[taylorbuley]

Given the evidence presented here, the courteous thing to do would seem to be to host the images remotely. However it makes sense why developers would default to frontloading the image loads as there's per access latency and overhead associated with hosting the images remotely vs. a one time hit for downloading the images from the App Store.

Instead of using a CDN and eating the bandwidth cost of retina display-ready assets, it sounds like apps companies are publishing the cost onto users for increasingly resolute image assets.

That or people should buy Apple's larger models if they expect to do serious computing on the iPad.