The year Apple lost its mojo

For me 2010 will be the year when Apple lost its mojo. We are only in march but in the space of two months Apple managed to change my feelings of  respect for one of the coolest tech companies to something close to the feelings I have for the likes of SCO. Don't get me wrong, Apple always was a company that was difficult to do business with, but until now its customers where its first priority. Now however Apple has turned against its customers and is destroying its brand.

Back then when Apple had its mojo.

If you looked at Apple a few years ago you would see one of the coolest technology corporations around. It's iPod line of music players was not only cool, but its iTunes software was a breeding ground for media innovation. It practically invented podcasts, allowing anybody to distributes its ideas and culture around in audio or video format. Steve Jobs was pushing the music labels to offer DRM-free songs. The OSX operating system build on BSD was considered the best customer OS, placing robustness, user comfort and usability above almost everything else. It was so good that some serious Linux geeks started using Macs. It is the company that scrapped the wildly successful iPod mini to innovate by releasing the iPod Nano. Apple was just plain cool for geeks as well as the man on the street.

Forward to 2010

Let's contrast this with the situation this year. For new year I purchased a brand new iPod touch, as I considered that the application ecosystem was finally mature. My primary interest was to read eBooks with the excellent Stanza reader, and also to play the games available in the app store. One of the main factors that pushed me toward the iPod was that a large number of adult themed games and applications had finally been accepted in the app store, something that in my opinion took much too long to happen. The fact that the iPod touch could also replace my old mp3 player was a bonus. Everything looked peachy at first, however this would not last long.

Problems starts

The initial setup of the iPod touch went flawlessly thanks to iTunes, but things quickly started to go wrong. First after the installation of Stanza I realized that I could not load my collection of unprotected ePub books purchased from Websciptions through my USB connection. This was possible before, but apparently Apple removed this much needed functionality. There was well a workaround that involved setting up a web server on my computer and downloading my books over my Wifi network. The thing is so involved for an end user that I have yet to do it. Since I choose an Apple product because they were easy to use I can say is that it is a major let down. Then one day most of the sexy games and apps that were such a big part of the iPod Touch attractiveness started to disappear from the app store. Despite contacting Apple to fix this it is still impossible for me to get that kind of content anymore. In the end I gave up, gave my iPod touch to my wife and purchased and Android phone (I needed a new phone anyway). Then a few day later I learned that Apple has started to play the patent troll with my new phone's manufacturer (HTC) to try to stop it from selling its Android devices, forcing me to use their own non-working products! Now as an Apple customer, how do you thing I feel. If you said "You'll never buy anything from Apple again" you nailed it, that exactly how I feel.

Turning against its customers

As I said, Apple has always been a company that was hard to do business with, but up until now they always protected their customers. What has changed is that now Apple is not only hurting their partners, but also their customers. One of the reasons that Microsoft windows is so bloated and insecure but still popular is that Microsoft has learned that once a feature of your products is used, you pretty much can't remove it unless you provide a better alternative. Whether you intended to provide the feature or third party developers created it as an "hack" is pretty much irrelevant: once your customers have started to rely on it, you pretty much have to keep it, or announce an "end of life" years in the future to give your customers the time to find alternative solution. Apple stopped doing this, choosing instead to leave the people who paid for their product out in the cold. This is not the behavior of a respectable technology company.

Not able to innovate anymore

If you look at Apple one thing is clear: they have not released anything new since the iPod touch / iPhone release. The only "new features" we have seen on these devices since their were released were things that should have been there from the start such as copy paste and a decent battery life or brought by third parties such as the Stanza reader. Look at the iPad: it is far from revolutionary: a big overpriced iPod touch! A $499 iPad cost little more than $200 to build, and there are many competitors such as Archos that have similar offerings for $200 to $400. What has Apple to show to justify the huge price premium? Very little as the iPad will be more limited than it competitors: it won't have sexy games, it won't have flash, and I bet it won't be easy to load your existing eBooks on it. What this looks like is a product from a company that is unable to innovate, wants to milk its customers dry for old technology and hopes to retain its user base by preventing other to innovate thanks to its patten portfolio. This is not far from the story of another company called SCO, and we all know how that story finished.

Lets hope Apple can get back on the right path before it is too late.

Why online resources are not free and ChromeOS will fail

Nowadays there seems to be a big push for the use of online resources to replace offline functionality. New operating systems like ChromesOS or Jolicloud are mostly web based, and more and more audio and video services are moving from downloads to streaming. On the surface it looks like this is a big win for freedom as you are much less dependent on your operating system or proprietary applications, all is in the browser. There is a big caveat however: this makes you overly dependent on your internet connection, and in a world that is more and more mobile this is a recipe for disaster.

An internet connection is expensive

The problem with many online services and applications is that they do not take into account the price of the connection. If you have to pay for an ADSL connection at home, then a 3G connection for your smartphone, then a Wimax connection (or another 3G connection, or a Boingo account) for your netbook or iPad you are looking at a frightening bill at the end of the month, even if these services are available. It is likely that many people will only afford an ADSL connection and end up "stuck at home" if they rely on online services for their application and entertainment. Streaming a video clip from YouTube may seem cheaper than purchasing the song, but it is probably not the case once the connection bill is factored in. It may look like a good idea to use picnic for editing and storing pictures, until you have to do it away from home. Initiatives like Google ChromeOS or Jolicloud may seems revolutionary, but I think they will only work for people who do not require to be mobile.

Going in the wrong direction


For years we have been evolving toward a computing experience that leveraged the internet. We assumed it was a great idea to have everything online, close by hand, only we failed to see that this reduced our physical mobility. We assumed that the internet would be ubiquitous and that we would get more and more bandwidth, and to some extend it is true: at home, on our desktops. The problem is that this is the decade of the netbook, the tablet and the smartphone and as far as mobile internet is concerned sufficient bandwidth for everybody  won't be available for years, if not decades. Current 3G networks struggle to provide barely adequate service because they are limited by available spectrum and technology. How will they fare if we all move to online streaming. What bandwidth is required to provide a fluid 480p YouTube or Hulu streaming experience to even 10% of the mobile subscribers on a wireless network? 3G won't do, 4G won't do, maybe 5G will do, but I doubt it. It will take at least 10 years to get there, if not 20, and we are only speaking about 480p,  the performance that a portable DVD player has been delivering for years. Web developers  assumed that we would get more and more bandwidth as the time passes, but users now want to access the net everywhere, meaning we get less bandwidth rather than more, and unreliable connections to boot. Most internet applications are now designed for ADSL and always on internet, but a lot of people are actually going the other way: lighter, more mobile machines, more infrequent connections, less bandwidth, less allowed transfer.

More and more laptops are sold but we are less mobile

More and more people purchase laptops or netbooks because they want to be mobile and take they computing infrastructure with them, but the increased dependence on our internet connection makes us less mobile. My wife has a nice Linux netbook she uses a lot at home, but whenever we get away from home she takes only her old Nintendo DS because most of the games she plays on the netbook are online Flash games and these don't work when the connection is lost. What does that says for the netbook mobility-wise? A failure! Who actually uses his or her netbook out of the house most of the time? Not many peopIe! Who uses his or her smartphone out of the house most of the time? Most people. In Japan mobile net access is overtaking fixed connections, soon the same will be true in the rest of the world. Soon tablets, smartphones and mini netbooks will be the way a lot of people use "computers".

Android will smoke ChromeOS

In the end I think that Android will crush Google's other operating system, ChromeOS because for the foreseeable future most people will still want to be able to take their applications, data, entertainment and games offline, or at least on a limited connection. That is something that Android is much better designed to do than Chrome. That's why streaming and Blu-ray will not destroy DVD sales for some time: impossible to rip the movie to a netbook or iPhone. That's why online games won't kill the Nintendo DS, why music streaming services won't kill iTunes. For these to take off much progress need to be make to ensure the resources are available offline since there won't be enough mobile bandwidth for all. All web applications and games should be cached. Any piece of music, video or web page that has been watched should be available for replay offline. It should be trivial to store online media or data for later consumption. Currently this is not the case and this would mean that browsers would have to be re-engineered, Flash would have to be completely re-engineered etc... Solutions like Google Gears or the HTML 5 specifications for online data don't go far enough as we do not only need to cache web data, we need to cache web functionality for offline use. Web applications and services needs to be designed for intermittent (not always on), low bandwidth mobile connections, not the monster ADSL many people have at home. What may happen is that smart developpers will create multiplatform offline applications using web technologies and tools such as appcelerator, but that will leave ChromeOS on the side.

Sub $200 Android tablets arrives: is the iPad doomed?

When the $499 iPad tablet was announced last month, many journalists commented that the device was surprisingly affordable for an Apple product. This may not actually be the case however, as several sub $200 competitors running the Android operating system have appeared. Will the iPad be able to gain major market share when it costs more than twice the price of other tablets or is the iPad doomed to be a "high-end only" product like the Mac?

The $179 Archos 7 vs the $ 499 iPad

The Archos 5 inch tablet has never really been a competitor to the iPad, as the screen size did put it more in the MID / media player category than the tablet category. The new 7 Inch Archos tablet running Android on the other hand is clearly aiming at the iPad crowd. Its major selling point: the price, with some models going for as low as $179 (for the 2GB version), less than half the price of the iPad. Spec-wize the Archos tablet is somewhat inferior to the iPad: it uses an older ARM 9 processor (but then the iPad A4 processor is not very fast either), has less storage (but allows for an SD card to be used), has a lower resolution screen and a more limited choice of application, but on the other hand it has a better media player (more formats are supported), do offer a browsing experience on par with the iPad and may support flash lite (flash 10.1 won't be possible however). You probably will not get an integration as good as between the iPad and iTunes, but then you won't have to deal with Apple censorship (you can install ANY working application just by downloading the apk file) and Linux is officially supported as your desktop OS.

Can the iPad survive?

The big problem for Apple is that for most common tasks such as surfing, reading eBooks or playing audio and video the Archos tablet will will perform as well as the iPad for less than half the price. The only usage scenarios where Apple dominate is mobile gaming, will that be enough to justify the price? For some people most certainly, and you can expect a lot of Apple fans to be ready to pony up the cash too, but I am afraid that the average user won't see it that way and that the iPad will stay an high end device with limited market share. When Apple launched the iPhone they were miles ahead of the competition and thus could justify the premium price, but with the iPad they will have to face aggressive competition from day one, and not only from Archos. When you add to that the recent shenanigans concerning "sexy apps" (not so much a problem in the US, but much more here in Europe where we are not used to that kind of censorship) I can see Android tablets winning the tablet war on the long term.

Designing the best tablet device

No one can deny that 2010 will be the year of the tablet. So many manufacturers have presented tablet designs during the last CES that some sites are now making tablet device roundups. This made me think about what the best tablet device would look like.

Tablet weight

Unlike a netbook that will be be sitting on your your lap or table, a tablet is made to be held most of the time. This makes the weight of the device pretty critical and in my opinion 2 lbs is the absolute maximum for these kind of devices, with a weight under 1.5 lbs being a major advantage.

Screen size

Tablet devices seems to fall in three categories: the 4' to 5', the 7' and the 9' to 10'. To me the 5' category is too small if you already own a smartphone. Why pay for another device just to gain one or two inches of screen real estate. The 7' category seem perfect to me: it is big enough to give a comfort level that is far superior to a smartphone screen, but at the same time stays small enough to preserver the device weight and battery life. The 9'+ category could be interesting if the manufacturers manage to fit such a big screen in a light enough device without sacrificing battery life, something possible if a PixelQi screen is used.

Screen resolution

800x480 seems to be the minimum to use a tablet device properly, but 1024*600 would be better.

Battery life

A tablet is a device that is not designed to be plugged in during usage. This makes battery life even more important than for netbooks. I think that an 8 hours battery is really a minimum, but a 10+ hours battery life would be a plus.

Processor

This would obviously be some ARM design. Tablet devices could be made with Intel Atom processors, but the current models would probably not be able to meet my current battery and weight requirements. Another factor is that most ARM designs also include 3D and video acceleration on the die, which is not the case for Intel Atom chips. To get the same feature set you would have to add an Nvidia Ion or a broadcom crystal HD decoder to your setup, which would degrade the battery life of the device and increase the price.

Operating system

Despite some rough edges the Linux based Android OS seems to be the most viable option. Android is free, stable, optimized for touch input and with more than 20,000 apps in the market the software ecosystem is fairly rich . Windows 7 could be a contender if it could run on ARM processors, consumed less resources and if the software library was better optimized for touch input. Windows CE is not really an option if you want to install third party applications as no "store" is available. The iPhoneOS could be an option, but I am not willing to invest in any Apple technology anymore because of their incessant changes of policy regarding what is acceptable on their devices. If Apple decided to give up its excessive control of the App Store content it could be an option in the future though. The other viable option is of course the other Linux based tablet OS: Meego. The only issue is that the project is still too new to allow me make an opinion of the OS, but this will probably be a contender in the future.

Price

This is difficult to estimate, but for me a price under $300 would be ideal. Like netbooks, tablets are meant to be secondary devices, not your main computer. The price should be low enough to allow most people to afford one in addition to a PC, and for me that means it should cost about half the price of your main computer. Since most PCs now sell for $600 that would make the $300 price point right. The Apple iPad would even follow this rule if we consider that the price of Macs is usually above $1000, however it would fare badly when compared to PCs.

Expansions

The most important expansion option for me is a SD or MicroSD card slot. Even on machines with a lot of on-board storage being able to plug in your camera memory card for a quick view on the big screen is a definite plus. Also with memory prices falling all the time this may allow for an easy upgrade in a few years time. A 16 Gb tablet may look impressive now, but it will look restrictive in two years time when 32 Gb SDs will sell for under $30. An USB connection to transfer files from your main PC is another obvious requirement. VGA, HDMI and USB ports are also nice to have, but they are not critical.

Input

A tablet by definition use finger as an input, so the software needs to be designed accordingly, and a multitouch screen is of course better than a "single touch" one but I do not feel it is mandatory. The possibility of adding a real keyboard through USB is also a plus if you intend to use the device for typing.

Software

Some software should be included with the tablet: capable audio and video players, a decent web browser with flash support, an e-mail client, a PDF and ebook (epub or mobi) reader, a picture viewer and a mean to install third party software and games. Most of the operating systems mentioned above cover most of these requirement  from the start except for the iPhone OS (no Flash and arbitrary limits on third party software) and Windows CE. As soon as Android gets flash support (currently in beta) it will cover all these requirements quite easily.

Conclusion

I think that we will see a lot of interesting tablets this year, and that I'll probably be able to purchase one that fits most if not all of my requirements. It probably won't be the iPad because to justify all the restriction Apple puts on the App Store their devices should be vastly superior to the competition in most other respects, and this is simply not the case with the iPad. The Archos Android tablets are currently the best contenders, but I expect many other to appear soon.

picture cc by nDevilTV

Apple insult their customers, women, free speech

Last Friday Apple decided to insult most of their customers, and the funny thing is that most of them did not even realize it. Apple has unilaterally decided to remove all "adult oriented" applications from the App store. Not only that, but it seems that to Apple a woman in bikini is considered adult material unsuitable for the Apple store.

Am I nine years old again?

I am the only adult owner of an iPod touch or iPhone that finds it extremely insulting to be treated like a 9 year old? I am 34 years old actually, and I feel that I can decide what level of sex I want on my iPod, thank you. Apple apparently does not allow anything that can be "sexually arousing". When did I allow Steve Jobs to decide if I could be sexually aroused or not? Beside that, women in bikini may seem "arousing" for a 9 year old, they are nothing especially new to me. Speaking of which:

Apple insult women

Apparently Apple considers that a woman in bikini is an unacceptable sight. As someone pointed out, what should the women wear in video games following Apple censors, the Burqa? In a country where women are fighting for the right to go out topless (like men) I would find it very surprising if most women did not find Apple stance on the issue insulting.

Apple insults our freedom of speech

A more important issue here is that Apple want to limit our freedom of speech. Yes, in my opinion video games and applications are a form of artistic expression, and they should be protected like movies, songs and books. When an institution appointed by our elected representatives apply some censorship at least there is some form of democratic control on what is censored, but when it is done by a private organization like Apple there is not control. Steve Jobs and Co are free to decide what you should and should not see, this is almost Stalinian and is completely unacceptable in a democratic country.


I didn't know I purchased a $300 toy

The only justification Apple seems to be able to come up with is that they want to protect the children. First, it is not their Job to protect the children, it is the parent's job. Second an iPod touch or an iPhone are pretty expensive items, not toys. The design as well as the location where these are sold clearly make them adult gadgets. If this happened to a Nintendo DS I could understand because the Nintendo is clearly marketed as a toy: It is sold in toy stores at a toy price. An iPhone is sold in the Apple store, not in the Toy'r Us.

My last Apple purchase

I think that the iPod touch will be my last purchase from Apple, personally I am too disgusted by their behavior to still purchase anything from them. Thankfully I puchased an Android powered HTC Magic as well as an iPod touch when I realised that I could have both for the price the iPhone is sold at without contract. I will focus on the Magic (despite Android current flaws) and just let my wife play with the iPod, but I will probably never buy anything from Apple again until they start treating me like an adult.