Customers are smart. Last year, there were more than two dozen Android tablets launched into the marketplace, and nobody bought ’em. Why? Because they’re gadgets, and people don’t want gadgets anymore. They want services that improve over time. They want services that improve every day, every week, and every month. [source]

Maybe a little hypocritical from someone dependent on Android for his product, even though there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that new Kindle software is based on Android 4.1 which they really need because the original was so goddamn slow.

Tragically, the higher resolution screens may lead to some weirdly displayed apps because Android developers seem to ignore the entire Best Practices part of developer.android.com and specifically Supporting Multiple Screens. Luckily, those writing “Kindle Fire only” apps will have the benefit iOS users have of a few discrete sizes to take into account so they might actually do it.

The iOS 6 SDK makes it literally impossible to support iOS 3 (and unfortunately devices that are capped at iOS 3). The Kindles move the bar a little higher with 4.0 but 4.1 has been out for a while now. They probably won’t get any Android updates either, just Kindle Software updates. It’s a shame too. If only the Kindle software was merely a suite of apps rather than a bunch of core replacements. Maybe Google could stop pretending Play is any good and partner with Amazon to get the suite on any Android device and compete with Apple where it really matters, the ecosystem.

I wanted to get one last post in before it comes too close to the unveiling so I can write from a speculative perspective. At christmas time, Apple’s iOS lineup (iPhones not included) should look like this:

• $099 8GB 4th Generation iPod Touch
• $099 new AppleTV + AirPort Express combo device
• $199 8GB 5th Generation iPod Touch
• $299 16GB iPad Junior
• $399 16GB iPad 2
• $499 16GB iPad “3”

Some other price points

• $199 8GB Kindle Fire 2 7″
• $199 8GB Nexus 7
• $249 16GB Nexus 7
• ??? Nexus Q
• $299 10″ Windows RT devices

For now, Competitors can escape the wrath of the iPad Junior by still being cheaper, but if they’re ever in a store together it’ll probably be game over. $499 10″ Android tablets don’t sell well when put next to the iPad with retina display. I imagine the 7″ers won’t sell well next to an 8″ iPad even without retina because it’ll still have the best IPS panel out of the bunch.

Remember how the less-bang-for-your-buck iPod mini sold better than the regular sized iPod? Do you recall what color sold the best? Pink. I can’t find proof of this but I know it’s true. Tech nerds like to forget that women exists sometimes and that they outnumber us. This iPad is for them. No it won’t be pink, but it will be slightly more tuned for smaller hands. It won’t be called the Lady iPad, but it is the target consumer. Yes it will also be the number one Christmas List item for children, and yes men who want something slightly more portable and/or have small hands will want one too (me), but by and large, it will be the women who buy it. As a developer, this means new users, not replacement users upgrading, and that means more customers. Awesome.

***

I won’t look for the link, but someone said that new devices will be able to AirPlay without WiFi. I don’t think Blue Tooth is the best way to do this and adding a BT chip to the AppleTV seems silly. If Apple can make an 802.11n base station the size of the current AppleTV like the current Express, maybe there’s enough redundant hardware to create at least a living-room sized n-network.

There’s only one little caveat. You should be allowed to create a network without internet for AirPlay, so how to do resolve the fact that any iPhone you add to it gets kicked off of 3G? iOS 6 has a new WiFi+3G option that will pull 3G data in the even that the WiFi signal isn’t doing it fast enough. This will also be helpful when you’re sitting in your driveway just barely connecting to your home router that can’t get any data to you. This would also be great for people like my parents who are using the G-router that came from Verizon without making them buy two things (the reason I haven’t bought them an AppleTV yet).

First, the good news: With Retina support enabled, VMWare holds up its end of the bargain just fine. Of course this taxes the hardware as it has to run two 2880 x 1800 displays, resulting in bad frame rates on some Aero effects, but that’s just the hardware. VMWare is fast enough, and performance-wise everything is usable.

Now, the bad news.

When you have a non-Retina App on OS X or iOS, it’s simply drawn pixel doubled. On Windows that isn’t always what happens.

Click through to the full size image to properly inspect the problems

Here is Windows 7 running at 2880×1800 with a DPI scaling of 200%, which should be the equivalent of 1440×900@2X in Apple’s nomenclature. Here we can See Chrome ignoring our DPI setting and running consistently blurry at 200% scale. Most apps do this.

IE on the other hand, renders text just fine but the tab sizes and forward/back buttons are at their intended physical sizes rather than logical sizes. The same is true for a few choice elements throughout Windows. Radio Buttons are too small, as are the forward and back buttons in the Control Panel. After finding some form elements in IE, they too were too small.

After trying to do some stuff, it’s actually bothering me a lot. I’d rather things were just blurry. I see why the Retina option is off by default. I still prefer setting the MacBook Pro to “1920×1200” and matching the VM to that. My eyes have no problem with this DPI (please let this be a real non-scaled resolution) and the smaller size hides the jaggies a bit better.

*** Update ***
You can run Windows in “1X”. Here’s 1X Windows running behind a retina Safari Window of the same content.

Yes, that is a continuous desktop, color ruined by the Dell display. Also, a cat

Me, Shawn Blanc, and Marco Arment all seem to love the retina MacBook Pro. As I’ve said before, my favorite feature is the triple display output on the 1GB video card. Even though it’s only 4.5 pounds, I also have an 11″ Air that I prefer when I’m traveling for long periods. You’d think that I’d be excited about a 13″ Retina MacBook Pro then, right?

Maybe not.

One huge difference between the 15″ and 13″ MacBook Pros has been the discrete GPU. When used as a laptop, this doesn’t bother me because I’m not gaming. But when I’m using it as a desktop, I need something that can effortlessly drive as much real estate as possible. With the 15″ Retina MacBook Pro boasting a 1440×900@2X display, I think it’s grandiose to expect the retina 13″ to have that kind of resolution. It will probably have 1280×800@2X display with a “More Space” “looks like 1440×900” mode. 1280×800@2X is 2560×1600, which is the “same” as the 30″ cinema display, which discrete graphics can drive just fine. So Apple doesn’t have much incentive to figure out how to stuff a real GPU in there.

In terms of driving external displays, we’ll probably see a two-display limit. So, let’s say it has a single thunderbolt and an HDMI (most likely option in my opinion), you’ll only be able to use both at the same time if you’re not using the onboard display. Since the 13″ Retina will most certainly be Apple’s best selling laptop, they will put HDMI on it, but of course they’re not dropping Thunderbolt. That’s why I’m not “regretting” getting a 15″ instead of waiting for a 13″… unless Apple proves me wrong, and we always hope they do.

In the few days since Normalize was on Gizmodo/LifeHacker, Huffington Post, Mashable, the Verge, and many, many others (you should see my pending pingbacks queue), the story has been liked hundreds of times, tweeted thousands of times, and viewed tens of thousands of times. It peaked at 250 and 350 in the overall paid downloads for iPhone and iPad respectively. For those keeping score at home, that’s higher than Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Sonic CD, Dark Sky, and Instapaper (on the iPhone front anyway).

So, I should be set for life right? During a Free promotion of Auto Adjust that thing had 22K downloads and it was only in the Photography charts.

It was less than a thousand – and before you tell me that $365K is a good salary know that it has already fallen by half with each subsequent day. Needless to say, the revenue is not sustaining.

So what went wrong? Well, as we already know, if you aren’t in the top 10 of something in the app store, people won’t find your app. Since the highest it got on any chart was 13 in iPad Photography, it didn’t “stick”.

Second, being on the Apps page of the Verge or on the Tech page of a “real” news site isn’t worth much as these stories don’t enter into the front page rotation.

Although I wasn’t the featured story, Gizmodo at least doesn’t make you subnavigate for stories, so I was less than a scroll away at some point… the only problem there was that it was 2:00pm Eastern on a Sunday… not the biggest time for technology blogs. That story had 20 thousand views on it on Sunday, which was pretty high for a Sunday, but still didn’t lead to sales.

I’m not blaming the press for maybe not linking hard enough. I’m not blaming them for sensationalizing a so-called “War on Instagramming”. I’m blaming you, everyone who tweeted and retweeted about the app without actually buying it. There are thousands of you. It’s $0.99, or whatever Tier 1 is in your country. You’re cheap. No really, if you haven’t put your money where your mouth is why do you expect your followers do it for you? Redeem Yourself

In case you can’t tell, this is all in jest. I’m happy with the attention it’s been getting, and although it looks like I won’t be quitting my day job just yet, I hope a future version (perhaps an Android version?) convinces you to buy it.

I’d like to thank Cult of Mac, Gizmodo, the Huffington Post, Mashable, and everyone else who linked, liked, and RT’d to spread the word about Normalize. You’ve made doing what I love worthwhile and I promise you I’m just getting started.

I’m not going to talk about Twitter’s API changes. I use the official clients and I only use Apple’s built in methods for my apps.

I’m @joemmac on Twitter and App.net (if they ever let me in the alpha). I’m not taking sides just yet.

This rendering looks better than the ones we saw yesterday. The Rounder corners make it feel more Apple.

When I first saw the new “news” that it would have the uneven bezel like the Nexus 7 (and iPods and iPhones) I originally hated it. I know see that I hated the first mockups because they were wrong. The home button will remain the same size on all devices and the corner radii is big. The first mockups also looked too “flat”, the back needed to be rounder, even though I prefer the flush sides of the iPad 1 the best despite it being bigger.

I’m still cringing at the idea that there might not be a $500 retina LTE version next to the $250 WiFi version. The A5X necessary to drive this thing is small and power sipping enough. The “problem” with the iPad 3 is that merely powering that many pixels takes a lot of battery. Still, if we think of this as four iPod Touches taped together it should be possible. I can live without LTE, maybe even 3G on it if hotspot tethering is part of the package with AT&Ts shared data plans. But without a retina display I’m not sure this will become my snuggle (AKA bed or couch) reader.

Regardless of specs, I can guarantee that I’m getting it, first edition, and stuffing it in my coat pocket this winter. I’ve long since discovered the secret to capacitive touch screens with gloves: the Cosmonaut Stylus. There’s just something I love about being outside in the middle of a forest (or swamp) during the cold months. First, there’s less human traffic. There’s also less bug traffic as they disappear for winter.

You’d thank that blasting off from the high 300s to 50 would be some sort of 2^n increase, a ridiculous exponential ride worth millions of downloads a day. LOL no. Auto Adjust actually had less sales yesterday than the day before when it was in the 200s. The non top-10 apps are so poorly trafficked that 10 more sales is several hundred positions. It also says that everyone else probably went down more than me since I rose during this little dip.

iOS 6 requires an iPhone 3Gs or newer, iPod Touch 4 or Newer (no such device exists yet), and iPad 2 or Newer. The exclusion of original iPads means if it were Mac like system requirements, it’d look like this:

• Armv7 processor except A4 in first gen iPad (A4 in iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4 OK)
• 256MB of SoC RAM except first gen iPad (256MB 3Gs and iPod Touch OK)
• Rear Facing Camera

The Camera is only only thing that singles out the iPad 1 in terms of specs other than the fact that it’s not still sold by Apple, which I believe is the real reason they didn’t give it iOS 6 support, despite the fact that it shipped AFTER the 3Gs with a slightly newer OS (3.0 for the 3Gs, 3.2 on the iPad).

Here’s an interesting fact: if Apple set the iPhone 4 as the baseline (A4 processor, 512MB RAM), the iPad 1 and 3Gs would be out of luck (fine) but so would the currently shipping iPod Touch.

I’m not saying Apple SHOULDN’T do things like require armv7 or even an A4 for iOS versions and knock off old devices, I’m just asking that they not do the whole supporting a worse device because they still sell it while cutting off a more powerful device thing they’re doing here. As such, I’m probably going to support iOS 5 a little longer than I thought because I can’t cut off support to cut off old hardware because I’ll still have to support the 3Gs. Can anyone think of a UIDeviceRequirements incantation that will get me all iPads, 4th gen iPod Touch, and iPhone 4 and newer devices?