Now, keep in mind where HD monitors came from. About 5-6 years ago, the first 1920x1200 monitors hit, and they ran in the $600 range. I bought my two 24" monitors around five years ago, thanks to a fairly unprecedented sale at NewEgg, so I could nab two Westinghouse 24" 1920x1200 MVA panel monitors for about $400 each.
The price floor dropped out because of the influx of cheap TV-type 1920x1080 panels. And yes, this may have driven the 1920x1200 panels back up a bit, but they've always been available, and far short of a grand.
Yes, different timings... 1920x1080/60p for video, 1920x1080/60p for computers, if you're talking about typical rates sent to LCD monitors. That's precisely why computer and television displays are unified. Sure, you can buy a "television" with a video processor to accept legacy video formats, and I have a set of computer monitors at home that also accept those. But being a digital display, there is one correct single resolution and rate for each monitor. And using a modern interface, DVI, HDMI, or DisplayPort, the monitor tells the video card what it wants, and that's what it gets. In some cases, there's a negotiation... I can still plug a 2560x1440 digital monitor into a Blu-ray player, but they'll agree on 1920x1080, and the monitor will convert. But usually, these days, the PCs and TVs are sending the same signal, identical timings.
The tall tower needed is probably one reason these aren't more popular, but it wouldn't be difficult to built a more robust swing mechanism that lifted and swung at the same time.
Doing real work, when I switched over to LCD five years ago, I could save the cost of both monitors in about two years of power saving, versus my fairly huge 19" CRTs... that's 8+ hours a day use, and yeah, it was my home office, so I was actually paying that bill. You might check the relative power consumption (and note, LCD-backlit monitors of today use less power than the CFL-sidelit LCDs of a few year ago) versus that big 22incher.
Windows 8's "new style" apps don't. So it's easy to imagine Microsoft deciding for us desktop users that programs on a 7680x4320 panel should also be full screen, just to make sure we don't get confused about the difference between that view and that of a 3.5", 800x600 smartphone screen. That'll be Windows 9 that phases out the "classic" windowed Windows. And Windows 10 that's sold, fire-sale style, to Oracle or IBM or someone looking to get into the OS business, as Microsoft goes down in flames. Or not... but it sure would feel good.
The 1920x1080 is using a television panel... the mass market makes that cheap. It's naturally the user's choice -- the unification with digital TV only added the options, it didn't eliminate any. And it drove down the prices on all monitors, even the higher end specialty type have dropped.
You have discovered that laptops are useless for real work, not 16:9 displays. But as Windows 8 demonstrates, at least Microsoft believes that no one's doing real work, anyway.
If you absolutely must edit a document full-page and full-screen, a tilting monitor has always been the correct solution, going way back to the 4:3 days. For most real work, any given text document is going to be just one of any number of documents open at once (at this moment, I have OpenOffice Writer open on a document I'm reading, two web browsers with about five separate windows, a CAD program (Altium), Microsoft Access, a couple datasheets in Acrobat, a calculator, and a notes windows, open at the same time. I'd be happy with more height and more width, or more resolution, sure... room for even more stuff. But I have never found 16:9 to be inferior in this to 4:3.
Nothing. A 1920x1200 monitor is better than a 1600x1200 monitor. Period. If you can't see a full page, your monitor is too low-resolution. Or your eyes are.
Ever since TV and computer displays became essentially the same thing, the consumer market has dominated.
Recall, if you will, all the build-up to the "Grand Alliance" that gave us today's ATSC (HDTV) standard. There was politicing on Analog vs. Digital (kind of a no-brainer), on RF modulation (we lost out on that one, here, 8VSB was selected due to Qualcomm lobbying and the fact it interfered less with existing NTSC broadcasts... now that those broadcasts are gone, we still have the problem that the signal isn't worth a damn indoors). And on display resolution.
Hollywood, Inc. wanted a 2:1 aspect ration. The computer industry, savvy enough to understand the impact of millions of consumer displays at higher-than-existing PC resolutions, wanted something more boxy. 16:9 was the compromise widescreen aspect ratio.
The PC industry, naturally, went full steam ahead... at 16:10. Silly PC industry. This lasted for awhile, but ultimately, with all those consumer LCD panels out there, most cried "Uncle" and went 16:9. I have dual 1920x1200 16:10 monitors at home, though I see an upgrade to 2560x1440 in the very near future. At work, they've been 16:9 (dual) for my current and previous job. Hardly useless for real work (and that's more Electronics CAD than video these days, though I did EE-CAD, embedded software, web servers, photography, and video at my last job), and the difference is, if anything, more significant for video work (16:9 monitors don't leave any room for controls on the full-screen video panel, 'cept as an overlay) than "real" work like designing circuitry.
Taxes, Jury Duty, and a few other responsibilities are the price of Civilization. For those unhappy with that price, you can always emigrate to... Nicaragua:-) Or get very rich, since once you make enough in the USA these days, you apparently no longer have the same level of responsibility. Like tgd paying 40% (pretty high), versus Walter "Mitt" Romney paying about 13%.
Similar in South Jersey, a couple of years ago... like $5 per day. But the parking was free, and the pizza shop across from the Court House didn't overcharge for a slice. It's a token payment only, not designed in any way to actually compensate you for your lost time. Salaried employees are routinely paid anyway, but hourly workers? I think they're getting hosed.
If such a simple option existed on Android handsets, I would suspect they would go after that too.
There is... Google Talk has supported Video Chat for quite some time. But some carriers may have got there already... it's not always enabled for 3G/4G use.
At present (in an unhacked, iOS 5 iPhone), FaceTime is and always has been limited by Apple to WiFi only. Apple announced for iOS 6 that FaceTime will be enabled for 3G/4G as well.. and that's not just for the iPhone 5, but iPhone 4 and iPad users who upgrade to iOS 6. Apparently, they didn't discuss this in depth with AT&T, or maybe they just didn't come to an agreement about it after discussions.
Anyway, the thing to understand is that, hacks aside, this is the first time FaceTime runs over 3G/4G. So it's not AT&T trying to cut down on existing traffic, it's AT&T worrying about crazy amounts of additional traffic (crazy, one presumes, because Apple, if they stick to their usual M.O, will offer the iOS 6 update to everyone at about the same time the iPhone 5 goes on sale).
Please... the last MacBook I bought only cost $1800. And it was pretty loaded: 2.3GHz i7, 8GB RAM, 750GB HDD, etc. Ok, add $100 for Windows as well. And no, it's not entirely throw-away, you can get the battery replaced pretty easily when it tanks in two years or so (about the limit on a Li-ion cell used regularly).
Of course, the Asus laptop I was looking at included the more recent i7-3xxx series chip, better graphics, a better, higher resolution screen, a Blu-ray disc drive, USB 3.0 ports, and ran only $1100. Oh, and the MacBook Pro was a factory refurb from Apple... the original price was more than twice that of the Asus. This was for my daughter, mandated by her college... not either of our first choices.
And that is just it about Apple fans -- they voluntarily pay twice as much for less, because they think they're getting something better, in some intangible way. This is why online retailers love to find Apple fans... they get directed to more expensive offerings at places like Amazon, etc. all the time. They just aren't good with money. One of my sisters is a good example. She's very smart -- PhD from Stanford. And a dedicated Apple fan, having drank heartily from the Kool-Aid some years back... first the iPhone, then iMacs, then iPhones for everyone (well, out Mom, her daughter), then an iPad. She's never been good with money, and the Apple stuff is just a prime example. Apple users are attracted to bright shiny things, with little understanding of what's inside.
And the A.C. below... your Mom's whole house would likely fit in my basement.
Well, a couple of things. AT&T doesn't have all that much LTE rolled out; when they say "4G", they mean either LTE or HSPA+ (given that T-Mobile was calling their HSPA+ "4G", AT&T wasn't one to miss out on a good marketing opportunity). So while they do have LTE devices and cells now, the bulk of the congestion is on HSPA. And all of the iOS devices.
There's some precedent for iOS actually being the problem, too. Verizon pushed hard to get Android folks on their more complete LTE network, but even more of an issue, I suppose, given how crunched all the iOS folks are on Verizon's pokey old EvDO. So they were offering double the data cap, etc. as an incentive.
And, of course, every market analysis does show that Apple customers will spend money in crazy ways that mystify everyone else. So this could be a big push to get iOS users on more expensive plans, just because. Or maybe something pre-emptive, for when the iPhone 5 ships next month. Clearly, if there's anything particular important about the iPhone 5 relative to the network, AT&T certainly gets advanced warning. It's quite possible that Apple's gone even more Cloud Crazy with iOS 6, and built an iPhone 5 that not only works on LTE but pretty much depends on it. Probably not, but you never know (well, you'll know next month). That would be a problem given the actual LTE coverage AT&T has available. Heading it off at the pass isn't an unusual thing.
Or maybe it's just plain greed... 40% profit margins may not be enough anymore.
Back when Verizon had already completed their 3G buildout (every cell site), Cingular and AT&T Mobile were merging two different networks into a single thing. That meant replacing essentially half of the 2G TDMA (DAMPS) cells with 3G/HSPA. Then they went back and replaced/upgraded most of the HSPA with HSPA+, and now they're adding LTE. Verizon skipped all that intermediate stuff and just added LTE.
With that said, they're both showing 40%-ish profits these days. It's hard to have too much sympathy for their sad plight, or when they screw over customers yet again, regardless of the reason.
As for 4G, in fact, a T1 backhaul isn't sufficient for 100 connections on HSPA, much less LTE. In fact, a single T1/DS1 circuit isn't sufficient for a single HSPA backhaul. New towers are nearly always Ethernet over optical fiber or perhaps high-speed point-to-point microwave (1Gb/s backhaul over 20 miles for under $40K in gear). Only those offering only 2G access ought to still be using a single T1 link (you need 14 T1 links to properly support a 3G/HSPA cell). But I agree... the cost of upgrade some remote-ass tower (like the one near my house in South Jersey, I'm guessing) isn't particularly attractive relative to the number of users likely to hit that tower in any given day. The one loophole in that -- carriers like to have really good service along major roads, and that may provide justification enough.
Microsoft's only real marketing push for Window 7 Phone was selling it as the smartphone for people who don't really want smartphones.
Sure, that's an untapped market... but I think the big problem with such folks is that they don't want the extra $30-$60 per month for that smartphone. Maybe a small percentage was afraid enough of Android and iOS but would find Windows Phone comfortable, but, can it really be that many. Even if you add in disgruntled Android/iOS folks who wouldn't simply swap with one-another, etc.
In short, I think they'll need more practical reasons people might want their devices. Which are going to be hard to come up with when you're shipping with 0.1% of the set of apps available to the iPhone.
WP7.x has to be stripped -- it's running over the old single processor WinCE kernel, and Microsoft set standards for the devices that don't compare to mid-tier iOS or Android devices in 2012. But sure, they did a good job of KISS -- I played with a couple of Win7Phone devices. They didn't do much, and it's pretty easy to see, with the content-spares Zune-style UI, that they're not being asked to do a great deal of work. But it was snappy, and that could well be all some smartphone fence-sitters are looking for. Who knows.
Windows 8 devices are meant to be something different, I think. Microsoft really needs to allow hardware that's competitive with Apple and Android at all market points, if they stand any chance of Windows Phone busting out of the 10 core desktops down to "free" smartphones. And if the desktop gets any success at all, given this no-upgrade policy on Windows 7 Phone, you have to wonder what becomes of WinRT applications, which are the only ones that run everywhere (or at least they did). On release, 100% of the machine that can run these apps will be desktops and laptops... with no real idea when tablets and phones will catch on, if ever. And some of those tablets are, of course, running full fledged laptop CPUs. Knowing how software expands to take up all available space, and how hard Microsoft is pushing WinRT as the future of all Windows computing, you have to wonder what happens here.
If developers don't believe in WinRT, you're going to see mostly Win32 work continue. WinRT could take a long time to get much of any support, other than app ports Microsoft pays for (as they did for most of the major apps on Win7Phone). At least until if/when they start selling 10's of millions of mobile devices.
If they drink the Kool-Aid, they have the problem of how to make WinRT do big-boy-computer things. But they also have the problem that they'll be doing those things primarily on desktops. Unless the mobile market really jumpstarts fast, it may become true that WinRT apps get quickly bloated, in the usual Windows way, and before you know it, Windows RT device feel like Netbooks on most new Windows applications. Just sayin'...
On the public "beta" anyway, you can only log in with a Microsoft "passport" login -- they want you to use the Don't-Call-Me-Zune-Anymore store. It's supposedly optional for desktop, but on Windows RT, you can only buy things though that store, that is correct. And you can only by the UI-Formerly-Known-As-Metro applications there as well, desktop or tablet.
Only Microsoft can write "desktop" (eg, Win32) applications for Windows RT. So that's not really much of a factor, even if it does improve the few Microsoft applications one might be inclined to run.
Applications, for one. On an x86 Windows tablet, you can in theory run your regular Windows applications, and whatever new UI-Formerly-Known-As-Metro applications that materialize. Of course, you'll need a keyboard and mouse for the former, and you don't care about these latter. So where's the advantage in a tablet over a small laptop here? And even those classic Windows applications are only practical if there's a boatload of storage on that tablet. I have some multimedia applications that eat 10's of gigabytes per install -- not thing thing for a 32-64GB SSD.
For Windows RT, your're getting yet another ARM tablet and OS, but it's not Windows in any recognizable way. Sure, the UI works on a tablet... then again, so do Android and iOS. There are no applications for Windows RT (well, about 600 in the Don't-Call-It-Zune store, along with some Windows Phone apps that might run), there are crazy numbers of applications for Android, even more for iOS. So what's the advantage of "Windows" RT over established tablets? And Windows RT is being kept consumer-only, there are no Domain joins, no Active Directory, none of the things Windows people would think of as advantages in their tablets.
Indeed.... what's the value of a full-screen application on a high-resolution monitor? I like the option, occasionally... but it's not necessary, and rarely even that useful. The largest single thing I ever need to see is a 1920x1080 video image at full resolution... on my 2560x1440 monitors, even this is fine in a window. Of course, I'm a power user -- but so are many desktop users. I rarely have fewer than a dozen windows open, that's a very efficient way to work. Eliminating them? That should be suicide.
Even the Start Screen... as a professional, I have hundreds of programs in multiple disciplines (video, photography, audio, EE-CAD, etc) as well as the usual stuff (office software, tax software, etc). There are programs that I use once a year, and don't recall by name. But that's no problem -- the tree-structured organization of the Start Menu lets me organize by topic (eg, Internet, Multimedia, CAD, Development, Home, Devices, etc) and it's trees all the way down (eg, CAD/RF/Filters, Multimedia/Video/Rendering/FX)... I can find anything in seconds, with a few rolls and clicks of the mouse. How does this translate to the Start Screen? It can't.
And I've been civil about this, and actually asked a bunch of different Windows 8/The-UI-Formerly-Known-As-Metro pundits about how, exactly, I should use Windows 8. They basically suggest the same thing.... I can pretty much re-create the Start Menu by pinning a tree of links to the Taskbar. Which is fine, and clearly, there may be third parties going even farther to re-create the Start Menu. But Microsoft force-feeding the toy UI onto professionals could very well make Vista look like a raging success by comparison.
I know what Microsoft is thinking, though -- mobile is critical to their long-term survival. So they're going hard as possible in indoctrinating everyone in their tablet/phone vision, to get users comfortable with this very, very bad way to use a computer. They risk some desktop sales initially, but I think they believe, as with Vista -> Windows 7, that everyone will come around, eventually, because there's no viable alternative for most users on the desktop. Given the inability of the Linux world to get together on most anything, or to embrace binary software -- necessary to have a real commercial market -- it's quite possible they are correct.
No.. well, they may have some other patents involved. But the main one -- it's just the look they're claiming, not the look and feel. That's kind of the point of a design patent in the USA, or the "Community Design" patent-like thing they filed in Germany. I haven't seen the US design patent; the one from Germany doesn't look much like either the iPad or the Galaxy Tab.
Qualcomm actually makes their own designs -- their ARM cores (Scorpion, Krait) are really their own designs, not modifications of the ARM core of the day.
Everyone who delivered an ARM Cortex A8, such as the one in the Apple A4 chip, that ran over about 600MHz did some work on it themselves. Whether you're Qualcomm or Samsung or one of the others, you can do this with an "Architecture" license from ARM, which lets you make changes, and presumably, requires a level of architecture conformance to be shown.
Anyway, Samsung's processor core was called Hummingbird. That's the exact version of the A8 core used in the A4. But it's even weirder than that. Samsung worked with a design firm called Intrinsity on the development of the Hummingbird; Intrinsity was a small design firm dedicated specifically to making designs go faster, using a variety of novel approaches. At point after the work with Samsung, Apple bought Intrinsity. So Apple can, retroactively, claim to have done design work on the CPU core in the A4. But that wasn't true at the time. The A4 is essentially a customized version of the Samsung SOC used in the Galaxy S... they used a different (slightly slower) PowerVR GPU, and the various other periperals were absolutely tailored to Apple's needs. But Samsung did most of the work.
That is not true of the more recent Apple SOCs -- by all accounts, they're being designed by Apple's chip teams, the former PA Semiconductor and Intrinsity people. And still made by Samsung, though there are continual rumors of one of the big silicon CMs, such as TSMC, being tapped at least as a second source. Given the wars Apple's launched against Samsung, that would seem prudent.
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1920x1200 has always been available. Still is. And while maybe a bit more pricey than 1920 x 1080, not outrageous. Here's the result of a 7sec search:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824176346
Now, keep in mind where HD monitors came from. About 5-6 years ago, the first 1920x1200 monitors hit, and they ran in the $600 range. I bought my two 24" monitors around five years ago, thanks to a fairly unprecedented sale at NewEgg, so I could nab two Westinghouse 24" 1920x1200 MVA panel monitors for about $400 each.
The price floor dropped out because of the influx of cheap TV-type 1920x1080 panels. And yes, this may have driven the 1920x1200 panels back up a bit, but they've always been available, and far short of a grand.
Yes, different timings... 1920x1080/60p for video, 1920x1080/60p for computers, if you're talking about typical rates sent to LCD monitors. That's precisely why computer and television displays are unified. Sure, you can buy a "television" with a video processor to accept legacy video formats, and I have a set of computer monitors at home that also accept those. But being a digital display, there is one correct single resolution and rate for each monitor. And using a modern interface, DVI, HDMI, or DisplayPort, the monitor tells the video card what it wants, and that's what it gets. In some cases, there's a negotiation... I can still plug a 2560x1440 digital monitor into a Blu-ray player, but they'll agree on 1920x1080, and the monitor will convert. But usually, these days, the PCs and TVs are sending the same signal, identical timings.
That's why you can't buy a 16:9 pivot -- it'd be even more useless than 16:9 landscape is.
Apparently, I don't have the same restrictions you suggest. Took me five seconds to find one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824260054
The tall tower needed is probably one reason these aren't more popular, but it wouldn't be difficult to built a more robust swing mechanism that lifted and swung at the same time.
Doing real work, when I switched over to LCD five years ago, I could save the cost of both monitors in about two years of power saving, versus my fairly huge 19" CRTs... that's 8+ hours a day use, and yeah, it was my home office, so I was actually paying that bill. You might check the relative power consumption (and note, LCD-backlit monitors of today use less power than the CFL-sidelit LCDs of a few year ago) versus that big 22incher.
Windows 8's "new style" apps don't. So it's easy to imagine Microsoft deciding for us desktop users that programs on a 7680x4320 panel should also be full screen, just to make sure we don't get confused about the difference between that view and that of a 3.5", 800x600 smartphone screen. That'll be Windows 9 that phases out the "classic" windowed Windows. And Windows 10 that's sold, fire-sale style, to Oracle or IBM or someone looking to get into the OS business, as Microsoft goes down in flames. Or not... but it sure would feel good.
The 1920x1080 is using a television panel... the mass market makes that cheap. It's naturally the user's choice -- the unification with digital TV only added the options, it didn't eliminate any. And it drove down the prices on all monitors, even the higher end specialty type have dropped.
You have discovered that laptops are useless for real work, not 16:9 displays. But as Windows 8 demonstrates, at least Microsoft believes that no one's doing real work, anyway.
If you absolutely must edit a document full-page and full-screen, a tilting monitor has always been the correct solution, going way back to the 4:3 days. For most real work, any given text document is going to be just one of any number of documents open at once (at this moment, I have OpenOffice Writer open on a document I'm reading, two web browsers with about five separate windows, a CAD program (Altium), Microsoft Access, a couple datasheets in Acrobat, a calculator, and a notes windows, open at the same time. I'd be happy with more height and more width, or more resolution, sure... room for even more stuff. But I have never found 16:9 to be inferior in this to 4:3.
Nothing. A 1920x1200 monitor is better than a 1600x1200 monitor. Period. If you can't see a full page, your monitor is too low-resolution. Or your eyes are.
Ever since TV and computer displays became essentially the same thing, the consumer market has dominated.
Recall, if you will, all the build-up to the "Grand Alliance" that gave us today's ATSC (HDTV) standard. There was politicing on Analog vs. Digital (kind of a no-brainer), on RF modulation (we lost out on that one, here, 8VSB was selected due to Qualcomm lobbying and the fact it interfered less with existing NTSC broadcasts... now that those broadcasts are gone, we still have the problem that the signal isn't worth a damn indoors). And on display resolution.
Hollywood, Inc. wanted a 2:1 aspect ration. The computer industry, savvy enough to understand the impact of millions of consumer displays at higher-than-existing PC resolutions, wanted something more boxy. 16:9 was the compromise widescreen aspect ratio.
The PC industry, naturally, went full steam ahead... at 16:10. Silly PC industry. This lasted for awhile, but ultimately, with all those consumer LCD panels out there, most cried "Uncle" and went 16:9. I have dual 1920x1200 16:10 monitors at home, though I see an upgrade to 2560x1440 in the very near future. At work, they've been 16:9 (dual) for my current and previous job. Hardly useless for real work (and that's more Electronics CAD than video these days, though I did EE-CAD, embedded software, web servers, photography, and video at my last job), and the difference is, if anything, more significant for video work (16:9 monitors don't leave any room for controls on the full-screen video panel, 'cept as an overlay) than "real" work like designing circuitry.
Taxes, Jury Duty, and a few other responsibilities are the price of Civilization. For those unhappy with that price, you can always emigrate to ... Nicaragua :-) Or get very rich, since once you make enough in the USA these days, you apparently no longer have the same level of responsibility. Like tgd paying 40% (pretty high), versus Walter "Mitt" Romney paying about 13%.
Similar in South Jersey, a couple of years ago... like $5 per day. But the parking was free, and the pizza shop across from the Court House didn't overcharge for a slice. It's a token payment only, not designed in any way to actually compensate you for your lost time. Salaried employees are routinely paid anyway, but hourly workers? I think they're getting hosed.
Neither Samsung nor Apple are part of the US Federal Government. So the FoIA doesn't apply here.
If such a simple option existed on Android handsets, I would suspect they would go after that too.
There is... Google Talk has supported Video Chat for quite some time. But some carriers may have got there already... it's not always enabled for 3G/4G use.
At present (in an unhacked, iOS 5 iPhone), FaceTime is and always has been limited by Apple to WiFi only. Apple announced for iOS 6 that FaceTime will be enabled for 3G/4G as well.. and that's not just for the iPhone 5, but iPhone 4 and iPad users who upgrade to iOS 6. Apparently, they didn't discuss this in depth with AT&T, or maybe they just didn't come to an agreement about it after discussions.
Anyway, the thing to understand is that, hacks aside, this is the first time FaceTime runs over 3G/4G. So it's not AT&T trying to cut down on existing traffic, it's AT&T worrying about crazy amounts of additional traffic (crazy, one presumes, because Apple, if they stick to their usual M.O, will offer the iOS 6 update to everyone at about the same time the iPhone 5 goes on sale).
Please... the last MacBook I bought only cost $1800. And it was pretty loaded: 2.3GHz i7, 8GB RAM, 750GB HDD, etc. Ok, add $100 for Windows as well. And no, it's not entirely throw-away, you can get the battery replaced pretty easily when it tanks in two years or so (about the limit on a Li-ion cell used regularly).
Of course, the Asus laptop I was looking at included the more recent i7-3xxx series chip, better graphics, a better, higher resolution screen, a Blu-ray disc drive, USB 3.0 ports, and ran only $1100. Oh, and the MacBook Pro was a factory refurb from Apple... the original price was more than twice that of the Asus. This was for my daughter, mandated by her college... not either of our first choices.
And that is just it about Apple fans -- they voluntarily pay twice as much for less, because they think they're getting something better, in some intangible way. This is why online retailers love to find Apple fans... they get directed to more expensive offerings at places like Amazon, etc. all the time. They just aren't good with money. One of my sisters is a good example. She's very smart -- PhD from Stanford. And a dedicated Apple fan, having drank heartily from the Kool-Aid some years back... first the iPhone, then iMacs, then iPhones for everyone (well, out Mom, her daughter), then an iPad. She's never been good with money, and the Apple stuff is just a prime example. Apple users are attracted to bright shiny things, with little understanding of what's inside.
And the A.C. below... your Mom's whole house would likely fit in my basement.
Well, a couple of things. AT&T doesn't have all that much LTE rolled out; when they say "4G", they mean either LTE or HSPA+ (given that T-Mobile was calling their HSPA+ "4G", AT&T wasn't one to miss out on a good marketing opportunity). So while they do have LTE devices and cells now, the bulk of the congestion is on HSPA. And all of the iOS devices.
There's some precedent for iOS actually being the problem, too. Verizon pushed hard to get Android folks on their more complete LTE network, but even more of an issue, I suppose, given how crunched all the iOS folks are on Verizon's pokey old EvDO. So they were offering double the data cap, etc. as an incentive.
And, of course, every market analysis does show that Apple customers will spend money in crazy ways that mystify everyone else. So this could be a big push to get iOS users on more expensive plans, just because. Or maybe something pre-emptive, for when the iPhone 5 ships next month. Clearly, if there's anything particular important about the iPhone 5 relative to the network, AT&T certainly gets advanced warning. It's quite possible that Apple's gone even more Cloud Crazy with iOS 6, and built an iPhone 5 that not only works on LTE but pretty much depends on it. Probably not, but you never know (well, you'll know next month). That would be a problem given the actual LTE coverage AT&T has available. Heading it off at the pass isn't an unusual thing.
Or maybe it's just plain greed... 40% profit margins may not be enough anymore.
Well, some of it is specific to AT&T.
Back when Verizon had already completed their 3G buildout (every cell site), Cingular and AT&T Mobile were merging two different networks into a single thing. That meant replacing essentially half of the 2G TDMA (DAMPS) cells with 3G/HSPA. Then they went back and replaced/upgraded most of the HSPA with HSPA+, and now they're adding LTE. Verizon skipped all that intermediate stuff and just added LTE.
With that said, they're both showing 40%-ish profits these days. It's hard to have too much sympathy for their sad plight, or when they screw over customers yet again, regardless of the reason.
As for 4G, in fact, a T1 backhaul isn't sufficient for 100 connections on HSPA, much less LTE. In fact, a single T1/DS1 circuit isn't sufficient for a single HSPA backhaul. New towers are nearly always Ethernet over optical fiber or perhaps high-speed point-to-point microwave (1Gb/s backhaul over 20 miles for under $40K in gear). Only those offering only 2G access ought to still be using a single T1 link (you need 14 T1 links to properly support a 3G/HSPA cell). But I agree... the cost of upgrade some remote-ass tower (like the one near my house in South Jersey, I'm guessing) isn't particularly attractive relative to the number of users likely to hit that tower in any given day. The one loophole in that -- carriers like to have really good service along major roads, and that may provide justification enough.
Microsoft's only real marketing push for Window 7 Phone was selling it as the smartphone for people who don't really want smartphones.
Sure, that's an untapped market... but I think the big problem with such folks is that they don't want the extra $30-$60 per month for that smartphone. Maybe a small percentage was afraid enough of Android and iOS but would find Windows Phone comfortable, but, can it really be that many. Even if you add in disgruntled Android/iOS folks who wouldn't simply swap with one-another, etc.
In short, I think they'll need more practical reasons people might want their devices. Which are going to be hard to come up with when you're shipping with 0.1% of the set of apps available to the iPhone.
WP7.x has to be stripped -- it's running over the old single processor WinCE kernel, and Microsoft set standards for the devices that don't compare to mid-tier iOS or Android devices in 2012. But sure, they did a good job of KISS -- I played with a couple of Win7Phone devices. They didn't do much, and it's pretty easy to see, with the content-spares Zune-style UI, that they're not being asked to do a great deal of work. But it was snappy, and that could well be all some smartphone fence-sitters are looking for. Who knows.
Windows 8 devices are meant to be something different, I think. Microsoft really needs to allow hardware that's competitive with Apple and Android at all market points, if they stand any chance of Windows Phone busting out of the 10 core desktops down to "free" smartphones. And if the desktop gets any success at all, given this no-upgrade policy on Windows 7 Phone, you have to wonder what becomes of WinRT applications, which are the only ones that run everywhere (or at least they did). On release, 100% of the machine that can run these apps will be desktops and laptops... with no real idea when tablets and phones will catch on, if ever. And some of those tablets are, of course, running full fledged laptop CPUs. Knowing how software expands to take up all available space, and how hard Microsoft is pushing WinRT as the future of all Windows computing, you have to wonder what happens here.
If developers don't believe in WinRT, you're going to see mostly Win32 work continue. WinRT could take a long time to get much of any support, other than app ports Microsoft pays for (as they did for most of the major apps on Win7Phone). At least until if/when they start selling 10's of millions of mobile devices.
If they drink the Kool-Aid, they have the problem of how to make WinRT do big-boy-computer things. But they also have the problem that they'll be doing those things primarily on desktops. Unless the mobile market really jumpstarts fast, it may become true that WinRT apps get quickly bloated, in the usual Windows way, and before you know it, Windows RT device feel like Netbooks on most new Windows applications. Just sayin'...
On the public "beta" anyway, you can only log in with a Microsoft "passport" login -- they want you to use the Don't-Call-Me-Zune-Anymore store. It's supposedly optional for desktop, but on Windows RT, you can only buy things though that store, that is correct. And you can only by the UI-Formerly-Known-As-Metro applications there as well, desktop or tablet.
Only Microsoft can write "desktop" (eg, Win32) applications for Windows RT. So that's not really much of a factor, even if it does improve the few Microsoft applications one might be inclined to run.
Applications, for one. On an x86 Windows tablet, you can in theory run your regular Windows applications, and whatever new UI-Formerly-Known-As-Metro applications that materialize. Of course, you'll need a keyboard and mouse for the former, and you don't care about these latter. So where's the advantage in a tablet over a small laptop here? And even those classic Windows applications are only practical if there's a boatload of storage on that tablet. I have some multimedia applications that eat 10's of gigabytes per install -- not thing thing for a 32-64GB SSD.
For Windows RT, your're getting yet another ARM tablet and OS, but it's not Windows in any recognizable way. Sure, the UI works on a tablet... then again, so do Android and iOS. There are no applications for Windows RT (well, about 600 in the Don't-Call-It-Zune store, along with some Windows Phone apps that might run), there are crazy numbers of applications for Android, even more for iOS. So what's the advantage of "Windows" RT over established tablets? And Windows RT is being kept consumer-only, there are no Domain joins, no Active Directory, none of the things Windows people would think of as advantages in their tablets.
Indeed.... what's the value of a full-screen application on a high-resolution monitor? I like the option, occasionally... but it's not necessary, and rarely even that useful. The largest single thing I ever need to see is a 1920x1080 video image at full resolution... on my 2560x1440 monitors, even this is fine in a window. Of course, I'm a power user -- but so are many desktop users. I rarely have fewer than a dozen windows open, that's a very efficient way to work. Eliminating them? That should be suicide.
Even the Start Screen... as a professional, I have hundreds of programs in multiple disciplines (video, photography, audio, EE-CAD, etc) as well as the usual stuff (office software, tax software, etc). There are programs that I use once a year, and don't recall by name. But that's no problem -- the tree-structured organization of the Start Menu lets me organize by topic (eg, Internet, Multimedia, CAD, Development, Home, Devices, etc) and it's trees all the way down (eg, CAD/RF/Filters, Multimedia/Video/Rendering/FX)... I can find anything in seconds, with a few rolls and clicks of the mouse. How does this translate to the Start Screen? It can't.
And I've been civil about this, and actually asked a bunch of different Windows 8/The-UI-Formerly-Known-As-Metro pundits about how, exactly, I should use Windows 8. They basically suggest the same thing.... I can pretty much re-create the Start Menu by pinning a tree of links to the Taskbar. Which is fine, and clearly, there may be third parties going even farther to re-create the Start Menu. But Microsoft force-feeding the toy UI onto professionals could very well make Vista look like a raging success by comparison.
I know what Microsoft is thinking, though -- mobile is critical to their long-term survival. So they're going hard as possible in indoctrinating everyone in their tablet/phone vision, to get users comfortable with this very, very bad way to use a computer. They risk some desktop sales initially, but I think they believe, as with Vista -> Windows 7, that everyone will come around, eventually, because there's no viable alternative for most users on the desktop. Given the inability of the Linux world to get together on most anything, or to embrace binary software -- necessary to have a real commercial market -- it's quite possible they are correct.
No.. well, they may have some other patents involved. But the main one -- it's just the look they're claiming, not the look and feel. That's kind of the point of a design patent in the USA, or the "Community Design" patent-like thing they filed in Germany. I haven't seen the US design patent; the one from Germany doesn't look much like either the iPad or the Galaxy Tab.
This isn't a hardware (utlilty) patent being discussed, either -- it's a design patent.
No, actually, it's a bit different than that.
Qualcomm actually makes their own designs -- their ARM cores (Scorpion, Krait) are really their own designs, not modifications of the ARM core of the day.
Everyone who delivered an ARM Cortex A8, such as the one in the Apple A4 chip, that ran over about 600MHz did some work on it themselves. Whether you're Qualcomm or Samsung or one of the others, you can do this with an "Architecture" license from ARM, which lets you make changes, and presumably, requires a level of architecture conformance to be shown.
Anyway, Samsung's processor core was called Hummingbird. That's the exact version of the A8 core used in the A4. But it's even weirder than that. Samsung worked with a design firm called Intrinsity on the development of the Hummingbird; Intrinsity was a small design firm dedicated specifically to making designs go faster, using a variety of novel approaches. At point after the work with Samsung, Apple bought Intrinsity. So Apple can, retroactively, claim to have done design work on the CPU core in the A4. But that wasn't true at the time. The A4 is essentially a customized version of the Samsung SOC used in the Galaxy S... they used a different (slightly slower) PowerVR GPU, and the various other periperals were absolutely tailored to Apple's needs. But Samsung did most of the work.
That is not true of the more recent Apple SOCs -- by all accounts, they're being designed by Apple's chip teams, the former PA Semiconductor and Intrinsity people. And still made by Samsung, though there are continual rumors of one of the big silicon CMs, such as TSMC, being tapped at least as a second source. Given the wars Apple's launched against Samsung, that would seem prudent.