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Apple

Initial iPhone 4 Thoughts

iPhone 4Here are my general thoughts on the iPhone 4 since the announcement. Hopefully I’ll be able to check one out in the store soon enough.

  • The “retina” display is the killer feature – I’ve yet to see anyone report anything other than words of astonishment after viewing it. Low resolution displays, poor refresh rates, bad contrast is all hard to read but we’ve all adapted from using technology. Go back to a CRT or monochrome display and you’ll know what I mean. This display is moving forward to the next generation. In a few years you’ll look at an iPhone 3G and wonder how you ever read email on something of that quality without getting a headache. The usability of the extra pixels and the quality will set the standard for future phones.
  • The form factor is strong – I actually think the new form factor is pretty nice. I appreciate the curved design, but it’s a bit out of style and quite frankly I’m not sure that space went to any better use in my pocket. It didn’t make it feel emptier either. Giving that space for more features and battery seems like a good tradeoff. Switching to stainless steel after so much aluminum is interesting. Will we see steel in other products? Or was this simply done because of the radio properties? I believe it was John Gruber who mentioned aluminosilicate glass being used in future products a few months ago since it has better radio properties than the metal backs on the first iPhones and isn’t as fragile and weak as the plastic that has been used on the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3Gs. It also looks pretty nice.
  • Better Camera(s) + Flash + HD Video – This is the runner up killer feature in my mind. The first big win is that the sensor is actually better, not just more megapixels, since megapixels are mostly the stuff of myths. Flash is handy, but in reality without a good sensor it’s not going to make much of a difference anyway. HD Video is interesting, 720p is especially awesome. I suspect the front mounted camera will be more useful to developers than to FaceTime use thanks to the WiFi limitation and people generally hating video chat for practical purposes. It’s still VGA quality, which is impressive. At this point for some people the iPhone 4 will be their primary camera. It’s not replacing SLR’s anytime soon, but Point & Shoot manufacturers should start thinking twice with what’s on the market now. Especially since video is becoming a focal point.
  • FaceTime – We all “ooh and ahh” every time we see video chat, but the reality is people hate it. The technology to do it has existed for almost a generation now in various forms. The reason why we call, email, IM, text each other is because we are either to busy for face to face, or we just want to avoid each other. Don’t take it personally, we all do it either for the sake of brevity, or so that we don’t have to comb our hair and get dressed, shave/apply makeup. I suspect this will be the same thing. If people were really so interested in it, everyone on earth would be using Skype or iChat by now. Almost every IM service has offered video chat at one point, all were pretty easy to use if you have a camera, which costs less than $50 for many years and is plug n’ play with OS’s post 2002 (Windows XP, OS X). How many of you Mac users with iSights built-in fire up iChat and not send an email? People think “Jetsons” then send a text message. It’s convenient.
  • Dual-mic noise suppression – This is a pretty fancy way of addressing the problem, and a pretty nice one. I suspect if Apple exposes the necessary API’s we’ll see some interesting Apps doing some unusual things with the hardware, assuming that API is exposed. If it’s not, there will be some clever hacks for jailbroken iPhones.
  • Finally 802.11n – iPhone 4 supports 802.11n, something that wasn’t advertised very much for good reason. While it’s pretty cool to support, I doubt the iPhone is powerful enough to process that much incoming data in any way that would make it worthwhile. I think the main benefit to connecting over 802.11n is to avoid lowering performance of non-dual-band networks.
  • 3-axis gyro means some good gaming – Game developers will make good use of it. We’ll see some impressive demos pretty quickly, I’m sure Apple gave a few folks a sneak peek so they could start developing. In several months we’ll see some real creative things come out of this.
  • Name is semi-stupid – Apple went from naming models like the “PowerMac 9600” to only naming generations of machines like the “G3”, “G4”, “G5”. More recently they moved to just “Mac Pro”. Now they are re-introducing numbers, but only for mobile phones? Odd.
  • Apple A4 processor – Faster, lower power. That’s about all there is to say here. It’s the future of Apple mobile at the present time.
  • Plan paradox – Interesting how as the phone gets faster, and can generate more data by way of HD video, and 5 MP pictures the data plans are actually getting smaller. I suspect this will eventually result in either several tiers or a pay as you go scheme. Overall I think there’s a good chance cost per MB will be increasing for most users in the long-term 18-36 months.
  • iOS – I knew Apple would rename the OS since it was getting confusing with the iPad. I would have assumed something more creative than iOS, especially given the Cisco IOS . Guess that’s good enough though. Most users won’t care. A few networking engineers will go insane when Google turns up iPhone blog posts rather than than relevant documentation.
  • Competing with Android – I think Apple did a good job here. The truth is most of the places where Android has a competitive edge are in cloud services and social networking. This is all software. Apple can address this well within a years timeframe if they think that’s hurting their sales. They don’t need to wait until a hardware revision. Apple could ship iOS 4.1 by end of year with those features. I think iOS 4.0 was set in stone a while ago to be honest. It was mostly about developer API’s and iPad. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple does do a 4.1 or 4.5 release more focused on this type of stuff in the near future. I’d put the odds at about 51%. Software is easier to correct than hardware.
  • Google should be thrilled – Google is still the default search engine, most users won’t even think of switching. Apple is also arming it’s customers with HD video and better quality cameras. That means tons more content going onto the web for Google to index and even serve via YouTube. Google can benefit immensely. One person catching an interesting news story on an iPhone video and uploading to YouTube can be huge for them. It can be huge for anyone who gets the video.

iPhone 4 photo courtesy Apple Inc.

Categories
Apple

Confirmation of the Tablet

The tablet was a foregone conclusion. Since late last year even if Apple didn’t want to build one, investors pretty much forced it upon them with the hype. Failure to produce at least a proof of concept by the end of the quarter would really hurt the stock.

Terry McGraw, CEO of McGraw-Hill decided to announce it a day early. Newsweek jumped the gun in 2004 with an iPod update. I’m sure their legal team is working late tonight.

With it presumably comes iPhone OS 4.0 preview for developers.

Either tomorrow or next month Apple will announce an update to the MacBook Pro lineup. It’s now 232 days since the last update (avg 200) and will likely get Core i5 and Core i7’s and slight hardware tweaks. I think Blu-Ray is still 50/50. Apple might hold this until early or mid February so it’s not overshadowed by the tablet announcement.

Likely a few other tweaks to the lineups, perhaps a CPU bump on the Mac Pro’s and perhaps a small tweak to the iPod lineup (more storage, new colors nothing major) though I expect the iPod/iPhone focus to be in June not now.