There's no way the tablet will be as hot as the iPhone
Market projections are a black art. How big is the market for an as yet unreleased product? Marketing departments always have to do the research and focus groups and test marketing to see what the projections are. But even these can be wrong or misleading. Based on this article one Wall Street analyst firm bases their projections on the market for the Apple TV a niche product if there ever was one. In the first year of it’s production the Apple TV sold 1.2million units. Given the appeal of the iPhone and iPod Touch, the projections are the Mac Tablet will sell far better than the 1.2 million units of the Apple TV. And with a list price of ~$600 US then the revenue generated would be approximately 3% of total revenue. This is all pad on paper estimates based on the up take of a somewhat less successful product, so it could be way off the mark. I’m hoping there’s something new, something nobody has guessed at so far that Apple will include in this device that will help really, really differentiate it. It should be unlike other tablets, and unlike its little brother the iPod Touch.
We believe an Apple tablet would be priced 30%-50% below the $999 MacBook, and would offer best in class web, email, and media software,” the report reads. “In other words, we believe Apple’s tablet would compete well in the netbook category even though it would not be a netbook.”
True to form, Apple is keeping a tight lid on their Mac Tablet. But all rumors are pointing to a release early in 2010. The announcement of the device may come in September of this year at the point where new iPod products are announced. Other scuttle-butt indicates Verizon may be providing it’s Fourth Generation (4G) network for the new device so that it can stay connected to the Internet wherever Verizon cell phone towers are available. It will be interesting to see how the market might fracture between cell phone and tablet users. I would guess this whole project may turn into an Macintosh Cube experience where Jobs reach exceeded his grasp.
This is how big the 10" tablet might be
However, the past six months have reportedly seen the critical pieces fall into place. Jobs, who’s been overseeing the project from his home, office and hospital beds, has finally achieved that much-sought aura of satisfaction. He’s since cemented the device in the company’s 2010 roadmap, where it’s being positioned for a first quarter launch, according to people well-respected by AppleInsider for their striking accuracy in Apple’s internal affairs.
Each of the people on the chain had to waste time navigating the chain merely because everyone else was too lazy to summarize what had happened up to that point.
Don’t I know it! Which makes me think about what other technologies we’ve adopted for help resolve enduser problems. Prior to working at my current job at a University I never had heard of the term ‘trouble ticket’. But soon like so many corporate trends outside of the University, this one slowly infiltrated the educational enterprise, only through our telecom help desk. The level of support their helpd desk attendants were expected to fulfill meant they needed to have full logs of every call that came in, and then a running log of steps followed to remediate the problem. That way no matter who was on call, who was on vacation, the work could be assigned to ‘somebody’ and the work would get done. Endusers love guarantees that someone is responsible and will do the work to fix the problem.
Faster Forward to my poor friend @ dandube.com. All he gets is email forwarded from person to person, with no log other than the reply field from a previous recipient. Which is never detailed enough to determine what’s been tried and what hasn’t been tried. Oh I feel your pain. Unraveling the email mess to get to what the original problem is through email sucks no doubt. Maybe one issue is the number of intermediaries who couldn’t fix the problem? If the first point of contact had sent the email straight to Dan, he wouldn’t be sorting through any intermediate steps. But I think there’s a real problem with the workflow of how a technical problem is escalated to someone with greater knowledge, experience, expertise.
So an executive decides to impose a trouble-ticketing system to help codify that workflow, right? The rush to trouble-ticketing systems is no help for very similar reasons. It comes down to the human tendency for what is expedient. Whether it’s forwarding an email or assigning a trouble-ticket, you’re not “SOLVING” the problem. You’re merely “CONVEYING” the problem. My experience with trouble-tickets is just as bad as it is with email. People don’t assign categories, people can’t be bother with logging what they tried and failed at doing, and worse yet with the routing of the tickets you get assigned something sometimes by algorithm, not by an actual person. And unlike email you can’t simply delete it and say you never got the assignment. Those tickets are the measure of your productivity. Every manager gets the report monthly how many tickets collected, how many closed out, how many outstanding. Those outstanding tickets are the strikes against you as a service/support person no matter what your actual title or responsibilities are. So whether it’s email or trouble-tickets it’s the same damned problem.
I will say though that the logging inherent in a trouble-ticket system will at least give you some insitutional memory or history of a particular problem, that the email completely obfuscates. But I agree with Dan, there’s got to be a better way that doesn’t rely on the Desktop/File Cabinet metaphor. Thinking about it more, the whole metaphor seems to be geared towards ‘collecting things’. You collect new emails, you file them away. You collect new tasks in Outlook, you file them away. You download a document to your desktop, you set it in a certain spot. You go to someone else’s computer in their home, you look at their desktop and it is FILLED WITH ICONS! Desktops and Filing Cabinets are for collectors. Dan is not a collector. Dan is the one fixing the problem, so he needs a metaphor that fits better.
I’m beginning to think the iPod touch is not an end-of-life product that should be ignored. Oh, I did at one time due to the torrid pace at which Apple was releasing new iPhone products. Seemed like the old iPod was absolutlely superfluous. As the iPhone models increased their storage and speed, the iPod touch tagged along, but not too closely. Currently the iPod touch is consider a second generation device (2G) versus the iPhone in its 3G and now 3GS forms.
Like most of you who may not own an I phone, I have felt the pressure of seeing all my friends of Facebook buying iPhones and cross-posting from Twitter to Facebook via their iPhone. So caving into peer pressure, I’m considering buying an iPhone maybe in October when I reach the 3 year mark as a customer with AT&T. I have some things working in my favor though. I lucked out with being a Cingular customer before they combined with AT&T and before the exclusive distribution deal for the iPhone. But do I really need to buy an iPhone to get all the benefits of the App Store? Do I need to pay for the big hefty data plan?
Maybe not. Just this past week Mark Sigal @ O’Reillycom followed up all the rumors and speculation about Apple entering the netbook market with a Tablet PC. He claimed then Apple was already making a netbook and it was called the iPod touch:
But, perhaps the real story with respect to the forthcoming Apple Tablet Device is that Apple has already released a tablet computing device.
It’s called the iPod touch, and because it’s often overshadowed by its noisier sibling, the iPhone, we sometimes forget that it has already sold 15M+ units.
Today J.P. Morgan is also saying, Apple is already in the netbook market. They have a device called the iPod touch.
The J.P. Morgan report views the iPod touch as Apple’s netbook, of sorts. At least, the analysis says, until Apple officially enters the netbook market – something the firm expects the Mac maker to do.
Given the confidence level of reading these two articles I am more willing to consider an iPod touch. It seems like a more frugal choice without the burden of un-ending data plan fees. True the cost is not susidzied by AT&T, but that one time shot of money is about what I was willing to spend on a netbook anyways. So maybe an iPod touch is the better option if you want to save a little cash by not purchasing a huge data plan from AT&T.
I can think of a hundred different pre-cursors to the golden Nirvana of Augmented Reality. Howard Rheingold set the bar pretty high in his catalog of the state of the art called “Virtual Reality”. Everyone from the pre-history of VR to the then present day had their say of what the future should look like. Enter now, the future as it is. Cell Phones! That’s what we got, so that’s what we’re going to use right? Sure enough if you know your own coordinates using the GPS chip in a cell phone and you know the orientation of the camera in that cell phone, you can overlay data one what ‘should be’ in the field of view in that camera viewfinder, right? Well sometimes good is not the enemy of perfect and a company in Amsterdam has created a smartphone app that combines these required features to present a ‘good’ version of augmented reality. As this article in the NYTimes below states it’s called Layar.
Previously in the field of Virtual Reality everyone attempted to provide near perfect reality. Using magnetic trackers from Polhemus to be calibrated up to some kind of goggles or head mounted visual display. At MIT’s Media Lab the project called “Put That There” was originally for commanders in the Navy trying to assess and react to battle conditions on the seas.
The next revision came in the early 1990s at Boeing where they tried using headmounted computer displays. The display with fit over one eye leaving the other eye open to focus on work being done within the fuselage of an airliner being built. The worker could see displayed in realtime information about what they were touching and moving wires and cabling through. Access to information like that without having to stop, look at blueprints, read computer documentation or find spec books would save inordinate amounts of time and prevent mistakes in the routing of wires and cables. Fast forward to today and now you have the ubiquitious cell phone, with camera and GPS chip and a little bit of mathematics and algorithms. A programmer can determine the field of view from the GPS coordinates, get the cell phone’s orientation, map out what should be in the field of view and overlay that information on the LCD viewfinder as you point the cell phone in all directions. It may not be smooth or realtime, but it may be ‘good enough’.
Personally I think GPS should also be paired with a laser range finder so that the field of view can be further refined. That way when you point the camera at a building or a river, you can ascertain the GPS coordinates of the thing at which you are pointing. Once the solution is calculated you look it up in your points of interest database, voila, that’s so and so church, that’s so and so river. That quickly. Some have decried this tendency in usage of navigation devices. Once you fully empower the autonomy and self-sufficiency of a stranger in strange land, you rob him of the benefit of ‘local knowledge’. In that sense Augmented Reality will make us all dumber the more technology enables us to find out own way or learn landmarks without interacting with people. I say to those people I respond with this flip remark: “Bring it on!” If it means being stupid, losing local knowledge, alienating myself from my surrounds then by all means I would rather have that autonomy and self sufficiency wherever I travel. That’s the kind of guy I am.
Augmented reality courtesy a smartphone
Augmented reality will “reinvent” many industries, including health care and training, Mr. Inbar predicted. Already, researchers at the Technical University of Munich are looking at ways to display X-ray and ultrasound readings directly on a patient’s body. A research project at BMW is exploring how an augmented-reality view under the hood might help auto mechanics with diagnostic and repair work.
Considering the evolution of email and the Internet it’s a wonder we cling to it so tenaciously. The original Internet was slow, unreliable, and had a small number of actual users. Email was a messaging mechanism allowed communication to occur asynchronously over a slow unreliable network. And the mechanims used to transport it prior to the ever popular SMTP server was something called Unix to Unix Copy Protocol. Your messages to people would get copied over the network as files to another Unix computer. Eventually they would get routed to the mail spool on a machine your recipient had an account on. He could then read the message and reply to it. Kind of like telegrams back and forth. So what if you got a telegram with no subject line? Or a telegram with all kinds of tasks for different projects all wrapped up into a single message?
Dan Dube @ dandube.com complains that Filing Cabinets which approximates the desktop computing metaphor are not good. The extra work required to make the Filing Cabinet work outweighs the benefit of the activity the email is helping take place.
Each email is a file, so each email needs an informative, relevant title. Look in your inbox — I would guess there are almost no emails that fit that bill.
Nobody uses subject lines. I get blank subject lines from people. Or they put the vaguest subjects in the subject line.
Emails don’t happen in a vacuum, people reply to them, are added and subtracted from the distribution list, change the content, etc. Yet we still treat each email as a singular file.
That’s the truth, especially for group projects, or worse committee projects where people come and go. You don’t know sometimes where a requirement or task ever came from because you don’t have the original text in an email from the person that proposed it. There’s no trail or flight data recorder for what transpired in that email message.
Emails don’t always categorize nicely. If they fit in more than one “folder”, the filing cabinet metaphor will fail.
I couldn’t agree more. If you have a boss who starts using ‘bullet points’ in the email you know you will need to file that thing in more than one spot. I have a boss that does this often and it takes a few minutes to parse out the tasks that are expected to be accomplished. Once that’s done, which “project” do you file that email message into?
Emails are extraordinarily redundant, with the original message copied hundreds of times in long conversations.
Oh the insanity of quote all. And worse yet I think Outlook turns it on by default. Occasionally I will go back through that really long message and delete everything except my own contributions so the email is physically shorter in length and easier to read.
Files can be emailed, which immediately forks the original file and makes any further edits a synching problem.
This happens all the time rather than copy and paste the text of another file into the medium of the email message, the immediacy of ‘attaching’ just makes it too appealing. Someone is ‘dumping’ the task off on you with the minimum effort necessary, and that means they attach the file that has the exact same text they could have included in the email. Worse yet, sometimes those attachments are PDFs! Useless,useless,useless. Try keeping track of that mix of files.
All of these gripes apply to the file system of the computer, too. Regular files (mp3, doc, html, etc) all have the same shortcomings.
Again it’s hard to associate files in a wide range of ways that make sense for a variety of projects. None of us are limited to one file type in all the projects we do. We might have pictures, audio, video, text, etc.
Now Dan mentions Google Waves. And I wrote a quick blurb about Google Waves about week after the Google demo in San Francisco. Waves is by design, very different from email. It’s not copying files from one server to another over an unreliable slow network. It is meant to give you realtime text based communication in whatever collaborative style you prefer. And it keeps a record of everything, so you can step back through a document at each version or stage of editing.
It’s kind of like chat too. You just start a connection with one other person, start inviting in participants as you go. And as part of the record of the ‘Wave’ or wavelength, you have buddy icons of all the participants. And everything is a reference to that original wave. So file it wherever you want, open it from wherever you want, it all points back to the original and will edit that original file for you AND all the participants. Because like I said, there is but one original, one index everyone’s client points to that same EXACT REFERENCE. That’s the genius of the wave format of communication and collaboration. Waves is a giant shared workspace, nobody really keeps private copies and edits them. They always edit the shared copy no matter what. And so the mailbox/cabinet metaphor is broken at last.
So if it’s not a filing cabinet we’re looking for, but Google Waves, what’s the metaphor? Instead of a filing cabinet in my office, I now use a big giant bulletin board that sits in the hallway in my building. And everyone posts there and edits there and nobody keeps copies of anything anywhere on the bulletin board. The original bulletin is there with all it’s edits recorded, all the participants in the document are recorded for all to see. Scary isn’t it?
The answer to the question in this picture to the left is a resounding NO! All bets are being placed on Apple using a custom processor for it’s version of a Tablet PC. This is interesting in that everyone in the Technology Computer Gizmo/Gadget news circles has pursued this as a story starting last week.
China Times Daily apparently is hinting a new Mac Tablet is being manufactured for release in October of this year. I’m surprised they decided to go with a custom processor for the tablet. But given the ultra-competitiveness of the Wintel netbook market, CPUs are the next big thing in product differentiation. There are manufacturers now using Google’s Android cell phone OS paired with cell phone processors from ARM and Motorola for a new generation of battery conserving netbooks. Most of those products are targeted at the Pacific Rim market and will never see the American market at all. Which made me sad because I would love to have a netbook with extra long battery run times.
I have adapted much of my computer needs to what can be delivered through a network, web-browser and web apps. So the netbook to me is a nice analog to a cell phone and I’ve been waiting to jump into the market until some bigger innovations occured. Maybe this product will help shift the market the way the iPhone has done for cell phones. And with their new found CPU designs maybe product differentiation will even be easier.
However, hairy eyeball of experience rears it’s ugly head and takes the shine of this buzzing hive of technology press bees. Enter Mark Sigal @ O’Reilly.com. Mark doesn’t think the tablet is the real story, but that the iPod Touch IS the Mac Tablet right here, right now. Given Mark Sigal’s earlier survey of the mobile computing landscape he proposes a unified matrix of Apple computing products rather than phone vs. computer. So the longer one waits, the less we have to worry about whether we should be buying a Tablet or an iPhone. Personally I think the bigger screen and the new CPU from PA-Semi does warrant some extra attention. I think we’re going to see either longer battery run times, or maybe mix of iApps and iLife and iWork on the same happy device. But, who knows? We all have to wait until October.
The VentureBeat note says that Apple divided the PA-Semi designers between two projects: ARM-based mobile phone processors on the one hand and a tablet processor, possibly ARM-based as well, on the other.
So we are looking at an Apple CPU-powered Mac tablet with touchscreen functionality and an October launch. The timing is said to be suitable for sales in the lead up to Christmas. Neither the manufacturers nor Apple are saying anything.
I first read about supercapacitors (Ars Technica-2007) some time back when gas prices were starting to reach an all time high. The Summer of 2008 everyone wanted to own a battery powered car, or hybrid drive car. Many writers were speculating then about the car of the future. All the hype surround hydrogen fuel cells was proven to be premature. But Tesla Motors was showing off what you could do with off the shelf Lithium ion batteries. And there were some announcements of new materials being used to create a possible adjunct to the Lithium ion cells. It was called a Super capactior.
In the time since Ars Technica wrote the article about supercapcitors, Zenn has created a car using the EEStor supercapacitor technology
EEstor Cell
In the rest of the high tech manufacturing world the electronics industry has recently adopted the supercapacitor as well. Why? Well, as this article from the Register states, more restrictions are being placed on Lithium ion batteries after some unfortunate accidents were splashed in picture form all over the Internet. But more than that, replacing failed lithium ion batteries on disk controllers is very inconvenient when you are a customer at a Lights Out style data center. In expensive flash memory has been around for a while now. And I have wondered when disk controller manufacturers might start using it for the high end disk controllers. Enter the Adaptec RAID controller with super capacitor backed Flash memory. This device should handle any amount of power outages and still keep all your disk writes from being corrupted. And the recharge cycle rate with a supercapacitors is much faster than any battery technology currently manufactured. So after full power is recovered, the recharge cycle is short enough to get full safety almost immediately.
Adaptec has done away with the need for battery back-up of its RAID controller cards by changing to a NAND flash cache and capacitor set up.
Everyone has been weighing in on the Google announcement of Chrome. Why last night even the News Hour on PBS did a short sales job on Google. They called it “Cloud Computing could Transform Data storage, Internet use”. The idea was selling software as an online service with all your data housed on the servers of a remote data center might change the software publishing business. The timing of this story on the heels of Chrome OS was a little too convenient. I wouldn’t have minded so much by Google CEO Eric Schmidt makes two appearances in the piece to argue on behalf of Google’s view of the Future of Computing. In some ways the whole piece comes of as a sales promotion for Cloud Computing.
Meanwhile on the Interwebs, I have entered into at least one discussion with an avid Google user who is swallowing the Google propaganda. I pointed out how poorly the first generation netbooks sold once unsuspecting or naively hopeful buyers tried to use them with the default Linux derived OSes installed on them. I’m not saying the majority of the early adopters were unprepared to adapt to a new operating system. But in fact after trying to adapt, they gave up and returned the computers. A mad scrambe occured to get a version of Windows on the next revs of the netbooks and voila! Microsoft entered a new market for the so-called ‘netbooks’ completely without trying. That is the end user/market inertia equivalent of falling into riches. Microsoft never saw this market, instead concentrated on the desktops and smart phones. Out of nowhere Asus and Acer along with all the other Taiwan manufacturers created a new product, trying to make it cheap they chose a Linux derived operating system. But the customer is always right. The customer learned how to use a computer on a Windows OS of some sort, old habits die hard.
So will Chrome OS beat the odds and succeed where Acer and Asus failed? Will they drive the next wave of innovation and make an OS that a Windows user won’t find unusable? I doubt it for a number of reasons. First off let’s address what you get with Windows in the ‘multimedia’ category. You buy a Windows OS, you get a whole layer of stuff in there called DirectX. It helps you play games, play audio, watch video all that stuff. You move from Windows to a Linux derived OS you get a loose aggregation of individual progams some of which play certain file types. Some require special program language libraries to be installed to work properly. There’s many dependencies, vast differences in the User Interfaces, and darned little of it is integrated into a seamless whole. If Google can bridge that gap, maybe the transition won’t be so onerous for the new Google Chrome OS users.
“Chrome is basically a modern operating system,” Mr. Andreessen said.
The first wave of netbooks relied on various versions of the open-source Linux operating system, and major PC makers like Hewlett-Packard and Dell have backed the Linux software. Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has worked on developing a Linux-based operating system called Moblin as well. The company has aimed the software at netbooks and smartphones in a bid to spur demand for its Atom mobile device chip.
Things are really beginning to heat up now that Toshiba and Samsung are making moves to market new SSD products. Intel is also revising it’s product line by trying to move it’s SSDs to the high end process technology at the 32nm design rule. Moving from 50nm to 32nm is going to increase densities, but most likely costs will stay high as usual for all Intel based product offerings. Nobody wants SSDs to suddenly become a commodity product. Not yet.
Intel is expected to bring forward the projected doubling of its SSD capacities to as early as next month.
The current X18-M and X25-M solid state drives (SSDs) use a 50nm process and have 80GB and 160GB capacities with 2-bit multi-level cell (MLC) technology. A single level cell (SLC) X25-E has faster I/O rates and comes in 32GB and 64GB capacities.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 