Category: Apple

Apple hardware, software, website, technology

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Apple

iPad 3rd Generation

There’s a misnomer out there that the new iPad has no “support name”. Per Apple Store’s shopping cart it’s “3rd Generation”. The product name is:

iPad with [Connectivity] [Capacity]GB - [Black|White] (3rd generation)

For example:

MD366LL/A - iPad with Wi-Fi + 4G LTE for AT&T 16GB - Black (3rd generation)

For marketing purposes however it’s just “iPad”. This makes sense and follows the scheme used for other Apple products. For example with MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, iPod lines we don’t refer to them as “MacBook Pro 6”. It’s just “MacBook Pro” but for support purposes it’s “MacBook Pro Spring 2010”, or just “MacBook Pro 2010”. Some nomenclature will include processor and CPU. For example “MacBook Pro 15″ i7 Spring 2010”. Apple just made the iPad fit the standard model of seamless product naming. I expect they may do the same with iPhones.

It pretty much met my expectations. Retina means “individual pixels not distinguishable at average distance from eyes”. Obviously the iPad that’s slightly further given the way you hold the device. Apple had to give on girth slightly to up the battery and keep battery life the same. They managed to keep that mostly under control.

A5X CPU sounds about what I’d expect. I doubt the performance is really 4X however. Just having 4 cores doesn’t mean you get 4X the performance. That only works if you have enough things going in parallel to use all 4 cores efficiently. If that were the case SLI or CrossFire would double the performance of any PC game. It’s very complicated to do this from a programming perspective. X-Plane developer Ben Supnik wrote about SLI and CrossFire a few months ago. Most of that applies. It’s not out of the box performance. Unless iOS 5.1 has some magic (unlikely).

Apple Store has been hobbling along all afternoon. Clearly someone is buying it. Tech press will always be disappointed. Even if the iPad cured cancer and produced kittens playing with puppies.

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Apple

We Are Apple

We Are Apple

We Are Apple

This is every 80’s business video/presentation cliché ever in one campy video. Enjoy.

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Apple Mozilla Security

On Gatekeeper

Gatekeeper is without question a bold move to prevent malware from impacting Mac OS X, but it will likely turn into a legal and ethical mess. Before I explain why, I’ll give a very high level overview. There are three options:

  • Mac App Store – Only run applications from the Mac App Store.
  • Mac App Store and identified developers – Only run applications from the Mac App Store and developers who sign up with Apple to get a key.
  • Anywhere – This is how every Mac and PC today operates out of the box.

The default in Mountain Lion is App Store and identified developers. As MacWorld’s Jason Snell explains:

Apple says, if a particular developer is discovered to be distributing malware, Apple has the ability to revoke that developer’s license and add it to a blacklist. Mountain Lion checks once a day to see if there’s been an update to the blacklist. If a developer is on the blacklist, Mountain Lion won’t allow apps signed by that developer to run.

It’s worth noting that at least today the authentication is only done on first run from what I’ve read. However it’s not impossible for Apple to later check an application on each run to make sure it’s not on the blacklist. That could even happen before the feature ships this summer.

What’s concerning is that Apple will now essentially be the gatekeeper (get it?) and thus pressured to control what users can or can’t install on their computer. Lets be honest, most developers will never get their users to open system preferences and change this, so getting “identified” is essentially required to develop on Mac OS X if you want more than geeks to use your software.

Apple in the past has been pressured to remove Apps from the iOS App Store. It’s likely (read: guaranteed) to be pressured to blacklist developers who write apps which are controversial. Anything that could be used for piracy from a BitTorrent client to VLC which uses libdvdcss (the library hasn’t been legally challenged ever AFAIK but pressuring Apple is a way around the court system) could be targeted. Apple has a bit of a history banning apps for all sorts of reasons including being negative towards Apple.

How would Apple deal with pressure from patent claims? What about a desktop client for WikiLeaks, like the one that was pulled from the App Store? What about a game distributed by Planned Parenthood or some other organization that tends to draw controversy? There’s also the international issues here (Nazi images and Germany, privacy violations and EU). What about more indirect things like Firefox which can run 3rd party code via plugins and addons. Mozilla refused to kill MaffiaaFire. Could the Feds have went to Apple?

These are all hypothetical situations technically since the feature hasn’t even launched and Apple hasn’t given any clear policies. That in my opinion is the big problem. Apple as far as I know hasn’t given any guidelines to what would put a developer on the blacklist? Is there even an appeals process?

I’m pretty sure we’ll learn more over the coming weeks. The cool guys over at Panic are pretty optimistic about the feature, so I guess we’ll see.

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Apple

On The iOS-ification Of Mac OS X

Tim Cook spoke at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference. Everyone was paying attention to information about Apple’s cash, and labor issues. They overlooked this juicy nugget of information:

Still, Cook doesn’t think the iPad will lead to the death of the personal computer as we’ve known it for the past 25 years or so. “I don’t predict the demise of the PC industry, I don’t subscribe to that,” he said, although admitting that tablet sales were eating into Mac sales and were likely having the same effect on the PC industry, which is essentially stagnant. It seems pretty clear that Cook thinks of the iPad as a different product from the PC/Mac, unlike some industry observers who would prefer to lump the two together.

While everyone is insisting Mac OS X is just going to merge into iOS and talking about iOS-fication of Mac OS X, clearly Tim Cook at least for now sees it differently.

I don’t think Apple would benefit by cannibalizing the desktop/laptop market. It’s somewhat high margin and eventually the tablet margin will drop as competition ramps up. Tim Cook knows that. Apple’s PC market share was never huge, but it was enough to grow the company for many years, and has been quietly gaining strength, even in the corporate world.

PC’s are still much more flexible and capable than any mobile product. Keep in mind almost nobody can take a photo they took on an iPhone and put it on paper without a desktop. Printing had been figured out by the time the IBM 5150 shipped. It’s worth noting however that this is likely at least in part due to patent wars and not really a technical limitation.

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Apple Security

Path’s Privacy Folly Proves Shift In Privacy Views

Path uploaded address book data from its users in order to provide “social” functionality. After this became public they deleted all address data and apologized.

Everyone is ignoring the worst part of this. While very bad, it’s not that Path actually uploaded their address book (I’d venture most store it in “the cloud” already, so true privacy is out the window). The worst part is that Path didn’t even think this would be a problem until it became news. Even 2 years ago I don’t think there was anyone other than malware developers who would think uploading an entire address book of contacts without an explicit approval would be an OK practice. That is a huge cultural shift.

If Path were a desktop app in 2010, they would be competing with AntiVirus and Spyware blockers who would be racing to provide protection to their users.

In just a short time, a practice that would be reserved for illegal and dubious software was adopted by what seems like a mainstream startup. It’s electronic moral decay.

Apple doesn’t get a free pass either. Why in iOS 5 a sandboxed app can access an address book without alerting the user is beyond me. Addresses, calendar data, geolocation, and the ability to make a call are sacred API’s and should have obvious UI and/or warnings. Geolocation does have an interstitial alert. Phone calls have an obvious UI. Address and calendar data need to have an alert before the app is granted access.

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Apple Internet

SPDY For iOS

It has come to my attention that work is being done (3rd party) to bring SPDY to iOS. Awesome!

However, I can’t help but think that Apple is already working to bring SPDY to iOS perhaps as soon as iOS 6. I say this simply because it would bring a speed improvement without involving more Tx/Rx or upping CPU power consumption. It just improves network utilization. In fact since it improves utilization it possibly could improve battery life by reducing the radio usage.

I’d also like to see the Nitro JavaScript engine available outside of Safari so UIWebView implementations could take advantage. Supposedly that’s a WebKit2 thing, but I’ve heard/seen little of WebKit2. I suspect SPDY will happen first.

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Apple

Apple’s Overseas Manufacturing

Apple’s logistics and manufacturing is extremely complicated, secretive and critical. The NY Times has a great story on it and how it is a great example of jobs leaving the US:

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

There’s lots more, go read it.

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Apple Hardware

Define Mute

One of the tricky things about building products is defining the details. When you say “mute switch” as you’d see on a phone like the iPhone, what exactly do you mean my “mute”? App sounds? Calls? What about an alarm? Muting an alarm sounds reasonable, but perhaps the reason for using the switch is so you can sleep until your phone wakes you up in the AM (I suspect that’s actually a very common use case).

John Gruber has a pretty good insight on the iPhones mute switch design, which doesn’t cover alarms as one New York Philharmonic audience member learned the other night. I agree that it’s an edge case, however think an alert the first time you switch it (and then never again) would be a reasonably good UX. Doing so every time as he explains wouldn’t be workable since you often do use the switch without taking your phone out of your pocket. I know I do it all the time.

In “the old days”, you’d just make that a 3 way selector: mute all sounds, mute all but alarm, all sounds on. 5% of users would figure out how it works.

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Apple

5 Years Of iPhone

iPhone Announcement

iPhone Announcement

Yesterday was 5 years ago Steve Jobs took to the stage to launch the iPhone. It’s amazing to think it’s been 5 years since the iPhone was announced. Watching this again, it’s amazing. In many ways it’s still almost futuristic, yet there’s so much vintage about it from the empty feeling home screen in the UI, to the name “Cingular” to the rather healthy looking Steve Jobs telling the world “…to unlock the phone I just take my finger and slide it across [applause]”.

This presentation is undoubtedly up there with the January 24, 1984 Macintosh Launch. Steve at his best, 5 years ago.

Part 2 can be found here.

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Apple Security

Smartphone Guest Mode

A very good idea by Greg Kumparak on TechCrunch:

Here’s the dream: one lock-screen, two PINs. One for me, one for anyone else who might use my phone but doesn’t necessarily need to see everything.

Not only is it a good idea for there to be a guest mode, the implementation is quite nice and simple. Maps, Phone, Clock, Calculator, Safari. Perhaps the ability to granularity add/remove from that default set. Everything is stateless and rest when guest mode ends.

This could potentially even lower the divorce rate in the US.