The Genius In Apple's Vertical Platform

Precision found a nice little piece of speculation on the real reason behind Apple's recent efforts to restrict app development to XCode. While the standard given reason is to kill competition from Flash and other stacks, this story speculates that the real reason has to do with the unusually large die size of the A4 processor inside the iPads. Worth a quick read.

Comments

Doesn't account for all the wording

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Not only does Apple restrict you to compiling your code in c, c++,objective c with the iphone sdk, they prohibit any code that was not originally written in one of those languages. The article would make sense, if the only restriction Apple had in place was that they code be compiled by the iphone sdk. That is not the case, as far as I know.

Re:Doesn't account for all the wording

[tk77]

iPhone OS 3 not only supports multitasking for 1st party apps, but it also supports multithreading for all apps. A cpu intensive app would then be able to take advantage of multiple cores. iPhone OS 4 also introduces "Grand Central" into the mix which along with the new background process ("multi-tasking") support would further benefit from multiple cores.

It's also obvious that OS4 has been in the works well before the iPad came out. OS 3.2 was most likely just a way to get the device out early.

I'm not saying what the article is saying is true, but it does make sense.

Re:Doesn't account for all the wording

[Lumpy]

the iPad has 10-12 hours of on in heavy use time. Everything else is an epic fail in comparison. I'd gladly give up features to get that kind of battery life from a windows tablet or a netbook.

Re:Doesn't account for all the wording

[marcansoft]

The guy who wrote the article is clueless.

These ridiculous claims remind me of that "tapionvslink" guy who swears that the Wii has a GPGPU with programmable shaders and twice the RAM and all sorts of things that the homebrew community knows are bullshit, just because he did some broken math on die sizes. He still maintains that we're all ignorant and just haven't figured out what real Wii games are doing with the GPU. Riiight.

Seriously, if the iPad were PowerPC, don't you think we'd know by now, considering it's been jailbroken? Chipworks also tore down the chip and found nothing unusual; it's just another mobile ARM. Also, no one in their right mind would ever use a CPU emulator on a mobile platform OS. It's one of the best ways to completely nuke your battery life, not to mention performance. It's a cute theory, but it's so thoroughly impossible it's not even funny.

Re:Doesn't account for all the wording

[Hal_Porter]

My Asus 1005HA can manage 9 hours of battery life. The newer, Pineview based 1005PE does even better.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/21/asus-eee-pc-1005pe-review/

Re:Doesn't account for all the wording

[Carewolf]

Giant 15.4" old-school dual-core Thinkpad: Battery time: infinite..

Reason: Exchangable batteries ;) No apple product will ever come anywhere close, because they are intentionally cripled.

PS. With traveling battery: 8hours of heavy use, this is added to the standard 4.5h on the standard battery.

Apple Fanbois

[nhtshot]

Disclosure: I'm writing this from a Mac. I like my Macs. I like Apple. I'm not delusional like this guy.

If you didn't RTFA, there's no need. It's just some Apple fanboi trying to find genius and conspiracy where there isn't any.

Are you serious? Constricting developers because you're going to change the platform? Really? I wonder if the article author even believes this crap.

Emulating a cpu you could just as easily install for real? Never mind going back to an architecture (POWER) that you've already EOL and that is wholly unsuited for the platform (high power consumption, high heat output).

He's right that Apple is a story in vertical integration. They're doing it the same way Rockefeller did. They want to control the entire platform.

Re:Apple Fanbois

[ceoyoyo]

"Constricting developers because you're going to change the platform? Really?"

That's actually not such a bad speculation. Apple HAS switched platforms before, and a key to that capability is having the apps written in XCode. It's not unlikely at all that they want to maintain the ability to switch the processor in the iPhone/iPad line, and they won't have to bother writing emulators if they can just tell all the app developers to recompile.

Where the article goes off the rails is when he starts speculating about that other processor already existing in the iPad.

Can a non fanboy re-write that?

[mjwx]

just blew coffee out of my nose when you said Jobs is shit-scared of Android.

Up until the "porn store" comment I would have agreed that Jobs is not that scared of Android but when he goes out of his way to bash it in an unrelated keynote in such a childish manner, that's fear talking.

But the main point is that Apple does not want to fill their platform up with mediocre apps written to support the lowest common denominator feature set

But dr. Evil, that has already happened.

Apple effectively prohibits highly complex applications by limiting the types of API's that can be used. The App store is designed to be filled with simple applications with a limited (Lowest Common Denominator) feature set.

If jobs allows another company to control the development trajectories of, say, even 10% of the apps on the store, Apple can no longer plan their product change and enhancement cycles around their own timeline

So Microsoft is at the whims of which company? or Dell? Red Hat? Novell?

I'm sorry but your logic fails here as there are already several successful hardware and software companies that can maintain their own release schedules without the input or approval of software manufacturers. If Apple cant do this their is something wrong with the Apple OS, not the software that runs on it. MS for all it's flaws has been able to maintain good backwards compatibility meaning I can upgrade my OS and have almost all my programs work (I recently upgraded from XP to Win 7 at work with no problems what so ever).