Steve Jobs live from WWDC 2010
engadget.com
engadget.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backside_illumination
At the bottom: "The new iPhone 4 uses this type of sensor in its camera."
I love the times we live in.
I'd guess the GAAP changes Apple lobbied for [1] made the difference.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/09/accounting-rules-c...
I'm a cynic: I assumed their motive for doing this was to make their iAd platform more compelling to advertisers.
From their website: "Freedom of Expression"...
Look at the iPod and the iPad. Who the hell had an MP3 player or a tablet before they came out? Not many people. Apple is good at creating needs and good products where products already existed. I'm not saying their design isn't part of that, I'm saying that their image can certainly help. We don't know enough about this new FaceTime to say it's instantly better than previous products other than the fact that it's free, and gong to be an open standard. Since we can't speak about the design of it, I chose to speak about another factor that could cause it to succeed.
Edit: "Reality distortion field" was a horrible choice of words on my part by the way. I meant that Apple's success at marketing would help this product succeed, no matter how the implementation was, not that their implementation will be or has been poor.
The reasons a lot of things don't happen sooner are often "smoke and mirrors," so it's a fitting remedy.
Actually since these phones were around before youtube and real mobile browsing, the main marketed reason to get a 3G phone originally was video chat.
Still, don't you think that video chat at no extra cost will be a rather huge innovation? If part of the reason it isn't used is because of the cost, wouldn't make it free help that? I know that video calling isn't necessarily better in plenty of cases, so I don't think it will completely replace voice calls (at least not for a long, long time if at all), but the facts that it's
1) free and
2) has Apple behind it and
3) therefore tons of media hype behind it
will help usage (edit: changed from adoption make my meaning clearer) by a large margin?
Why? People are really good at perceiving presence even if we can't see someone. It's just not necessary.
Think about this: What fraction of time do you spend looking at a person's face in a casual conversation?
The 'mobile' in 'mobile phone' seems directly at odds with the whole concept.
Most people like being able to get away with all those little things that the other person can't hear over a phone. Being on camera would seem more stifling/restrictive than freeing in many situations.
And as for it being at normal data rates on 3G, I'll believe it when I see it. (It can't be free.)
Wouldn't that be awesome? Wouldn't you use this free feature if it came at no cost? I know I'd LOVE it.
Other than the points highlighted above (and cost of video call), the big question is how are video calls done in Asia. Does it require the user to spend more than 3-4 secs to set up a video call (check if the other person has video call support, is he on the same network, do some prior WiFi settings, etc.). If so then that is a big barrier. And Apple definitely has the usability smarts to break that down.
I have the ability to video chat with many of my contacts through Skype or Google Talk yet I pretty much never take advantage of it. Not sure adding that feature to my phone changes anything.
Mobile browsing: iPhone 58.2%, Android 22.7%
Looks like Android is edging the iPhone in mobile pageviews per user. Or am I thinking about this wrong?
I think the probable reason is that the web-browsing data tends to be a few months ahead of those gartner market-share estimates.
The reason it is epic is because this is the first time it'll actually work. Who cares about N900s? Does my grandma know what an N900 is?
When I was in Sweden last (some 5 years ago) I was blown away during a bus journey by watching a deaf person signing into a bog standard Nokia with her friend on the screen signing back.
Now that's epic.
5 years ago. Commodity mass-market phone. Watching a deaf person video conference on public transport.
Likely, Apple will do a better job of it, but "first time it'll actually work" is hyperbole. For a bit of hyperbole of my own, let's try "first time Americans, who have been the laggards in the mobile phone space until the advent of the iPhone, will take note of it".
My father has an N900, and he video calls europe every day. I didn't need to show him how to use it or anything.
Hooked up to Wifi? Is that hard to do? Or are you making the point that it's wifi only for now. Jobs specifically stated that they are working with carriers to support it. That means it's coming. Baby steps. This is what Apple does. We don't always get the full package with iteration 1, but when it does come they do it right (see copy/paste, see multi-tasking).
I don't know a single person who owns an N900, and I don't know a single person outside of a very small group of tech friends who knows what one is. I'd guess that 80% of the people in my friends/family/work circles have Apple devices, most of which are iPhones.
I've owned "dumb"phones that could do this five years ago as easy as regular calls.
Except for the father videocalling mother + baby use case I can't think of a single instance where I would want the other person to see what I am doing OR where I would want to see what they are doing.
Should be interesting.
Of course, we'll see what they mean by "open standard" after the recent debacle with Safari's "HTML5 Demo", but I'd like to remain optimistic. Webkit was a nice gift, and hopefully this will be something similar.
I'm quite surprised that it's not at least compatible with the video calls in iChat. 3G will definitely happen, but they have a built-in base of millions of users on iChat that could have helped kick things off.
I'll leave this chat to chummy family and spousal conversation and celebrities, because there are only so many times of the week where I look good.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
As geeks, we'd tend to say "New and improved screen resolution: 300 DPI!". Which doesn't mean anything to 99% of the general population. But "retinal display", withs its attached explanation, now that's really something.
Words matter.
Problem First:
Tired of text that looks like it was built out of lego blocks? iPhone 4.0 has a 300DPI Retinal Display, which is so sharp that the human eye cannot see individual dots on the screen.
Feature First:
iPhone 4.0 has a 300DPI Retinal Display, which means you will never see blocky pixels again: the display is so sharp that the human eye cannot see the dots.
...
Tired of working around the clock on a cool new feature only to have customers ask you "So What?" These two feature pitch templates explain why customers should care, which means more sales for you!
Or perhaps:
Reg Braithwaite's "World Of Go" uses gestures instead of buttons, which means the entire screen can be devoted to the board, making it look like a Go board instead of like a Go program.
In either case, I can't imagine games running their own UI would look better as the images are limited to their original resolution. Only the UIBuilder interfaces will look sharper.
What about battery life?
This will work great for the web - but when initial size is a factor (along with video memory that is still shared with the OS - is there more video memory in this version?) this actually creates more of a limitation as you could reach the ceiling quicker with no more functionality - just higher res images.
So two versions isn't likely - scaling down is time consuming, battery consuming, and a waste of space. For optimum distribution, you would need a 3G version, a 4G version, possibly an iPad (HD) version, and maybe even a lite version of all three. You now have six version on the App Store.
One compromise is to make a 3G version and a 4G retina display version - of which would probably look ok on the iPad because it has 78% of the pixels.
I've developed multiple graphical applications and games for the iPhone so my perspective comes only with experience. Textures were always a hardware/memory limitation (it also only accepts textures in the size of a power of 2 - meaning you will need a sprite sheet layer as well) which made development-for-delivery a little tricky.
I didn't hear anything about more on-board memory so despite my fragmentation comment this actually doesn't help much. a 300x200 transparent PNG takes almost a meg of RAM.
But then, what happens if you short the gap with metal ? That sounds a lot less nice. I'm sure the RF power amp must be shortcut protected, so you don't risk damaging it, but if you short the gap, and thus the antenna, bye bye outgoing packets.
Maybe it's more complicated than that, and the other metal half is not the ground for the antenna, but it's insulated - floating - from the exposed antenna. Therefore shorting the gap would not short the antenna to ground but it would modify the physical characteristics of the antenna, therefore its impedance, therefore the radiating efficiency. This is all messy, as I have never practiced RF design, only took classes.
...too bad.
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/06/apple-...
C'mon. Can't Apple just live stream these keynotes from here on out? Everyone on all sides knows these announcements are in the public sphere 250 milliseconds after Steve says it.
For being so controlling of their media message, why let the bloggers run the final leg?
In an era of easy video feeds of everything, the un-videoable seems far more valuable. Seeing photographs from pay-per-view events on the news gives that impression. Or think of the US Supreme Court. They only allow people to sketch the proceedings! Pencil drawings are the ultimate status symbol.
This is the same thing that Nintendo added to their controllers a few months ago.
For example I wrote an app that calculates Horsepower based on weight and acceleration, however it's hard to determine if detected acceleration is due to the vehicle or gravity (if the device tips or tilts during the test). By having the gyros available, I can detect and compensate for the error-inducing influence of gravity.
In short, the accelerometer detects movement the gyroscope detects exact direction.
Actually I found the shot at google ads amusing. The quip about how (Theo? I can't read his first name) Gray earned more money on the app store than in 5 years of operating Google ads on his website periodictable.com, appears to have taken down his site
(The slide I'm referring to is http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/06/apple-...)
They now control a 3rd of the mobile market (iPads excluded) and are seemingly poised to continue this trend with the new iPhone packing several new and revolutionary killer features. Again this excludes the sold-every-3-seconds iPads. We all know that they'll get the lion's share of what's left of RIM and Windows mobile in a year or two.
Also, Jobs definitely didn't hold back when introducing Bing and iAds during the presentation.
I'm a little uneasy about all of this of course. I love the web and have devoted much of my career to building web apps that run on laptops and netbooks but I have to say, love it or hate it, Apple is bringing some serious game changing shit to the table and continues to iterate faster than anyone can catch up.
I disagree - I think Android devices will experience more growth than iPhone OS (or iOS) in a year or two.
Seriously though, I know very little of these matters, but it does seem like there should be some sort of solution developed for them with the frequency that these issues keep cropping up in major tech demos. It seems embarrassing that companies that are supposed to be innovative and great with technology are being stymied by the lack of WiFi.
I'm currently using a Nexus One as my primary phone, but let's please make honest comparisons.
HD video is "neat", 5MP camera on a phone is so last year though.
I'm actually more interested in the display than in the rest of the phone. It seems like a nice piece of tech. It's definitely a better sounding display than I've seen elsewhere.
Takes 480p video at maybe-20 fps. If 480p is HD, then my bad, but the iPhone 4 is doing 720p video at 30 fps.
Multitouch = innovation
Apple store = innovation
GPS = innovation
UI thought for mobiles = innovation
Apple came out first with those things. Then people catched up. This time what is the innovation? A bit more pixels on the display and the farmville client? Are you kidding me?
This is being pedantic, and doesn't really help the argument that the iphone 4 is better, but, at least one of your points is invalid.
They've all moved the slots to underneath the battery and given up the pretense of it really being removable storage.
Those features are why I picked the iPhone as my first smartphone. Other features are making me strongly consider switching to an Android phone. I know the mantra here is "design is everything, feature count is unimportant", but I think that is an oversimplification. Design (really, usability) is more important than features, but once two products are roughly as usable, well-implemented features make a big difference. Clearly, Apple thinks that these features are important, otherwise it wouldn't be choosing to showcase them.
The original iPhone had a competitive advantage
based on a "real" webkit-based browser,
visual voicemail, a large multitouch display,
on-screen keyboard with good auto-correction...etc, etc
I agree that it's not spouting a coffee filter and electric razor, but strongly disagree that you can step to "not innovative" "meh, useless catchup".
One part of not being measured at features/$ checklist is not being measured at -$ per lack of never seen before feature.
You've seen the Netflix announcement, now take a look at this:
http://lonelysandwich.com/post/662129889/ipad-tv
1 day ago that was posted, today we have a HD camera, iMovie and videophone announcement on a device with an upgraded screen, and talk of working with carriers for videophoning (i.e. transmitting video over the cellular networks).
This "no innovation" device might not need a USB hoover attachment to be a cornerstone piece for turning another major industry upside down in a way that others could not mostly by virtue of lots of integration, evolutionary changes and a pleasant enough UI that people wont resist.
It's about on par on quality as the HTC Evo or Droid Incredible, which is great, but not astoundingly spectacular in my opinion. And as we all know, two months from now HTC will probably be releasing some newer and better.
It's a competitive product, but in my eyes it's comparable to what's already out there, improving in the same way other products do when they're released (screen resolution, thickness, etc). It's just not worthy of getting your panties in a bunch, and certainly not worthy of migrating to it from a n Incredible, Evo, or Desire. Just not enough advantages to make it worth it.
If the fight is on software, I put my money on android: big time! Android is quicker at introducing new OS features because it's open source. I am thinking wifi tethering, customization beyond folders, web integration... and it offers a more competitive and free app market.
I'd go so far as to say that Apple never competes purely on features. They resisted putting features into the iPod (like an FM radio) for years and yet those devices still flew off the shelves. The iPhone 3GS screen is 1/4 the resolution of my now highly obsolete WinMo phone. Apple never rushes to add anything when they don't need to -- and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
I suspect the difference will be in both speed of updates and accuracy. It doesn't matter (in fact, you won't even notice) if the phone is a little "off" when pointed at the sky, but I can't see the compass+accelerometer trick providing accurate absolute positioning for a fast-paced game.
Not that it means very much - changes like the screen, storage and ram/cpu were pretty obvious.
MacRumours coverage: http://www.macrumorslive.com/
Second of all. I am an Apple fanboy. I have more or less everything they do and don't care whether flash is on there or not.
That does not mean that I have to buy weak arguments just because they come from Jobs. And they are in my opinion weak I would gladly explain in further detail.
I call it as I see it and given that Apple has now both entered the ad space and is said to be developing a new framework for HTML5 I frankly don't see why that would be conspiracy theory.
Last but not least. I never ever talked about unfair play, so why you would claim such a thing is beyond meaning.
You suggest that Jobs' open letter to Adobe, and Apple's stance on Flash generally, is a deliberately deceitful and misleading cover story for some underlying real motive. Then suggest that the underlying motive is them conspiring to force Flash-using ad providers to move to iAd. Sounds like unfair play to me.
Specifically, I think Apple do want ad providers to move to iAd, but I don't think they are doing so by covering up a big plot with a stance of lies.
Adobe hasn't shown a stable mobile flash implementation yet. That sounds like a pretty convincing technical argument on it's own, and is the one I'm most interested in hearing about it's weaknesses.
Maybe the battery life / CPU use one is something Adobe can solve, maybe the security updates could be rolled into Apple's iOS updates, maybe Adobe could push for stability, maybe they could even come up with a way of mapping mouse/click/hover onto multitouch in a way that works usefully enough for many things without rewrites (though I have reservations that they could do that to Apple quality).
But to put them all together, mostly things which Adobe could have done over the years and haven't, which Apple could not do because of the closed nature of Flash... for what reward? Punch the monkey flashing ad banners filling the small iPhone screen? Games and all-flash websites stretching off the edges? Intro movies to websites? Scribd style "readers"? Flash DRM enforcers and downloaders? Clunky Flash recreations of common GUI elements? Not much reward for a lot of effort, is it?
Particularly when other platforms are trying to promote HTML5 and marginalise Flash, so they would want to support HTML5 anyway.
Who is talking about deceitful or lying?
I suggest no such thing. I actually believe that Jobs believes what he writes. I just think what he writes is wrong.
Regarding a stable mobile flash implementation. You are right they haven't.
But the same can be said about HTML5 convincingly showing that it can compete with flash on other than some video, without sucking up CPU.
Showing a slideshow or some simple transition simply isn't going to cut if if you want to talk about comparative experiences.
The whole multitouch argument is also misleading as there really isn't any reason why Flash wouldn't be able to work with that. The flash player would be written specifically for the iPad/iPhone anyway so that could be solved. And rollover isn't by any metrics a problem. That too can be easily solved.
If Apple really where serious about open standards why not disallow flash on the laptops? They have far less battery life than their mobile peers so the reason to remove it from there would be just as strong.
I don't really care whether you like the things that flash is being used for and there is absolutely no reason to believe that HTML5 wont be the exact same things happening. Whether annoying banner ads or clunky recreations of gui elements.
If HTML5 is better it will end up replacing Flash. But HTML5 has a very long journey before it's anywhere close to flash. At least if it was possible to opt in or out of flash in the setting people would have a choice and we would see a natural selection process taking place.
Instead what we have is a bunch of bad excuses for why Flash shouldn't be on the iPad and iPhone.
The only thing apple get out of that is going to be substandard flash emulation with JavaScript and Canvas. Surely not something to wish for.
You are. You suggest that their officially given reasons are not their true reasons. If they aren't the true reasons then they must inherently be false reasons. Lies. Falsehoods. Misleading. Deceitful. Dishonest.
I actually believe that Jobs believes what he writes. I just think what he writes is wrong.
And this is where it turns into proper conspiracy logic. Instead of banning flash because Jobs/Apple thinks it wont run well and provide a good user experience, as claimed, you suggest that:
Apple think they could provide a good flash user experience if they want to, but they would rather ban it to convert advertisers to their ad platform, but the CEO has no idea about either the possibility of making it work or the company's actual motives, and honestly believes his own claims that they are banning flash because it cannot be adequately fixed.
If Apple really where serious about open standards why not disallow flash on the laptops? They have far less battery life than their mobile peers so the reason to remove it from there would be just as strong.
No, because they can be plugged in more easily because of the limitations on where you can use them, they aren't carried around as often while in use, and they have historically had Flash so taking it away is different from never adding it, and they don't have an app store to remove it from and they don't have a precedent or a method for controlling / curating desktop software and their desktop software isn't running a DRM'd environment so they couldn't effectively enforce it and they can support open standards on their desktops by adding safari and let Adobe deal entirely with flash which they can't do on a mobile platform with a very restrictive constraints which they would have to ensure it met.
there is absolutely no reason to believe that HTML5 wont be the exact same things happening.
OK.
If HTML5 is better it will end up replacing Flash
Not true. Better is too vague and better doesn't always win anyway.
At least if it was possible to opt in or out of flash in the setting people would have a choice
People have a choice - Android. We'll see if Android sales skyrocket because of Flash support.
Instead what we have is a bunch of bad excuses for why Flash shouldn't be on the iPad and iPhone.
It's irrelevent whether they 'should', the iPhone is an Apple product and the only reason things get on it or not is because Apple want it that way. 'Should' doesn't come into it.
The only thing apple get out of that is going to be substandard flash emulation with JavaScript and Canvas.
Again, no. Apple get browser stability, reduced engineering costs, reduced support costs, more polished and more pleasant user experience - the main things they are selling.
I don't know about you but in my world when someone say they wonder whether something is the case I would either ask the the reason for this or tell them why it can't be the case. I wouldn't lash out as you did and accuse them of putting forward conspiracy theories and saying other people are lying.
"And this is where it turns into proper conspiracy logic. Instead of banning flash because Jobs/Apple thinks it wont run well and provide a good user experience, as claimed, you suggest that: Apple think they could provide a good flash user experience if they want to, but they would rather ban it to convert advertisers to their ad platform, but the CEO has no idea about either the possibility of making it work or the company's actual motives, and honestly believes his own claims that they are banning flash because it cannot be adequately fixed."
That is you reading words into what I say, talk about conspiracy theories!
I am beginning to realize that I am speaking with one of Lenins "useful idiots" and that makes this conversation fruitless.
You know my opinion you haven't made any arguments to change that.
I explained where I saw that and you denied saying it again.
I explained (again) precisely where in your comment I picked up what I said, and now again you say I have no ground and am lashing out and am one of "Lenin's useful idiots", whoever they are.
Meanwhile you haven't addressed the main question I was curious about - how could Apple practically have been pro flash on their mobile devices when there is no mobile flash, and wasn't several years ago when they were developing iPhone 1, 2, 3 and now 4.
That is you reading words into what I say, talk about conspiracy theories!
No, I'm just reading what you say, that's how reading works. What you say happens to include lots of weird inconsistencies that when you say them make you look odd and when I repeat them back you say they make me look odd.