Aenean144

They’ll likely have a small announcement or two for Mountain Lion in addition to what is already known.

For hardware, one or all of Apple’s Mac Pro, iMac, MBP and MBA line of devices could be announced. But expect 90% iOS and OS X, and the odds are low for a hardware announcement now that the iPhone update cycle appears to shifted to October.

Colonization of the moon, Mars, any habitable location in the solar system, and development of space resources for food, energy, and materials is necessary for us to support the ever increasing population on Earth. If we don’t do it, things aren’t going to be pretty for the human populace in a 100 years.

Lots of people get this. Unfortunately, none of them are voted into office in the USA, the nation with the most money at its disposal, and the nation that uses the most resources on the planet. Sigh.

Definitely wait. If you have to have something now, try to find a used 8 GB 4th gen for < $100, then buy the new one in 5 months.

Can’t wait! Still love the original and play it once and awhile.

It’s really little profit in big China. Lenovo “reported … an operating profit of $584 million” for the last fiscal year. That’s profit for the whole year. Not one quarter.

For some perspective, that’s about a 2% profit margin on 29.6b in sales last year. They are barely doing better than retailer Amazon. Walmart, another retailer, is around 3% profit margin. Problem is, Lenovo is a not a retailer. They are a PC and consumer device hardware vendor, and they are only getting a 2% margin. That’s crazy. It won’t take much for things to go south.

I was VERY disappointed by the lack of a hardware refresh on the iPhone 4S though. I’m itching to see what Apple has up its sleeve for the next design!!

What you mean be “hardware” here is how it looks and maybe the size of the display. The iPhone 4S was a gigantic upgrade in terms of “hardware”:

1. 2x CPU improvement from ~800 MHz unicore Cortex-A8 to ~800 MHz dual core Cortex-A9
2. 7x GPU improvement from a PowerVR SGX535 to a SGX543MP2. 7x!
3. 64 GB storage option
4. 5 MP to 8 MP camera
5. Transmit and receive antenna diversity

I think a 4k Apple monitor is inevitable. A 27" to 30" with 4096 × 2560 resolution, maybe a 4096 × 2048 monitor. The thought has nothing to do with having a retina display. It’s all for Apple’s prosumer FCPX, Aperture, Logic, iOS developer, etc market. 4k video is coming. 2013 may well be the year of 4k for mass market camcorders and cameras, and there will be a need for a 4k monitor. A larger resolution is needed for iPad app development.

So the market demand for such a monitor is ever increasing.

It doesn’t matter anymore. Apple’s performance is not dependent on the late Mr. Jobs anymore. It is now in the hands of Tim Cook and his executive team. The mistakes are theirs now. The hits are theirs now.

Yes. Such is the life of a developer. An iOS developer today has to design a game for:

1. 480 × 320 3.5" display
2. 960 × 640 3.5" display
3. 1024 × 768 9.7" display
4. 2048 × 1536 9.7" display

So, they current need to have 2 UI designs and 4 sets of graphics. If Apple stops selling the iPhone 3GS when the 2012 iPhone is released, maybe the developer load won’t be that big if they drop the 480 × 320 3.5" set of stuff and their design load won’t be much bigger. So they would have to design for:

1. 960 × 640 3.5"
2. 1152 × 640 4"
3. 1024 × 768 9.7"
4. 2048 × 1536 9.7"

Probably not realistic to drop 480 × 320 3.5" as there are still a lot of 3GS devices in use and developers will need to cover it for another year. If the 7" iPad comes to fruition, then devs really have their work cut out for them.

That’s a good render. The display is symmetric top and bottom and left and right. The home button and ear piece, front cam, and prox sensor are properly center.

They used a white anodized aluminum unibody design language, which looks nice. However, they are using a magic display technology to make the transition from aluminum to glass display seamless. ;)

Kudos on the diagram/art. It’s pretty cool.

I would like Siri to have keyboard input. Sometimes, like in a meeting, I would like to ask a question, but don’t want to say it out loud.

So, put a little keyboard icon on it, and after a long press to activate Siri, I can tap on it and type in my query.

The bolt on the left appears to have just a flat surface on the its head. No philips head, hex-head, not even pentalobe. What magic instrument will be used to drive the bolt in and out?

You have a curious notion of what forcing means.

Apple is sometimes very good at negotiating. Arguably they are the best at negotiating component goods, but for digital service they’ve been hit and miss.

For the music publishers, the negotiation tactic was basically that Apple believed that $0.99 was the precisely right price for selling music combined with making it dead simple to do. That was the carrot. The stick was that music was been digitally converted and distributed for free. So, the option was get some money, or get no money. That’s not forcing. That’s negotiating a good deal. SJP was legend as a negotiator, but I digress. Apple’s DAP dominance did the rest.

The music publishers were free to develop their own digital player and digital distribution system, but they were curiously inept at that.

For ebooks, it’s basically the same tactic except the boogeyman was Amazon instead of people “stealing” books: Apple offered a way to kill the boogeyman and give back the publisher more control. Basic negotiation 101.

Again, it’s curious why the publishers don’t band together and develop a standard format for all ebooks and level the playing field or even develop the readers themselves.

There will come a time where ebooks will be like music though. It’s inevitable.

That’s the cost of storing a digital copy still has to paid for in some way.

Sigh. No editing function.

Like others are saying, writing, typesetting, layout, editing, the things that make a good book hasn’t changed one single bit. This the majority of the cost of a book.

The act of distributing and selling a book is at best an orthogonal move. You still have to pay for the servers and data in some way. You still have to pay for “retail store” costs. If the retailer or publisher is providing a backup or free redoenloads

The price of a book is not how much it costs to make, but how much you value the content. If you value the content less than the listed price, it doesn’t matter if it is hardcover or ebook, you are not willing to pay the list price regardless.

At least it shouldn’t matter. People value material physical things more than digital things. Can’t deny that, even though the content is identical. It’s going to take awhile to culturally get away from that mindset.

While an ebook doesn’t have the second sale rights as a paper based book, digital books have the advantage of being able to carry your entire library with you, having your library backed up, etc.

Ostensibly, ebooks could be updated like apps for up to date information like apps. It’s a democratizing medium. That means you should get lot more content for cheaper, but TANSTAAFL, the content won’t be as good because of its cheapness, like apps.

There are always pluses and minuses.

The most fair way for consumers is for a consortium of companies to establish a format standard for books that anyone can implement a reader for. Like the W3C and HTML or any other number of industry wide standards bodies.

If the govt had consumer interest in mind, they would just make it a rule that any ebook they buy must be in an open, industry standard format to ensure a more competitive market. By industry, I mean the whole market, not just one company.

bq, For example, name a time when computers doubled their clock speed, decreased power consumption and drove significantly better graphics in only a few months time.

ARM SoCs have never done what you are saying here. It’s always a continuum, and the cycle time has to be on the order of 2 years where the chips are bridging a die shrink combined with new micro-architectures. We’re living with Cortex A9 architecture for 2 years. We lived with Cortex A8 architectures for 2 years.

Intel’s move from 90 nm Netburst chips to 65 nm Core chips was time when performance increased and power consumption decreased. You can say this happened over a few months too, but that’s just cherry picking a time. ARM’s big advantage was that they could implement architecture improvements on a faster schedule because they were pioneered on older chips first (scaler to superscaler, in-order to OOOE, branch prediction, multi-core, etc.). It was or is just matter of implementing features that meet perf/watt goals.

Intel integrated graphics can support “Retina” graphics, and it did it 5 years ago. How do I know? Apple’s Mac mini and MBA using integrated graphics supported the 30" Apple display way back when. Or any number of systems with integrated graphics.

Supporting 2D graphics at these large resolutions aren’t a problem for laptop hardware. It just isn’t. Not only can today’s integrated GPUs drive large resolutions, it can drive multiple screens at those resolutions. The only thing that integrated graphics can’t do well is 3D, and that’s relative to 100 Watt GPU cards. Intel’s integrated graphics solutions are and will be more powerful than those in ARM SoCs.

As for CPU power, ARM is the class leading perf/watt design, but it’s same deal. TANSTAAFL. On aggregate, on the same playing field, more performance means more power. You can’t get around it. Look at the Geekbench scores. iPads get 700 aggregate scores. MBPs get 10,000 aggregate scores. Yes, that’s 10 times the computational power, but it requires 10x the power consumption.

It’s all about priorities for Intel and Arm on quite a shallow cost-benefit design curve. Intel’s Medfield currently owns the higher Sunspider score for a smartphone today with comparable power draws to ARM SoCs. This should be evidence to folks that x86 can compete with ARM. It’s just a matter of priorities and design goals.

The problem for Intel is that they are trying to shoehorn a laptop (netbook) CPU into a smartphone. Not only that, a highly triangulated design not meant to compete with Core CPUs, and effectively has no room for maneuvering in the smartphone space. Even so, it has the best single threaded performance on a smartphone today. Never count Intel out.

The biggest issue is the number of vertical pixels in a lot of these 16:9 screens. With 1366 × 768, the most popular screen resolution today, the problem isn’t the aspect ratio, it’s the 768 pixels vertical resolution. 768 pixels simply isn’t all that great for Mac OS X or MS Windows. When you have status bars, title bars, docks, menu bars, tool bars, etc, on the screen, there’s precious little vertical space for the application content you want to see.

Somewhere between 800 to 900 vertical pixels is the practical minimum for today’s desktop OS design.

This is from the dude who wants 30" 2.5:1 aspect ratio screen. ;)

iOS 5 on a 4S has at least 2 ways to get weather information that is much much better than looking at the app icon.

1. Use the notification center weather widget. You get a current temp; weather bitmap thing indication sunniness, cloudiness, rain, storm, etc; and, a 6 day forecast.

2. You can use Siri. I asked it what the humidity is the other day, and it reported a rather depressing 90%. You can ask for hourly forecast, week forecast, humidity, and who knows what else. You can ask it for the weather anywhere there is data on it in the world.

The whole inside of the phone is redesigned every generation. It’s not an easy task yes. Expectations should be high, not low, no?

Use 2 batteries, and have the main circuit board in the middle.

When I’m standing, it’s no problem.

When I’m sitting, it can be very problematic to pull your phone out of your pants pocket. It’s not tight or loose jeans. It’s shallow or deep pants pockets, and where the pocket opening is.

Another place to put ads?

The paper could be designed to just block 2400/5000 MHz signals while letting cellular 2100, 1900, and lower signals through.

If true, Bluetooth signals would be blocked too since it’s at 2400. Sprint WiMAX as well.