Jason Grigsby discusses the initial method that Apple.com will use to serve retina graphics to the new iPad:
As far as I can tell, there is no attempt to prevent duplicate downloads of images. New iPad users are going to download both a full desktop size image and a retina version as well.
The price for both images is fairly steep. For example, the iPad hero image on the home page is 110.71K at standard resolution. The retina version is 351.74K. The new iPad will download both for a payload of 462.45K for the hero image alone.
The total size of the page goes from 502.90K to 2.13MB when the retina versions of images are downloaded.
I’m not sure how anyone could get by with the 250MB AT&T data plan on the new iPad unless they stick to email and non-retina-serving sites.1 Grigsby goes on to note that websites could more intelligently deliver retina-only graphics. However, even in those cases, image sizes are going to be three to four times as large as their non-retina counterparts.
I think it’s safe to assume that data usage will increase for users upgrading to the newest iPad.
(via: Luke Wroblewski)
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Of course if you are mainly using Wi-Fi, who cares? ↩︎