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iPhone5

iPhone

A disappointment which will sell well.

With discretion and confidentiality being concepts of the past, the forthcoming iPhone5, to be announced on September 12 and on sale September 21, has been the most leaked iPhone design ever, despite Tim Cook’s commitment to tighten up security. Here’s what we know:

  • Same width as the iPhone 4S.
  • Half an inch taller for 16:9 widescreen rather than 4:3. Largely useless.
  • LTE 4G cellular, meaning AT&T can cease lying about 4G (my AT&T 4S says ‘4G’ when it’s ‘3G’).
  • Thinner, owing to integration of touch sensors into the LCD panel.
  • Better battery life, maybe as good as the competition.
  • A smaller dock connector, just to make sure 50 million users of accessories get upset.
  • Maybe an even better camera sensor to update the already excellent 8mp one in the 4S, the biggest update from the previous model 4. OVTI’s pop in share price and revenue predictions suggest this may be so; they make the sensor.
  • The global Qualcomm comms chip to permit functioning on any cellular network, including China Mobile which has yet to sign with Apple. China Mobile accounts for 50% of Chinese cellphone users.
  • A faster A6X ARM CPU.

Here’s what we likely will not see:

  • Near Field Computing. NFC is the technology which will replace credit cards and drivers’ licenses, storing that data encrypted in the phone and transmitting it by a proximity wave to the reader in the retailer’s store. Or cop’s cruiser …. In an insightful piece, one of the best tech sites around, AnandTech, has concluded there is insufficient space inside for an NFC chip, further hampered by a reversion to a metal back, compared with the current glass one.
  • A proper sized screen. Having sued and prevailed over Samsung’s copycat efforts, and rightly so, Apple is likely finding it hard to argue for the right-sized screen in Samsung’s Galaxy III phone. As regards those who damn Apple’s intellectual property efforts, they forget two things. Apple has paid its share of penalties for IP infringement. And how would these critics feel were it their IP which was being stolen?
  • Biometric technology. Apple recently bought biometric security (fingerprint recognition, retina scans, etc.) AuthenTech for $356mm which brings with it the thrilling prospect that I will no longer have my credit card number stolen annually by Russian hackers. You will access your iPhone with your fingerprint, no more easily guessed passwords for thieves. The thieving sales clerk will no longer see your CC number. And, once licensed, customers of WalMart will be able to check out with a fingerprint which is an improvement over the ‘X’ they currently struggle to write on the credit card machine’s screen.

In a nutshell, if the above is right – and I pray it is not – the iPhone 5 is a useless 0.5″ longer than the iPhone 4S and represents little more than tinkering at the margin of the current design, while increasingly falling behind the best of the competition, stolen as many of their designs may be. 4G is nice for the 2% of the cellphone world which has access to it. Verizon 4G on my iPad3 is outstanding in the Bay Area, by the way. AT&T’s 3G on my iPhone 4S is anything but.

Yet despite that litany of disappointments, it will be a massive success, for several reasons:

  • The Apple ecosystem. You can argue, correctly, about the dated and confusing design of iTunes, but a relatively stable iCloud and high integrity email and related applications not only tie in existing users but also attract those brutalized by Android and Windows.
  • There is no earthly reason to think that Microsoft’s Windows 8, promising everything to everyone, will be any more successful than the disastrous Vista. iOS and the iPhone/iPad were in development 5 years (500 man years?). Why on earth would anyone think that Microsoft, famous for poor UIs and a cynical disregard for the user experience owing to long vested monopoly power, should succeed with an immature Windows 8 which tries to please both desktop and mobile users? Were I a gambling man I would bet that the Surface tablet will be the Sinker tablet before too long, having successfully upset all of MSFT’s traditional manufacturing partners (Acer, Asus, HP, Dell, etc.) who have had the carpet whipped out from under their feet by MSFT’s sudden decision to become a manufacturer. (Xbox was purchased and remains largely unchanged since, and making mice is not the same as making tablets).
  • China Mobile. Apple will soon sign this carrier in China, one who accounts for 50% of China’s cellphone users. The new Qualcomm comms chip in iPhone5 will, for the first time, accommodate CM’s cellular technology. Sure, that does not mean 500 million new sales, but Apple is about profits not market share. Another 10 million at 45% profit margin will do nicely. That figures to $30 or 5% on AAPL’s share price.
  • Pent up replacement/upgrade demand from iPhone4 owners who were disappointed by the marginal improvements – camera aside – in the iPhone4S.
  • Vanity sales from Apple’s growing share in laptops, where users are introduced to the elegance and quality of Apple’s design work. As one example, the 2012 MacBook Air is an outstanding, attractively priced machine and the Retina Display 15″ MacBook Pro has the best laptop display in the business and will soon be joined by a 13″ model which will further grow laptop share.
  • Continuing Apple supply chain dominance with long-term supply contracts signed up with key component makers, not least the three manufacturers of retina displays.

So while I expect the camera to be further improved in iPhone5, yet another nail in the point-and-shoot sector’s coffin, I will be waiting for iPhone6 unless I am significantly mistaken in what I wrote above.

As for Apple’s future, the company has lots of good things in the pipeline but the ones we know about are anything but innovative. The iPad Mini will clean up in the education market (OK, not in US public schools, which hardly qualify as education) at a $249 entry point, and will get no competition from the soon to be introduced Kindle Fire2, which will be heavily advertising supported to direct you to buy more stuff from Amazon.com. Teachers will likely not take kindly to their charges firing up their, err…. Fires only to be confronted with condom ads. Patent litigation will continue for the forseeable future and Apple will mostly prevail, setting back the thieves and forcing them to actually make something original. Everyone wins, but Apple wins first.

The Steve Jobs pipeline of innovative products is ending, so some really new things have to come along for Apple to maintain its torrid pace of growth. I expect that to continue for at least another year, but absent a fresh burst of innovation, the storm clouds will come closer. The replacement market is not a growth business, after all.

Disclosure: Long AAPL, QCOM, BRCM.

Quack, quack, quack.

iPhone

Obviousness.

Considering how all the pundits claim that the stock market is stacked against the ‘little guy’, it continues to offer up no-lose opportunities with startling frequency.

In the past quarter alone, had you loaded up on Apple and shorted Facebook and Hewlett Packard, you would now be substantially wealthier. Apple makes things which Asians steal. Facebook is a fraud aimed at impecunious teenagers. And Hewlett Packard has Miss Piggy at the helm. Shareholders must rue her loss in the CA gubernatorial election. Gee, you don’t need a spreadsheet to analyze that lot.

And Friday’s patent decision by a jury in Silicon Valley rightly concluded, despite an arrogant judge who made the error of thinking the jurors were stupid, that theft is punishable by law. At least by American law. The jurors needed no advanced degrees in patent law. A 132 page ‘How to Steal’ Samsung document and sheer obviousness led them to speedily conclude that if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck.

Obviousness.

If, like me, you shelled out $500 for iPhone v1 5 years ago on the day it went on sale, the prevailing memory of that day is of your crashing jaw. Rubberbanding, pinch to zoom, tap to fill, multitouch, icons, the internet in your pocket. All had the same effect on this user’s jaw. And all were faithfully copied by Samsung.

There is a body of opinion out there which has it that this verdict will stifle innovation. The writers, of course, are journalists who flunked Econ 101. The explosion in innovation which will result as cheaters are forced to become designers will astonish and delight.

Meanwhile, do the obvious and make some coin. And your iPhone comes with a great camera, too, soon to get even better, so take some snaps while you are at it.

As for the Apple haters reading this, ask yourself which you hate more. AAPL or $$$$?

By the way, a piece I wrote four years ago which attracted record amounts of hate mail, has just been updated. Like I said, obviousness is a reliable guide.

With the Trinovids, looking into the future. iPhone 4S snap by my son.

Disclosure: Long AAPL, QCOM, BRCM; short FB.

The iPad Mini

iPad

Coming before Xmas.

Supply chain rumors are now firming up and you can expect the iPad Mini to be here in time for (not so mini) Christmas stockings. Sporting a 7.8″ 4:3 aspect ratio display and iPad1 definition – perfectly adequate – here are my predictions on what this new tool will be. Weight? 11 ounces, meaning almost half that of the iPad3.

Apple will likely want to limit the number of versions, and keep the price as low as possible to compete with Nexus 7 and new Fire(s) though you might reasonably argue that the simply terrible line of Amazon’s Kindles/Fires is not a competitor at any price, including free. And if you are holding out for Microsoft’s Surface (why?), you are making the assumption that the world’s worst run tech company (OK, second worst after HP), the one with a chimpanzee in the corner office (HP has a dog in the rôle), will suddenly do something right. Good luck with that.

I would think that anyone would pay $50 more for a Mini than for a competitor’s offering, to buy into the ecosystem and superior UI, not to mention better usable life, one conformed OS across all mobile devices unlike the half-dozen or so versions of Android, robust anti-virus design and excellent resale value. Anyone using a non-iPad tablet invites ridicule on a variety of grounds, ranging from poor judgment to plain nuttiness.

So $250 (16GB) and $300 (32GB) compares to $200/250 for the Nexus 7, with an alloy back, unlike the chintzy plastic one on the Nexus pretending to be carbon fiber. That price will allow AAPL to preserve its 35% margin on the new device. Wifi mandatory as we all move to the cloud. Same screen definition as iPad1 – no Retina Display (cost and production limitations). The current premium is $130 for cellular, but they can easily get that down to $80 with the new 28nM Qualcomm comms chip. The new comms chips from Qualcomm and Broadcom will see to it that battery life remains high as they use far less power than current designs. The 4:3 aspect ratio, shared with the big iPads, will mean that no changes need be made to apps for them to work out of the box …. err, iCloud.

So my guess is (wifi/cellular):

  • 16GB – $249/$329
  • 32GB – $299/$379

Two cellular versions as now – AT&T and VZ, but the new Qualcomm chip which will be shared with iPhone 5 (due September 12) is multi-band, so no increase in production costs – it’s a software switch only. The ARM CPU (a rare example of Britain doing something really well) will be at least as fast as the one in iPad2. Start-up costs on that have been recovered ages ago. And that multi-band QCOM chip should even accommodate all three Chinese carriers (I expect AAPL to add China Mobile – 50% of that market – in early 2013), all European carriers (if Europe continues to exist, that is) not to mention losers like Sprint.

Decent front and rear-facing cameras will likely be included and a microphone of course.

But what will really move the needle is that this device will be snapped up by impecunious schools worldwide, because an iPad can do a heck of a better job of teaching than the joke that passes for ‘teachers’ in US public schools who couldn’t get a real job.

Disclosure: Long AAPL, QCOM, BRCM.

Mountain Lion on the Hackintosh

Hackintosh

Shades of Microsoft.

While I very much doubt Steve Jobs knew an operating system from an operating table, his tyrannical, bullying rule of Apple Corp. ensured a high level of attention to detail on the part of his workers. As the guys on the disastrous MobileMe product team, who are now holding up cardboard plaques at the corner of Atherton Avenue and El Camino Real proclaiming “Will Work for Food”, will attest.

Such were my thoughts when installing Mountain Lion on the HP100 nuclear powered Hackintosh chez Pindelski. The download price was right, as in free, as my 2012 MacBook Air had grandfathered the freebie. Getting the freebie was a mess of passwords and poor instructions for which I had to wait 48 hours, the sort of thing Bill Gates revelled in, but I got there. Installation on the MBA was uneventful and after thoroughly wringing OS Mountain Lion out with all my favorite apps (especially LR 4.1 and PS CS 5.1) I concluded it was time to give the big guy a spin.

The Hackintosh thing requires that a major release be downloaded from the AppStore and the installation files transferred to a separate bootable medium. (Minor releases are a simple AppStore download). Tonymac’s Unibeast transfers the downloaded files together with a bootloader to the partition of choice. Restarting from the new partition saw Mountain Lion installed to my boot partition in some 10 minutes (SSDs are fast!) and a restart resulted in …. another Microsoft moment. Most things worked well, but Mail was a spinning beach ball much of the time and Contacts (the Address Book of yore) refused to show. So I did a second install, identical to the first and found myself in the land of sweetness and light. Shades of Windows.

The CPU is at 4.4GHz, but 4.3GHz is as high as OS X can show.

The first Geekbench CPU performance score was a ghastly 5500 – I expected 15,000 or so on the overclocked Core i7 SandyBridge. A moment later I had installed NullCPUPowerManagement.kext using Tonymac’s Multibeast as well as the HDARollback and Realtek sound kexts to restore sound functions. Another restart and the Geekbench report was back over 15,000 and Cinebench came in at almost 30fps. Slower than the 38 I was getting in Lion, but it may be that the Nvidia 9800GTX+ GPU, ancient as it is, is beginning to show incompatibility issues. Still, for my purposes (LR and PS) CPU speed is far more important than GPU throughput, given the CPU-intensive nature of those apps.

Geekbench and Mountain Lion.

Cinebench with Mountain Lion. CPU speed is shown correctly.

So, overall performance is largely unchanged compared to Lion 10.7.3 and some handy features are added. One note – Photoshop required a large Java update when first launched, which took a few minutes. Now it loads faster than ever, under 2 seconds, and Lightroom remains as fast as ever.

Dictation works well (HP100 has a Logitech USB microphone connected), the Notification capability mimics iOS and obsoletes Growl to a large extent, and the showstopper (on the MBA) is the addition of AirPlay, a feature common to iPads and iPhones for a while. This allows you to redirect video and audio from Mountain Lion to any TV with an AppleTV connected BUT the sending machine must have an integrated GPU for this to work. Thus regular Core2Duo or Core2Quad machines cannot do this, whereas those with an HD3000 (Sandy Bridge) or HD4000 (Ivy Bridge) integrated GPU can accomplish the task. I have no need to do this with HP100, despite the presence of its HP3000 integrated GPU, but having this on the MBA, the ‘sofa’ Mac, is heaven-sent, and will create another crack in the bundled pricing hegemony of the cable TV providers. You can get it on your laptop? You can send it to your TV!

The enhancements in Mountain Lion are mostly cosmetic. It’s 64 bit only so you will be SOL if you use 32 bit apps, and now is as good a time as any to start researching the topic. Given the otherwise modest changes, the ML upgrade is a low risk proposition if you can cross the ’64 bit only’ hurdle.

This is no bleeding edge upgrade, as Apple’s $20 upgrade price indicates, and I suggest it’s a low risk update for Lion users. Stated differently, it’s last year’s Ferrari with some chrome trim strips added. With Windows 8 set to emulate Windows Vista (last year’s Trabant), there has never been a better time to abandon the Evil Empire. Let’s just hope that Tim Cook shows some tyrannical traits real soon and kicks some rear on those installation glitches.

Preserving TRIM with SSDs:

To understand TRIM – garbage management for SSDs – just search the term using the box atop this page. A photographer friend who has just built a fabulous Hackintosh using a Z77 Gigabyte motherboard and an Ivy Bridge i5 CPU advises that preserving TRIM with a user DSDT file requires the following settings in Multibeast:

TRIM and Mountain Lion.

I can confirm these work.

10 years on

Macintosh

Jony Ive’s design for the first iMac with its ghastly translucent colored plastic covers may have been a low point, but he has yet to improve on the successor, which came to market 10 years ago.

The second iMac.

While the original came with a 4:3 screen, by the time I bought mine it was stretched to my favorite aspect ratio, 16:10 in 15″ and 17″ sizes. Extra memory was strictly a factory installation thing and the hard drive but 60GB.

And, as you can see, the machine was anything but cheap:

It remains happy in occasional use, where it controls profiling of my HP DesignJet 90 wide carriage dye printer; just as well, as good luck getting HP to update their online apps to work with anything later than OS Snow Leopard.

The genius of Ive’s design was not just the unique packaging, but a screen cantilever which has yet to be improved. You could raise the display to a proper working height even if you were over 4′ 10″ tall, the optimum height for anyone buying any subsequent iMac. It runs cool as the ventilation design is not compromised, the way it is today. The current iMacs with their awful support foot benefit from a ream or two of paper underneath, which isn’t quite consonant with Cupertino’s design aesthetic.

To see the roll out with the master circus barker himself at the helm, click below. Refresh the page if it’s not visible.

Jobs rolls out the iMac G4.

My subsequent odyssey:

Along with the Powerbook G3, this was the last consumer grade Mac designed with both form and function in mind. Thereafter, form would rule and reliability went to pot, as my experiences disclose. A while back, Tim Cook, Apple’s new CEO, speaking of design, joked about the inadvisability of combining a toaster with a refrigerator. Obviously he had never used an iMac G5 which was a unique combination of toaster and computer. The fans also managed a passable rendition of an F15 at take-off. Anyway, after a long run of failed Apple hardware I approached my computer builder friend, the pseudonymous FU Steve, and had him build me a Hackintosh. So successful was the result that he would later build me two more while simultaneously upgrading the original to current specs at very modest cost. Plus you could get a decent, wide gamut, matte display to go with the box. I have never looked back. The perfect combination of reliable, easily available and inexpensive PC parts with a robust OS, Mac’s OS X. Wild horses would not induce me to buy a new iMac. I have dismantled these in many repairs of mine and can assure you there is simply no way so poorly designed a machine can withstand the long-term stresses of hard use. It’s a toy inside with proper heat management an afterthought.

To be fair, Apple has somewhat redeemed itself with the latest 2012 MacBook Air which runs so-so cool (mostly thanks to Intel’s progress with its low power consumption CPUs and integrated GPUs), is fast and if its 2010 predecessor is any guide – an outstanding machine – should prove reliable. It harkens back to Ive’s classic iMac in its design; the MacBook Air design is elegant, robust and well executed.