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I don't get it. Why do this with iPads, rather than the old-school way with monitors? Wouldn't that make for easier, cheaper, and higher-value? Unless they really did have 21 iPads lying around the office. Okay, back-of-the-envelope time! 21 iPad2s is what, $850? Plus $1k worth of server to drive it? Over $9k, anyway. This whole setup is 5376x3072 resolution, at roughly 23" by 41" of viewable area (at a novel 1.75x aspect ratio). Nine 1920x1024 monitors would give you 5760x3072, at a more traditional 1.78x ratio. Each needs to be 13.56" x 7.75" to get the same physical size, which is to say we're talking about 17" monitors. So let's make it more visually imposing, scale it up 25% to 21" monitors. Those go for $120 each, so that's just over $1000 in monitors. You're gonna need 5 video cards, call it another $1000, and maybe those are going to go into two servers instead of one, so another $2000. At $4000 total, you're ahead at least half the price. If you don't want to scale it up, and you're willing to go slightly lower-res, you can do 4 24" monitors, easily driven by two cards on one server. Lower cost, more-useful hardware, but lower res. More interestingly, with either case you don't have to fight Apple's walled garden, you don't have to worry about weird RF issues or charging, and you've got general-purpose hardware that you can use for developer machines afterwards. So, anyway, now that I've spent WAY too much time on this and should go back to work, here's my TL;DR: Is there any reason at all that this is a good engineering approach to building a video-wall? |