Apple: just breaks

The real pleasure of using a Mac was that you took it out of the box, asked for your previous Mac personality to be transferred over, and you were in business. Things generally work, and that also runs to UNIX-style development, as is typical of many academic projects.

Whether you want a consistent user interface or to go to the command line and type

./configure
make
make install 

it all, in Jobs’s words, “just worked”.

The other side of the Jobsian design world is making things look cool, and that is part of the experience. You have hardware and software that you feel good about having in your home or workspace. Sometimes, that conflicts with practicality, but when both are right, it’s a winning formula. But if I have to sacrifice one, I would rather have something that works and looks a bit less cool than something that looks super cool and doesn’t work.

A while back I updated to Mac OS X 10.9 (“Mavericks” – also the name of a surfing spot with scary monster waves that occasionally kill a surfer). I was travelling at the time so I didn’t use it much before updating to 10.9.5, after which I ran into a problem printing. Could it be a coincidence that a release named after a beach with a vicious break is the turning point from “just works” to “just breaks”?

I use HP printers connected via and SMB server, a setup that has worked across a number of OS upgrades and different Macs. The Mac I have now, a fairly new MacBook Pro 15-inch, Mid 2012 model, bought around the time it was being phased out, should not have problems running the latest software. It is a well-tested design, and only barely out of production.

Another issue I have run into is that the new LLVM compilers don’t entirely work with projects designed to work with the GCC toolchain. Since a lot of what I do is shared projects with other academics running on Linux, this is an inconvenience, but one we will eventually work through. I could have stuck with the older version of Xcode a while longer, but wanted to try out Apple’s new Swift language.

Waiting until some of the earlier complaints about Mavericks were sorted seemed a safe step. But the printing thing was a surprise, and I have had no luck with extensive interactions on Apple’s Support Communities forum, nor so far with posting a bug report though Apple responded by asking for more information. I will add an update if I get a response on that.

Since Mavericks only broke printing and messed up compiling stuff I share with Linux projects, should I install Yosemite (a place of grand view sites and frosty glaciers – and where climbers occasionally fall to their deaths; do you see a pattern)? One major upgrade before, after all, only broke two things.

Does anyone else wonder why Apple can’t step back from their obsession with anorexic design (wow, look, I’m so thin, you can’t see me side on) and get back to making stuff that “just works”?

And could they please stop naming new releases of the OS after places that kill people?

Are computers throw-away appliances?

With each new design, Apple moves closer to a view that computers should not be repaired or upgraded. Take the latest-generation MacBook Pro Retina: RAM is soldered to the logic board, and removing the battery is even harder than the last non-Retina generation, which required a special screwdriver. While this is no worse (mostly) than the last Retina model, Apple now has no high-end notebook, other than the 13" that allows memory upgrades and relatively easy access to internal parts.

Some argue this is no problem – you should think of a computer as an appliance, and letting an untrained person (you) fiddle with the insides is asking for trouble. Do you insist on fixing your own broken fridge or car, they ask?

Apple has been claiming since the original Mac in 1984 that computers are appliances with no user-serviceable parts inside. The original Mac was held together with then-uncommon torx screws, and popping the case was a non-obvious operation. And the RAM was soldered onto the logic board. Fixing the RAM at 128KB, then later at 512KB, turned out to be rather unpopular, because RAM prices dropped rapidly and a computer short on RAM is very limiting – no less so today, when you have VM, and a shortage of RAM means swapping to disk. I had a 512K Mac that I later upgraded to 1MB with significant complications to make the upgrade work.

For a computer a few years old, the cheapest and most effective upgrade is an increase in RAM. Why? Because CPU speed does not improve nearly as fast as RAM prices drop, and an old model with enough RAM for current workloads can still run pretty well. And also, RAM speed does not improve fast, so the relative speed gain of a faster CPU is not as great as you would expect just looking at clock speed or count of cores – RAM is the biggest speed bottleneck for a bigger range of speed updates than most expect.

For the last 30 years, then, a RAM upgrade has been a great way of extending the life of a 3–4 year-old computer by another few years. And there is no change in industry trends that suggests this will be overturned any time soon. By taking away this option, Apple is losing one of the Mac’s great selling points – you can keep running a Mac several years longer than a typical Windows machine because they last longer, and Apple has less of a problem supporting legacy hardware than competition whose OS must run on anything anyone can screw together.

So what about the argument that you shouldn’t want to crack open the case for fear of breaking something? How does this compare with things like cars?

It’s certainly true that 30 years ago there was a lot more reason to fix your own car. Cars today are more reliable, have much longer service intervals, and rely increasingly on computer-controlled electronics that you can’t set without a bit of research. But that doesn’t mean they should be inherently harder to repair when repairs are needed. Just because you have long-life spark plugs that may only need to be replaced a few times in the life of a car doesn’t mean they should be welded into the cylinder head, or that the plug for connecting computerised diagnostics has to be glued closed so you can only open it at risk of breaking something.

If these examples seem ridiculous, it’s because I could only think up ridiculous examples to compare with some of Apple’s recent designs – glued-in batteries, soldered-in RAM, components that are really hard to take apart without breaking something. These design choices imply you should toss your computer when something breaks, or give up on it when you discover it needs an upgrade.

Even if you buy the argument that only trained technicians should open your Mac, why design it so it’s almost impossible to repair without damaging something?

Case in point: I replaced the hard drive in my white 17" iMac. This machine had previously had its screen replaced under warrantee. When I opened it, I found the radiation shielding torn in parts, and 2 of the highly inaccessible screws holding the whole thing together were missing.

Apple today designs computers the way the Italians used to design cars: look great, great to use, terrible to repair. The only real difference is Macs are relatively reliable. Great design does not preclude design for repairability. Apple can do better.

Rumour: Business Magazines to Fire Clueless Reporters

All kinds of rumours are floating around about Apple ahead of their latest quarterly report, due today, after a precipitate drop in their share price. The picture here (from Google Finance) exaggerates the effect because the graph scale isn’t zero-based, but the drop from the peak of $702 on 19 September 2012 nonetheless is spectacular.

One claim is that Tim Cook is about to be dumped as CEO.

Another story doing the rounds is that Apple has run out of innovations in the absence of Jobs, since nothing new has appeared for the past 6 months. A possible concern – except that Apple had a huge launch season late 2012, and seldom refreshes a line in less than a year. This creates stability in the market, and avoids customers feeling they wasted their money buying a product that’s instantly obsolete. The iPad mini was launched in November 2012, and the latest iteration on the iMac a little later. True, these models are not major new blockbuster sector definers: the iPad mini extends the reach of an existing line, and the new iMacs are a refresh if with significant detail changes. And the iPhone 5, announced latish 2012 (September) is also an incremental change, rather than a major new sector definer.

So is the big worry instead that Apple is not “innovating” in the sense of defining whole new industries any more? But how often does a company need to introduce really big new changes? If we consider this sort of repackaging to be insignificant, what are Apple’s major new products and how often are they launched (starting from Jobs’s return to Apple in 1996)?

• iMac 1998
• iPod 2001
• Power Mac G5 (and successor Mac Pro) 2003
• iPhone 2007
• iPad 2010

That’s an average of one major new product line every 3 years or so. Which is pretty impressive. You could argue that Apple is due for another major breakthrough. Of the above, the Pro line is the only one that wasn’t much of a game changer, so you could adjust your expectations down to Apple “only” averages a game-changer design about once every 4 years. Either way, the absence of some major new design is not a reason to dump the stock.


To inject some reality: here are the latest mobile device operating system stats from Netmarketshare. Not only does iOS dominate but, after a period of slight decline, iOS share is on the up again (March 2013: 61.41% vs. 24.85% for Android, the next biggest competitor). That may be a short-term effect but is hardly indicative of a massive drop in popularity or loss of market share. These figures rely on Netmarketshare’s methodology and I have no measure of how accurate that is in absolute terms, though the trend their number indicates is unlikely to be biased relative to the broader market.

So is Apple in trouble and should Tim Cook go?

Not on any evidence I can find.

The source of much of this speculation appears to be a rumour mill in some cases fuelled by players in the market who are shorting the stock – or possibly planning on buying it when it sinks low enough. Those who actually work the numbers claim that far from an unstainable bubble, Apple’s rapid rise in value is justified based on traditional calculations like PE ratio and variants, and the stock is now extremely inexpensive.

So unless Apple has some truly horrible surprise in their quarterly report due out later today, I will be very, very surprised if Tim Cook is going anywhere soon, or Apple’s stock is going anywhere but up, once the current hysteria has subsided.

What baffles me about all this is that stock manipulation in the US is illegal. Shouldn’t the SEC be investigating the more obvious instances? For that matter, couldn’t a large group of stockholders identify the more significant rumour mongers and hit them with a class action suit? Possibly not, since the actual numbers will reset the stock price.

Back to the title of the article: I wish it were true. It’s not only in this field. Climate scientists have renamed the Wall Street Journal the Wall Street Urinal because their science reporting is so absurd.

What’s really wrong with Apple?

Despite the huge tumble Apple has taken on their share price, the reality is they are doing well on most measures that count, and exceptionally on some. Take for instance the way they have pushed Samsung to second place in the US cell phone market in the last quarter of 2012. Samsung has a vast range of phones including some very cheap entry level models, whereas Apple only has premium models. This is like Mercedes-Benz pushing Toyota or VW into second place.

Here’s a much bigger story of decline.

Dell is buying back its shares and going private, while pretty much scaling back on manufacturing.

Anyone following this story will no doubt have seen numerous reminders of Michael Dell’s advice to Steve Jobs: close Apple and give the money back to the shareholders (repeated in the article I point to above). Apple right now could buy Dell for cash and still have $100-billion left in the bank. For now it seems that Apple had the right business model all along, it was just poorly executed until the Jobs revival.

Next year, we could have a different theory of the universe.

My view: Apple does some things right, other things wrong. They could still have a major stumble if one of the competition gets a major thing Apple is missing right, whereas they are all trying to do better than Apple at the minor things and missing the big picture.

Next year, we could have a different theory of the universe.

Microsoft Surface: a precision-engineered kick stand, I ask you: what major problem does that solve? Microsoft has designed a laptop you can’t use on your lap and is selling it as a better kind of tablet.

Many of the arguments about what Apple is missing revolve around minutiae, like the absence of this or that port, or this or that hardware or software feature deemed so essential that the Apple product will surely fail if one of the competition remedies the defect. One of the competition remedies the defect, and sinks without trace. How often have we been told some Apple product would be a success if only it had a USB port, could use SD flash cards, or could receive FM radio? Products like Zune that supposedly met one or more of these needs litter the trash heap (or, better, the recycling bin).

If any competitor is to get serious traction, they need to focus on finding something major that Apple is missing or getting wrong – and finding a product or niche is not enough. You need also to find a fundamental flaw in their business model that stops them taking on your new idea.

All these other things excite geeks, not people who just want something that works and don’t care about technology.

Of course Apple did get things badly wrong in the past. In the late 1990s, they almost went broke.

The original Mac OS did not have a proper kernel, so it did not implement memory protection or true multitasking, meaning one program could take over the machine if it went awry, destroying data of other programs or requiring a hard reboot to get the machine back under control. In the late 1980s, I told someone from Apple that they already had a solution. At the time, Apple had a version of UNIX, called A/UX, that included a way of running Mac apps in a compatibility layer called Blue Box. I proposed that they give up on their own operating system project that eventually became the disastrous Copland project, and create a new Mac-like interface on top of UNIX, with Blue Box for old apps. No, they said. UNIX was way too heavyweight for ordinary users. At the time, A/UX only ran on the top of the line Mac II (with a wicked fast 16MHz Motorola 68020). I tried to explain that they didn’t need all of UNIX, just the kernel, and the application layer could be a version of the existing Mac application layer, but they insisted it wasn’t possible. Nearly 10 years later, Apple bought NeXT, and the resulting new Mac OS, called Mac OS X, was pretty much what I proposed. You may argue that the entry level Macs of the day didn’t have hardware to support a proper operating system with memory protection, but that’s very short-sighted. By 1991, System 7 was launched with virtual memory support, requiring a hardware memory manager (though still without protection, since that would have required a major rewrite of many applications that relied on accessing a single common memory).

Where Apple went wrong in this whole exercise was taking focus off their key strengths: usability and clean integration between multiple hardware and software components. Design of an operating system kernel is secondary to this focus. Once they reverted to their traditional strengths, they recovered fairly quickly (in the process also addressing another of my criticisms, a complex product range no one could understand).

Apple went badly wrong because they took their eye off the ball, and wasted huge amounts of money on something that no one but a geek or hard-core computer scientist would care about, a highly innovative operating system kernel.

So if anyone is to seriously dent Apple’s dominance of their key markets, what it will take is a clear understanding of the important things Apple does well and the important things they do badly. Identify the latter, and address them, and you’re in with a chance.

What options are there? Here’s a few hints. Apple’s serious weaknesses are not in areas like ports, memory expansion or kickstands. So what are they then?

I do think Apple has some serious weak points, and I’ve been right on these things in the past. So what do I think Apple’s real problem is (or will be if someone sees it and exploits it)?

Sorry, I’m tired of giving my ideas away for free. If you have a serious amount of money to invest, let me know.

Tablet Wars

No, not anything to do with the war on drugs.

One thing Apple does well is secret. The 23 October iPad mini launch was widely leaked, though the originally rumoured date earlier in October passed uneventfully. What did take everyone by surprise was a major overhaul of the full-sized iPad. There had been some rumours of an iMac update; I don’t recall seeing any rumours of a Mac mini update.

All of this of course was designed to upstage the Windows 8 and Microsoft Surface launch scheduled for 26 October.

It remains to be seen whether people really want something closer to a full computer in this form factor. Once you add a mouse or trackpad, you can’t hold it in your hand any more, and stylus-based devices have been around more than 10 years and never sold in big numbers. The kick stand is not a great design feature, because it implies the need for a firm surface, reducing again the scenarios when you can use it comfortably. Currently this space is owned by Apple and Android variants (Kindle Fire, Samsung) and Microsoft does not have the app base to take them on. If you are going to buy one of these as a notebook alternative, why not get a notebook?

I bought an iPad mainly because it gave me the option to take something much lighter to a conference, where I need to read email and give a presentation. When I have that option, it works pretty well for me. If I need a real computer, I bring that instead, so I don’t need to compromise on issues like keyboard quality and a poor alternative to a mouse or track pad.

It will be great if Microsoft can bring new competition to this space, but I have my doubts (and an early review is not too promising). An important thing to understand what business a company is really in. Although most people focus on Apple’s hardware and the question of what value it really represents, Apple’s real competitive edge is in a huge bank of credit card numbers. If they wanted to switch their business model tomorrow to slim margins on hardware and making most of their money from their app and iTunes stores, they could. Microsoft on the other hand has built a business out of high-margin software. How can they turn that around overnight?

Check this out: current total app count in Windows 8 RTM Store = 4,284 (mostly free); compare with iOS total available apps: 694,566 and current number of Android apps in the market: 548,200.

The real big killer number is Apple has (at last count I’ve found) 435-million credit card numbers. Only Amazon is in likely to be in this league: a much higher fraction of of Android customers only download free stuff.

As for the new Windows look of huge fat, flat icons, if it works as badly as the Ubuntu Unity interface (some say worse), meh.

Back to Apple’s announcements: I’ll hold off judgment on whether the iPad mini is too expensive for the market (vs. more expensive than I’d like it to be). The overhaul of the bigger iPad is unexpected, and an indication that Apple is not willing to let Microsoft steal any territory back from them. The Surface RT (ARM processor, not able to run most Windows software) is the target. The Surface Pro will have to take its chances selling against Ultrabooks that are a little heavier and work better as a full computer. The ultra-thin iMac is an engineering marvel; my 2009 27" iMac has just had to go in for repairs because of a recall on its 1TB drive; had Apple designed it to be easy to repair as well as to look good, they could have couriered the drive to me rather than requiring that I send the whole machine in to repair.

Looking great is important, but if you end up with a Lamborghini that needs a specialist technician with special tools to service, even if it only costs as much to buy as a BMW, you have a practicality problem. So I am genuinely disappointed that no one is seriously competitive with Apple in the things it does best: providing a seamless end-to-end experience centred on the user.

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This article lists Microsoft's lessons from the Zune fiasco. Did they learn? I have my doubts. Microsoft's development model, cemented by the success of Windows 95 at a time when Apple was floundering, is to get at least two iterations wrong: design refinement on the back of customers. With Apple on top form, I'm not placing any bets on the once good old strategy.

Will Microsoft Surface Sink?

In the wake of complaints that Microsoft didn’t give their hardware partners sufficient notice of their Surface announcement, it seems Ballmer thinks he can get close to Apple’s success by copying the jerk side of the Jobs persona. Nice try, but there was more to Jobs than that. There’s also the perfectionism, the sense of style and the ability to get the best out of people.

Absent all that, why announce a product with so little detail? The biggest effect this is likely to have is chilling prospects of aggressive hardware development for Windows 8. Anyone partway through a design will be strongly tempted to go Android instead, with the threat of such a big player invading their space. An example of this effect: Intel’s IA64 (Itanium). IA64 never delivered in a big way, yet it essentially killed off development of future generation MIPS processors for the high performance market, and killed both the HP PA-RISC processor and the Alpha (by then also owned by HP, but for practical purposes killed by Compaq, who bought DEC and drank the Itanium Kool-Aid).

I don’t understand why the media have been so conned into reporting this as the product that will knock down the iPad. That story has been done so often it’s become ridiculous. The only thing Microsoft adds to the game is some hardware innovation that no one really wants. We have at this stage no data on some rather fundamental details like when it will ship, performance, battery life and what communications it supports besides WiFi. To add an edge to the bizarreness of the whole thing, the case is made with a technology called “VapourMg”. You can just imagine the jokes that will provoke around Microsoft announcing vapourware.

The big thing missing here is how Microsoft will tackle Apple’s massive lead in free and low-cost apps targeting this market. And also Apple’s massive lead in a customer base in hundreds of millions who’ve entrusted their credit card details to a 1-click order process. The x86 version will run standard Windows software and dropping the price on those will be a huge risk when Microsoft and partners are dependent on a much higher pricing model on desktops, and the cheaper model with an ARM processor will require recompiles at very least, and it will look very odd if Microsoft has two very similar looking options with radically different pricing policies on apps. The most likely scenario is that the two will have completely different software models, adding confusion to the market. It’s not just a matter of choosing based on speed and screen resolution; if trading up to the faster model means replacing all your software, the two devices might as well be different brands.

What they still don’t get about the Jobs story is the big breakthroughs happen when you don’t listen to your customers. Arrogant though that sounds, customers used to an old paradigm aren’t the best people to ask about game-changing ideas. I bet this thing was designed based on focus groups who said, “If only we could get a tablet that worked just like a desktop machine.” Guess what? The same people in those focus groups won’t buy one, any more than people in 1900, asked what an automobile should be like, and who said it should have a horse manure scoop, would buy one for that feature.

Tablets with keyboards have been done, and failed. Doing the keyboard better in some way (thinner, sort of possible to ignore because it’s a semi-rigid dust cover you can presumably fold out of the way) doesn’t fix that. I don’t see the value of a keyboard without tactile feedback (if they’ve achieved that with something a few mm thick, that would be a real first, and no one has mentioned that). It means you have to keep looking to type, negating the value of separating it from the touch screen.

Microsoft is trying to find a reason to use Windows in this new form factor, and it doesn’t add up. If Microsoft wants to get into hardware, they would do better making an Android tablet and adding value, as others like Samsung and Amazon have done. There really are only two operating system kernels in wide use (if you don’t count embedded systems where the market is highly fragmented): variants on UNIX (including Linux and Apple’s OS X and iOS), and variants on Windows. Maintaining your own kernel without some significant value you can add is nuts. The cost is huge for no perceptible benefit. Apple discovered that only after nearly going broke (I told them to use a UNIX kernel with a Mac outer layer in the late 1980s: there are times when they should listen).

Another missing detail: how well will it work away from a rigid surface (aka desktop)? If Microsoft have invented a notebook computer you can’t use on your lap top, that would be an interesting first.

In the meantime of course the rest of the field won’t stand still. Apple, Samsung and the rest of the Android crew have time to think up other ways to add value.

I’ve been wrong before but not as often as the journalists who’ve reported yet another iPad killer. Time will tell.

The Market Share Bug

Ford did it with the Model-T. VW nearly went broke for the same reason. Is Microsoft heading for trouble by listening to their customers too much?

Not so long ago, I recall reading somewhere that Microsoft was not going emulate Apple's iPad design, because they had consulted their business clients and they all wanted something that looked like Windows.

This all reminds me of how VW battled to break away from selling the Beetle (Bug if you're American) for much the same reason. All their customers said they wanted one (or something much like one); as many as 90% could say that and still lead a company to terminal decline.

This picture is a tad complex but captures the basic problem. Let's assume a company launches a new product in a market with an overall growth of 10% per annum, and it consistently scores a 90% retention rate with clients (the red line): that fraction can be relied on to buy it again. Despite this very consistent figure, market share rises very fast at first, peaks, then goes into slow decline. Growth follows an even more spectacular variability, starting at over 40% the first year of production, shooting up to over 80%, then going into steep decline, steadying at around 5%. They key to understanding all this is the yellow curve, the fraction of the market the product doesn't already have that it takes from the competition. This fraction rises very fast until it levels off at 40% (first arrow, a) for a couple of years, then the competition starts retaining its customers a bit better (second arrow, b), and the rate of converting competitors declines for a couple of years to 20%, where it sticks for a while until the competition comes out with a product with significant new appeal (arrow c), and conversion from the competition enters a steady and terminal decline.

This graph doesn't correspond to a real scenario; plugging in actual market share numbers requires access to stats over a long enough time to do this properly. Nonetheless the basic model applies whenever a company hits a point where it has a very loyal client base and new buyers aren't interested.

Through all this, the company has been maintaining 90% of its loyal clients, yet if this trend continues, they will eventually go out of business. This is what happened with the Beetle (and before it, the Model-T). Increasingly, buyers who had not bought one before saw it as outmoded and uninteresting. Asking the existing client base what they wanted would have resulted in a resounding "more of the same".

This is why Microsoft today asking their clients what they want is to risk oblivion. Ford and VW recovered; will they?

Where is Apple Headed?

One end of Apple's range is being ignored and it's not the iPhone.

There's something of a feeding frenzy going on around iPhone 2.0, with claims that inventory has dried up (all models at time of writing show "Currently Unavailable" at the Apple Store, a sure sign that something is up), Apple has imported unusual consignments to the US, various phone providers leaking alleged attributes of the new model, etc.

That there will be an iPhone 2.0 is a given. That it will appear soon looks very likely. But is this all?

If you mosey over to the Apple store, you will notice that the Mac Mini has ceased to make much sense. The fastest model comes with only a 2GHz processor for $799 with 1GB RAM and a 120GB hard drive, while the base iMac has a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and a 250GB hard drive and significantly better graphics hardware. Option the Mini up with a 160GB drive, and you have an $849 machine before you've bought a screen, mouse and keyboard. Go cheap on those e.g. via Dell, and you add about $280 to get USB mouse and keyboard, and a 20" screen, total $1129, only $70 less than the base iMac – despite a significant loss of features and speed.

So I predict the Mini is due for an overhaul.

What else?

Apple TV remains a half-baked product. Who heard of a TV without a tuner? You can buy devices like EyeTV for a Mac then export recorded video over to an "Apple TV" to play. But this is silly. You want this part in the box called the "TV" – and you want to be able to watch live TV, not only recordings, from your EyeTV. Why not support a developer interface to Apple TV that would allow devices like EyeTV to be implemented even if Apple isn't interested in the concept? After all, many people have made a big deal of the absence of an FM tuner in iPods, a need that's been filled by third party developers.

In any case, since no one else is talking about this, I propose that Apple do something a bit more creative: merge the Apple TV and Mac Mini into one low-end product that can be configured as a pure black box media device, or used as a more general-purpose computing device with options to add on your own features.

All that it would take is opening up the interface to Apple TV, and converging the feature set of the two devices with some creative build to order options. With a bit of a stretch the feature range could go from a relatively simple low-end box to something close to an iMac without a screen.

The overall lineup then would look something like this:

• iPod lineup – Shuffle, Nano, Classic, Touch: eventually Classic will go when flash is cheap enough; no big change except Touch will get any appearance overhaul to match the new iPhone
  
• iPhone lineup – soon to be clarified but I would be surprised if the variations widened significantly before Apple had a worldwide presence
  
• entertainment Mac lineup – Apple TV with options up to an attractive Mini, comparable to an iMac
  
• iMac – no change since there has been a revamp recently
  
• Macbook – no big change
  
• Mac Pro – no big change
  

So that's my prediction: not only an iPhone overhaul but something at the low end. The iPhone is obvious; the other more a question of fixing some flaws and inconsistencies.

Solid State Disks and Apple's MacBook Air

Here is an interesting article on SSD vs. HD pricing: Flash Memory vs. Hard Disk Drives - Which Will Win?

In the 1990s, in my advanced computer architecture course, I demonstrated that the price trend of hard drives was going to intersect the price trend of DRAM at around 2004 to 2005. Of course an solid state disk (SSD) can't be made out of DRAM without a robust power source; FLASH has fixed that problem. Even if FlASH is more expensive per bit than DRAM, taking away the need for power means it's a viable alternative to disk and the crossover point wouldn't have moved that far out. The price trend is approximately the same as that of DRAM.

So why aren't we all using FLASH drives, with disks relegated to museums?

Obviously disk manufacturers also have smart people working for them and didn't want to be put out of business. If (as seems very likely) they also spotted the trend, they had 2 options: get into SSDs early (a few did) or push the improvement rate of HDs to match DRAM -- which happened in the late 1990s.

The other interesting observation in the article is that there is a floor price for hard drives -- there is a bare minimum cost for the mechanism that doesn't reduce if you make them smaller. Their graph illustrating this point is a bit misleading: disks are not a fixed price per unit irrespective of capacity; they were trying to represent the scenario that a 64GB drive was the only one available, which is not fully representative (for clarity, they should have shown the graph to the left of the 64GB point as an extrapolation e.g. by dotting the line). For example, very small drives are more expensive to make, on general principles, than very big ones, priced per bit -- an effect to some extent masked by economies of scale for smaller drives. But anyway, the floor price observation is correct.

Why is this floor size observation useful? Because below that size, FLASH can be cheaper than the smallest disk you can buy. Obviously, it will also be lower capacity, but if that's all you need, why spend more on a bigger, slower technology?

If these trends persist, we may reach a point where FLASH is big enough for most mobile devices (at a price point below the cheapest disk). Currently, the cheapest disk is around $50. a 64GB FLASH drive -- as is an option the MacBook Air -- costs about 20 times that. However, if you are happy to have up to 3GB of FLASH, you come out ahead on cost. This would be enough to make minimal bootable system but once you start adding applications and user data with all the cruft (not to mention useful stuff like large data files) those entail, you can burn through 3GB very fast. (My iMac has 2GB in its /Applications directory tree alone, and 77GB in /Users and it's not as if I am making movies on a regular basis.)

If the current rate of improvement continues, with prices halving roughly every three years, if the minimum disk price doesn't drop, you'd be able to use 6GB of FLASH by the same argument. However, minimum disk prices are dropping, and the minimum space you need is a moving target. The only way you would see a substantial change is if there is a new mindset in systems and application development. Even so, users needing large-scale data (movies, big graphics files, databases) would still need disk storage a long way into the future.

So where does this all take us?

First, trends do not continue indefinitely, as we saw with the change in price trend for disks. A breakthrough in how SSDs are constructed could tilt the balance away from disks.

More likely, though, is the emergence of a new computing platform with a smaller memory footprint, but which can use external storage efficiently. It is this detail that is interesting about the MacBook Air -- it's a gentle step towards distributed storage, if only to dispense with the need for an optical drive. A more exciting idea would be the development of a global secure distributed file store, which takes away the need to store all your files on your own platform.

This already exists in the form of the Google File System (GFS) though unfortunately that is not available for general use, outside of services Google provides. In research projects, the Carnegie Mellon Andrew File System (AFS) and its successor Coda were nice ideas. Although the original AFS and Coda projects don't appear to be going anywhere, versions such as OpenAFS continue to be developed. The Hadoop Distributed Filesystem looks interesting too.

So in the long term, I would expect computing to look a bit more like Google's services. Computation would go wherever it was most efficiently performed, and data would be stored wherever was most convenient and efficient, if necessary fragmented and replicated for greater redundancy and bandwidth. Your own personal device would not contain all your data -- only that which was critical for system performance, and cached copies of data for immediate use.

How big a step is the MacBook air towards this? Pretty tiny, actually, but it got me thinking. Good on Apple.

Third-Party Apps on iPhone

It's nice that Apple has conceded the need to allow other developers to build apps for iPhone.

It's also nice that they have conceded that they have delivered a platform full of security holes -- and that they plan on fixing this.

The most obvious security hole is a gaping opening: everything runs as root (system administrator). That had to he a quick and dirty fix -- exactly the sort of thing that leads to long-term trouble. You would have thought that Apple would have learnt the hard lesson of the past: make a system as secure as it's ever likely to need to be from the start, not as secure as you think you can get away with now.

The really huge thing though that this development opens up not only for the iPhone but the iPod Touch (and one presumes future iPods which should be build on the same platform) is turning it into an alternative computing platform. This opens up really interesting possibilities, like a decent voice over IP implementation. Aside from what this may do to whatever deal Apple made with Cisco to avoid confusion over the Linksys iPhone, this would be a very attractive addition for iPhone users roaming in parts of the world where cell phone service is very expensive. The option to control whether you connect through WiFi or the cell network for data traffic would be useful here as well.

If Apple fixes the security problems (which I hope is not too hard an ask, given that the list of existing applications is small, and most are based on apps that run in a more protected environment on other platforms), this is a really big development. Many, many more people should be interested in an iPhone if it can run apps of interest. This puts it much more into the camp of smart phones running a real operating system, like a variant of Linux or Windows.

The iPhone battery lawsuit

Another day, another Apple battery lawsuit.

The whole thing is at http://gizmodo.com/photogallery/iphonelawsuit/ for those interested in the detail.

The substance of the allegations against Apple is:

• an iPhone battery only lasts 300 charges, and this implies a battery must be replaced in less than 2 years
  
• only Apple can replace the battery because it is soldered in, and this imposes not only an unacceptable cost but unfair "enrichment" on Apple's part
  
• sending in the battery results in total data loss
  

First, the battery replacement policy is not great – most cell phone users who need a new battery would at worst expect to wait in a shop while it was replaced. Second, the cost is high.

However, the substance of the allegations doesn't stand up to detailed scrutiny. The "loss of data" is not as serious as it is made to sound. As Apple makes clear, you should back up your data before sending the phone in – not exactly the same thing as total, irrecoverable data loss, as the law suit would have you think.

Also, the number of charges is stated by Apple as follows:

A properly maintained iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 400 full charge and discharge cycles.

Nowhere does Apple equate a "charge and discharge" cycle to about one day's use as the lawsuit attempts to claim. Let's for example take a day's use as:

• 1 hour of music
  
• 2 hours of video
  
• 2 hours Internet
  
• 1 hour of talking
  
• 18 hours standby
  

Given Apple's claims of 8 hours' talk time, 6 of Internet, 7 of video playback, 24 hours of audio playbackand up to 250 hours of standby time, these numbers represent about 85% of a full charge on a good battery. You might do something like this if you were travelling (watch a moving on a plane, catch up on your email, listen to some music, do some long business calls).

What if you have a day at the office, and only use the phone for a few phone calls, and to listen to some music on public transport to and from home? The usage could look something like this:

• 1 hour of music
  
• no video
  
• no Internet
  
• half an hour of talking
  
• 22.5 hours standby
  

On Apple's numbers this would use less than 20% of a full charge. So with this sort of usage, you could go almost a week between charges.

On these numbers, the phone would still be reasonably usable in a wide range of scenarios if Apple's 80% of capacity after 400 cycles is correct. With moderate usage – mostly phoning with occasional music in daily use; videos only while travelling – a full charge cycle every 4 days seems likely. This would mean the battery would still be reasonably useful after 1600 days – over 4 years.

My own low-end Nokia phone which is a couple of months shy of 4 years old has a battery which is holding about 50% of its original charge.

So unless Apple is lying about the battery specs – which is not claimed in the lawsuit – I can't see that the claim that the battery's life is inadequate by industry standards holds up.

Of course it is possible that Apple did not have all the information I found on their web site the day the phone was launched. However, I do recall discussion of the battery issue pretty early on and, as others have pointed out, the plaintiffs always had the option to return the phone if they didn't like it.

So, in summary – I don't like the battery policy but don't see the basis for the lawsuit. It looks to me like a fishing expedition.

iPhone = iFlop?

Within days of the iPhone's launch, some clown published an article claiming "Apple's iPhone missed a 1 million unit sales target and rivals are rejoicing". I haven't seen this "target" anywhere else and judging from the fact that most AT&T stores and a high fraction of Apple's retail outlets are reporting stock shortages, it is extremely unlikely that Apple missed an internal target.

Then there are the articles that iPhone will not be adopted by business, mainly because it does not fit the "standard" of Microsoft Exchange.

Wake up, people.

Microsoft is not a standards organization, it's a monopoly.

Any organization which ties its infrastructure to a monopoly when there are open standards available (which are technically superior in most respects) has to be run by morons.

Until they lost their dominance, it used to be said that "No one was ever fired for buying IBM". This wasn't always because they had the best technology (they didn't) but because they had a strong commitment to looking after their customers. If you are a huge customer, you may get that from Microsoft. Good luck otherwise.

Another "biggie" is the absence of a "real" (what they mean here is "toy") keyboard. I can't see myself that typing on a tiny keyboard with real keys is going to be a whole lot faster than Apple's touch screen if it works as advertised. As some have pointed out, learning to type reasonably fast on these small keyboards takes time; already some have claimed to be reasonably quick on the touch keyboard. This looks to me like jumping to a conclusion before the facts are in.

I can just imagine these analysts poised over their keyboards for the first reports of functionality to dribble out, so they could finish their headline "iPhone will not be adopted by business because ...".

In any case, why is this such a big deal? What we have is a simplified portable computer with cell phone functionality, WiFi, calendar, web access (with a few features left out), photo viewing and music. The last two clearly indicate a focus on personal use. The market for personal cell phones is huge, as is the market for music players. Putting these two together alone would be pretty big – as several have tried before. The only real question is whether Apple has a compelling enough product to sell. The initial sales are promising – but the real test will be in how sustainable they are.

So, hype and counter-hype aside – it's still early days, and any prediction of how hot iPhone will be long-term is premature. My feeling is that it will be pretty big but there are too many unknowns to be sure: that's what you get with a breakthrough product.

That leads me to the other common thread: is it a breakthrough product?

Just as with the iPod, there are plenty of other options out there that on paper have the same feature list – even add some missing details. (Like toy slide-out keyboards.) Just as with the iPod, the real difference will be how it all hangs together. Apple can fix some of the obvious annoyances (I was really surprised that there is no copy and paste); the competition can't make a solution cobbled together out of mismatched parts suddenly become cleanly integrated. The difference reminds me of a question I ask about cars: how is it that European car makers can build cars that are made all of a piece, whereas US cars are made all of pieces?

A real big difference I haven't seen much positive comment on is the way pricing splits the handset from the phone plan. This is supposedly a negative. At first sight, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that (aside from non-obvious workarounds) you have to sign up for 2 years of Cingular, yet the handset is sold separately. My guess is that this arrangement is an artifact of Apple's 2-year US exclusivity deal with AT&T, and they would rather maintain this separation for when the deal runs out. To me, this is a positive: it puts real pressure on Cingular to up their act, to keep future iPhone buyers. If they become the major source of complaint, Apple will have no reason to stick with them after 2 years: if iPhone is a huge success, other networks will have little cause to resist adding in the extras Apple needs from them.

So, in summary, talk of iPhone as being a flop is typical FUD from ignorant business columnists. There's no way the initial roll-out can be anything but a huge success. As to the longer term, we don't have the data. My bet is that it will do well, and exceed Apple's 10-million target in the first year easily.