WWDC 2016. Intel, like Microsoft, have continued to their inability to capture any piece of the mobile pie. Both companies are far from “circling the drain” as parts of the Apple tech press will like to claim, but both are a mere shadow of their former selves. So why is the Intel CEO on stage with Phil Schiller?

Phil starts reminding everyone that OS X (and thus iOS too) are platform agnostic. He reminds us that the iOS Simulator has always run x86 versions of apps rather than emulating arm architecture. Everyone’s getting nervous. Intel still hasn’t impressed anyone with their Atom processors. Their integrated GPUs have only recently become considered adequate for 1080p gaming as 4K/2160p TVs break under the $2000 barrier.

“Today we have the honor of previewing Intel’s next generation of mobile processors – All Apple Exclusives. This truly represents the next giant leap.”

One of two things is about to be announced.

Possibility One: iOS on x86

In a leap of engineering more astounding than transitioning from Pentium to Core processors, Intel has “cut the [legacy] crap” from x86 to create a backward incompatible processor that thanks for Intel’s superior fabrication blows Apple’s ARM chips out of the water performance wise 4 to 1 at the same power consumption and a quarter of the physical size. This is by all definitions an x86 processor, but you’ll never jailbreak legacy versions of x86 operating systems onto it. Today this processor will be in a Mac Mini and retina 11″ MacBook Air – not Pro – Air. “Tomorrow” (Fall) it will be in iOS devices.

Possibility Two: ARM: by Intel

Coming off of a bad quarterly report, Intel has made a tough decision. Apple is about to announce a developer transition machine. It runs OS X on ARM, but it’s designed and fabbed by Intel. Apple’s A10, already considered a generation ahead of Samsung’s ARM processors, is now obsoleted by Intel’s ARM chip, fabricated using a die size two generations ahead of Apple and Samsung – and Apple has bought out all of Intel’s ability to make it. Apple devices from now on have twice the battery and half the thickness of competitors at the same time – starting with the impossibly thin retina 11″ ARM MacBook Air and a 5 watt Apple TV sized (maybe not even as tall) ARM Mac mini which Phil will take out of his pocket.

***

So which is more likely? My money is on the latter.

Remember those initial iPhone commercials (and keynote) about the iPhone being able to replace your iPod, your point and shoot, and your cellphone? By having an LTE iPad mini and iPhone 5 I feel like I’m moving in the wrong direction sometimes.

Stephen Hacket is currently (and famously) attempting to live life without an iPhone and instead carry an unactivated LTE iPad Mini and dumbphone. Hackett isn’t doing this as a page-view publicity stunt (his blog ads don’t work like that) but rather because he wants to be a good father (and good person) by not being on his phone all the damn time. I’d like to coin this “Pulling a Hackett” now that I’m tempted to try a variation of it myself.

Since getting my LTE iPad mini with grandfathered AT&T unlimited plan I haven’t left home without it. Literally. Why? It fits in two very convenient places. The first is my pants back pocket. Sure I can’t sit down, but what I can do is have my hands free as I walk from point A to B and have the mini easy to grab. It also fits in the front zipped pocket of my jacket. This is my all year except summer jacket since it’s a heavy duty but light windbreaker that serves as the outer layer over a fleece for my winter ensemble.

I don’t feel ridiculous walking and using my iPad mini. In fact, it has taken over the iPhone’s duty as podcast player during my 2 hour walks (I’m really going to miss Hypercritical). I don’t feel ridiculous using it in people’s homes either. I spent a lot of time demoing it on Thanksgiving. It’s been with me at work where I have a company issued iPad 3. Really, the only roles it doesn’t serve well are the phone exclusive roles. It doesn’t vibrate. Only half the people I text use iMessage. It’s obviously not a phone.

Unlike Hackett, I have less of an “addiction” problem. I make everyone I know play Phone Stack during meals. If you haven’t heard, that’s where everyone puts their devices in the middle of the table and if someone picks theirs up before the check comes they pay 100% instead of splitting. Since starting several months ago, no one hast lost yet. Like water on a fire Pokémon it’s super effective. I’m not nearly popular enough to be addicted to any form of social media. In fact, I’m so unpopular I have notifications turned on for Facebook. I basically do one of two things when I “waste time” on my iDevices. Read Instapaper, and add to Instapaper. I have far too much undiagnosed attention deficit disorder to ever worry about something distracting me from being creative. On the contrary, I’m often thinking too creatively to handle the task at hand, including using my iPhone – see? just now I stopped writing to make a stack of all the iPhones and iPods on my desk.

Let that be a reminder that I’m not a journalist nor aspiring writer. I write without editing, other than stupid typos, and changes of opinion get new posts.

So yeah, no, I’m not not buying the next iPhone or anything like that. I still feel weird carrying two iDevices though. At least I can justify one as my development device and one as my “real” device but that’s hard to explain without explaining provisioning profiles (which I’m not sure anyone anywhere understands, including Apple).

*** if you want to skip this part, go ahead ***

I got the original AT&T iPad and have been paying for unlimited data ever since. Afraid to trust the “move service from another iPad” option I’ve instead been moving that SIM from my original iPad to my iPad 2 and 3rd generation iPad. Everything’s been working fine, but the credit card I had used expired this month, so I went in to update it and was greeted with a nice friendly “whoa Buddy, this isn’t an LTE SIM Card, you gotta go get a new one before I let you see anything” (non contractual accounts don’t have a web interface so you can only update it on iPads).

While AT&T was able to help me free of charge, I did have to wait in a queue (not a literal line thank god) probably due to it being Sunday evening. While I was waiting in line I checked out the Lumia and other Windows phones. They’re huge. Really huge. I couldn’t get over how much front-to-back there was on the Lumia.

Anyway, the girls were off buying $100 of a perfume it turns out I like so I went to the Apple store to fondle the iPad mini and new iPods (I haven’t been in a store since their announcement, either). The new Nano, which is annoying similar to the Lumia in design, is really tiny. Apple’s hero shots make it look gigantic.

I then took an empty spot at the iPad mini table…

As soon as I picked it up I immediately thought damn, Frommer, Gruber, Marco… they’re all right. There’s nothing “mini” about it. It’s really a perfect size and weight. My Incase Sling Sleeve for 11″ MacBook Air holding only my 1.46 pound iPad 3 suddenly weighed a ton on my shoulder. I can’t wait for mine to come.

*** Surface story starts here ***

Despite stories of people getting immediately hassled, I was able to use a pink one for two whole minutes. One notable difference from the Apple store is that no part of the device is actually tethered to the table. When I yanked off the cover and power cord to look the device over I might have triggered the arrival of John (or maybe it would’ve happened soon anyway since generally people have been saying they’re immediately helped).

The only think I can fault John for is having a script in back of his mind. I knew he understood the product well but you could pick out the company indoctrinated nonsense (he said 22 Degrees a few times). I told him I might not use it personally, didn’t mention any of my Apple products, and said we had a lot of Windows 7 tablets we didn’t like at work because they weren’t as elegant as iPhones and Androids (I intentionally didn’t mention iPads).

He followed his “script”, showing me the Type Cover (which is a very good keyboard I might add), let me open Word to try it, showed me Metro’s multitasking, and used the correct word for the “Charms” on the right hand swipe gesture. I can’t remember if either of us said “Metro” at any point. I wasn’t going to blow my cover and call it Windows Redacted Style.

I said our electronic health records either need a Citrix client or x86 support (and, apparently I’d need a Pro to join Windows domains) so we started talking about the upcoming Surface Pro. He went back into script mode for a second and said that the Intel 4000HD on the upcoming Surface Pro was comparable to a low end ATI or NVidia card. I had to correct him by adding “of two or three years ago”. I feel like that disarmed his corporate speak, identified me as a nerd, and from then on we could talk like nerds.

He agreed not having the Pro until potentially after the Holidays was a puzzling choice from Microsoft, but offered to show me a Samsung with an Atom processor in it. And boy, when Samsung doesn’t have an Apple product to copy, they can make some bad stuff. This thing was 13″, same 1366×768 resolution (so really blurry), and although it was very light, it was bulky and plastic-y. I correctly pronounced “the Vapor Mag feels a lot better than this”.

Since I had it undocked, getting the screen resolution from the Windows desktop by “right” (hold) clicking took me two tries to hit the tiny touch target. He said something about the keyboard shortcut which was obviously not helpful since it was undocked (I supposed it would be if I failed 3 or 4 times). Just another point of these-things-actually-require-their-keyboards.

He offered to pull up an RT vs Pro Fact Sheet from Microsoft. He put it back in the keyboard to perform the Bing (which worked btw). “Oh yeah, an i5 should be much better than this Atom” I said. He agreed. At this point, I noticed the girls had found me and were waiting outside the store (I had ignored a few calls during this) so I decided to wrap it up. I told him he’d been very helpful and I can’t wait to see the Pro, whenever it arrives. He said that most customers leave with the same conclusion.

There’s an awful lot of jubilation regarding Forstall’s departure. People seem to think Apple will turn back the clock on iOS-ifying OS X, remove the stupid leather textures, and everything will be great in the hands of the all knowing Ive. Sir Jony is not infallible.

Just a reminder, Ive often prioritizes form over function. Let’s talk about the iPod Touch. What started as a spec-for-spec iPhone without cellular parts has devolved into a neglected, under-specced, over priced, just to remain unnecessarily thinner than the iPhone.

• The third generation continued to lack any cameras due to device thinness
• The 4th generation
  • 720p Still cameras when the iPhone 4 had 5MP
  • No LED flash
  • No IPS Screen
  • 256MB RAM vs 512MB
• There was no release comparable to the 4S
• The 5th Generation
  • Finally gets good cameras and a flash, but they stick out because of thinness
  • No ambient light sensor!

There are also some hardware products that for no apparent reason just don’t exist

• Black and backlit external keyboards
• USB Magic Trackpad
• Wireless Keyboard with Number Pad
• Peripherals with internal lithium batteries the work and charge over USB (hell just make it Lightning if you want to oppose micro USB so bad)

The retina MacBook Pro 13″ has no discrete GPU and the Intel 4000 can barely drive its own display. I pity anyone who tries to add any externals to this. Meanwhile, my 15″ drives three externals.

The Mac Mini, which doesn’t even need to meet some arbitrary portability standard dropped the discrete GPU this year. If they can get one in the new iMacs they can make one fit in the Mini. Maybe sacrifice the second drive bay, or move one of the drives to the on-chip SSDs used in the Airs.

Do I need to mention the Mac Pro?

The de-pro-iziation of Mac OS has been happening since Steve returned and announced OS X. Early commercial versions of OS X not only didn’t have any pro software on them because Apple couldn’t bribe Adobe, but the OS itself couldn’t even use all of its hardware. Burning was the most infamous shortcoming.

Final Cut Pro was a product that changed hands many times before Apple bought it to release it to fill the void left by Adobe not porting Premiere. They since bought several other products (notably Shake and Color) and like the Mac Pro let them lapse, like Final Cut itself is now experiencing in its horrible rebirth reminiscent of OS X 10.0.0

Apple’s iOS Maps have great UI and features. What sucks is the data, and a Google street view brute force human approach seems like the thing that wouldn’t even be Forstall’s call.

Of course, there have also been stories where Forstall has been on the right side of history, and Ive or Jobs weren’t. First, there’s the Forstall’s incredible foresight to base iOS on OS X rather than a new Linux flavor, which makes development for veteran OS X developers easy as pie, and they didn’t even ship with an app store.

The second, anonymously reported to Hypercritical Episode 93, was that Jobs and Ive wanted a no-button iPhone (referring to the home button, not necessarily the sleep button) and Forstall wanted the home button. No word on who was for or against volume buttons but based on the original iPod Touch not having volume buttons I’m guessing that was a concession to see if users would like it, and they didn’t. All iOS devices have had volume buttons since.

You should really listen to that Hypercritical episode.

*** Update 11/13 ***

The iPod Touch actually has much lower margins than Apple’s other products, making it particularly aggressive in its current pricing (at least for Apple).  That doesn’t mean that making it as thin as it is doesn’t carry unnecessary manufacturing difficulty and thus either yield or time penalties. Lacking cellular and GPS related features (magnetometer, etc) are obvious for iPhone differentiation, but making it “too thin” for an Ambient Light Sensor, I feature that’s been on I think every G4 PowerBook and beyond, is a step backwards for a very bad reason.

The iPad Air is coming. It’s just not what Gruber thought. It seems Apple kept the iPad 2 around with the mini introduction so it could have retina and non retina iPads for the sake of price differentiation. As we’ve seen in laptops and the iPad 2/3, big retina screens (in terms of pixels) have some additional hardware expenses, mostly battery.

What if Apple keeps a product with iPad 2 / iPad mini 1 / iPod Touch 5 like specs but takes all they’ve learned building the A6 to make the thinnest possible 9.7″ iPad without retina display. It could be as thin as the iPod Touch. Reviewers would give it a resounding “it doesn’t even feel real”. This would be the new suffix-less iPad. It would probably gain the new color scheme as well. It would also debut beside the thicker retina model with better processor.

***

If current A6 devices Geekbench at 1600, and these scores have doubled every generation, then we’re on the cusp being way post the 2260 the 2010 original 11 Inch Air with 1.6 GHz Core2Duo, 4GB of RAM, and Nvidia 320m, a machine I still have plenty of use for.

Maybe this would be time for OS 11, maybe just the we-totally-know-it-exists Arm port of OS X. Either way, the 11 inch Air is the perfect platform for it. The only downside of course would be waiting for Adobe and Microsoft to recompile their apps. It shouldn’t be nearly as complicated as the Intel switch (because PPC applications tended to have some Altivec code in there somewhere) it should be a simple recompile with an updated Xcode. Did you know that when developers run their apps in the iOS Simulator on Mac Xcode just makes an Intel version rather doing emulation (which is why it’s called the Simulator vs the Android SDK’s emulator). At this point in its life, Xcode projects have very little byte code in them so it’s just a matter of the compiler.

What would an Arm MacBook Air have against an Intel one? Well, for one, battery life. This could be Apple’s first 12 hour machine. It would also be an excuse to bring the black/white thing to some of the Macs. Like last time, though, Apple would have to spoil the surprise a little and have a developer only machine first, probably Mac Mini shaped.

According to the news today, Office for iOS (and Android) will be a free reader app with a subscription for basic editing functionality. My assorted thoughts

• Keeping “real” Office a Surface/WinRT exclusive in an attempt to differentiate
• Even the minimum $1/month $12/year price could help alleviate the overall “race to the bottom”
• “Freemium” doesn’t guarantee you any money, but it does guarantee your competitors will get less

By making it a free reader with inexpensive but limited write support, millions of iOS and Android users are going to conclude that Office sucks, rather than concluding they should buy a Surface. It’s unfortunate that Microsoft is choosing to spend its resource on the uphill battle of Windows 8 rather than the downhill battle of having all the “must have” apps on iOS. They’re confusing themselves for an OS company when they’re merely a software company.

Elephant in the room: If the iPad mini is so awesome, why didn’t it start at 7.9″ with a larger cut iPhone Screen instead of being what it was? Before I get technical, Gruber makes a great point that without making it 9.7, it would be perceived as even more as a “big iPod touch” and might have done as poorly as the seven inchers of the time.

I, too, think a 7.9″ iPad 1 would do as poorly as its 7 inch rivals. Yes, because of marketing, but more importantly, because of performance and shape.

The iPad 1, with its non retina display, was the biggest iPad of them all. Not only was the flat part bigger than the iPad 2 and mini, but it also had that bulge. Most of that was battery, driving those comparably very poor specs that were quickly “obsolete” with the release of iOS 6. Imagine a 7.9″ iPad as thick as the iPad 1. Sure, it’d be way thinner than rivals, but proportionally it’d be very thick. Since the A4 would be driving the same number of pixels with less battery, maybe it wouldn’t be 10 hours, maybe it would get warmer, who knows. Apple probably tried to make one and it probably wasn’t very good.

The night before the mini event, Marco Arment predicted along the lines that there might be an A6X undersold “Speed Bump” retina iPad that might revert to the iPad 2 size and heat performance. Although we got an undersold A6X (reviewers are having a hard time stress testing it) we didn’t get a size reduction from the iPad 3. Instead, we got a new 12 Watt wall charger to improve the iPad 3’s charging time.

When I visited my parents during the Hurricane Sandy aftermath, they told how my AT&T iPad 2 I gave them saved them in one driving situation and otherwise was their lone window to the outside world since they don’t have smartphones, and didn’t have power and therefor any FiOS. When I held it, I remembered just how fat my iPad 3 is and iPad 4 will continue to be.

***
A quick aside: It costs me $10 a month to add that barely-used iPad 2 to my data-share plan. Even if just you and your significant other are on iPhone plans, once you add a third iPhone and an iPad or 2 data share becomes very cost effective, especially if you’re adding people that don’t use a lot of data.
***
another aside, they actually got power back before me. I’m still waiting!
***

Looking forward, we can predict that the retina iPad mini will continue to carry the same premium the retina iPad and retina MacBook Pros have: thicker, heavier, perhaps hotter too. I would not be surprised if a lightning equipped iPad 2 gets introduced next year rebranded as “iPad without Retina Display” (there’s also a chance Apple might bother making it as impossibly thin as the mini). And honestly, that’s OK. Fonts didn’t start looking bad on non-retina displays until designers starting using fonts that only look good on retina displays, and there’s always Safari’s reader button. If Apple can keep non retina devices around for the sake of lower price points and people who can’t distinguish them don’t care, that’s a win for everyone.

Personally, I’m willing to accept a little bulk for that beautiful screen. As soon as there’s a retina mini my original will move into its new home in scenic my girlfriends purse.

Here’s my 16GB iPad 1 from work configured for “Productivity”. 2.3GB used for iOS 5.1, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, note taking / drawing apps, and all the VNC/RDP stuff. I’m posting this of course in reference to 32GB Surface RT having less than 20GB available after Windows RT, Office, and an archaic 5GB recovery partition. Simply, a 16GB Surface is literally not possible, and depending on app sizes, 32GB might not be all that usable either.

With iDecorate closing in on a whole GB (it’s 100% those 2048×2048 stamps) I’ve been paying a little more attention to storage and app sizes. For the record, Auto Adjust is the smallest app on all of my devices at 900KB, and Normalize is number 2 at 1.7MB, so it’s not like installing all of my apps will fill anything or that I use space wastefully.

Does anyone else think Apple is missing out on a big opportunity here? Thanksgiving is November 22^nd this year. If something delivers on black friday, those of us who are only getting an LTE mini:

• can’t pass it around the Thanksgiving table
• can’t tell everyone if it’s too small to read, to big to fit in a jacket, etc
• can’t tell everyone to go buy one tomorrow, Black Friday
• can’t go out on black friday because we’re waiting for UPS/FedEx

Well, at least I will have had my smart cover for 3 weeks by then… why won’t Apple ship things together…

How undersold is the iPad 4 update? How angry should you be if you have an iPad 3? What does it teach us about future iPad Minis?

With the A6 having twice the processing power as the A5, the iPad 4 probably finally has enough CPU to do non-accelerated operations on its 2048×1536 context. In this regard, the iPad 4 is a polished or finished iPad 3. Unfortunately, the A5X wasn’t the culprit of the iPad 3’s size and weight compared to the iPad 2. It remains as thick and as heavy. It’s still noticeably lighter than the iPad 1 and Microsoft Surface, but it’s still noticeably heavier than their iPad 2. Marco Arment has postulated that the A5X was the reason for the iPad 3 running warmer than the iPad 2, so maybe the iPad 4 will run cooler. Apple also quietly increased the wattage of the iPad wall adapter, hopefully decreasing the exceptionally long charging time of the iPad 3. I’ve joked around the office that since they killed the iPad 3 but kept the iPad 2, the iPad 3 must be the “worst iPad we’ve ever made”.

Other than having a lightning port and twice the processing power, the iPad 4 didn’t improve on the iPad 3’s dimensions. I fear this means that the iPad Mini simply cannot be made to drive a retina display with current technology and we’re not any closer this year than we were last year. Again, the A5X and A6X are not the reason for the big battery, it’s the retina display itself. Remember when PowerBooks had their replaceable batteries in a corner of the device, taking up less than 25% of the area? A look into the retina MacBook Pros and all iOS devices reveal that the battery is now effectively most of the device.

I don’t mean to write this to sound pessimistic but rather to temper expectations. We shouldn’t expect at retina iPad mini until we see an iPad 2 sized retina iPad, unless Apple will get off the 10 hour battery high horse (they shouldn’t).