MacRumors

As noted by Insanely Great Mac, Walmart has issued a statement announcing that it will be offering a "limited supply" of the new iPad beginning at 12:01 AM local time at its 24-hour stores in the United States. Walmart's sales will start eight hours before Apple's own retail stores open for business Friday morning.

If you want to be the first person amongst your friends and colleagues to have the new iPad, you will need to head to your local Walmart. Starting at 12:01 a.m. local time on March 16, a limited supply of the new iPad will be available at your local 24-hour Walmart. Other retailers’ doors don’t open until 8 a.m. local time, so you can get to work on time and beat the rush by coming to Walmart.

Several retailers in Australia also offered midnight sales of the new iPad, meaning that some customers have already been able to purchase the device. The teardown experts at iFixit were first in line at a Telstra store in Melbourne and have been dissected an LTE iPad over the past several hours.

Earlier today, we noted that iFixit was on hand for an early midnight launch of the new iPad at a Telstra retail store in Melbourne, Australia, and the teardown experts are now beginning the process of opening up the device to examine its internals.

A number of the parts appeared in leaks leading up to the device's introduction, but the teardown offers the first confirmation of details on what is included inside the new iPad and reveals some of the additional parts such as the cameras and battery that had not been seen in leaks.

Among the details revealed in the teardown:

- The display appears to be manufactured by Samsung. Samsung has been claimed to be the sole supplier of displays for the initial batch of new iPads, although LG and Sharp are expected to come on board shortly as they catch up from quality control issues in their production.

- The new iPad packs a Broadcom BCM4430 Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip. As with a number of other recent Apple product releases, the new iPad supports low-power Bluetooth 4.0.

- The A5X system-on-a-chip carries a manufacturing date code of the first week in January.

- The wireless baseband chip is indeed the Qualcomm MDM9600, as had been suggested in restore code for the device.

- The new iPad indeed contains 1 GB of RAM, and unlike in A5-based hardware, the RAM consists of two standalone chips from Elpida rather than being integrated directly into the A5X package.

- The iPad's flash memory is from Toshiba, while the flash storage seen in the leaked logic board last month was from Hynix. Apple uses a variety of flash memory suppliers, balancing its load based on vendor capacity and pricing.

- The battery cells are roughly 70% larger than on the iPad 2, with the extra thickness of the new iPad providing space to house the larger batteries. Earlier speculation had suggested that Apple may have had a breakthrough in battery technology to allow for greater energy density that would have explained the 70% increase in battery capacity, but this is apparently not the case.

The Verge confirms in its testing with a review unit of the new iPad with 4G LTE that FaceTime video calling remains limited to Wi-Fi networks despite the fact that LTE offers greater bandwidth than many Wi-Fi networks.

We've just confirmed that although the new iPad has incredibly fast download and upload speeds over LTE, FaceTime video chat still won't work directly on the 4G network. As you can see in the positively vexing screenshot above, attempting to initiate a FaceTime call over LTE fails out with a message exhorting you to connect to a Wi-Fi network.

As the report notes, Steve Jobs claimed during FaceTime's introduction at the iPhone 4 media event in June 2010 that Apple still needed to work with carriers to support FaceTime over cellular data networks and that the feature would consequently remain Wi-Fi-only at least through 2010. Well into 2012 and with 3G now giving way to LTE on the new iPad, it seems that carriers are still unwilling to allow FaceTime calls to be transmitted natively over their networks, presumably due to concerns about increased data usage and strained network capacity.

Apple's share price touched the $600 mark as trading opened this morning, just a month after reaching $500/share for the first time. The stock has, however, pulled back slightly since the open and now sits at $594.

The stock price has been on a tear ever since Apple reported blowout earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2012, rising nearly $180/share, or close to 40%, in under two months.

At the end of February, Apple broke through the important psychological barrier of $500 billion in market capitalization. Apple is the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, worth nearly $560 billion, more than $150 billion higher than second-place ExxonMobil.

Apple is now within $50 billion of claiming the "most valuable publicly traded company ever" title. According to the S&P, Microsoft had a peak market cap of $604 billion during the dot-com boom in December 1999. Adjusted for inflation, Microsoft was worth $813.42 billion in January 2012 dollars at its peak, and Apple would have to reach $873/share to surpass that total.

With Apple's official launch of the iPad in Australia, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong just hours away, it seems that some of the company's retail stores are beginning their preparations. At Apple's Fukuoka Tenjin store in Japan, which closed for the night a little over an hour ago, employees are currently hard at work removing iPad 2 units from display in order to replace them with demo models of the new iPad.

Apple's retail stores will be opening at 8:00 AM local time to begin selling the new iPad, but some third-party retail partners will be opening even earlier. In fact, our friends at iFixit have traveled to Australia in order to be among the first to obtain an iPad for teardown purposes and were first in line at a Telstra retail store in Melbourne that opened just a few minutes ago at midnight. The carrier is even celebrating the event with a meter square iPad cake.

Update: iFixit now has its iPad in hand and will begin tearing it down shortly.

While shipping notices for pre-orders of the iPad began going out over the weekend, those notices have been accompanied by "future delivery requested" notes indicating that Apple is working with delivery companies to coordinate the launch for this Friday, March 16. But the new 1080p-capable Apple TV set-top box is also set to debut at that same time, and at least some U.S. pre-order customers are receiving notifications that their packages are already out for delivery today.

The first hint of potential early delivery for Apple TV pre-orders surfaced yesterday when they began appearing in FedEx shipping notices with overnight shipping and estimated deliveries of today. But the initial shipping estimates appeared to be based only on the fact that shipping information had been received by FedEx, with the actual packages not yet showing up in the system.

But the packages themselves did start registering in FedEx's tracking system during the overnight hours and have moved quickly to their final distribution points, and a number of MacRumors readers have reported that the packages are out for delivery.

Early delivery of the Apple TV would be a welcome surprise for a number of customers waiting to stream the higher-resolution content to their televisions, and would not be unheard for Apple. While the focus is on coordinating an iPad launch for Friday with in-store launches occurring on the same day, the Apple TV is much less of a priority and thus Apple is likely unconcerned about the shipments of the new device coming in a day early. On the contrary, getting some of the Apple TV orders delivered today could be part of the plan to help ease the load on delivery companies for tomorrow's busy iPad launch.

Update: Deliveries of the new Apple TV are indeed being made today:

(Thanks, Nan Zi!)

The embargo has lifted on the reviews for the 3rd Generation iPad, and they are starting to trickle out. Here are links and summaries of some of the more prominent reviews:

Macworld Review and Video

- Text in most apps will automatically take advantage of Retina display, though with some exceptions (Kindle App)
- "The third-generation iPad had a frame rate 1.6 times that of the iPad 2"
- 3rd Gen iPad almost identical physically to iPad 2
- Video quality of 1080p video recorded was "very good" even in low light
- "AT&T’s LTE network in San Francisco was impressive." with 14.5Mbps/20.6Mbps download and upload rates.

LoopInsight Review

- "Remember how startling it was to go from one of those giant standard definition projector TVs to an HDTV? That’s what this is like."
- Screen is a huge difference from iPad 2.
- Movies and photos are crystal clear

TechCrunch

- "Once you see and use the new iPad, there will be no going back."
- LTE: "Really fast. Faster-than-my-WiFi fast."
- LTE: 40 mbps down and 20mbps up on Verizon
- Bigger battery, and does get noticeably warm in lower left corner after prolonged use.

The Verge Review and Video

- "I'm not being hyperbolic or exaggerative when I say it is easily the most beautiful computer display I have ever looked at."
- Verizon LTE: 22Mbps down, 21Mbps in mid-town Manhattan
- Battery tests almost matched Apple's claims.

AllThingsD

- "If you already own an iPad 2, and like it, you shouldn’t feel like you have to rush out to buy the new one."
- Was able to use smaller font sizes to read books and email on 3rd Gen iPad vs iPad 2

NY Times

- "Really, the new iPad should have been called the iPad 2S."
- "Apple just took its white-hot iPad and added the latest screen, battery and cellular technologies."

Following yesterday's unboxing video of the new iPad in Vietnam, which has also resulted in benchmarks and sample photos and screenshots from the device surfacing, Hong Kong's PCM Online reports (via Engadget) that it too has gained early access to the new iPad.

PCM's device is a white 16 GB 4G model, and the report includes a number of photos and benchmarks of the device comparing it to an iPad 2, as well as a video highlighting a number of features of the device and containing a sample video shot with the new iPad at the end of the clip. The new iPad's video quality from the rear camera is obviously superior to that of the iPad 2, but still suffered from a bit of overexposure in PCM's sample clip.

Benchmarking the graphics performance of the new iPad also showed significant improvement over the iPad 2, with benchmarking tests boosting performance from 90 frames per second (fps) to 140 fps in the GLBenchmark 2.1.1 Egypt offscreen test and from 146 fps to 250 fps in the GLBenchmark 2.1.1 Pro offscreen test. Similar data had previously been uploaded to GLBenchmark's site, although its authenticity has not been confirmed.

With just two days to go until the launch of the new iPad, third-party retailer partners are apparently beginning to receive their stocks of the device. Engadget shares a photo of what is claimed to be several boxes of the new iPad that have arrived at a Best Buy location in the United States.

Meanwhile, another report claims that at least one PC World location in the United Kingdom has received its shipment, with the boxes "stacked up ready to go". For those looking forward to an in-store purchase on launch day in the UK, Pocket-lint claims that PC World may be a solid option with rumors that at least some of the chain's locations will be opening ahead of Apple's official 8:00 AM launch time.

Update: We're also hearing of iPad shipments arriving at John Lewis in the UK and at Target in the United States.

Last week, we took a look at the compression being employed by Apple with its new 1080p content on the iTunes Store, a feature that has allowed Apple to increase file sizes by only 15-25% compared to 720p even as the number of pixels have more than doubled. A number of commenters were interested in seeing how 1080p iTunes content compares to Blu-ray, and Ars Technica has now returned with a new analysis looking at the relative quality of those two sources.

The report offers a number of blown-up comparison shots, finding that the iTunes Store content generally compares fairly well to Blu-ray content, although it does struggle a bit more with bright highlights, scenes with high detail and noise levels, and dark gradients.

I was surprised to see how close the iTunes 1080p download comes to Blu-ray, considering that it's only a fraction of the file size. And let's be honest: there are lots of Blu-ray titles that look much worse than this iTunes download. But despite an impressive effort by Apple, Blu-ray still reigns king when it comes to image quality. And unlike iTunes titles, BRDs can have uncompressed multi-channel audio, multiple audio language options, and special features.

Apple's move to 1080p video content in the iTunes Store is part of a significant shift to higher-resolution offerings, pairing the new new content with movie support for iTunes in the Cloud and new 1080p hardware in the new iPad and Apple TV set to debut on Friday.