Vision precedes engineering prototypes which precede products

Google unveiled voice controlled "intelligent" assistants today -- in a phone and a home listening device.



The vision of a voice-controlled intelligent assistant in which the manufacturer made tightly integrated hardware and software was shown in Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video.



We'll see if Google has pulled it off.

Brick and mortar stores -- Apple, Microsoft and Google?

Dell, HP and others now have relatively upscale Chromebooks that approach, and in some features surpass, the high end Google Pixel and Google just announced that Chromebooks will be running Android apps in the future. At first, those apps might not be optimized for the Chromebook form factor, but many will look good in phone or tablet-size windows and I bet we see Chromebook-friendly Android apps in the future.

Given all that, I thought I might like to get one, so I headed over to the closest thing I know of to a Google store -- the Google section of my local Best Buy.

It's a total Fail.

As shown here, all they had was half a dozen low-end machines. That might work for a Chromebook for a school child, but it is not sufficient for someone thinking of spending $700 or more.

But, it gets worse.

There were two, sweet, young sales people wearing Google shirts next to the Chromebooks, so I asked if they had other machines -- perhaps a Pixel -- somewhere else in the store. It turned out they didn't know what I meant by "Google Pixel." I explained what a Google Pixel was and one of them went off to inquire. When she came back, she said they did not have them.

Since I was there, I asked about the six machines they had on display and discovered that they were confused about the difference between memory and storage. None of the machines on display had more than 2GB of memory, but they assured me that that was no problem because you could attach a large external hard drive.

(In the early days of personal computers, there was a joke that the difference between computer store sales people and car sales people was that the car sales folks knew they were lying).

I don't know if these kids were Google or BestBuy employees, but they were wearing Google shirts and that surely cheapens the top-notch "Googler" brand.

If Google hopes to sell and support high-end hardware, they will have to do much better than this, and that will be expensive.

A little while ago, I had been in a shopping mall near my home and dropped in on the Apple and Microsoft stores, which are just a few stores apart.

It was the middle of the week, but the Apple store was quite crowded. Customers were talking with sales people, playing around with machines, getting help from Apple "geniuses," etc. Apple runs classes in the stores, offers walk-in customer support and the employees are knowledgeable and helpful. I snapped this picture just before the man in the foreground told me to stop taking pictures:

I walked over to the Microsoft store and found it to be pretty well empty -- the store employees outnumbered the customers. They had a wide range of computers on display -- from both Microsoft and OEMs. They also offered service and classes and the workers were as knowledgeable and friendly as those in the Apple store. There was no pressure and no problem playing around for as long as I wanted to and they were happy to have me take pictures.

I had visited the same Microsoft and Apple stores two days after Christmas in 2014 and, while both were more crowded post Christmas, the Apple store was totally jam packed and the Microsoft store still fairly empty.

I personally don't see much difference between the Microsoft and Apple stores and can't figure out why one is so much more popular than the other, but, I can tell you for sure that Google will have to be creative and spend a lot of money if they want to sell us high end hardware. They will also have to step up customer support. You can sell a $35 Chromecast in a BestBuy store or online, but not a $1,300 Pixel Chromebook.

If you build it, they will come

A lot of folks are saying that phones are so fast these days that the 64-bit processor in the iPhone 5s does not change the user experience -- it is nothing more than a marketing gimmick.

Wrong.

This reminds me of the time I was consulting to MicroPro International, publisher of WordStar -- the most popular word processing program of its time. I was fired as a consultant after telling them that the second-generation word processor they were developing, WordStar 2000, was a loser because it was not graphically oriented. They ignored me because, hey, a graphically oriented word processor would require 64 MB of memory and 16 MB was a lot of RAM at the time.

In a Moore's Law world, you design for the future, not the present. Apple's 64-bit CPU will not make placing phone calls or texting any faster, but it provides a new platform on which to build new applications. For example, we will see the substitution of computation for hardware in making better videos and photographs -- the 41 megapixel camera in the Lumia 1020 will not seem so amazing in a few years. Improved voice recognition and synthesis will demand more horsepower. Wearable things and physiological monitoring applications will be developed to use all the processing power we can muster.

And, how about something mundane like PC replacement?

My main computer is a Dell Precision M4400 laptop. It has a dual core 64 bit processor with 410 million transistors that is clocked at 3.06 GHz. It has 8GB of memory and a 256 GB solid state drive.

I do 99% of my work on that machine, and unless I am streaming or rendering video, it seems quite responsive. If the CPU were ten times as fast, I don't think I would notice much increase in my productivity.

The iPhone 5s has has a dual core 64 bit processor with "over 1 billion" transistors that is clocked at 1.3GHz. It has 1 GB of RAM and up to 64GB of storage. It also has a motion sensing coprocessor.

Anandtech reports that the new iPhone is substantially faster than its quad core, faster-clocked cell phone competitors -- Apple is using those billion transistors well.

The iPhone is faster than other phones, but how would it compare to my laptop if it were plugged into a keyboard/monitor docking station?

Both have dual core, 64 bit CPUs and judging by the transistor counts and cell phone benchmarks, the iPhone processor should be able to beat my laptop. But, what about the low clock speed and relatively small memory? And two cores sounds kind of lame these days.

Apple has kept clock speed, memory capacity and core count low to save power, but, when docked, power is a minor consideration. I bet Apple's clever engineers could design a dual mode machine, that slowed and saved power when not docked. (Cooling would be a problem when docked and running fast).

Canonical is taking a shot at cell phone docking with Ubunto for Android. It is vaporware for now, but they have a cute video to illustrate the concept:

Apple traditionally does a major iPhone upgrade every two years. This was the year for a minor upgrade, but it laid the foundation for the future. I do not know what applications will be developed to utilize that 64 bit address space and processing power, but ... build it and they will come. ----- Update 9/21/2013 Last week, I asked my class whether they thought the finger print reader on the new iPhone 5s was a big deal. They did not think so -- they said they would be willing to pay from 0 to about $10 for the added convenience. Then I asked them about using it as general ID for authentication and for purchases in stores and online. That perked their interest up. But, will that happen? Brian Roemmele thinks it will and builds a strong case in his post What is Apple’s new Secure Enclave and why is it important?. It turns out that some of those billion plus transistors in the the A7 CPU are devoted to the implementation of patent protected security features.

If Roemmele is right, we will see a slew of authentication and transaction-oriented applications for the iPhone 5s and future devices using this technology. Here is the conclusion of his post:

Apple has taken a very slow and methodical approach with the release of Touch ID. We can see that there was a tremendous amount of amazing work that has gone into this project. All of this convergence took over seven years of very hard work. It includes many patent applications, the acquisition of AuthenTec, the selection of the A7 processor and the integration of the TrustZone suite all baked together into what we now know as Touch ID. This has been a long journey that has only just been made public and I am rather certain that Steve Jobs would be quite proud.

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Update 10/22/2013

The new iPad and iPad mini are out and Gigaom's first look singles out the speed of 64-bit apps and predicts that other developers will follow suit. Here is a quote:

The native Apple apps open super quick and there’s no lag when scrolling or paging through content in Pages or iPhoto. You tap and the device responds. Obviously Moore’s Law is at work here, but it helps that Apple has rewritten its native apps for 64-bit compatibility to be fully optimized with the A7 chip. Developers will be doing the same over the next year, so the iPad Air is likely only going to get better until the next model arrives.

Apple built it and they are coming.

Apple patents the ability to disable mobile cameras and connectivity

Apple has a patent that would let police or others turn off mobile cameras and wireless communication.

I am not a constitutional scholar, but don't we have a right to record the acts of police in public places? To capture images like these:

The photos show police using dogs and fire hoses during civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, beating Rodney King, killing of Kelly Thomas and using pepper spray at Occupy Wall Street.

While the patent does use "covert police or government operations" as an example of an application, it also mentions legitimate applications, for example, stopping cameras in a locker room or other place where one has a reasonable expectation of privacy.

As is the case with many technologies, we should control its use, not its existence.

Three reasons the iPad will succeed. Whoops, make that two.

The Apple iPad was announced January 27. After years of hype, people were generally disappointed. The trade press carried many articles like this one listing ten missing features. It can not play Flash movies, the aspect ratio is not 16:9, AT&T is the only carrier, the battery can not be changed, the operating system cannot multi-task, there is no camera or HDMI interface to a TV set, etc.

For me, the most important missing feature is a microphone with accompanying speech recognition software. I want to be able to input marginal notes, email addresses, etc. without typing on a glass keyboard.

In spite of all of this criticism, I expected the iPad to succeed for three reasons.

The original Macintosh had 128 KB of memory, only a floppy disk for storage, and a tiny, monochrome screen. Still, its operating system and simple applications for image and word processing had graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The earlier Apple Lisa and Xerox Star also had GUIs, but failed because they were too expensive. By the time the Mac was delivered, technology had improved, and they had engineered a minimal system that was just good enough to get people excited and succed in the market. The timing was right.

As technology advanced, Apple upgraded the Mac, adding memory and a hard drive, followed by a larger screen, color, etc.

The same will happen with the iPad. Features will be added as technology improves. I am confident that Apple has a multi-year plan for iPad improvements, and it has the potential to become a significant device for consuming content -- games, books, periodicals and video of all sorts.

I was optimistic for a second reason. Apple understands that the device is only one part of a system that includes the application store, content deals, and synchronization with the desktop and Internet. Apple learned this lesson with their ill-fated Newton, the first pocket computer. The Newton failed because the hardware was not powerful enough, and, more important, because it did not synchronize with desktop machines.

I am confident that Steve Jobs and his colleagues are negotiating with TV, movie, book, newspaper, and magazine publishers for content deals as I type this.

The third reason I was confident was that Apple had legions of software developers who, because they had developed iPhone applications, were ready to go on the iPad. Their iPhone applications would run with little or no modification on the iPad, and their programmers were up to speed on Apple's software development tools, their software development kit (SDK).

Apple might have learned the importance of the developer community by watching Microsoft. Microsoft wooed independent software vendors (ISVs) from day 1. Since the early days of MSDOS, they invited ISVs to conferences, provided them with excellent tools, set up a developer's organization, etc. Apple has taken this a step further with their application store -- they also provide a distribution channel at a reasonable cost. They removed the "V" from ISV. Independent developers were just developers, not vendors.

That is the good news (for the iPad). The bad news is that Apple seems to be blowing off the developer community. To use Apple's SDK, a developer has to agree to draconian terms. For example, they can only sell through Apple.

At some point, Microsoft could have afforded to ignore the ISV community -- Windows had a monopoly -- it was the only game in town.

Unfortunately for Apple, their developers have alternatives -- Google's Android, Microsoft's mobile version of Windows 7, and Palm's webOS. Google seems to be the biggest threat. They just released a new version of their SDK, which is provided to developers without restriction, and they offer prizes for outstanding applications.

I am still betting on the success of the iPad, but the odds have dropped. Apple's high handed attitude toward developers could be the chink in their armor.