Retina iPad? Srsly?

To really, appreciate the difference, click on the picture and see the original. Related posts: iPad NHS Innovation Fund announced Stop trying to make an iPhone killer. Srsly. IPad Theft in Lisburn update

To really, appreciate the difference, click on the picture and see the original.

It’s not the product, it’s you

Oliver Reichenstein writes: When people say the UI of Android is so intuitive/unfamiliar, it’s because Android doesn’t educate us through marketing Which is shorthand for “It’s not the product, it’s you”. Andy Rubin whined last week about how the consumer wasn’t educated and that’s why they weren’t buying. “The educated consumer realizes it now that … Continue reading “It’s not the product, it’s you”

Oliver Reichenstein writes:

When people say the UI of Android is so intuitive/unfamiliar, it’s because Android doesn’t educate us through marketing

Which is shorthand for “It’s not the product, it’s you”.

Andy Rubin whined last week about how the consumer wasn’t educated and that’s why they weren’t buying.

“The educated consumer realizes it now that they’re either picking the Apple ecosystem or the Microsoft ecosystem or the Google ecosystem… we’re going to do a better job at making people understand what ecosystem they’re buying into.”

It sounds to me that they believe the problem with Android tablets is all about marketing. It couldn’t possibly be that the product needs polish. Expect adverts, lots of adverts.

Be Unbeatable

Farhad Manjoo, writing for Slate: Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple. … How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad? … For your sake, my hypothetical CEO friend, I hope you’re frightened. … It’s the iPod model. In this story, Apple begins by … Continue reading “Be Unbeatable”

Farhad Manjoo, writing for Slate:

Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple.

How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad?

For your sake, my hypothetical CEO friend, I hope you’re frightened.

It’s the iPod model. In this story, Apple begins by releasing a novel, category-defining product. Then, as rivals scramble for some way to respond, Apple relentlessly puts out slightly better versions every year, each time remaining just out of reach of the competition.

In the tradition of the best armchair CEOs, I’ll post my thesis here. If you want to compete with Apple, you have to:

  1. Buy Low, Sell High – Apple does this by being confident it can sell gasquillions of devices and so they make big orders and suppliers are not only hesitant to hedge bets and lose big orders to competitors but they’re willing to make steep discounts to a big order that pays in advance. By dipping a toe in the water, you will never hit the economies of scale needed to compete with Apple. And when Apple enters a market, you can be sure they’ll be looking for 33% margins or better so take that into account.
  2. Own Your Destiny – this is one of the issues with developing on Apple’s platform; you don’t own your destiny, Apple does. But at least developing for Apple,you know you have a partner who wants you to make money. It’s not quite so cut and dried when dealing with other platforms. If your OS vendor isn’t bothered about whether you meet your profit targets, then you should worry. And if you’re developing software for that platform and they seem disinterested, you need to take stock. Whether it’s Apple or Google or even the FLOSS zealots – be careful who you get in bed with.
  3. Respect the Customer – Apple spends millions on marketing, especially recently, showing off the capabilities of the customer when using their hardware and software and the apps produced by third parties. Customers love this, so do the Developers. It makes them compete to get included. In contrast, too many competitors ads focus on the customer, deriding Apple’s customers as deluded by marketing or suckers for wearing white earbuds. The Apple demographic are willing to spend their hard-earned on high end devices, accessories and software. What’s your demographic?
  4. Make the Buy Impulse Easy – Simplify your product lines like Apple did when they axed the entire line to consumer and portable, desktop and laptop. Don’t release three competing devices at once. Apple released one device: iPad which had three choices: Colour, Capacity, Cellular. If you make me wonder whether I want the 5″ or the 7″ or the 7.7″ or the 10.1″ and only some of them come with a Stylus and not all of them ship with the latest version of the software (4.0), some of them still ship with old versions (2.3) and every one of them has a different interface, then my hesitation is making me wonder if I’m making the right decision.
  5. Be Courageous – Don’t wait for Apple to define a market. Go out and take one. In two years, Apple has created a brand new market from nothing and imbued it with the graphics prowess of the leading consoles. And they managed it while also making the “optical plastic disk” market look archaic. Apple re-invented music players, phones, watches, micro-laptops, media players, PDAs and tablets. They’ll do it again unless you do it better. They entered these markets because no-one was doing them well. And especially not for Mac users. People who buy expensive computers when they can buy cheap ones.

So, consider some of these and see if you can do better. I’m pretty sure that Apple won’t enter the TV market (just look at the margins), white goods (look at the margins) or legacy CE (do I need to say it again?). I do have a few ideas about where I think they won’t enter which still has decent margins, but I’m not going to blab. You can figure that out for yourself, probably.

Battleheart calls it quits on Android

Very sad result from Mika Mobile: We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another – porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc. I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats … Continue reading “Battleheart calls it quits on Android”

Very sad result from Mika Mobile:

We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another – porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc. I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn’t go through. We spent thousands on various test hardware. These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android. Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink. Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable.

Battleheart is a great wee game; I’ve played it through and the kids love it too.

The main problems here are not the lack of money being spent on their game by customers but the overheads of supporting dozens of different configurations and the daft limitations imposed by Android on app sizes on internal storage. This was an issue a couple of years ago but I was under the impression that things have improved. Of course – most Android devices are not on recent versions of the operating system and, in fact, you have no idea of knowing what operating system you’re trying to target.

The blame here is squarely with Google. Their solution is “buy a new device”. That’s not a good enough answer.

When companies have more money than god, there is a certain level of support that you should expect. For instance, Microsoft has done well over the years with some flagship releases of their operating systems (Win95/98, Win2K/XP, Win7) and Apple has traditionally had great success in getting decent adoption of their software (75% of the iOS market are on iOS 5). Google has less than 4% penetration of their latest release and I can’t find a phone sold here that actually comes installed with Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4). Everything sold by Apple will have iOS5.

Google is to blame here and Android just lost a great developer that went over and beyond the call of duty.

iPad

There were a few people complaining about the new iPad. Apparently it wasn’t innovative enough. That a faster processor (presumably more RAM), 4G networking (and faster 3G), quad-core graphics, Bluetooth 4, 1080p video recording and pushing 4 times the number of pixels (Retina Display at 2048×1536*) while still maintaining the battery life and the same … Continue reading “iPad”

There were a few people complaining about the new iPad. Apparently it wasn’t innovative enough. That a faster processor (presumably more RAM), 4G networking (and faster 3G), quad-core graphics, Bluetooth 4, 1080p video recording and pushing 4 times the number of pixels (Retina Display at 2048×1536*) while still maintaining the battery life and the same cost is not innovation.

The iPad was revolutionary because it consisted of a screen with a border. The screen was everything. The screen was the gateway to the magical software that runs on the device. Not the Apple-supplied Springboard but apps like Pages, iPlayer, pUniverse, The Elements. The software changed the entire purpose of the device with just a tap. That was the magic and that is, in my opinion, the singular reason for the success of the iPad.

Which is why the most important part of the upgrade was the Retina Display and the quad-core graphics processor to push those millions of pixels. The singular magical feature of the iPad just got four times better. Not ten percent better, 300% better. The touch interface will be just as accurate but the pixels which make up the display will be, for nearly every instance, invisible to the naked eye.

Tim Cook made a big deal that none of their competitors managed to beat their Retina Display in the iPhone nearly two years later and none managed to beat the iPad to release with a similar class of display. As the screen is the most visible part of the device and in many ways; is the device ; it surprises me that none of the competitors have bothered to improve the most important part of the device.

Technology journalists can’t just embrace the success. They get eyeballs from presenting jeopardy so every headline is about how Apple still needs to look out for a series of unlikely competitors because one of them is bound to unseat the Cupertino giant. They wanted the iPad to debut with haptic feedback, fold out keyboards, anti-gravity repulsors and the ability to transform into a pony. They’re also seething that their puerile predictions that it would be known as an iPad 3 or iPad HD were also torpedoed. And they’ll rail in their little gilded cages about how the device will only appeal to the Apple faithful; an assertion that if true, means there are millions of new faithful followers appearing each year. In truth, they’re just angry about being wrong. And they’ll take their anger out on Apple by writing glowing reviews of third rate plastic tablets running outdated versions of second rate software. Or in touchy-feely tones about how Apple was better, you know, before Steve died.

I’ve been a long-time user of Apple equipment and software. The equipment was the only way to get to the software and the software, nomatter what you may have thought of it, was worth paying extra for. I’ve always had the choice of software and hardware over the years due to working for a couple of huge corporations but I came back to Apple every time because it was simply better. They understood what I wanted out of a computer and they still do.

People will buy the new iPad in their millions as they have in previous quarters. The new lower priced iPad 2 (£329) willow, I predict, further push Apple into places they could never have considered before.

* Putting that in perspective, Apple’s 27″ display costs twice as much as an iPad and offers 2560×1440.

Musing on the communication of culture

the game’s systems encouraged team play supported by strong communication via text, which meant that teams were generally segregated by language. Implementing a communication system is much more complex than enabling a text chat, even if you’re within a company and not just playing games with strangers on the Internet. In two major corporations where … Continue reading “Musing on the communication of culture”

the game’s systems encouraged team play supported by strong communication via text, which meant that teams were generally segregated by language.

Implementing a communication system is much more complex than enabling a text chat, even if you’re within a company and not just playing games with strangers on the Internet. In two major corporations where I have worked, the adoption of a common language wasn’t actually much help in communication. Where things improved was in the recognition of similarities in culture. We understood that Jean from the south of France preferred to have our weekly Friday meeting over by noon so he could spend the afternoon “drinking sweet wine with his friends”. Was his productivity affected by this? Certainly – but for the better. The difficulty in passing over the non-verbals in both language and culture (both being filters for communication) mean that for the most effective communications we may have to pare back the layers to the most basic. A few years ago, a tabletop RPG called Og presented a limited way of communicating where, similar to Twitter, you were limited in your ability to complete communications. In this case it was a limited vocabulary and a limited number of words you were permitted to use. You still had to interact, to solve puzzles and achieve objectives, but communication was artificially limited to allow for creative expression in other ways. It’s also possible to use tools like Rory’s Story Cubes to facilitate this sort of communication and I’ve previously used Everway vision decks to boost understanding and imagination.

The game mentioned in the article reminds me of the Wii method of communication. When playing Super Mario Kart Wii, there is no free-form communication. There are a number of emotes that you can select for our character which are language specific and therefore easily translated. This has two effects – it makes it really easy to permit my kids to play online as there is no way to see inappropriate content and there is no way for a player to feel alienated by the language.

Of course you can have entire conversations using “emotes” (visual verbs) and a strong visual library with appropriate translation can enable meaningful conversation even without a line of text being passed.

And this is why I don’t read The Register any more…

5th March: Bill Ray from Register Hardware: Canadian gadget emporium Future Shop sold more BlackBerry PlayBooks than iPads last week, indicating the end of Apple’s dominance or at least lending some succour to RIM’s investors. Two days later, Apple announces the third iPad iteration. For months this has been speculated, for weeks stock of the … Continue reading “And this is why I don’t read The Register any more…”

5th March: Bill Ray from Register Hardware:

Canadian gadget emporium Future Shop sold more BlackBerry PlayBooks than iPads last week, indicating the end of Apple’s dominance or at least lending some succour to RIM’s investors.

Two days later, Apple announces the third iPad iteration. For months this has been speculated, for weeks stock of the previous iPad has been decreasing. So consumers are well aware there’s about to be a new hardware revision. And they’ve slowed their buying habits. But this would have required researching a story or maybe being honest with readers, something the Register has always been loathe to do. There’s a market in being the “News of the World” of Tech.

And Future Shop, obviously the Canadian retail equivalent of Currys, wastes no time being bullish on the Playbook which they probably stuffed their channel with as soon as it was announced. On their front page they mention an Acer tablet and the Playbook (being sold in a fire sale for $199.

Well below the fold.

So yes. If you’re a complete moron, you’ll think that the Playbook being sold in a fire sale is suddenly dominating over the iPad selling a week before the announcement of a new and updated model. And this is why I don’t read the Register any more.