Apple made the display a priority with its latest iPad release, breaking an unwritten rule that their products should get thinner and lighter with each release, not the other way around. John Gruber of daringfireball.net hit the nail on the head in his review of the new iPad:

Which brings us to an immovable object meeting an irresistible force. Apple doesn’t make new devices which get worse battery life than the version they’re replacing, but they also don’t make new devices that are thicker and heavier. LTE networking — and, I strongly suspect, the retina display3 — consume more power than do the 3G networking and non-retina display of the iPad 2. A three-way tug-of-war: 4G/LTE networking, battery life, thinness/weight. Something had to give. Thinness and weight lost: the iPad 3 gets 4G/LTE, battery life remains unchanged, and to achieve both of these Apple included a physically bigger battery, which in turn results in a new iPad that is slightly thicker (0.6 mm) and heavier (roughly 0.1 pound/50 grams, depending on the model).

50 grams and six-tenths of a millimeter are minor compromises, but compromises they are, and they betray Apple’s priorities: better to make the iPad slightly thicker and heavier than have battery life suffer slightly.

This point can’t be understated. For Apple, the quality of the display, both in terms of resolution and color gamut, is so critical to the experience of using an iPad that they were willing to make some major tradeoffs. In this case they not only ended up with a slightly thicker, heavier device, they also used a significantly more expensive part. The end result is a stunning display that amplifies everything that was already great about the iPad 2 so it looks like a tradeoff worth making.

We took some color performance measurements of our new iPad this morning and we’ll be posting more details shortly.