Perhaps Apple has finally reached too far. The iPad 3 was the forbidden fruit that tempted mankind, but it is quickly becoming a regrettable indulgence for many.

It started with complaints about being too hot to handle. Various people even pulled out their sundry thermometers and even FLIR cameras to report that yes, indeed, the iPad 3 gets hotter than the iPad 2 and 1 ever did. In some cases just a few degrees. In other cases, enough to literally make it uncomfortable or allegedly even burn the holder.

And if that had been the end of it, Apple might have gotten off easy, like they did with Antennagate. (You know, where your iPhone4′s antenna is all too often attenuated by you simply holding your phone “wrong”, causing really bad connections, dropped calls, etc. Wrong according to Apple. If it’s actually wrong then why have so many people been trying to hold it that way?)

Alas, there’s more. Much much more.

Next was, well, Antennagate 2. The shiny new iPad3s were, reportedly, having some really bad connections to Wi-Fi. Yep. All your network connections are belong to … no one. Even though your old iPad (or your iPhone, or dare I suggest any other wireless device like an Android phone, a laptop, a printer, a PC) could connect to a wireless router easily and reliably, the iPad 3 … couldn’t. The range of iPad3s was strangely shorter. The connection quality was worse. And that’s if they could connect to your wireless router at all!

But then Antennagate 2 got even worse. Because the same thing started being reported with 3G networks. Especially if you dared to do something stupid like leave your home (with its local Wi-Fi) and roam off to a 3G connection. The iPad 3 would claim that you were connected, only the internet was strangely missing and nothing networked (nearly every app in existence) would work. Until you rebooted your iPad 3. And then it would sort itself out. At least until the next time that you changed networks, such as coming home.

And no matter what you did to reset or change your network settings, the iPad 3 would claim to be working, to be connected, but clearly still be lacking the internet. (Except for rebooting, the only true fix.)

Even worse yet, even 4G reports of the same are coming in now!

Apple didn’t bother testing their hardware?

But even Antennagate2 isn’t enough rain on the iPad 3 parade. Now reports are also coming in that the iPad3’s brilliant Retina Display is also causing issues. Not the least of which are that even with the bigger battery, causing the iPad 3 to be chunkier and heavier, the battery life often times still comes up short compared to the iPad 2.

Then, however, it became even stranger. Reports are now even coming in that the Retina Display makes content on the iPad 3 look worse than on the iPad 2. What?! How could so many more pixels go so wrong? Well, in the up-conversion, apparently.

Yep. If your app, webpage, image, whatever you load is formatted for the iPad 1 or 2 (and why wouldn’t it be?) it is a lower resolution than the native resolution of the iPad 3, thanks to that shiny display. Apple told us that this would be okay though, because it was a direct 4x increase. (Twice as much vertically, and twice as much horizontally.) So everything would still look exactly the same as it did on the iPad 2.

Except – apparently -  it doesn’t.

Just like how most TVs will try to convert your crappy standard definition signal into a shinier high-def image so that it takes up the full screen, the iPad3 attempts to do the same and up-convert your iPad2-sized content to the iPad3’s larger resolution. If it’s drawing, such as rendering text, drawing a box, a line, a window, etc. then it tends to look fine. But if it’s a graphic, a pre-rendered image of any sort, the iPad 3 seems to have a pretty bad algorithm to up-convert. And the result is especially noticeable for any apps, web pages, etc. which render text into their images/pages instead of using actual HTML-formatted/placed text. Which apparently a significant number of content providers (such as online magazines) do. And the result is that in those cases what looks just fine on an iPad 2 looks absolutely awful on an iPad 3.

Of course, whenever anyone complains to Apple that, “It hurts when I do this,” Apple’s answer (when/if it ever gives one) is simply, “Then don’t do that.” Which is, of course, no answer. Just a very old joke.

So not only has the iPad 3 spawned Antennagate2, but now it has also spawned Retinagate. And having a shorter battery life.  On top of being too hot to handle. And just plain harder to handle due to the size and weight increase.

All for an iPad with the same OS and apps that everyone already had.

Thanks to Apple’s new iPad, buyer’s remorse is certainly on the rise.

As are the thread counts in Apple forums.

It’s almost enough to make one think it might be worth the time and effort to actually research a purchase instead of pre-ordering or waiting in line for hours on the release day.

But probably not.  Because that’s not the Apple way.