for those temperatures.
PCWorld reports on their infrared thermometer testing, not so much of the new iPad in comparison to the old one, but in comparison to other tablets and notebooks, including the Asus Transformer Prime and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Their conclusions? There’s not much significant difference; the 3rd generation iPad does run a touch warmer than the 2nd generation, but within a whisker of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 most of the time, and only a touch above the Transformer Prime, which was the coolest running tablet in their roundup.
Conversely, Wired‘s testing on the 3rd generation iPad versus other tablets saw the Transformer Prime run the warmest, ahead of the iPad, as well as the Kindle Fire and Blackberry Playbook.
In any real case, the temperatures recorded for either test weren’t particularly significant for actual human use, and compared to some of the notebook heats registered in the same test, they’re positively frosty. [PC World and Wired]