Random musings of a child progeny
“He is educated who knows how to find out what he doesn’t know.”
- George Simmel
As I alluded to in my previous post, finding out what you don’t know has never been easier. While the mobile Internet has all but curtailed the fevered pub discussions about pointless trivia, Google is far from having made us dumb.
Source: Chuck & Beans
As already noted, like any impending new Apple product, the iPad was hyped to the max before its launch and it would have taken something special to live up to the speculation. Like a lot of people, I was expecting an all-singing, all-dancing super-device – an OLED-based display with tactile feedback, front and rear facing video cameras and facial recognition. Given that this was supposed to be the saviour of the print industry I was expecting a multimode LED/e-ink screen at the very least.
But these bleeding-edge technologies don’t come cheap – certainly not for $499. I thought it interesting that there are actually two devices: one wifi only, clearly targeted at home use and another slightly more expensive 3G-equipped mobile version.
The speculation on the technology gave rise to a rumoured $1,000 price point. If the iPad was basically a keyboardless MacBook Air replete with the aforementioned display then I would say you could safely double that and halve the battery life.
Shares in AAPL started to slide when the product was initially announced but when the pricing was revealed the market cap grew by $5bn. I’m not suggesting for a second that Apple had anything to do with this. Besides, thing have since reverted to post-announcement form and shares fell 4% the next day.
It has slowly dawned on me that this device is brilliant for the market that it’s
aimed at: namely people who consume more than they produce. It is not meant as a replacement for the laptop but more for casual browsing, emailing and a low-margin front-end for purchasing content from the Apple Store.
Apple made $15.6bn revenue in the first quarter, has $35bn in cash at the bank and no debt.
While not a loss-leader per se, Apple simply don’t need initial sales of the iPad to make them money.
Unless you spend hardly any time online – in which case I’ll assume you won’t be reading this – then you’ll have heard that Apple will be announcing something at a special event tomorrow. The general excitement is based around the much anticipated “slate” tablet form computer but due to the extended running time I suspect there will be other things on show.
Just like the iPhone, the applications and content for this new device will be distributed through the App Store. I’m also fairly confident in my predictions that the current applications will be able to run on the new device and that the OS will be heavily based on the iPhone. This system has come under fire recently but turnaround times have been much improved ahead of the explosion in content likely to be made available for the tablet. Personally, I’m a fan of the App Store approval process. Anything that comes between me and malicious content on my phone can only be a good thing. Of course, it’s not just a phone any longer: I do my banking, make online purchases and organize my life. Already the Android Marketplace has been a target of at least one application that tried to steal your data.
Apple are by no means perfect but controlling their system is what they feel is necessary to protect their customers. Having famously pushed for the removal of DRM from music it will be interesting to see how they approach the issue of keeping other content producers happy.
CES is over for another year and a seemingly massive concerted push for 3D was the stand out news for me. There’s still a huge disconnect between the perceived worth of these products and the actual value they bring to our lives. While 3D looks like it’s here to stay for the movies there’s probably quite a low demand for the technology in the home for the passive TV-in-the-background type of viewer. Until another breakthrough in something like the holographic projection front then I’m going to stick it out with normal broadcasts.
One product that did catch my eye was the Airenergy harvester that claims to pull energy from wifi signals just like Ed Begley Junior’s go-cart. However, not everyone is convinced that the gadget does exactly what it says on the tin.
Wireless power is certainly nothing new: Tesla was experimenting with it over 100 years ago. Several years ago I started to get all excited by SplashPower – which has now become the far-less-catchy ecoupled. You may be more familiar with the Power Mat after their advertising campaign just before Christmas.
The ultimate goal for wireless power is to beam solar energy back from space. Japan has big plans to be a pioneer in this field. The future looks like it’s finally only a few years away, I’ll have a flying car yet!
I’ve been convinced for a while now that Google are up to something. I’m not talking about the real-time results inclusion that launched today but something more fundamental that will have a huge impact next year.
A couple of weeks after the announcement of the Chromium SPDY protocol we now get the Google public DNS. OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch shared his thoughts on this pretty quickly. Then there’s all that Dark Fiber that we first knew about a few years ago that I suspect we still don’t know the full details of.
Is this all just positioning for the best possible experience of Chrome OS next year? Speed of connectivity and reliability are going to be key. Google have reportedly dropped Gears – their proprietary browser plugin – in favour of the offline caching features found in the as yet unfinished HTML 5 specification.
Google’s corporate mantra of “Don’t be evil” is quite subjective. Just how much control do you want to give a single entity? The recent aggregation of data held on an individual from each of their services through the new Dashboard was a very welcome move. They also appear to act responsibly and actively avoid being a brain drain on the rest of the industry.
If relinquishing control to Google and newly designed – preferably open source – protocols eliminates the problem of spam and phising then I for one would welcome our new Internet overlords.
