The dilution of “4G”
So, iOS 5.1 changes iPhone 4 and 4S handsets on AT&T to show “4G” instead of “3G”.
4G was originally defined in 2009 by standard body ITU-R as “peak speed requirements for 4G service at 100 Mbit/s for high mobility communication (such as from trains and cars) and 1 Gbit/s for low mobility communication (such as pedestrians and stationary users)” (quote from wikipedia). Then the carriers got hold of it and started redefining any old thing they had as “4G” because it sold better that way. The latest trick is that even absoultely-just-3G-with-bells-on standards like HSDPA are “4G” too. The graph below shows just how low we’ve come.
Don’t believe anyone who tells you that Apple stands firm against the worse excesses of the carriers. This is pure capitulation to AT&T’s marketing department.
Update: According to various folk on Twitter, some recent Android handsets indulge in this too. Windows Phone 7, on the other hand, shows a far-more-honest “H” to denote go-faster 3G modes like HSDPA. The Windows Phone 6 handset I was using in 2006 did this too.
I am also grateful to several Twitterers who introduced me to the perfect phrase to describe this shady re-branding: “faux G”.
(HT to Brian Klug for checking my numbers for me.)
What resolution would a “Retina display” 27-inch screen be?
Earlier, via @viticci, I saw a tweet from @marcedwards that said:
Retina 27” Thunderbolt display: 5120×2880 = 14,745,600 px
4K film: 4096×2160 = 8,847,360 px
Retina iPad 3: 2048×1536 = 3,145,728 px
This is based on the widely-held but fallacious belief that a “Retina display” is twice the resolution of a current-day display. There’s another widely-held but equally incorrect belief that to qualify as “retina” a screen must have more than 300 pixels-per-inch. I have previously debunked both of these for TUAW. In fact, Apple defines the term like so: “[a] Retina display’s pixel density is so high, your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels”. This means the truth about what is and isn’t a Retina Display is more subtle, and demands consideration of viewing distance as well as screen size.
Let’s use the methodology I outlined in my TUAW post to consider the 27” Thunderbolt Display.
A Thunderbolt Display has 2560x1440 pixels over a 27” screen — that works out to 109 pixels-per-inch. If I had 20/20 (i.e. average) vision, I’d have to be further than 32” back from the screen to longer be able to resolve individual pixels.
I’m typing this on my 27” iMac right now and I’ve just measured the distance from the screen to my eyes as about 28”. This is probably a typical sitting position, At this distance, the finest detail I am able to discern is a mere 123 pixels-per-inch. In other words, my 27” iMac only has to go up to 2896x1629 (or some slightly higher and more palatable numbers) resolution to be a “retina” display at my current sitting distance. This is far lower than the resolution of a 4K film.
Footnote: I’ve glossed over some interesting details with regards to different types of visual acuity for different types of image, which you might like to read about.
MG Siegler: "Why I Hate Android"
MG Siegler hates Android because, he claims, Google kowtowed to the carriers. He writes that the original plan for the Nexus One back in 2010 was to sell it as an unlocked Android handset for $99, but the US carriers outright refused to support it. Google’s hand were tied so in the end it went on sale for $529 and no-one bought it. Later, Google started to support things like Verizon’s attack on net neutrality.
I see two problems with this theory.
Firstly, the Nexus One cost about $175 to make at the time, plus the significant R&D costs necessary to have designed the thing in the first place. Teardown estimates like this are far from infallible, but I think that’s enough evidence to indicate that Google would be losing a lot if it had sold Nexus Ones for $99. Even if development costs could be amortized down to $25 per sale, Google would be left trying to recoup $100 back per user just to break even. That’s a tall order for mobile ad display.
Secondly, Google’s strategy was only flawed in the US. Here in the UK, we enjoy a wide variety of decent pay-as-you-go options from our four cell networks and half-dozen or so MVNOs. This is the perfect environment for Google’s plan, as Siegler outlines it, but the Nexus One launched £330 ($510) here. Similarly attractive no-contract mobile plans are available all over Europe and in many other countries worldwide but Google didn’t even make the phone directly available anywhere else.
So if Siegler is right, and Google had grandiose plans to do an end-run around the carriers, why didn’t it simply go abroad? It could have sold the Nexus One cheap in any number of countries, then pointed to those deals to put pressure on the US carriers to open up a bit via some simple consumer activism. The fact it didn’t makes me suspect Siegler’s reasoning is incorrect.
Source: parislemon
iTunes Match quality upgrades isn’t just for low bitrates
I’ve seen a lot of tutorials like this one by Quentin Stafford-Fraser or this one by Jason Snell stepping people through the process to upgrade their old low-quality music to high-quality fresh version via Apple’s new iTunes Match service. All the posts I’ve read suggest the same thing: make a smart playlist showing all your matched songs with a bitrate below 256 kbit/sec (which is the quality setting for all iTunes music downloads), delete those files, and tell iTunes to get fresh copies from iCloud.
In other words, a playlist like this one:
This method, however, is missing a footnote. Quality isn’t just about bitrate; it’s also about the actual codec in use. MP3 is a very old format with problems and limitations that were addressed in the design of later solutions like AAC or WMA. Because of this, 128 kbit/sec AAC files sound quite a bit better than 128 kbit/sec MP3 files, for example.
With this in mind, I’d suggest you employ an extra smart playlist to pick up MP3 files of greater than 256 kbit/sec bitrate. These files, which won’t show up in the first playlist, will also sound better if you replace them with the iTunes Match version from iCloud — and as a bonus, the new files will even be smaller than the old ones.
Try a smart playlist like this one:
It turns out I had a few hundred of these, because back in the day I routinely ripped CDs using the --extreme LAME preset. This uses a variable bit rate codec which, for complex songs, could often average out at somewhere around 280-300 kbit/sec. I also had some rips I’d done at a fixed 320 kbit/sec. Listening to a few of those has confirmed that the AAC downloads from iTunes sound better, so I’ve deleted all those now.
So if you are looking to upgrade those old rips to pristine new downloads via iTunes Match, don’t overlook this extra trick to squeeze out a little more sound quality and save a modest amount of disk space.
A delivery of fresh hell for me this morning, courtesy of Apple. I plugged my iPad into iTunes only to be confronted with the news that apparently I’d never synced it before and my last backup was from months ago. Meanwhile, the iPad’s Settings app claims to have been merrily backing up to iCloud since then, with a last backup date of the night before last. Meanwhile, my iPhone sync is fine, so it can’t be anything global that’s changed in iTunes.
Even worse, I know I synced it after that backup date. On the 29th October, a different broken sync wiped 60 or so apps off my iPad. This cost me the save game state in a number of games I was enjoying, which is infuriating.
I’ve now told iTunes to restore that ancient backup, because at the moment I can’t sync new photos. A brief survey of the things I’ve done on the iPad over the last two months suggests I haven’t used anything other than cloud-enabled apps. Indeed, to my surprise, I noticed my entire homescreen only has apps that are cloud powered; Reeder, Flipboard, Writing Kit, Twitterrific, Mail, iThoughts HD, and so forth. So I’m not expecting to lose anything in reverting to this old backup — indeed, I might get back some of the save games I lost.
I look forward to seeing what iCloud is going to make of my iPad, post-restore.
It just works, right?
iPad 2 seasonal sales at risk from iPad 3 rumours
Remember what happened to iPhone 4 sales last summer? They hit a wall in mid-July, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, when “speculation” that Apple was about to release a new iPhone, “hit extreme highs.”
Now we’re in the middle of what’s shaping up as Apple’s (AAPL) biggest holiday season ever, and the same thing may be happening to the iPad 2.
On Monday — with 13 shopping days until Christmas — Taipai-based DigiTimes reported that Asian component makers have started supplying Apple with parts for a new iPad that “sources” say will go into production in January for release by March or April.
Me, back in July:
The iPad 2 was unveiled on March 2nd, just 67 days after Christmas. And we know that Christmas sales were very strong for Apple. Now, no-one knew that the iPad 2 was so close around the corner, so it had no chilling effect on iPad 1 sales during Christmas 2010. Suppose, however, we go into December this year with everyone believing that we’ll see an annual refresh and an iPad 3 in March 2012. It’s not like people aren’t used to the idea that Apple re-ups its kit approximately every year. So, how many potential purchasers will balk at the idea of a soon-to-be-obsoleted iPad 2 and instead buy some other fancy geegaw? Perhaps — horrors! — one that wasn’t designed by Apple in California?
At the time, I reasoned that — as John Gruber and MG Seigler were saying — this could be a sign we’d get an iPad 3 release before 2011 was out. We didn’t, and now Elmer-Dewitt claims we are, indeed, seeing a possible chilling effect on iPad 2 sales. Except that unlike Elmer-Dewitt I don’t blame DigiTimes for it; I believe this is a problem entirely of Apple’s own construction.
Practically every Apple consumer gadget (as opposed to computers) — the iPhone, the iPod, the iPad — has been on a strict annual refresh rate for years and years now. The three-months-behind-schedule release of the iPhone 4S is the only deviation from this pattern. Consumers, I reiterate, aren’t dumb, and they don’t like buying (or gifting) devices that will soon be perceived as out of date. They don’t need DigiTimes to join these dots for them.
Now, does that mean I think Apple are going to have a disastrous Christmas? Clearly not. The iPad is still a supernova hot product and plenty of consumers won’t realise the above — and plenty more won’t care it’s going to be replaced soon. After all, computer gadgets are always about to be replaced soon, for some shorter-than-you’d-like value of “soon”. But will it put some folks off, and lead them to buy some other gift instead? I’d say the answer to that has to be “yes”.
I very much doubt this will be a big issue. But, still, given Apple’s usual total control over its product supply and release pipeline, I remain slightly surprised that it was allowed to become any sort of problem at all. I cannot fathom why it didn’t hold the iPad 2 release back until April or May or so; it’s not like there was any credible competition to pressure it.
'Apple's aesthetic dichotomy' by James Higgs
John Higgs on Apple’s skeuomorphic designs:
They are an expression of purest kitsch, sentimentality, and ornamentation for its own sake. In Milan Kundera’s brilliant definition, kitsch is “the absolute denial of shit”. These are Disney-like apps, sinister in their mendacity.
This was widely linked to a few weeks back, but it so neatly encapsulates how I feel about Apple’s decisions that I wanted to link to it.
My biggest problem with skeuomorphic design is that it creates false UI interaction clues. After reading a novel in iBooks, I once switched to Calendar, and instinctively started dragging the stack of pages on the edges of the screen to flip through the display. This doesn’t work, of course. Neither does dragging at those cutsey little torn edges in the Calendar, in a futile attempt to clean them up — which is precisely what I’d do to the real-world object.
This will always be a problem unless we somehow make all our UIs exhibit all the physical behaviour of the real world objects they resemble. That’s at best massively redundant and at worst impossible. As far as I can see, this is an Achilles’ heel that skeuomorphic designs can never hope to side-step.
Your daily dose of anti-Apple-hivemind
A few anti-Apple-fanboy blogs have either sprung up or crossed my radar recently. Daring No Balls is a witless and charmless troll attempt, and not deserving of your time. But Raging Thunderbolt and the older The Occasional Blargh very much are. Even if you don’t agree with everything they say, even if you count yourself as an Apple true believer 1 the fact remains: they both routinely raise valid points that are worthy of consideration and debate. What more could you ask for in a weblog?
Update: This trend has legs, apparently. There’s now also Stu Parker’s Reactions To John Gruber. Like the others, Parker is making (to my mind at least) some valid and interesting points. I’m a little uncomfortable with how focussed he is on responding to Gruber specifically, though. It feels… slightly rude to single him out, I guess. There’s plenty of other pundits who’s work is just as worthy of examination. One day, I’d like to be well-regarded enough to be one of them.
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Which, personally, I do not. Although as I write for a prominent Apple blog I concur I am probably a part of the establishment, whatever that means. ↩
Benjamin Brooks on Photo Stream
I bought an iPhone with tons of storage because I don’t want to have to think about such things as which photo app to use for each scenario I find myself in. To me, it’s worth the price of admission.
Sure, it’s a couple hundred bucks more for 64GB, but that’s a couple hundred bucks that means I don’t have to worry about such things as space for Photos and circumventing Photo Stream. It’s a couple hundred bucks that gives me all the convenience in the world and none of the hassle. …
So Apple went the Apple way: make it painful for edge cases and perfect for the average user.
On the one hand, Brooks claims Apple has done the right thing by “the average user”; on the other, he admits he bought a top-dollar 64 GB iPhone 4S so he wouldn’t have to “worry about things such as space for Photos and circumventing Photo Stream”. But the “average user” doesn’t have a 64 GB iPhone. Many of them are buying brand-new 8 GB iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 models. What are they supposed to do? Turn Photo Stream off altogether? That doesn’t sound “perfect” to me.
And that’s before you think about what would happen if they dared to pull 5 GB of RAW files onto an iPad via the Camera Connection Kit — something I, not unusually, do a lot of when I’m on holiday. They all end up uploaded into Photo Stream as full-sized RAW files of 10-15 MB each. This is a scenario that I’m sure is kicking the everliving shit out of hotel wifi’s meagre upstream connection all over the planet right now.
Photo Stream needs a few more levers for the user to be able to adjust its behaviour. Apple dropped the ball, plain and simple. It’s the kind of thing they fix in a .1 release, sure, but we don’t need to pretend it’s perfect in the mean time.
Apple earnings smackdown: The bloggers got clobbered - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Tech
Philip Elmer-DeWitt for Fortune
This is the exercise in which we divide those analysts into two groups — the pros and the amateurs* — and pit their estimates against each other. (See footnote on nomenclature.)
The cluster of green at the bottom of the chart at right tells the story: This quarter, for the first time since we’ve been monitoring them, the bloggers got clobbered.
And not just by a little. The average miss in the categories that matter most — revenue and earnings per share — was 5.8% for the institutional analysts and a humiliating 23.5% for the independents.
I’ve long wondered if the reason bloggers outperform analysts in these things is because the bloggers in question are very bullish on Apple and estimate on the high side because of emotional ties. Meanwhile, the analysts are a bit more sober and hence are rather more conservative. But Apple kept growing faster than seemed possible, so it looked like the bloggers were always right.. until they weren’t.
