Briefly: I removed iAds from both my apps, and I’m still getting impressions (and revenue). So, that means I have ACTIVE users, who ignore that number on the App Store icon. If you’re one of them, please update and write a nice review 🙂

According to AppleInsider Apple may drop the Mac Pro. The rest of the internet has all the numbers and such, so as a pro user myself who compiles, renders, renders 3D, runs multiple virtual servers, all on a single 8-Core Mac Pro with 32GB of RAM, I’ll let you know what I need in a “Pro” machine.

Since Apple first started using Core2Duos, the speed bottlenecks have rarely been the processor. Usually it was prohibitively expensive RAM (2GB at the time, 8GB is standard now), but now even with SSDs it’s still the hard drives, in part because some applications don’t greedily take 4+GB for themselves and instead page often.

Back when I was a student, we had to design an experiment to determine whether additional threads or additional processes had greater overhead. Running it on the earliest of Core2Duo MacBook Pros we found that process creation was in fact slower but not as drastically as we hoped. In fact, the fastest completion of the program was to serialize the steps and only run a few threads. This may sound trivial, and it’s what the Grand Central Dispatch APIs are for, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

When I do a clean compile of iDecorate, Xcode has to reconvert all of my PNGs to compressed PNGs that iOS uses. When this happens, I see one PNGCOMPRESS process for each image, no more than two at a time, all spiking the core they’re running on at the time.

When I use Final Cut Pro X or reencode something using Quicktime X, all the work is done on the GPU and my MacBook Air with a 320m actually keeps up reasonably well with the Mac Pro.

So in the real world, the Mac Pro only wins when doing CPU only work (no GPU) that’s optimized for 8 Cores, like exporting from Bryce. The following is what I think is a realistic headless machine Apple could make between the Mac Mini and the soon to be dead Mac Pro.

Size: Think two mini’s stacked. This shape would also be stable upright which I like.
Processor: One quad or higher core mobile processor. Apple will officially stop using desktop processors.
RAM: The Mini has 2 slots, I want 8, 4 would make me happy. Yes it will be mobile RAM.
HDD: 4 2.5″ Drives. Let’s face it, SSDs negate the need for 3.5″ SATA Drives. To be true to the Mac Pro spirit, these will be as easy to replace as RAM is in the current Minis.
RAID Controller: NO
Fibre Channel: Available via thunderbolt?
Optical: Haha just kidding.
Video: A desktop class card with at least 1GB of VRAM, 3 thunderbolt ports, one HDMI, and the ability to run 4 displays (including the HDMI).
Name: The Mac
Price: $999 for Dual Core i5, one SSD, a decent video card, and a miserable amount of RAM.
$1999 for the Quad (or more) i7, twice as much VRAM, one SSD, and a fair amount of RAM.
$999 “Server” Quad (or more) i7, intel graphics, one SSD, and a miserable amount of RAM.

It would not surprise me if moving forward Apple started making SSD’s the “starting point” configurations for the advertised price and you could CTO it to a larger HDD for the same price. (“More Speed” vs “More Storage”, the marketing writes itself!). Hopefully this will somehow get Apple an economies of scale advantage on SSD prices because right now they sell them for twice retail.

Additional Details:
Remember Steve’s square? One Consumer and One Professional Desktop and Laptop? Kill the Mac Mini and replace it with this also and we’re getting there.

Now that I look at that, the iMac not lining up with an iBook, and the MacBook Pro not lining up with a Mac Pro bothers me, and it probably bothers someone at Apple. Maybe Apple will name
this abomination a Mac Pro after all and rename the iMac to the Mac? I’m not so sure, there’s 10 years of goodwill behind that name, then again, 10 years…

9to5Mac, or at least Seth Weintraub, just gave their guess at how the Apple HDTV (which people think might as well be called iTV, so I will too).

One area I disagree with them is the whole idea of a newsstand like “channels” app that will show live TV. I find it odd that they end with a potential sales pitch likening it to the drastic difference in music and smartphones Apple caused because having a live “channels” section is no different than prettying up the UI of my set top box. That’s actually not different. Apple destroyed the physical music business, which was the actual standard back then, not pirating. The standard content delivery today is live streams.

You may not have noticed but radio isn’t live streams any more. Instead you a la carte playlists yourself, choose a genre from a shuffling service (pandora), let the Genius or Spotify work, let one of your friends DJ for you (turntable), all of which are a la carte as well instead of live streaming.

There will be no Apple DVR. Why should you be SOL when you forget to DVR The Simpsons or miss half of it because Baseball delayed it and you just taped 30 minutes of the 9th inning? No, you go to Hulu or iTunes or Fox.com and watch it with your method of paying/commercials. “Air time” will change to “launch”. The only streaming will be actual live events, which you’ll be able to start from the beginning whenever you choose to tune in.

DVRs were never anything other than a bandaid for lack of complete on demand catalogs anyway, and Apple doesn’t do bandaids.

People are thinking very in the box on these “rumors” so far. So once again:

• The Apple HDTV / iTV will have one cord, the power cord.
• It will work over WiFi (and hopefully also work as an AP / range extender for existing AP networks)
• There will not be an HDMI/Composite/Component/VGA etc in but there will be AirPlay that supports 1080p24
• You will not use your remote app to move a cursor on screen, you will use the remote app to tell it what to do. (You’ll pick Fox > Family Guy > Petarded from the UI on the app while the iTV waits with a gorgeous screensaver instead of tapping/swiping Up Down Left Right Enter buttons).
• You will be able to use the existing IR remotes as well but App control will be heavily marketed / recommended.

I posted a lot the other day about how Apple could change the HDTV industry. One point I didn’t do enough justice to was my claim that it will not have input switching as a feature. At first that sounds insane, after all my Dell Projector that I use for everything has HDMI+Audio, DisplayPort, Two VGAs and a VGA Out, Component, Composite, and S Video, RCA and 1/8″ audio inputs and 1/8″ Output, and so did my 24″ Dell Display which also had 2 DVIs on it. Nerds love that shit, and it was great. It was one reason (besides price) that I got that instead of a 23″ Cinema display which only had DVI. Nerds love that shit. I know I did.

But then comes that time when you have to explain it to someone…

“Press the input button… ummm it looks like a rounded rectangle with a line- yeah an arrow… yeah OK now hit it until the screen says HDMI on it… no you have to wait a few seconds before it switches… yeah wait… OK it says HDMI the TV should come up. Press ‘STB’ on the FiOS remote. Give it a minute. OK, now press DVR” – and that’s what it’s like explaining to my Mac literate family. This is how I explain it to my computer illiterate grandparents:

“Yeah sure I can come over”

An Apple HDTV (which I’m going to call it to distinguish from the blackbox) would have Zero buttons on it. None. Like the cinema display it would either be on or sleeping. I also claimed it would not have an onboard OS and instead would have a single input designed for an AppleTV blackbox. I now realize this was just wishful thinking. It was wishful because I wanted to play xbox on my Apple HDTV. Apple doesn’t care if you can or can’t, and your grandparents don’t own an xbox. The AppleTV ecosystem already has an input, it’s called AirPlay. Maybe Apple will client/server Apps to improve latency but honestly I think sending 1080p over 5GHz 802.11n is only going to get easier over time.

That makes me wonder if the Apple HDTV will also be able act as an AirPort Express. If you don’t have a wireless network it can create one and if you already have an AirPort powered network it can extend it just to make sure things work.

Not too long ago (actually, still) when the next version of Photoshop, VMWare, Final Cut Pro, or something came out you’d have to buy it (possibly at a discount for existing customers) or hope the old version continues working alongside other software updates.

Today, Pixelmator 2.0 announced it’s App Store release, as a free upgrade to Pixelmator (using the same App Store ID). BBEdit similarly moved from version 9 to 10 on the App Store. This begs a very interesting question: is the increased exposure and convenience of the App Store enough to offset the lack of additional funds from existing users? Does any other industry do this?

• When you buy a Ford or Toyota, at some point you’ll need a new car and based on your experiences there’s a certain chance it’ll be another Ford or Toyota.
• When you need a new iPhone, you buy a new iPhone.
• When you finish your Soda/Latte/Beer you buy another one
• etc

Since software isn’t a “real” good it seems obvious that you don’t need to pay for it more than once, as it’s not “expendable”.

Literally the day after I got the iPhone 4S, I took a trip to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania. Although the 4S has a great camera that’s always with you, it still has the rolling shutter and blah blah the photography blogs have it all by now. So I brought my “real” camera, which is a 1080p24 Sony Camcorder that takes 12MP stills. When I got home I put all the images in Aperture and synched the album back to my iPhone. And Here’s What I Got.

For some reason, and I’m not sure if Aperture, iTunes, or iOS did this, the dimensions of the pictures got halved, resulting in one quarter of the number of pixels.

Making sure it wasn’t some forgotten code in Auto Adjust halving sizes because of memory warnings I decided to check a picture straight from the camera roll. Yep, full 8MP. So what is going on here?

UPDATE

OK so I uploaded an image and saved it using Safari and…

It would appear it’s not iOS, so it’s either Aperture or iTunes, and either way that’s stupid, but at least I have my workaround.

On a side note, Auto Adjust had no trouble with those 12.3MP and it took the iPhone longer to write the data than to process it. When Auto Adjust came out with the iPhone 3G in mind, the thought of doing anything larger than the 1600×1200 photos the device could take was a frightening one. Images have to be decompressed into RGBA bitmaps with some more room for overhead so that 12.3MP picture is really 49,298,944 bytes of RAM. It’s one of those times you get pissed at Apple for not going up to 1024MB on the iPhone 4S (other things need that RAM too you know). Case and point: iPod Touch has 256MB, and crashed after processing and trying to save to the library. It was a nice hard crash too as it restarted all the background shit like FaceTime and Mail.

Today was officially my last day of Verizon FiOS TV Service with HD DVR. Not because of rumors or anything but because I realized something during the summer when nothing was new: I actually like buying my shows one at a time from iTunes. And that goes double for documentaries.

Also, I don’t have an HDTV, I have a 1280×800 (16:10 version of 720p) DLP projector from Dell hooked up to some JBL creatures. There’s also a monoprice HDMI switch in there that ties in the Xbox and a Mac Mini. Between all of those I can watch whatever I want (except Blu-Ray) but I’ve found my favorite is the Apple TV using my iPhone as a remote. And I think that’s why I hated the FiOS box so much even though it was a lot better than the Cablevision box it replaced.

IR remotes are somewhat directional. When you’re using a projector, all of your equipment tends to be behind/next to where you sit rather than in front of. This made using any remotes really annoying. During movie nights I would sit in the only seat you could use the remote from.

Then I discovered Apple’s remote App. What’s great about it isn’t the ability to use it to replace the buttons on the remote. The real advantage is being able to use it to search through your library and select what you want to watch or listen to. Also, it has a keyboard. A USABLE keyboard. On Demand TV demands a keyboard and those godawful Sony remotes for the Google TVs are not the solution.

Before I got sucked this deep into iTunes for my content, I used to use the Mac Mini. And, for Flash content (Hulu, CNN, CSPAN, etc) I still do. I used to think that the wireless keyboard/trackpad was the way to control that but I soon found a more elegant solution to that too. My 11″ MacBook Air. I use screen sharing to remotely view and control the Mac Mini and get a proper control experience. I’ve also tried VNC apps for iOS but the Mac OS works better with a trackpad.

So do I think Apple will release an HDTV? Probably. Here’s my official spec list guess.

That’s right. It won’t have input selection because my grandparents still can’t figure that crap out. That would freak out most geeks, but I’m comfortable with my HDMI switcher being separate. Based on that Real Racing multiplayer demo the new AppleTV brick that’s made for it is going to give consoles the same look in their eye portable consoles have right now.

It’s pretty obvious that the new AppleTV brick will be an A5 with 512MB RAM and 8GB (I mean “Zero”) storage capable of 1080p for real. In other words, a screenless iPhone 4S.

So what’s going to make this great? True À la carte access to SHOWS, not NETWORKS, with sane variable pricing. If they want it to take off they need to make 22* minutes of SD $.99 and scale prices from there, with HD being a flat extra $1.00. I know it’s trivial but here’s a table anyway.

*In case you never realized, a 30 minute show has 22 minutes of content + commercials.

As commercials become a thing of the past we may or may not see actual 30 minute episodes but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Maybe Apple needs Steve Jobs to negotiate these things with networks, but something tells me they’re going to be much more frightened of Tim Cook. The way he confidently refers to the entire 90% Windows market as potential is going to make his reign interesting.

UPDATE

Shaw Wu points out that due to many subscribers “cutting the cord” like myself that Apple may gain an advantage as providers look to Apple to “bring subscribers back”. So that brings up the theoretical $30/month iTunes Pass (or whatever) that lets you view all available content on demand. I would love that because I wouldn’t have to use so much HDD space on shows, but one wonders if iOS (non AppleTV) and Mac OS X viewing would be included, or if it would be set top box only. If iOS viewing for example becomes an add on $10/month then we’re right back to paying $10/month per cable box which is what Steve Jobs told Walt Mossberg is what’s wrong with the current system.

Even if a magical $30/month all device pass exists, with the current selection of content on iTunes it may not be worth it for some people, as it will be “less for less”. iTunes is pretty good about having new episodes of things and old seasons of the shows it has new episodes for, but it’s not complete. There’s no DragonBall Z Kai for example. Some of us don’t just watch new shows either. We like watching shows that are over being reran on USA or TV Land or something. Some networks are better at getting their stuff on iTunes than others. Some of my childhood cartoons (Batman the Animated Series) are available in full, but Spider-Man and X-Men have one season as of this writing.

And then there are one time “specials” that don’t really fall into a series. The History Channel and National Geographic have made a “specials” series they can through these things into but they usually take time to show up, unlike a new Simpsons episode which is available within 24 hours of airtime. A particularly telling example is that Discovery’s recent “iGenius – How Steve Jobs changed the World” isn’t on iTunes.

This brings me to why even though I’d like it and save money, subscriptions are not the future TV needs. À la carte shows fund themselves and can continue with only a cult fallowing. Futurama and Family Guy were both uncanceled due to DVD sales. If they were À la carte to begin with the numbers would have prevented cancelation in the first place.

I have a feeling that game shows and reality TV wouldn’t do to well under the À la carte model.

News might also suffer, but the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report are Comedy Central’s best selling shows on iTunes.

The final piece of the programming is things that can only be live. The President addressing the nation, presidential debates, 9/11 type events, and anything else that shouldn’t be pre taped. The answer is simply to make live streaming possible for this sort of thing only. Every single network doesn’t need to broadcast the same Presidential Address, that should come straight from Washington. Only one network gets to have each presidential debate (as they do now) and in the case of actual breaking news (the Casey Anthony verdict does NOT need to interrupt my regularly scheduled programming) any network that covers it would be available and if necessary any other iTunes downloads would be suspended for bandwidth.

Bandwidth is the potential bottleneck here. The reason cable works now is because there’s only a hundred channels with hundreds of repeaters nation/world wide. Live internet events have a history of being unable to operate under a load. A few years ago I tried to watch NJ Governor Elect Chris Christie in a conference room at my job (in the public education sector so we were more worried than excited to hear/see him) and bandwidth coming from NJN or whatever wasn’t sufficient. Luckily there was also an audio only stream that worked. My attempts at watching Rutgers Football on ESPN3 (formerly ESPN360.com) have been better but similar. At the start of the game when everyone is tuned in the stream is 320 x 240 at some abysmal bit rate (and yes that’s somehow not 16:9 but 4:3) but by the third quarter when people start to stop watching the quality goes way up and I get a proper 720p experience. Things like sports would have to be free but the stream originator would be free to insert ads (can’t skip ads with live TV so no problem there).

It’s obvious that the networks would stream to Apple and Apple’s data center would stream to you, but Apple hasn’t had a perfect track record either. A lot of the nation doesn’t have what we Coastal Elites call broadband either. Any connection can take all the time it needs to download a show to watch later, but would Apple offer 360p and 180p streams for lower bandwidth customers? Could Apple convince AT&T to let us watch at least the 180p stream over 3G?

Toshiba showed off a 498 ppi WQXGA 6″ display which of course makes a QXGA (2048 x 1536 or 2 x 1024 x 768) 9.7″ iPad more likely. This should make photography apps development interesting. Chances are the A6’s CPU won’t be much more powerful on single core* performance than the A5 or A4 and Apple doesn’t seem to like including much RAM in these things either. I expect to see a lot of apps that have trouble adapting to the new ridiculous resolution. The positive side: apps made by developers good enough to use the GPU or multiple CPU cores* will get the attention they deserve. But perhaps I’m being overly optimistic/pessimistic. The masses didn’t seem to care when most photography apps did 480×320.

* I expect the A6 to be quad core on iPad, but a dual core die shrink for iPhone.