It’s about that time of the year, Apple Inc. with their “spot on” product refresh cycles. You can’t help but ask, what’s next? That’s always the question on everyone’s mind. Most likely what will be next will be a refresh of their laptop line, although nothing revolutionary has been mentioned, you never know, the iPhone is Verizon after all. The next Apple refresh with the most hype is definitely the Apple iPad, or the iPad 2. It was March 5, 2010, when the Apple iPad was “given” to us by Steve Jobs. The next question is, what’s next for the iPad line?

Rumors and speculation are rampant. Although it took almost an entire year, fierce competition will make this iPad 2 refresh crucial to maintaining Apple’s market share. This year at CES everyone and their mother had a tablet to announce – most notable were the Blackberry Playbook by RIM, the Motorola Xoom and the HP Slate. But let’s not underestimate Dell with the Streak, Asus with their various tablet models and the Toshiba Tablet. (These names are getting ridiculous.) All of which have varying processors, screen sizes, operating systems and not to mention, different prices.

Apple started off this tablet war with almost an entire year head start, what can they do to maintain that lead? First up, cameras, front and back. With rumors of the front camera being a VGA webcam with the rear camera at one megapixel. Kind of lacking in the resolution department, no? That may be because they have to squeeze more under the hood, like an A5 dual core processor for example. Not to mention the rumors of the graphics being four times better than the original iPad, that combined with putting the retina display from the iPhone onto the iPad, this new iPad will be pretty slick. But at what cost?

I wouldn’t put it past Apple to attempt to raise the price of their newest iPad, claiming it’s a premium tablet, better than the others. Fooling most tech journalists, the media and consumers who get lost in the Apple “Steve Jobs Keynote Reality Distortion field.” The new iPad will be cool, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t see it being “the best thing ever” like the first one was. The only thing the Apple iPad 2 has over any other tablet on the market is the huge Apple App Store. It’s too hard to beat 350,000 apps. Motorola, Blackberry and HP don’t have that many developers or large enough app stores (even Android with 90,000 apps) to even try and surpass the money making juggernaut that is the Apple App Store. However, the one thing that mystifies me the most about the iPad and Apple products in general, is the fact that although better products, that cost less money are on the market, we all still buy the “cool” one, the one with the Apple logo on it. This new iPad could be a sign of what’s to come. Is Apple still cool? Are they still the anti-Microsoft they initially had claimed to be? Have they become that giant corporation with the mediocre products refreshed once a year that we all feel compelled to give them money for? This iPad refresh and only time can tell.