So the ipad 2 was launched in San Fransisco yesterday. For anyone who missed it the key points are that it is faster, slimmer and lighter.

In fact, its significantly faster. It's in fact TWICE as fast as the original iPad. Maybe we have become so used to Apple progress that it is easy to just shrug our shoulders at such an achievemnet. Well its much more significant than that.

This is wehere Moore's law comes in. Moore (who worked at Intel) stated in 1965 that the quantity of transisitors in an integrated circuit had been doubling over time. The graph below shows the strength of the correlation.

In 1975 Moore re-stated his law stating that the number of transitors was doubling every two years. Since 1965 Moore's law has been correlated to a number of industries and more generally to the advancement of computing and it keeps working.

So with the ipad 2 we have seen that doubling in processing power within 12 months! Moore felt that the speed of advancement may actually slow after 10 years. So this is a "mind blowing" achievement and one that competitors will seriously struggle to compete with because in March 2012 the iPad3 will be twice as fast again.

This competitive advantage could last 10 years or more and as many futurists have noted is leading towards a potential technological singularity where innovation happens in an instant. So let's make a bold prediction that the iPAd10 will arrive in 5 years not 10.