Sam Iles's Blog

Geez.

A.

Lou.

For a blog which started out almost exclusively about technology, I sure haven’t blogged about technology for a long time. So here goes: The iPad 2. It will be announced on Wednesday, if the hints from the invitation are anything to go by. I figured I had better write some kind of prediction post with what I think we might see. Naturally, nobody will care. But I like writing.

The first issue will be who does the presentation. I assume it will be Tim Cook, the acting CEO since Steve Jobs is on medical leave at the moment, or someone like Schiller. One thing I have seen thrown around is that the idea that it may be announced that Jobs will not be returning to the company at all at this event, or that a plan of CEO-succession may be announced. This will not happen. When Jobs does quit, Apple’s share price will have a seizure and nosedive. For this reason, any kind of announcement like this will be made after trading hours, giving the market the night to reflect on the change and time for Apple to explain why it won’t happen. The announcement won’t happen at ten o’clock in the morning at the start of a full day of trading. Moving on:

So, about the actual device. Firstly, what major changes will there be? Screen size, for example. I expect it will stay exactly the same as it is now. Apple has been more than happy to berate the 7″ devices as DOA and pointless. (I agree, too. I have used a Galaxy Tab and, for me, I found it to be portable but not at all useful.) The only reason I can see Apple making a 7″ device is if demand for them is very high and taking product sales away from the iPad, which certainly isn’t happening now. But, you never know. And, remember, just because Steve says he hates something, doesn’t mean it won’t happen – he said nobody wanted to watch video on an iPod, he said Apple would never make a phone, he said Apple would never get involved in books because people don’t read and he said they’d never make a tablet because they were so bad.

And, about the screen resolution. I think it’s perfectly good. Fantastic, even. I wrote a piece about the idea of it having a retina display before:

Then there is the issue of the screen. People are throwing around the idea of a retina display for the iPad. I think this is complete crazy talk. Let’s remember what the definition of a Retina display is: a display with which the average human eye cannot discern the individual pixels. Apple found this to be 300 PPI. Consider what this meant for the iPhone: Original iPhone: 480 x 320 = 153,600 pixels at 165 PPI iPhone 4: 960 x 640 = 614,400 pixels at 330 PPI This is a big jump and these remain very big numbers but let’s transfer this to the iPad. Giving the iPad a retina display with at least 300 PPI, the resolution would be 2560 x 1920. That may not sound a lot, but it is. That’s more than my 17 inch MacBook Pro. It’s twice as much as Dell’s highest class 24 inch monitor. We’re talking about a 10 inch iPad which would be displaying as much information as two 24 inch monitors. Imagine how much rendering this would take. There is no way that an A4 could do that. Even assuming a new processor was powerful enough for general apps, even an Xbox could barely render a fast moving game at sizes like this. You would to tie a generator to the back of the iPad to use it without a power source.

I stand by all that. I don’t think it will have a retina display. I also think people need to be more careful when they talk about things like a “slight resolution increase”. I do not think Apple will do this. The iPad is currently 1024 × 768 and increasing the resolution a bit would create a weird number of pixels. The problem is for developers. Android has this problem and Apple have slated (PTP) it before, saying that developers have to make several different versions of apps to cope with all the different possible resolutions and sizes. With the iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4, the pixels were doubled to make the retina display. This meant there was no problem for developers – Apple could easily deal with resizing things and just ask developers to make higher quality graphics whenever they could.

You can’t make 1.3 times more pixels and have it work this flawlessly. Developers would need to change things and there would be multiple inconsistencies and unpleasantness. I think there will either be a doubling of resolution (which will take us to 2048 x 1536 pixels and 264 PPI, just short of the 2560 x 1920 and 326 target for a retina display) or no change at all.

Of course, resolution doesn’t have to change for a better screen. The screen can have better contrast and colours or better viewing angles or better response to sunlight. I’m not saying it will be the exact same screen – just I don’t think a resolution change will happen.

So, what else. A camera? A cameraS? Sure, why not. While I don’t think Apple will always do things that make sense, everyone is just certain there will be two cameras. Just don’t be so certain. As I wrote before:

Apple doesn’t mind saying no to something. I can picture Steve on stage right now, saying that the iPad has a camera on the front because, ‘FaceTime is great, everyone loves FaceTime,’ and then smoothly explaining away the lack of rear camera with, ‘but, nobody wants a camera on the back, nobody wants to hold up their big iPad, nobody wants that.’

And the SD card slot? Well, I don’t think so. Again, as I wrote before:

Consider the rumour of SD slot. Right. Hmm. Well, I don’t think so. Currently, Apple sells a small piece of hardware which plugs into your 32 pin connector and acts as a SD card reader. That’s great. I can look at my photos. Yay. But thats all. It’s a reader, nothing more. If Apple puts in a SD slot, would they allow you to simply use it as storage space? I don’t think so. Apple sells three three storage sizes of iPad. There is a bigger markup on the bigger devices and I don’t think they’ll throw all that away by adding an SD slow. Reader, perhaps. But, it’s seems like too much trouble to go to to add just a reader when they can charge you an ungodly amount for an adapter.

And the boring stuff. RAM increase? Sure. New processor? Sure (I don’t it’s the A4unicorn). Storage bumps? Probably.

Then, the other news.

iOS 5: I HOPE SO. Apple usually shows it off before it ships and this seems like the ideal time. I expect one of the tent poles to be a new notifications system. And that’s really all I care about.

MobileMe for the peasants: Will it be free? Is this why Apple built their big data centre? They recently stopped selling boxed versions of MobileMe, so it’s almost certain that something will be changing. I hope it gets free.

iTunes in the clouds: Will it happen? Is this why Apple built their big data centre? I sure hope so.

“Oh, and there is one more thing:

We are making a hydrogen car! It’s called the Apple Car.

Oh, and we’ve made a super intelligent robot to clean your house and stuff!”

Man, that would be cool.

It’s pretty much a prerequisite for me now. Before any Apple event, I take to my blog to post my predictions. So here goes:

Apple have said it’s ‘back to the Mac’, which is great, because many people have been foreseeing the end of the Mac (with multiple crazy people even saying Apple will just open source Mac OS X)… The first thing (which is pretty much a given) will be 10.7. Do remember that it was over a year before Snow Leopard was announced and shipped, so don’t expect immediate availability. I did a blog post a while about about what I wanted Mac OS 11 to be – these aren’t predictions though, merely requests. Linux kernel is my favourite, although I doubt that would happen…

A new MacBook Air seems the popular rumour right now, and I agree that this makes sense. However, I don’t think a smaller screen is likely – that’s what the iPad is for. A new Air really doesn’t interest me, so let’s move on.

iWork. All we’ve got at the moment is 2009. We haven’t had an update for ages – I’m still using 2008! Since it’s so late in the year now, expect it to be called 2011. I think it’ll also ship immediately as that’s what they usually do with this kind of software.

iLife 2011 will probably join iWork too. I can’t really imagine what they’ll add, but I expect it’ll be good.

Although I do think this will be mostly about the Mac, I think we’ll get the usual updates (particularly updated AT&T call drop data, if it’s better), Apple TV sales info if it was good and maybe something else crazy (like a Verizon iPhone)…

Both Google and Apple had technology fails at their recent keynotes. Google couldn’t get their Bluetooth keyboard to work and Apple had a problem with wifi. Both companies handled it very differently and both are perfect metaphors for Apple and Google.

Google Google tried to fix their problem, with presenters on stage debugging whilst another stalled for time. In the end, they shakily asked “Umm, could you turn of your wifi, umm, please?”. They completely forgot about their audience, approaching this like a technology problem.

Apple Steve’s page wouldn’t load over wifi and, rather than get upset, he simply moved on. Later, he presented his audience with a clear choice: “We have two choices. I have more demos to show you. We either turn [your wifi base stations] off, or I show you the demos. Which do you want?” He was in perfect control and, because it’s Steve, everyone kindly obliged without a grumble.

There’s the difference, Google made itself look like a company that only understands technology and can’t reason with people, whereas Apple showed an understanding of Humanity. Frankly, after the constant abuse Google threw at Apple during their keynote, it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole Apple fail was fabricated so that Apple could show how awesome they are. But then, I am just an Apple fanboy.

SO, IT’S HERE: the iPhone 4. Here’s a run down of WWDC 2010 and my opinion of it all.

1) New Design I love it. Enough said.

2) FaceTime Perhaps the worst name for anything ever, but it’s still iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 video calling and that’s good. It looks nice at first glance, although pretty useless since the only people I video chat are unlikely to have an iPhone 4. It won’t be interesting until we find out if Skype can use that front facing camera…

3) Apple A4 I still think that fact that Apple is making it’s own chips amazingly shocking. I expect to see Apple chips in all iPods and iPhones and iPads before long. Which is awesome. Clever of Apple too, because it reduces their manufacturing costs.

4) iMovie. The HD video camera and iMovie editing app cometely surpases anything we’ve seen on a phone for video editing. It’s truely amazing, and makes my Cisco Flip kind of pointless.

There is much more interesting stuff, but I feel those four are the most important. I was disspointed that it was only iPhone news at this event, and no Macs or anything. So most of my predictions were right. Although we did see Safari 5 later on Apple’s website, it was still a boring WWDC overall.