Photos of Leaked iPad 3 Parts Indicate Minor Design Changes; Bigger Battery

In the last 24 hours, a number of sites have posted photos, which they claim are of Apple's next generation iPad parts.

RepairLabs was the first post photos of the inside of iPad 3's rear shell. Based on the photo, they have made the following observations:

A. You can see here that the mounts for the logic board are very different, which means the logic board shape will be different allowing for . . . .

B. More battery. The width of where the logic board sits on the iPad 2 appears much larger than that of the iPad 3. We have long heard that the iPad 3 was going to provide longer battery life, and this back housing seems to support that.

C. The camera is different. It is hard to make a judgment just by looking at the casing, but what we can expect is a different camera on the iPad 3 than what we had on the 2.

D. LCD will be different than what we have had before. Whether or not it will be the super screen we have seen reported will have to wait. But the different mounting does mean that the LCD has been redesigned at the very least.

This was followed by folks at Apple.pro posting photos of the outside shell of iPad 3 and Smart Cover magnets. As MacRumors points out, they appear to be quite similar to iPad 2 and indicates that iPad 2 Smart Covers will work with iPad 3 as well.

Cult of Mac just posted photos, which they claim are of iPad 3 internals. They report that the most of the iPad 3 parts appear to be different from iPad 2 parts, however, they found the changes to iPad 3's headphone jack the most intersting.

As you can see below, the iPad 3”s headphone jack is different again, with what appears to be another connector on its bottom end. iPatch believes this connector is for a dock connector, which would suggest that the iPad 3”s headphone jack will be at the bottom, alongside the dock connector, similar to the iPod touch. However, the images we have of the iPad 3”s rear panel conflict with that theory.

 

iPad 3 is also rumored to come with Retina Display, faster processor (but still a dual-core processor) and improved camera front and rear cameras and support for 4G LTE networks.

Now that most rumors indicate that iPad 3 will look similar to iPad 2, will Apple surprise us with a redesigned iPad?

[via RepairLabs, MacRumors, Apple.pro, Cult of Mac]