Couldn't resist!

Back-from-the-blogging-dead for just 1 post!

For the last few weeks, it's been full-on with the rumour mill on the Apple iTablet/iSlate or whatever. Let's just call it the iTablet here though I doubt (hope) tablet or slate will be in the name.

There have been some really intelligent things written by the usual commenters (oh, if I could write and think like Gruber!), and there's been the usual useless prophesying of doom, me-too, etc.

What the naysayers still haven't realised after years of being proven wrong is that Apple hasn't just been lucky, it's been incredibly smart for years and years. The only area where Apple has arguably not delivered a success in the Jobs-era is the AppleTV - and this is the one thing that Steve Jobs described as a hobby around the time it was released. If you haven't figured out this guy is smart yet, it's really about time you stopped "analysing"? I've interviewed with him before, and believe me he knows what he wants and he knows the people who can make it happen (I DIDN'T get the job!)

Has Apple's success happened overnight with just a few clever ideas? No. Look at the small pieces that have to be put together one component at a time to deliver the whole experience. It is this attention to detail in terms of the overall experience that takes each individual product above its competitors and keeps it out ahead. At the same time, Apple would rather leave out a feature than do it badly or have it create other problems that they KNOW, but the "analysts" don't. Does it now look like a stupid move to have a 2G iPhone as the first model?

So, with this in mind, we enter this week in the expectation that Apple will completely re-invent another area of our lives that we didn't even know needed re-inventing before the rumours started. Just as Apple killed the successful iPod mini with the iPod nano, I expect it this week to announce the product that begins the long-term decline of the laptop. Of course, many people will still need a laptop and/or prefer one (I'm likely to be a long term user for many reasons, but I would probably be considered unusual), and these people will generally be the ones that pour scorn on the new direction. Other people will say it wasn't Apple that did it, but that Apple is just responding to the netbook companies that started it.

But, Apple will do it in Apple's way - using user interface paradigms that initially we'll be unsure about, but will begin to appreciate as we see it demoed, as we see it being used, and as we begin to use it ourselves. Irrespective of the absolute form factor and other features, it will be the way we interact with it that will make THIS product introduction be the defining way such devices will work in the long term. Think Mac GUI and mouse, iPod clickwheel and iPhone multi-touch here - defining moments in the consumer electronics industry.

Could Apple get it wrong? Possibly. Newton 1.0 wasn't ready for primetime. Newton 2.0 was, but never got over the reputation of 1.0. Jobs is smarter than the people around Apple at that time. He has been waiting until it all comes together to do it right (iPod required small disks, firewire and clickwheel to do something revolutionary; iPhone required touch, SSD, high power tiny chips).

Apple have been sweating these details for years. I've read a rumour that the iPhone came out of the tablet development, and it's not an unlikely scenario. Multi-touch was not sufficiently developed or even understood to be used in something revolutionary beyond a small device with limited gestures. As MacWorld contributor Dan Moren wrote, this device will succeed or fail based on whether people BELIEVE they can INPUT stuff into it quickly and accurately - whatever stuff they want, but especially the stuff they are used to putting in their laptops via a keyboard. Any additional inputs (e.g. dictation, recording) will be bonuses. But the basics are a REQUIREMENT.

If Apple CAN get the input side right (early reactions will no doubt include the same people who condemned touch on the iPhone), then it has several advantages over the situation in mobile when it jumped in. Here, they were a late entrant into a theoretically competitive and maturing market - a market that was supposed to swallow up the iPod line as this functionality became just an extra app built into a mobile. Also, there was the gateway managed by restrictive telcos to negotiate - what was the most Apple could put in the device that would still allow them to partner with one or more major telcos? The iPhone remains below it's true potential today for these reasons (e.g. VoIP on 3G), but has blown a big hole in many of the restrictive models that were around before - something rarely appreciated by Apple's critics, but which has benefitted all handset makers and consumers.

In this case, we have an immature market, with no gatekeepers - and that is even giving some credit to the tablets already out there that are really nothing more than windows pc's with a stylus. With the iPhone, there were NO apps when it was released, and the best we could get were a limited number of web apps. Apple will release the tablet with a rich set of applications already there to demonstrate it's usefulness, and the existing iPhone developers will jump on ship quickly making use of possibly the best application delivery platform ever available (I do not see this as just a big iPhone - that would fail, but I do see many of the developments being carried over to the iTablet. I guarantee, there will be no shortage of apps very quickly - perhaps even day 1. Let's just hope that the good ones rise to the surface quickly. I believe the key in widespread success will be how quickly the ecosystem of hardware add-ons and software develops to produce compelling uses that were never before possible with either a laptop or a tiny phone. That will create the barriers to entry allowing Apple to profit from the device over the long term.

That brings us to two other key success factors. The first is how much Apple can open up this device when compared with the iPhone. I've no doubt this will be an openly multi-tasking device (not just limited to certain Apple-designed apps) - but how this is done without compromising performance, reliability and security will be key. I also think Apple will have to allow alternative application delivery methods here - at least in the medium term. Central control has served it (and its customers) well for the iPhone. But this model will be too restrictive in the longer term for a device like this, constrain new business models and entrants into the ecosystem. I don't believe Windows will develop fast enough to offer good alternatives, but Google can take either ChromeOS or Android into this area quite quickly and give a more open proposition if Apple doesn't do it fast on the back of release.

The final issue comes down to cost. Apple is known as the high cost company - something I feel is grossly misrepresented by many in the media and the anti-apple brigade who can't understand basic specification sheets or look at cost of ownership - but let's face it, plenty of companies will come up with something cheaper that purports to do a similar thing. Can Apple deliver this best-of gadget at a compelling price - much as it has with the iPhone - by both quantity production and perhaps viewing the device as a gateway to content consumption and application purchase for which it's getting a cut?

If these things are on Apple's side, then this device becomes the main device we carry around with us as we work, play, travel, etc. THE primary device on which content is consumed, communicated and collaborated (but less so, created). Sure, we'll still need our phones - and for many this may still do - but how often will most people need their laptop? It's not even going to be one device per family - this will be intended to be a one-per-family-member product much as the iPod has become - with you in the kitchen/breakfast table, a companion to watching tv, on the train, in meetings, at conferences or lectures, as we go about most aspects of our jobs and our leisure activities. There will be a steady shift back towards the home computer/desktop computer as the place it all comes together and for heavy lifting (e.g. photo/video management) - as well as (or maybe just) the cloud for the actual storage of our data.

The notebooks have tried to destroy the laptop market by cheapness. Can Apple destroy it (an area it makes much of its profit) by building something BETTER than a laptop for most of what we do? I personally think it can and I think Steve Jobs is on a mission to do this (remember the comment "the PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago"? Is that not a motivator for him to change the game?). The mainstream media have set this as a (perhaps an unfairly) high hurdle, but Wednesday's announcement will probably be judged on whether the new product meets this challenge (while being criticised for attempting to take the challenge on and not delivering in every single possible area!). It is a measure of Apple's achievements that this is even being talked about so enthusiastically BEFORE a product is released - where's the excitement from Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc who should equally be capable of this sort of development, let alone the Redmond machine which will once again be left looking foolish and void of ideas. It will be a true measure of greatness if Apple can deliver something that yet again inspires a new round of innovation.

What an exciting week ahead!

Tags: Apple, iTablet, iSlate, iPhone, Microsoft

Firewire dead? You could have read it here 3 years ago!

By a quirk of fate, the firewire -missing-from-MacBook-furore (one of many, many stories on this) got me looking back on my posts and finding one that I made on exactly this day 3 years ago! Sure, I perhaps expected it faster, and I don't take credit for predicting it's demise - I'd give the credit to the CEO of Wiebetech whose article I had read.

But the signs have been getting more ominous over the last few years - no firewire syncing of iPods, iSights built-in using USB, all new camcorders (effectively) using USB, most external disks supporting USB as the basics, and of course the fact that just about all PC's (laptop or desktop) don't offer it either, and most recently lack of firewire charging of iPods and iPhones.

It seems amazing to me that people are astonished by this after this time has elapsed and when it was quite clear so long ago that this was inevitable. I give good reasons in the article, and it is not that firewire was a technical failure - just a commercial also-ran. It's also fairly clear that perhaps excepting journalists in the field with small laptops and high end camcorders, the loss is not really anything other than an imagined problem by now.

In some ways, the Apple faithful should perhaps be chastising Apple for not including an e-sata interface on the MacBook Pros! Because, surely, Firewire is clearly not going to be around forever? Otherwise, these announcements seem great to me - very very solid improvements, and a real 13" MacBookPro at MacBook prices (well, minus firewire!).

Anyway, if you didn't read it here first, then perhaps you could have done! And, perhaps I should be digging through some old posts about Apple marketshare predictions and the Guardian/Observer getting it so wrong on calling the end of iPod!

Tags: Firewire, Apple, MacBook, MacBookPro

XBox360 Double Whammy

The news on XBox 360 failures is truly quite amazing - easily on a par with the Sony laptop battery recall episode last year. Amazingly Microsoft's stock has hardly budged. There are very few companies in the world that could withstand a write-off of over $1bn so easily. Yet, I don't think Microsoft has yet done the right thing by its users. I think this post makes many reasonable points. Microsoft should do a recall and fix this problem for good. However, I would say that, based on comments attributed to Microsoft VP Peter Moore (see same link),

In our interview with Microsoft corporate vice president Peter Moore, he pointedly declined to offer specifics about what was causing the problems on the grounds that he is not a technical person, nor would he answer whether the flaws should be attributed to design or manufacturing.

it's not entirely clear that Microsoft has a complete solution to this problem even now.

However, it was not this particular issue I wanted to post about. It seems that Microsoft used that tried and trusted PR technique of burying bad news on a day of other bad news. In this case, its own bad news. Hardly commented on was the amazing confession that they had failed to hit their target of selling 12million XBox 360's by end of June 2007. Maybe those that read this saw that they had sold 11.6m, so it wasn't after all that far off the target. But let's look a little closer at this. Only in January this year did Microsoft revise its target from 13-15m units to 12m. So, it is now at least 1.4m below the target it had just 6 months ago, and perhaps up to 3.4m below. So, it's not 0.4m of 12m (just over 3%) but between 11 and 22% below.

There's another way to look at this, too. By the end of December, Microsoft had sold 10.3m XBoxes. It has since sold just 1.3m boxes. Instead of the 3-5m for that period (as per Microsoft's own December targets), it has sold between 1/4 and 1/2 of that number. This is the truly amazing statistic and something I'm surprised has not been more widely commented on. During this time, Microsoft introduced the XBox 360 Elite, and it has had ample product to sell globally. Despite this, its sales have been less in the most recent 6 months than the first 3 months of its life when it was limited to the US market and very supply-constrained. These statistics are available here.

Now, in fact, things are not as bad as this, but only if you understand the phenomenon of channel stuffing - whereby a vendor records sales by stuffing products on shelves even though they remain unsold. This is widely reported as how Microsoft account for both XBox and Zune sales and why individual figures need to be taken with a pinch of salt. It is highly likely Microsoft stuffed the retail channel with lots of XBox 360's leading up to Christmas last year, perhaps so it could meet its target then of selling 10m by the end of 2006. So, either you think Microsoft missed both targets, and engages in this practice, or you think it only missed the current one - by a large margin. It's pretty bad either way (in fact a cynical person might suggest that channel stuffing is continuing and that the situation is even worse than the numbers suggest). And, a nasty by-product of that strategy is if you were to buy an XBox 360 today, it is quite likely you may be buying one made sometime last year and subject to the potential failures noted. As Microsoft have not published serial number ranges, this makes it pretty hard to guess what you're getting.

(As an aside, I don't believe Apple can account for sales in the same way due to its own retail presence which accounts for a significant chunk of sales. At the very least, I believe that Apple would not be able to call an iPod sale via its own online or retail stores a sale until it was sold to a real customer).

Really, this XBox 360 sales fiasco is a BIG deal, and it should have been picked up as such. I am somewhat surprised in all honesty, as I had expected the XBox 360 to be a winner. Back in 2005 before any of the new generation consoles was released I posited that Sony would be the loser and that it seemed Nintendo might defy the odds and with the XBox 360 would be the other winner (not a bad forecast for a non-gamer!). At this point in time, both the high-end consoles are struggling badly, despite (or perhaps because of) the huge companies behind these products. There has been just one winner so far - the company that focused not on stuffing untried/unproven/unwanted technology in to a device then subsidising its high price, but on delivering a value product that consumers adored, could afford and all the while making sure that it makes a profit from each unit sold. Both Microsoft and Sony are behaving almost as state-sponsored monopolies delivering what they THINK the public want, using the vast resources of their other monopoly/semi-monopoly businesses to get by. Microsoft's failings have opened the door to Sony who, while being late to the party, at least have the better-specified box. Instead, they should have been dead and buried. A real price cut from Sony (not the reduced price for discontinued models) at this time might allow it yet to beat Microsoft.

Some will say that new games about to be delivered for the XBox 360 and other developments will rescue it from this lull. But unless Microsoft sells at least 10m more units before the end of the year, its shareholders should be calling for it to pull the plug. Even then it will have TOTAL sales for 2 years of around the same as the iPod for just Christmas quarter 2006. Indeed, its own sales for this calendar year will be barely above 2006 calendar year sales. The supposed "future of gaming consoles" selling less in its second full year than its first is a pretty bad sign.

Update: Is this in fact a triple whammy with reports that Robbie Bach (head of the MS division that includes XBox) sold over $6m of Microsoft stock just a few weeks before these announcements? Or a quadruple whammy to include this week's news that Peter Moore (see above) has left?

Tags: Microsoft, XBox360, Nintendo, Wii, Sony, PS3

The definitive iPhone review?

Trust AnandTech and Anand Lai Shimpi himself to write what is probably the definitive iPhone review - all 20 pages of it.

What I like about this site is that they do a thorough job of every test they do. Second, they have no particular agenda other than doing a great job. This is not a pro-Apple site per se (though Anand did I believe switch to Mac last year).

If you thought the pro-Apple journalists such as Walt Mossberg and David Pogue are not independent enough, you should certainly read this one.

On a related note, I think this article at Blackfriars marketing gives great insight into Apple's business strategy. Admittedly unlike the iPod (which Apple didn't have to bring to market), they were always going to have to build a phone as a defensive measure. What is so remarkable is that they've entered this market and turned it inside out. They say the best form of defense is attack, and this product will define the starting point of a long-overdue period of innovation in both products and services for the mobile industry.

Tags: Apple, iPhone, Anandtech

TeraBytes at Home

I just purchased a 1TB external disk from LaCie for about £230 (ex VAT). This will be primarily used for backups at first and directly connected to our laptops. Longer term, I may use it as a NAS-type device (a networked disk perhaps using Apple's AirDisk). But the 1TB figure seemed pretty monumental to me, and got me thinking back to how quickly this has developed.

A few years ago after an article in the Independent by "Cursor" claiming that disk drive technology had seen 200 times compound growth, I checked their calculations (which were wrong) and showed that in fact, disk drive size had doubled approximately every 11 months versus chip technology which had doubled every 18 months (the infamous Moore's Law). I got a quick reply and correction from Cursor (Charles: are you listening) admitting a rushed job on doing the exponentials.

We all agreed nevertheless that doubling every 11 months had been phenomenal and was still 63% better than chip technology. I think since that time disk drive technology might have slowed a small amount (though chips have continued to develop along Moore's Law lines, albeit with a slowing down in clock speed advances). Of course, at this time, the real star is NAND Flash storage that is growing at a faster rate than either.

But 1TB at home seems just amazing. To put that in a few perspectives:

- 1TB for £230 is equivalent to 23pence per GigaByte, or just .023 pence per MegaByte.
- 1TB is 12,500 times an 80MB disk (that was the size of my first major disk purchase (for a Mac II in 1998 which cost more than this).
- 1TB disks come in a size no bigger than the 80MB disks of old, and are also better in every other respect - power, seek time, reliability, transfer time, noise etc.

That is some achievement. Interestingly, the transfer time of this disk in Firewire800 mode is such that it can transfer over 80MB in one second, which is conveniently equal to the full size of my first hard disk!

Of course, back in the 80's nobody would have thought that the average consumer would require terabytes of data storage. But with uncompressed storage of music, storage of our digital photo collection, and increasingly video storage, it is quite easy to see 10TB being necessary in the not-too-distant future. What about the 1PetaByte home? That is 1,000, million, MegaBytes! Is it really that far off?

Tags: TeraByte, LaCie, Moore's Law