Yearly Archives: 2011

iPhone 5 – my guess

Hardware

Due Tuesday, 10/4

It’s always fun to speculate on new Apple gadgets, and never more than when it comes to the iPhone, the latest version of which is scheduled to be released on Tuesday.

This will be new CEO Tim Cook’s first product roll-out so it has to be good to conquer any lingering doubts about his fitness for the rôle, even if the design will have been largely fixed a year ago.

Here are my guesses.

There will be not one, but two.

The old iPhone 4 will be limited to 8gB of memory and is actually the more significant, if less glamorous, of the two. It will be cheap and with the Motorola dual band comms chip will work on CDMA and GSM networks, meaning worldwide. It will be sold locked to a carrier and unlocked at a premium for markets dictating that. Why the more significant of the two? It’s the old ‘sell one to every Chinese’ argument and this will be the Third World model. 4 billion prospects and counting. All other specs will be as for the iPhone 4 available today, meaning the single core ARM A4 CPU. US price with a two year contract? $99.

The iPhone 5 will be for the developed world. Dual band comms chip, of course, a larger 4″ screen (not curved – that will be in iP 6 – there’s not enough lead time to machine these), 32 or 64gB of memory and 1gB of CPU RAM supporting the dual core ARM A5 CPU from iPad2. Thinner than iPhone 4, of course and with a proper Sony 8mp camera. This is likely to be a serious photographic tool for still and movie picture making and you will always have it with you. The iPhone is already the most used camera on Flickr. This will extend its lead. That 1gB of RAM will be required for the true WOW! feature, which will be Nuance’s Naturally Speaking voice recognition technology with the front end engineered by Siri, which Apple acquired a while back. Generic voice recognition is insanely difficult. Why do you think no one has it running locally? Apple will be the first to make it mostly work and it will run on the iPhone, not having to send your speech up to the cloud and back down, with the inevitable delays. $199/$299. With a two year contract running some $2,500, the upgrade cost is trivial for anyone out of their previous contract.

Both will come with the new iOS 5 (which will also work on all iPads), meaning a full roll out of Apple’s iCloud. Your music will all be cloned to the cloud at no cost and will magically appear on all your iOS and Mac and PC devices. Everything will (finally!) be wireless. Let’s hope it works better than MobileMe – down twice this past week. I like to think that’s in preparation for my predictions. iCloud means that the 8gB in the ‘new’ iPhone 4 will be more than adequate.

My favorite feature? Row 5, Item 4. iP6 will have a ‘sterilizes all politicians and bankers’ option,
making it the hottest seller ever.

Disclosure: Long AAPL 2012 call options.

About those snaps

Photographs

A few prints later, and the gallery is done.

I wrote about an inexpensive way of displaying large prints in a professional manner here. After satisfying myself that this worked well and did not fall apart after a few sun cycles (a daily occurrence here in California, not known to residents of England and northern Europe ….), I got at it and ran off another nine 16/18″ x 24″ prints on the HP DesignJet (a company now permanently stuck on stupid). After mounting them all that was left to do was to wait on Documounts to deliver the required mats. Paper used is HP Premium Plus Glossy. Some speedy work with 3M Double Sided tape to fix the mats in place, a spirit level, measure and hammer, and 90 minutes and 36 mirror retainers later all was done.

All of these were taken in the last year in San Francisco, their recency based in the simple philosophy that if your latest pictures are not your best you should quit the hobby.

Cobbler’s display in North Beach. Mural at Capp and 16th Street.

Woman in the window in an alleyway in the Business District.

Mural behind the W hotel at 3rd and Howard. Rusted wall at Dogpatch. Comstock Saloon on Columbus Avenue in Little Italy.

Mural (lower) off 24th Street. Café Bastille on Belden Place in the Business District. Chairs on Maiden Lane and tram at the Ferry Building.

Hopefully all of these will have changed a year hence, or I’ll be doing needlework in my spare time and you can buy my photo gear. All snapped on the Panasonic G1 using the kit lens or the Olympus 9-18mm wide angle zoom.

Meanwhile, the thrill from walking up the stairs and recalling the exact circumstance of each picture is really quite something. Even in our modern LCD digital world, there’s nothing quite like a nicely displayed wall print.

Several of these snaps involve murals or wall art. If you are in San Francisco and want a good guide to the city’s many murals, click the picture below:

Click for the SF mural guide.

No more slot loading

Hardware

Traditional DVD drives rule.

Apple may be trying to obsolete the DVD but this user of Netflix-by-mail refuses to. The best catalog by far, with much more choice which does not come and go, unlike its streaming counterpart, is to be had by Netflix mail order.

Unfortunately, to the extent that Apple even includes DVD players with its machines they are invariably of the slot loading variety. I have suffered through no fewer than eight of these on various iBooks, MacBooks and iMacs and fully half have failed. Your choices are to have the slot loading DVD drive replaced at enormous cost or procure a used one on eBay (taking your chances with the high fraud rate there), and using the excellent pictorials at iFixit.com to do it yourself.

It is never easy. I have done it in iMacs and iBooks and you are essentially looking at almost completely gutting the machine to get at the drive. You need mechanical skill, courage, excellent organization and a good deal of luck. Those small parts and connectors you will be removing can be very fragile, which is where the luck comes in.

So when the slot loading drive in my MacMini, used as a DVD movie player, started playing up, I took it to the Apple Geniuses at the local Apple Store only to watch them blast compressed air through the DVD slot and through the ineffectual ventilation holes in the base, and the thing worked again. For a couple of weeks. So I procured my own compressed air and repeated the process with the next four failures over the past ten weeks.

After the fifth time the drive refused to come back to life, and knowing how hard it is to procure and replace, I decided I was through with this compromised design and bought an external one.

The Samsung Ultra-Slim DVD reader/writer.

It’s compact, has a proper extendable disc tray, is far cheaper at $50 than any repair could be, and fits nicely between the Mini and the Airport Express, as you can see above. It comes in a wide range of colors – I opted for white. There’s no power brick, the stated trade off being that it uses two USB sockets to derive sufficient power for operation. With my 2010 MacBook Air and 2009 Mini just inserting the larger of the two USB plugs had it working fine. That’s just as well as the two sockets on the MacBook Air are on opposite sides of the keyboard which would have necessitated a USB extension cable to connect to both sockets. Not all computers deliver sufficient power at their USB sockets, so if one does not work, use two. I was certainly not going to buy the $79 MacBook Air Superdrive which is …. you guessed it, slot loading.

Operation is plug-and-play with a Mac. No software installation is required. The empty tray is opened using a finger touch on the front or the eject key on a keyboard. I find that the eject touch key on Mobile Mouse (used on the iPad as a wireless remote keyboard) works fine too. With a disc loaded, the only way to open the drive is with a keyboard or using the eject icon in the Finder – a push on the front of the drive will not work. A bad DVD or CD which never boots can be removed by pressing in the tray for a few seconds, after which it opens, meaning you don’t have the dreaded situation you get with slot loading drives where a bad CD/DVD can render the drive useless. Sure Apple has start up key sequences which purport to force a jammed disc out, but they don’t always work. Want to guess how I know?

For anyone seeking to watch or burn DVDs for movies or photo backups, this Samsung external drive is recommended. It cannot possibly be any worse than the slot-loading drives Apple provides. The only issue encountered so far is that the unit is so light, I had to place some two sided tape on its rubber feet to stop it shifting when the tray is operated. Further, when running Carbon Copy Cloner to back-up the Mini to a USB-connected and USB-powered external drive, trying to start a DVD in the Samsung while CC was running resulted in nothing happening. The likely cause is simply an overload of the modest aggregate power available at the Mini’s USB sockets. So I simply let CCC run, restarted and all was well. It’s probably not a good idea to run other USB devices, which do not have separate power supplies, while using this DVD player.

Meanwhile, I can add another notch to my belt, testifying to the many failures of Apple’s awful hardware. Can you wonder that both my serious work machines are home grown – and ultra-reliable – Hackintoshes?

Disclosure: Long AAPL 2012 call options.

Once magazine

iPad, Photographs

A worthy iPad photo magazine.

The cover of the inaugural issue. Click the picture,

The first issue of ‘Once’ for the iPad is available as a free download from the AppStore and it’s something I suggest you get. The magazine does everything right in contrast to the BJP which does just about everything wrong.

First, it downloads fast and loads quickly.

Second, content is limited to three photo essays, some with nicely integrated sound clips.

Third, navigation is excellent – intuitive, direct and simple. Everything about this says “Designed for a touch tablet”.

Display quality on the iPad is as good as it gets – just like looking at Kodachrome slides on a light box.

The magazine is a sort of modern LIFE, with traditional high quality photography accompanied by excellent writing. True photojournalism. There are no advertisements and no equipment reviews. The focus is on the pictures and the story.

The first issue has articles on the dispossesed people living in the no man’s land between Russia and Georgia in the aftermath of the hostilities there; on the last suvivors of an ancient lifestyle in Greenland – this piece is quite special; and on a retirement community in Arizona. Typically these include a 5 page essay and 20 photographs. Unlike with the BJP, there is no bloat so there are no attention span issues, nor is there any frustration in finding things.

Recommended. Let’s hope it’s published more than its title suggests.

Update August 24, 2012:

Sadly, as the following email indicates, Once has folded after just 11 months:

Seems it’s pretty much impossible to make money at these things.

The Kindle Fire

iPad

A well placed offering.

At $200, the new 7″ Kindle Fire color LCD tablet is attractively priced and designed, for what it offers. However, I see limited use for photographers at this stage, and all the talk of competition for the iPad seems to miss the point of the very meaning of the word.

Click the picture.

Simply stated, you do not choose between a Porsche and a Ford when buying a car, though you may own both. The comparison between the iPad and the Fire is much the same. They can coexist in a market which has not remotely been penetrated yet one whose lower demographics have nothing to choose.

With apps like Snapseed bringing a well designed touch interface to the oft tedious job of photo processing on the iPad’s 9.7″ screen, the migration of the iPad away from a pure consumption device to a content creation one is accelerating. I often find, for example, that I create or edit blog postings using the WordPress app on my iPad, especially now that the app’s many early problems, with lots of bugs, seem to have been overcome. The latest mobile version offers most of the editing tools of the desktop variant.

The Kindle Fire is a more narrowly focused device than the iPad in its first version, but Amazon’s touting of its ingeniously designed predictive web browser, named Silk, is very promising. So, in addition to all the usual book access, now supplemented with music and videos, you will be able to browse the web for content. If the browser is fast then the Fire will make a tremendous tool for schools at all grades. And, if content is king, then the Fire is only the second tablet to hit the market not only with a full complement of content in all its guises, but also with a loyal and growing customer base.

At its attractive price, maybe our 9 year old will cease having to lug 10 lbs. of books to and from school daily, when all he needs access on any day is a page or two. Carrying 10 lbs and accessing 2 ounces really is rather silly. The Fire weighs but 15 ozs …. A touch Kindle at $200 plus lots of public domain content should be substantially cheaper than traditional hard copy while adding video and sound to the learning experience, so it’s not like the device represents an increase in operating costs. And teachers will be able to maintain dynamic curricula on the school’s servers, accessible at the touch of a screen. One can but dream, with makers of traditional – and very profitable – academic text books even now warming up their slush funds to delay the inevitable victory of digital delivery and consumption. It’s called the US taxpayer-funded abomination which is our public schooling system.

Meanwhile, until proposed screen designs which meld eInk (traditional Kindle and excellent in bright sun) and LCD (excellent in all other lighting conditions) are perfected and manufactured in volume, the Kindle Fire will have the same issues with readability as the iPad – meaning it’s unusable outdoors most of the time.

So the iPad soldiers on without any competition, all other tablet makers are in big trouble (Dead Pool: HPQ, RIMM; Two shots, back of skull: Asus, Acer, B&N Nook, Xoom, Sony) either because they are clueless drunks (Dead Pool) or overpriced with no apps or content (Two shots crowd).

For photographers, there’s little here. The Fire’s screen is small and the absence of apps, at least for now, debilitating. However, a rumored 10″ Fire in 2012 may change the competitive landscape and I most certainly hope it does. Competition is always good – have you checked you monoplistic provider’s cell phone bill recently between all your dropped calls?

Disclosure: Long AMZN stock and long AAPL 2012 call options.