I think few would disagree that the iPad 3 is destined to become yet another breakout hit for Apple. With a reported three million units sold as of the first weekend, some analysts are predicting as many as 12 million will be reaching customers by the end of the quarter. That assumes, of course, that supplies and sales continue at the current fantastic rate.

The reviews are, almost in uniform, in praise of of the latest and greatest iPad, particularly the gorgeous Retina Display. Sure, some may dispute the claim that 264 pixels per inch is sufficient to render those pixels indistinguishable at a normal 15-inch viewing distance. It’s been suggested that Apple really needed over 400 pixels per inch to earn that title, but that may be taking things a little too far. Few are complaining about such technical niceties. Besides, it’s not as if Apple’s competitors are coming up with similarly sharp displays, let alone anything better. This is an argument that really isn’t worth much further discussion.

But there is one potential fly in the ointment. It appears that Consumer Reports is now investigating reports that the iPad 3 puts off too much heat. This comes on the heels of some reports that it’s warmer to the touch. One estimate had it running 10 degrees hotter than the iPad 2, which is still a lot cooler than most note-books. It’s not as if there are widespread reports of the thing running hot, as opposed to warm. But you have to expect that Apple had to devise a scheme to disperse lots of internal heat what with more power hungry components in operation. Apple’s position is that the new iPad is running “well within” specifications. But it appears that CR is desperate for headlines. Indeed, their initial analysis complained that the iPad 3 wouldn’t charge when under a heavy load, such as playing an action-filled game. What a silly reaction? I presume CR realizes that you normally don’t use an iPad or iPhone very much while in charging mode. Or maybe they don’t.

Anyway, the larger question is where does Apple go from here?

Certainly there were serious tradeoffs in keeping the new iPad relatively the same size and weight as the previous version. Yes, it’s a mite heavier and thicker, but you have to look real close to see a difference, and even then it may require hard measurements. However, the iPad and similarly sized tablets are already considered to be on the heavy side. It’s not as if one-handed use is comfortable for any length of time. So I would expect Apple is working hard to make the next generation Retina Display and accompanying components thinner and lighter. Knocking a few ounces off that box would be an amazing achievement. If it gets down to a pound or so, I expect the complaints about the iPad’s girth would vanish.

Another issue, occasioned by the Retina Display and LTE support, is the larger battery. While that’s not a serious issue itself, it also means that it takes a lot longer to recharge. It’s more common now to keep your new iPad tethered to a charging station, or a Mac or PC, for the entire night rather than two or three hours. But this might require an upgrade to battery technology, along with ongoing power efficiencies.

Other than a thinner and lighter form factor, just what’s left? Well, I realize Apple is going to want to continue to upgrade the processor and graphics. Today’s iPad has the same dual-core processor as the iPad 2, although graphics have been upgraded to quad-core. In the real world, that extra pixel crunching capability is required to handle the demands of the Retina Display. In real world benchmarks, it seems to run fast enough. Some early tests that include Android tablets indicate the new iPad is highly competitive, but it still comes down to the user experience. There Apple excels, which is why other tablets are going nowhere. Even the greatly hyped Amazon Kindle Fire appears to have lost its mojo since the first of the year.

But is there something afoot that would allow Apple to make the next iPad a significant upgrade after what they did this year? Thinner? Lighter? Well, I suppose spiffier looks would account for some sales glory, and better performance and, perhaps, battery life, might be important factors in convincing the media that the next upgrade is significant. It seems far too many so-called journalists and commentators cannot seem to comprehend that a product revision might be a major upgrade even if it looks very much the same as the previous model. Of course the success of the iPad 3 and iPhone 4s put the lie to that argument.

But it’ll be repeated next year if the next iPad looks mostly the same as the current model. Maybe they’d prefer a diamond-shaped version, or one with tiny rectangles at each edge. Oh wait, maybe someone will actually take me seriously.

Otherwise, Apple might install a rear camera with more pixels, and make the front sensor HD, for better FaceTime performance. Having an onboard dictation feature for inserting text into emails and other documents is a good thing, but I expect some of you would have preferred to see Siri in all her glory. But Apple never puts in all the features for which customers clamor in a single year. If it’s not there in 2013, maybe it’ll happen in 2014.

And I haven’t begun to consider iOS 6, which is expected this fall.

Apple tends to release little more than bare-bones specs for most of their mobile products. Beyond basic dimensions, battery life, and supported multimedia formats, there’s not a lot to find. That requires some heavy lifting by others to determine, and sometimes you wonder if they’re looking at the wrong things.

First there’s the inevitable teardown. You get a “bill of materials” (or BOM), a summary of the parts used and the estimated prices. Now knowing that Apple buys this part from Samsung, that part from Qualcomm, might appeal to you in an abstract sense, if you care about such things. That roughly half the parts in the iPad 3, in terms of estimated price, come from Samsung, is especially curious. After all, Apple has been suing Samsung for alleged patent violations to the ends of the planet.

However, Samsung is a multilayered company, with many divisions that act almost like separate companies. So they might be making billions as a parts supplier to Apple, while the mobile handset division is fighting tooth and nail to defend their right to build more iPad or iPhone knockoffs. But Apple will buy parts where they can get the best deals, with consistent quality and prompt and predictable delivery times.

Unfortunately, you have to wonder about the estimates for the prices for parts. I’ve seen reports, for example, that Apple is paying either $70 or $87 for the Retina Display. The entire bill for these parts indicates Apple is evidently taking a decent hit to profit margins on the third generation iPad, no doubt expecting that those prices will go down over time as manufacturing techniques become more efficient.

Regardless, how can anyone outside of Apple and their suppliers know the exact prices? Apple is legendary for negotiating billion dollar deals with suppliers to get large quantities of the parts they need. The prices you read are estimates, and maybe other companies may pay those prices to get the same components, but wouldn’t Apple do better if they’re buying ten or twenty million at a clip? Offering hefty upfront payments can certainly influence those prices. The people who know the truth aren’t going to reveal any of that information except, perhaps, years later after the raw numbers no longer make a difference.

Beyond the BOM, there are benchmarks, just to see how well, say, an iPhone or an iPad fares against the competition, particularly products running the Android OS. When you read those benchmarks, you’ll find that there often isn’t a lot of difference. Maybe a few fractions of a second faster or slower in browsing speeds, or minor variations in game frame rates. If you believe only in numbers, the fact that some Android tablets have eight megapixel camera sensors, and Apple only installed five megapixels in the iPad 3, ought to mean the former delivers superior pictures.

But it’s not just the raw numbers, but in how well the camera software can turn the data into real pictures that counts. So far it seems that the latest and greatest iPad is making more of its pixels than the competition. Step up to the iPhone 4s, with eight megapixels, and you find good reason for many people to leave their point and short digital cameras in the closet. Sure, those cameras offer extra customization options, including optical zooming, which will deliver superior snapshots, at least in theory. In practice, most people won’t care, or notice a significant difference. Apple demonstrates the real advantages of their mobile computers, specifically the iOS and the vast app catalog.

However, testing the advantages of one operating system over another is a far more granular process, involving the weighing of numerous pros and cons that can be time-consuming to evaluate. It’s a lot easier to say that Product A is better than Product B because the specs are better. That’s why Consumer Reports wants you to believe that smartphones with larger screens must be superior to the iPhone, even though there are well-known usability concerns. But determining usability is not something you can do with a pocket calculator or with bullet points that emphasize product measurements.

Of course, the subjective factor isn’t restricted to computers, operating systems, and apps. Consider a speaker system. You can find lots of gear with roughly similar specs, but actually measuring the performance of loudspeakers in your listening area is a highly complex affair. Room reflections, not to mention the source material (rock, classical, folk, country, etc.) can highly influence your reaction. I recall doing both measurements and listening tests with computer speaker systems years ago for Macworld. It took weeks, and ended up being a far more complicated evaluation than the magazine would have undertaken had I not insisted on following the testing model of some of the audio magazines of the period. But most people just listen to decide which products they prefer.

Obviously customers rate the iPhone and iPad superior to the competition. User experience may be quantified on a spreadsheet, dividing one’s reaction into different categories, such as interface response, ease of use, and so on and so forth. But often it’s a magical combination of all these factors that comes together and makes one product feel superior to another. The snappiness of the touch interface on an iPhone and an Android smartphone are clearly different, though less so than it used to be. But can you quantity those differences with raw numbers, or one’s subjective impression?

In the end, specs and benchmarks are just easier to do, but they will often give you only a vague idea of how a product performs in the real world. Doing it the right way, however, isn’t easy. Agreeing on the proper method is difficult too, which is why so many product reviewers choose to take the easy way out.

It may be a “hobby,” but that hasn’t stopped the Apple TV from being a best seller among accessory TV set top boxes. Aside from the receiver you get from your cable or satellite TV service, you have a choice of loads of peripherals to add, such as a Blu-ray player and a gaming console. Roku has been pretty successful with their alternative to Apple TV, although Google TV has been a non-starter.

The advantage of the Apple TV is the seamless integration with the company’s ecosystem, including iTunes, Macs, iPhones, iPads, iCloud, and so on and so forth. While other tech companies struggle to integrate their TV accessories, Apple succeeds, which allows you to forgive some of the lapses in available content.

The third generation Apple TV, which came out on the same day as the new iPad, but was obviously upstaged, looks the same as the previous model. It’s a tiny black box that ships with a power cord and Apple’s minimalist remote. Yes, you don’t have to deal with a hefty power brick, because the power supply is internal; you just need the cord. But that’s understandable, since Apple TV uses low-power parts derived from their other mobile gadgets.

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As the world anticipates, expects, or ignores, the arrival of Windows 8 later this year, the real question is whether Microsoft has made a huge gamble that may not pay off. While previous versions of Windows at least had close resemblances to one another, the Metro interface seems to be daringly different, or is it?

Responding to a question that few might have asked, Microsoft decreed that the Start menu, where you access your most-used apps and, curiously, restart or shut down your PC, must go. In its place comes the Metro interface, an overlay of square or rectangular tiles, which most recently graced the face of Windows Phone.

The artwork is minimalist. Sometimes it’s just a label with thin white text, or perhaps some stick figure artwork. In a vague sense, Metro harkens back to Microsoft’s Bob, a failed attempt to place a warm and fuzzy cartoon-like face on Windows from the 1990s. Then, as now, Microsoft used old fashioned artwork in an effort to seem somehow relevant.

But the larger question is why Microsoft has become convinced that taking an interface that has already failed on other products must somehow succeed. Is it because it’ll have the same theme on both traditional PCs and tablets? Microsoft has so far failed to develop a successful tablet strategy. Or maybe it’s all about watching from the sidelines as Apple infuses iOS elements into OS X.

In a sense I can understand Microsoft’s dilemma. Apple and Google have taken control of the mobile computing market, while the market share of Windows has been steadily, if slowly, eroding. As sales growth of new Macs exceeds that of the PC industry, Microsoft has been forced to change their core product, and attempt to persuade tens of millions of customers that it’s high time they upgrade from Windows XP, which is over ten years old.

While Metro has gotten some reasonably favorable reviews, I have problems with the execution. The tiles present a mixture of darker hues, with thin lettering, making the labels sometimes difficult to read. Some tiles have artwork, some don’t. Unlike the icons you find on the iOS or Android, the tiles all seem to run together, and you often have to look closely to see which one you want. You don’t have the sort of instant recognition, of say, the icon for Apple Mail, or for Microsoft Word for the Mac for that matter.

While it’s possible consumers will take to this scheme, or put up with it, the same can’t be said for businesses who want predictability. They aren’t interested in the niceties of Windows beyond making sure the apps they need to run operate efficiently. They don’t want to have to retrain their employees as the result of the whims of Microsoft.

More to the point, since Metro’s appearance on such products as the Zune and Windows Phone smartphones wasn’t very successful, why does Microsoft think things will magically change on a PC, or by imposing essentially the same interface scheme on a traditional PC and a tablet?

Someone once said that a definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result.

But Metro isn’t the first interface curiosity from Microsoft. Consider the infamous ribbon, which is essentially a mass of toolbar buttons on an app that are meant to make features more discoverable.

However, there’s nothing new about the ribbon. We still call them toolbars on most apps. Whether horizontal or vertical, toolbars contain buttons that allow you to access a program’s key features. You had app toolbars in the 1980s, so why does Microsoft believe it’s something new? Well, on the Windows platform, menu bars are buried in favor of ribbons, expecting customers to appreciate the fact that they don’t have to scan through drop-down menus to find the functions they need. They’re all there for you to see.

Only it doesn’t always work that well in practice. Buttons are tiny, icons are sometimes indistinct as to form and function, and the features they manage aren’t always obvious until you test them out, or remember the positions for quick recognition. Now Microsoft does this better on the Mac, because the traditional menu bar isn’t hidden, and you can go from menu to toolbar and, usually at any rate, figure out how to accomplish a particular task. The ribbon for the Mac version of Outlook seems more haphazard, but since the program is such a mess in regular use, that’s simply what you expect.

However, Microsoft has been using the “discoverability” excuse on their products for years. It doesn’t seem as if they’ve become any easier to use, or that the ribbon answers an actual need. Microsoft, however, is very much into doing focus groups to test out what features people like. However, if they had focus groups back in the early days of the auto industry, they would have ended up with better horse-driven wagons. That’s not the way to innovate, but to exist in the past.

But since Metro’s artwork is very much from the 1980s or 1990s, perhaps my suggestion that Microsoft is living in the past isn’t that far off.