That is a big part of it. Any given night, in the US, on Prime Time TV, you're more likely than not to see an ad for the iPhone. I don't recall ever seeing an ad on TV or in print (outside of maybe a "geek" oriented rag) hawking any Nokia phone. They aren't featured in phone stores, either, in the way that iPhones, Android phones, or even Blackberries are. Nokia just never tried here... I have no idea why.
Apple's got an 18% market share, but it's still growing. Not as fast as the smart phone market itself is growing, but growing. Nokia seems to be losing share. RIM's been flat lately, Android is growing fast, but it's still pretty small overall. WinMo has been shrinking for a long while. Palm's going up and down... probably up this quarter, thanks to moving to Verizon, but also very small, at least in their modern form.
The iPhone dominates the world of BUZZ, not the actual real world of telephones.
But their market share has been growing. The iPhone was the first real smartphone for end users. Not even really when it shipped... it was more of a "feature" phone. But with the apps, definitely targeted at regular everyday consumers.
WinMo? Not yet, definitely in "Windows Phone 7"... following the iPhone, of course. Palm? Maybe a little in the past, but old PalmOS didn't even come with a media player... WebOS, targeted directly at consumers... with Palm, Inc. full of ex-Apple guys, all the way to the CEO. RIM? If you're not forced to use a Blackberry by your office, there's little to recommend it. Android? Well, sure... Android was stated by guys from Danger, Inc. and WebTV... definitely consumer targeted, but it didn't get out until after the iPhone. Nokia... a few geek oriented devices, some smartphones so basic they're hard to tell from feature-phones.
So yeah, Apple's the one folks are looking at. In a large part, because so many of the established phone concerns have been looking that same way. That doesn't mean the iPhone nailed it, only that they really did fill a gap that, three years ago, few established phone makers believed existed.
The 0xdeadbeef article definitely states Mozilla's position... though they use incorrect language. H.264 is NOT a proprietary CODEC. It's a published ITU standard...the specs are available to anyone. Same idea as HTML4, 802.11, 802.3, JPEG, USB, PCI, 1394, Open Document Format, 1284, etc... an open standard, managed by a recognized standards body.
"Proprietary" would be something like the old RealMedia CODEC, Microsoft's WMV prior to their opening it as the VC-1 standard (SMPTE), the Cineform or Apple Intermediate CODECs used for HD video editing, Adobe Flash, etc. In short, the details are a trade secret, at least some of them. Patents may or may not actually be involved, but either way, the only chance you have of supporting such things legally is a clean-room reverse engineering of the proprietary item (which, in some countries, Germany for instance, is a protected right... it's a bit more dubious in the USA, particularly if they tossed in some encryption, to kick the DCMA into effect).
What they don't like about H.264 is really that it's "patent encumbered"... that it's still covered by patents, at least in those parts of the world that recognize software patents. To be taken seriously, they really should use correct terminology... this article makes the author seem rather ignorant of the whole H.264 situation. I'm fairly certain he's just using "proprietary" because it's a scare-word, particularly to radical FOSS types.
Yeah, they're using the DSP, and that's something. But the H.264 acceleration is more than just DSP code on these TI parts. There are hardware units used to accelerate various parts of the video decode pipeline. This is clear from his demo: despite Theora being a lighter weight decode, he's limited to a somewhat jerkey 640×360/24p, which he pronounced "good enough". Perhaps on an iPod, but if you're using a DROID or another modern smartphone, you're going to want the full 848x480/30p... which plays perfectly on mine, from AVC.
The problem, of course, is supporting this all over the place. All modern phones have hardware acceleration for H.264, but they get it in different ways. The OMAP 3430 is probably your best bet for Theora acceleration, because of the DSP just sitting there. On the iPhone, they're presumably using the PowerVR H.264 acceleration hardware, which is much less flexible... maybe it maps to the needs of Theora (certainly, H.264, Theora, WMV, and MPEG1/2 are all DCT-based compression schemes), maybe not. But is Mozilla really taking on every platform? Won't they have the same problem with low-levels docs on these as they did on the OMAP?
Apple doesn't want Flash, Air, Java, or any other means of loading applications onto an iPhone. They want total control, and as many commercial apps as possible, so they get paid. That's the only reason they're not supporting Flash, Java, or other defacto web standards on the iPhone, despite the fact that's currently making the iPhone a lower-class web client.
Microsoft is the only proponent of Silverlight, a competitor to Flash that's just as proprietary. So it's quite natural they would not be supporting Flash themselves on their WinMo devices... 'scuse me, their "Windows Phone 7" devices... a new name with each revision. Of course, had you read the link you posted carefully, you would know that Microsoft is working with Adobe to allow them to release Flash for "Windows Phone 7". I would estimate, at this point, Microsoft will do everything they can to not screw up their new platform, and "better web experience than iPhone" will be one of the standard targets of, well, everyone but Apple.
And in fact, it is Adobe's job to push Flash. They're doing that, too, even on Linux.. they recently joined the LiMo Foundation, and play to support Flash on Linux phones and other devices: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000072-264.html
Google's YouTube is moving away from Flash, for very good reasons: they're a video site, and Flash is just extra baggage, once you have standard video. That's very different than Google saying "no Flash anywhere". YouTube is an entirely different concern than smart phones and tablets.
Open standards are, well, open standards. H.264, VC-1, AC-3, USB, 802.11, 802.3, etc. They're published standards, anyone is free to implement them. This is entirely aside from whether there are patent entanglements or not.
And in fact, you probably know whether there are patent entanglements in published standards, because there's a licensing body that both takes your licensing fees (independent of any other corporate control -- thus, still open, same deal for all comers), or it's 20 years old, thus, no patents left. Other things, well, you may expect it to be without patent entanglements, but do you really know? VP3 was patented by On2, but Xiph has a free license for those patents. But it's only ten years old... are the really in the clear with Theora going back before 2000? Have they added any improvements over VP3 that might be newly entangled? And most of all, if I'm a big company and start using Theora, who's paying the settlement costs if someone does come out of the woodwork and sue me?
To summarize: there are functions in the OS that do these things, that every other piece of software uses, that have been in the OS for over a decade, and that do these functions better than a CODEC embedded in our Web Brower ever will. Thus, we refuse to use those interfaces.
I suspect next, Mozilla will be writing their own video drivers, file system, PDDs, etc. since they can't trust any of those to be 100% functional. Or maybe, they should just write the stinkin' web browser, and use the parts of the OS that are written by folks who know those functions better than Team Mozilla.
Of course, what'll really happen is that someone will hack Firefox to use the OS routines, and before you know it, Firefox will be about as popular as Navigator is today. Or it may slip completely, overtaken by Chrome. Religion is like that... it's a guaranteed fail, when it's put up against rational thought.
if you actually WATCH the videos it's not hard to see that the theora encode looks FAR worse than the h.264 on practically every frame
Indeed. And consider... this is the Xiph web site.. these are the Ogg Theora development people. So what you're seeing there is the best argument they could construct, and it still fails.
Theora is at an inherent disadvantage, and always will be. It was, after all, based on On2's VP3, which they tossed out there for free once VP4 was shipping. They're on VP8 now, and recently bought by Google. Anyway, they are inherently limited by the improvements they can add, because they're likely to trip on any number of video encoding patents that have been filed in the 10 years since VP3 was released. This, in fact, is one big concern from the big companies involved in HTML5... if you're an MPEG-LA licensee, you're covered should any new patents emerge on H.264, as unlikely as that is. But Theora hasn't been all that tested.
I have absolutely nothing against some open source CODECs being available, I think that's great, and would put pressure on the MPEG-LA to keep H.264 free. But Theora is the wrong answer. Right answers? Well, it needs more work, but the BBC's Dirac CODEC is more competitive, if just as much of a problem on handheld gear. Google could release VP8 to the FOSS community, which is said to be noticeably more efficient than H.264 at lower bitrates. Both still could have patent entanglement issues, however.
Not to mention other things. H.264 is used in satellite and cable television. It's the recording CODEC for nearly all tapeless HD consumer video cameras, some pro cameras (Panasonic's AVC-Intra) and an increasing number of digital still cameras with video. Some smartphones record in H.264. So you're going to want interchange... if I ever buy a "tablet" computer, it'll be able to dock to my camera or camcorder, and play back 720p (camera) or 1080p (camcorder) on that 10" screen... or I'll wait for a tablet that can. H.264 is the standard CODEC for the early 21rst century. If it's replaced, as it's has largely replaced MPEG-2, that will take something substantially better. Not something worse.
The main reason you might not be able to hardware decode for Ogg Theora is simple: these devices already exist, they don't necessarily have the hardware, and certainly not the software, for accelerated Theora decoding. So it's going to take some work to even discover if some reasonable percentage of today's devices could decode Theora. Which means you need a real incentive to get device manufacturers and OS creators to do this.
Now, look at who these folks are. You have Google. Apple. Microsoft. Palm. RIM. Nokia. Does anyone have a strong incentive here, unless somehow, magically, Theora DID become the web standard? Not to mention that the hardware's already cast, and may simply not be retargetable to Theora so easily... the acceleration in the ARM/PowerVR and TI SOCs was designed with H.264 specifically in mind. It's a bit different on desktops... much of the very good H.264 acceleration you get today is done by graphics cards, using more general purpose resources.
Then, you have video streaming guys like Google... they're happy with H.264, and do not want Theora as a standard, because it's less efficient. That means real money to them... YouTube's primary expense is the cost of streaming video. In fact, Google recently bought On2, ironically the company responsible for the VP3 CODEC upon which Theora is based. On2 has VP7 and VP8 CODECs today... supposedly, VP8 is even more efficient than H.264, particularly at low bitrates. It's quite possible Google's planning to switch from H.264 to VP8 on YouTube in the not too distant future... that would actually save them fairly big bucks, if VP8 is as good as claimed.
Basically, the HTML power-that-be set out to establish video as a first-class thing within HTML, via the tag. Much as with , they would not dictate precisely what kinds of video would be supported, but basically allow the browser to play it or fail. BUT... there was general consensus that, as with JPG and GIF, originally (and later, PNG) there ought to be known standard formats that everyone supported.
The Mozilla folks, backed by Opera and a bunch of FOSS entities, back Ogg Theora as the video CODEC that should be "built-in" on all web browsers. They do this because Theora is open source... it's based on On2's VP3.2 CODEC, which was released as open source after they had produced their VP4 CODEC. They gradually opened the source even more, eventually granting the Xiph Foundation a "do whatever you like with it" BSD-like license, including the free use of any governing patents. "Theora" is named for Theora Jones, a character from the "Max Headroom" series.
Anyway, the opposition, including Apple, Google, and various others back H.264 instead. Some of this is de-facto.. H.264 is already the standard used in most modern video these days: satellite and some cable TV, European HD broadcast, YouTube, iPhone/iPod, etc. It is, of course, not free, but administered by the MPEG-LA, the same licencing organization that deals with other MPEG and related IP. The FOSS folks reject this because it means no built-in free H.264 CODEC, and as well, potential frees for internet broadcast, even per-view fees (which have been promised, but regularly rolled back to date).
Big companies are also somewhat concerned about the patent implications of VP3 and Theora... there aren't tested in court, and there's no organization like the MPEG-LA ready to take the legal heat if there's any new patent exposure. It's so far just a fear, but not a trivial one. The other is for streaming video: companies like YouTube spend nearly all their money in network fees... the cost of delivering video. Ogg Theora is less efficient than H.264, so switching to H.264 would result in a quality loss or much more costs, neither of which is deemed acceptable.
I actually understand both positions. But Mozilla takes it one step further... they won't just not support H.264 as a built-in, but they do not intend to support external video CODECs. That seems to be a very stupid position: video CODECs for many different kinds of video are now a standard part of every major OS, just like device drivers moved from hacks or in-application to in-OS back in the 1980s or so. Many OSs (for example, Windows 7 and MacOS X) ship with H.264 drivers built in. It's actually important to at least have the option of using an OS driver in preference to anything you might build in to your application, simply because OS-level drivers can very often use your hardware better.
A couple examples. It's impossible to play 1080p H.264 in software on a 1GHz ARM A9 processor. Yet, in the nVidia Tegra 2 chipset, you can not only play 1080p H.264 video, but you can play it at very low power, around 200mW. They have a rockin' accelerator for it... same as most every handheld device today. Another one... most desktop PCs play 1080/60i or 1080/30p pretty well, as long as they have dual core or so CPUs. But 1080/60p is pretty challenging. I have been shooting 1080/60p video for sports video, much better. It'll play in VLC, sort of... it's choppy, and using 40-60% of my total CPU, this, on a Q9550 PC. Running in evil old Windows Media Player in WIn7, I get perfect 60fps, full screen on one of my 1200p monitors, using 12% CPU. Why? That video CODEC is tapping DXVA 2.0, which is offloading much of the work to my nVidia 8800GT, which would otherwise be sitting around, all 118 stream processors given nothing to do.
So with Mozilla, it's not just sound open source philosophy, it's religion. There's no reason they shouldn't support OS-level CODECs, they're just trying to leverage Firefox's popularity to force others to adopt Theora as the one and only default CODEC.
Most modern mobile devices have a screen resolution of at least 800x480, so we're just fine with those old hard-coded 800 pixel pages. These forthcoming tablets will probably have at least 1024x600.
Sure, it's better to reformat on the fly where possible, and support some lower resolutions. You may want to support a custom tiny, feature limited version for limited devices like iPhones and Blackberries. But a minimum of 640x480 has been around for 30+ years... no need for normal web pages to consider anything smaller. Most desktop users have 1024x768 or better, and should get to use that while navigating web pages.
After some years of using a TI Silent 700 dialup, an Exidy Sorcerer, being on hardware design team of the Commodore +4, years of using standard hardware PCs, using HP-UX, UNIX Systems III, IV, and V, Amiga UNIX, Sun Solaris, AmigaOS, BeOS, BSD, many flavors of Linux, and also designing Macs back in 1997, I have come to the conclusion that you're an idiot to rely on any company's proprietary hardware for something as important as your computing needs, unless there is no other choice. So maybe at the very high end, no other choice. On the desktop, plenty of choices.
For music, I've gone from "Six transistor!!!" radios, home made AM receivers, a dozen boomboxen and another dozen portable CD players, MP3 CD players, half a dozen dedicated MP3 players (including an iPod), another bunch that quality as PMPs (including a Zune), and finally ended up with the Motorola DROID. This is the one device that really replaces all those little pocket boxes with LCDs attached: GPS, cheap camera, Palm T|X, cellphone, guitar tuner/chord book, PMP (with greater than SD resolution), MP3 player (with my choice of fully functional player apps, such as Museek and Pandora), web terminal (on par with the small Nokias as far the browsing experience goes), etc. No software is locked out, anything can run as a daemon or background program, multitasking works just dandy, and I still get longer battery life than iPhone users. I can download the SDK, put an app up on my web site if I like, and every Android user can use it, no hacking the system needed. And even more amazing, it even works very well as a phone.
Apple is the wrong way. It's a throwback to the 1970s/1980s, when everyone made their own proprietary computing environments. Apple's done a fine job tying up the hardware so you have to pay 2x-3x as much fo the same PC you can buy from anyone else. Now they're working hard, not on the Mac, not yet, but elsewhere, to eliminate price competition in software, and have absolute say about what you may and many not run on your purchased software.
Actually, TiVo did well by getting there first, and delivering just the one function people needed at the time: smart digital VCR, aka DVR, aka PVR. It was so simple the computer and even smart TV challenged could use it, and it just did the one thing well. Sure, they've added a few features, but it's not intended to be an applications platform.
Early cable and satellite company DVRs were actually so horrible, they sold TiVo and Replays. But they fixed that. It was inevitable that "DVR" become a function of other hardware. And that's why the cable and satellite units sell... they bundle the DVR free. Their goal isn't selling hardware, it's keeping customers happy enough to keep paying that monthly fee. So they toss in a workable PVR, and folks just use it. My fairly ancient Dish Network model 4000 receiver (used in my office, not my media room) died a few weeks ago. Dish sent me a fee-free PVR/receiver to replace it.
MythTV has failed to catch on for many reasons. A big one... it needs a PC. I can have an STB drawing a few watts in standby mode doing my recording, or I can have a full fledged PC. Even a scaled down (Atom or VIA) PC is going to suck 10x-20x more power than a modern STB.
Then, well, ok. I can order parts at NewEgg and build myself a low power PC in a nice CE-lookin' box, track down one of the better tuners that's working ok these days, download and install Mythbuntu, etc. Then again, I used to design personal computers from scratch.. this is pretty easy. But where do my Mom or sisters go to get a MythTV box? Then, how to they get it working with their cable or satellite systems? Ok, now how do they do that in HD?
The iPad certainly will cater to the stupid, and the naive, and the.. well, those who don't know any better, and are in the thrall of Apple. For awhile, anyway.. but some of that's because the uses for a tablet, versus a smart phone or laptop, have not quite been established in the consumer's mind yet. But they will, and as this happens, the iPad will come up increasingly short.
Look at the Smart Phone.. this has replaced a pocketful of devices. My DROID can do most anything you'd find in a stand-alone "digital appliance" with an LCD screen. It does the PDA-thing, and currently most of it better than my old Palm T/X or Treo. It's a decent enough phone, for all I care about cellphones. It's a better music player than an iPod or a Zune, largely because I ran change the music player.. run Museek to get my random plays tweaked to my mood, run Pandora or streaming internet "radio", etc. It's a better pocket video player than these devices, too, higher resolution, and with interchangeable memory cards, to I can carry as much video as I like. It does the GPS thing very well, and a bunch of location-based cool things that no GPS device does... like finding moves playing where I am, or showing me the prices of an item online and in the surrounding stores. It plays games... I only have a few stupid ones like Majhong, but for pocket entertainment, better than the Palm. It's a fine guitar tuner and chord library (yeah, I actually do have numerous little boxes doing those functions), and I can store and view my song library (chords and lyrics) on the device, too. It's a fine internet pad, about as good as those little Nokias... no replacement for my 24" screens, but it beats the crap out of the Treo or the iPhone. And the list can go on.
This "tablet" thing is interesting for a few reasons, but it's always going to sit between "laptop" and "smartphone/PDA". So, what can get out of this device I can't get in my PDA. The iPad seems to be shouting about eBooks. Maybe. Real eBooks reflow, and yeah, I have the Aldiko reader on my DROID, and it's not actually that bad. Inside... it's useless outdoors, and it's going to suck too much power to keep on all the time. Well, hey, same with the iPad... you know that screen's going to power down after awhile, and it's just as crappy in the bright sunlight. So iPad fails even on the main premise Apple seems to be pushing, other than "ru
> Why in the hell do I need 3 fucking USB ports on an underpowered toy?
So you can hook in a mouse or keyboard. Or your digital video or still camera, to preview what you just shot on a big screen (Epson sells specialty devices that do this for $500+). To access additional information from USB storage devices, keys or HDDs. To download routes to your car GPS unit (they're not all wireless yet). To download music to your media player. USB is a dandy thing to have... Apple as bone stupid to not support at least one USB port in the iPad.
> What well-adjusted person would connect a fucking tablet to a TV? What is the benefit of running 1080i video on this tiny ass screen?
The 1080p output is for the HDMI connector.. obviously, you don't run full resolution on a smaller screen. The reason you'd want to hook this to a TV? Same reason you would want to hook any PMP to a television -- you have this portable media player with you, and hey, look, a TV. Same reason I can hook every one of my camcorders to a TV. Apple was bone stupid not to offer HDMI out on the iPad.
The whole point of a general purpose tablet computer is to replace a bunch of things done by "digital appliances" today. It's an eBook reader. And a PMP. And a photo/video previewer. And an internet tablet. And anything else you want it to be.
Ever used a smartphone? If you use one for awhile, you'll notice it's not really so much a telephone anymore, it's a general purpose pocket computer. It's a GPS, It's a PMP/MP3 player. It's an organizer. It's a mobile search engine. Same thing here with a well designed tablet. This is a well designed tablet.. in fact, perhaps the first one with the hardware necessary to actually deliver more than just "fat iPod" functionality.
I agree. There are several things I must have an in eReader, to even bother with one. It needs to work on the beach, and it needs at least an easy day of life of book reading. I also want color and decent resolution on the display, so that magazines and datasheets are at least possible to read. This seems to be the first device that does that, thanks to the Pixel Qi display (been following that one for awhile).
The nVidia Tegra 2 chipset, though, clearly makes this more than an eReader. They've done a great job on the hardware.. as long as they're supporting each of these OSs correctly (nVidia hasn't been great in the past, but they are really serious about being a force in the device market), they were delivering 16+ hours of 1080p video on the devices that were floating around CES this year. This also has HDMI output, so it's definitely going to work as a larger-screen PMP-style device. That's also a dual-core Cortex A9 in the Tegra 2.
I'm wondering about storage... I kind of expect them to go with internal flash rather than a 1.8" HDD, particularly after seeing the size of the thing. I didn't see a memory card slot either, but at least you could "dock" with a USB drive of some sort. That's also key to allowing the device to act as a video/photo field accessory... if I can offload photos and video to it (at least MP4/USB video, I don't imagine I'm getting to hook an HDV camcorder to it), then it's additionally useful in the camera bag.
In short, this one's very exciting to me... and seems to have corrected most every mistake they made on the Apple iPad.
Java is the high-level language, at least assuming you're using the standard SDK. Dalvik is the byte-code/virtual machine model. There may be other ways to generate Dalvik byte-code in the future.
There was no NEED to do three traces between pins. They just didn't want to fork over the dough for an extra two layers or so. And while that density might have been "unheard of" at the time in the emerging PC industry, it was SOP in industry and aerospace, even back then. You're talkin' about what, 8/8mil traces, maybe even a bit fatter, assuming the gigantic ICs they had back in the 70s.
Right. And Apple had their own internal needs for a browser they controlled, obviously (well, obvious in retrospect). They timed Safari to be ready when their support deal with Microsoft on IE for Mac ran out.
It was important to establish desktop cred for Safari, at least among Mac users, so when it moved to the iPhone, it would be accepted as a better handheld browser than you typically had on a portable device. Which it pretty much was. Not because Safari was any great shakes, but because most of the mobile browsers just sucked.
Not marketing to business seems to have done Apple just fine, anyway. The iPhone has done so well precisely because it was the first smart phone really made for and marketed to consumers rather than business users. They get into business much the same way Macs do... individuals bring them to work. Doesn't mate with every business need, but at least in engineering, I'm surrounded by the frickin' things. Though lately, more DROIDs are showing up.
Well, a couple of things. On the average, most of your friends don't have Macs.. they're 5% of the global desktop computer market. Secondly, it's a reasonably upgrade.. going to the new MacOS X "Snow Leopard" costs you $29. There's just one version. I thought the $50 upgrades to Windows 7 I bought last summer were reasonable-ish. So I spent $150.. with Mac, it could have been just that $29, if I wasn't honest.
But here's the thing... updating actually benefits Apple. They're not really big enough to use Microsoftian bad behavior to push upgrades, but they also don't want to support older OSs forever. So upgrades are very good for Apple, even if they don't make money on every one. Not so for Microsoft..
Apple never did business/enterprise correctly, or well.
But they used to be a powerhouse in education. And they're not just losing that market, they're intentionally walking away.
The future trend is one computer per student. They've been doing that at my kids' high school recently. This was completely enabled by the rise of Netbook PCs. Every kid in school borrows a Netbook for the year.... that's possible with $300 Netbooks, impossible based on the lower Apple iBook prices. In fact, Apple's prices are all over crazy... the average price paid for a laptop, excluding netbooks, was about $550, 4Q09. Where is Apple's $500 laptop, much less their $300 laptop. Without they, they're walking away from one of their traditional markets.
My guess is that Apple just doesn't care.. they like the high margins on the Apple laptops.. they're getting twice as much money per computer as Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba, etc. That's got to feel good, but also, I think Apple doesn't quite believe that the Mac is their future.
You clearly have network problems.... I'm no fan of Word (it's a wordprocessor entirely optimize for simple 1-25 page documents and memos), but I've been forced to use it at many companies over the course of my 27 year career, and have not once found anything remotely close to the issues you're describing. Even between mixed versions of Word, and quite often, Open Office.
With that said, I really have problems with the idea of Word Documents being used as the company standard for document distribution. And yet, it's often the standard.
Back in the 90s, while leaving a company to form another, I was writing up a formal document (150+ pages) describing details of the 100,000 line-or-so program I had written during my three years there. I was forced to use Word (our documentation group had revolted and moved to something else, everyone else still used Word), and it was a heinous boondoggle.. barely functional. I would have been better writing it on the Commodore 64... I'm not being satirical. One assumes they have fixed it.
But the proper in-house standard for documentation is PDF. That's the rule I set when I get to make those decisions. Otherwise, individuals or groups use their wordprocessor of course, though these days, I'd demand an ODF file checked in to match that PDF. In the past, as long as the company owned a license for your WP of choice (I found buying you your favorite, versus forcing Word on you, was a no-brainer cost savings, at least where engineers were concerned).
Actually, Apple has bought most of their media content creation software from other companies. These didn't have anything to do with locking out the PC... the PC market is crowded. Yeah, the program that became Final Cut was Macromedia's video editor before Apple bought it. But there are at least a half dozen pro-level video editors on the PC: Media Composer, Premiere, Vegas, EDIUS, SpeedEDIT, eQ/iQ/sQ, etc.
They also bought Emagic.. sure, it was to acquire Logic, and sure, they cancelled the PC version, but it's not as if this was a blow to the even-more-crowded PC audio market. Same goes with the TOW DVD creation companies Apple bought to deliver today's DVD Studio, or any of the others.
Apple started this back in the days when PCs were better than 2x as fast as Macs, period (eg, not just based on prices), and Apple was seriously in danger of losing their media content creation niche. They started becoming another Adobe, in a sense, just to ensure the Mac remained viable, even if companies like Adobe and Avid left the Mac. Which they were.. Adobe was cutting back on Apple support in the latter days of the PPC Mac, and recommending migration to PCs to their customers. Once Apple went to x86, they recanted.. even before Apple as able to regain some installed base.
And while my Apple Fan quotient is zero, I can't support a falsehood... they have evolved most of the programs they have acquired in good if not earthshaking ways. Some of these were bought years back, but they still produce decent new versions. Some of this was smart behavior by Apple.. they kept the original development teams. Same thing Sony did when they bought Sonic Foundry, which has kept me on the Sony tools for my own video and audio work. Those guys were the best in the business on any platform, before Sony, and the remain unequaled (unpaid plug).
Sure, there are other companies still supporting MacOS. If you're doing UNIX stuff, it's pretty simple to support MacOS, and at 5% worldwide, on the desktop, they do represent the largest, if oddest, UNIX-based installed base. Media content creation software companies have to walk a fine line.. the Mac is more viable than it was some years back, which is good. If you have a great new product, they might buy you. But they might also buy your competition. That makes your head explode, in thinking of Mac support versus a presence in the Windows market (eg, is that wasted effort or your exist strategy?)
Apple is counting on user and group demand to get into business.
For example, they have good traction in some media content departments. Most professional media organizations standardize on a set of tools, and stick with them for decades. If you go to video production houses, you'll generally find they're "Sony shops" or "Panny shops".. they don't mix and match camcorder gear. Same applies to video editing suites and at least OS platforms if not necessarily (on the PC side) PC vendors.
In short, Apple keeps their adherents, and they have virtually no chance of selling Macs to a PC/Vegas, PC/Newtek, or PC/Grass Valley shop, and not a very good chance of selling to PC/Avid or PC/Adobe shop. Similar things in audio work.
Outside of content creation, it's even more difficult. There's lots of talk of corporate email and maybe even desktop apps, and if that's all you're doing throughout your organization, maybe Apple stands a chance. If you're doing software development, sure, you might be able to run on the Mac... at least as a Linux replacement. But once you get to non-FOSS development, you probably can't get that special compiler for a NXP ARM or TI DSP on Mac. Windows may the only target.
Going on to hardware development, it gets even more severe... there are no good hardware tools for MacOS, and for any reasonable hardware development environment, you don't just need one, you need dozens of tools. This is the same reason peopl use Windows and MacOS for media content creation over Linux.. it's not just one tool, it's potentially dozens (I do hardware development, software development, video and music... the PC is the only possible answer).
Now, get back to larger companies.. you have to hire a sysadmin. He may not need to do much in the engineering group, but his department is going to manage computers in marketing, sales, finance, office support, documentation, etc... definitely all the non-tech departments. Unless you can do each and every one of those things on the Mac, the PC wins by default.
And then there's the smart business decision. If I'm building a new company, I need gear. I'd like to establish a relationship with a hardware vendor for any medium sized company or larger. If I pick Apple, I have no recourse... I take what they give me, and that's that. It's an expensive platform shift to move to another platform. If I buy a PC, regardless of the software platform. I can change hardware suppliers any time I like. Which gives me much more leverage with them. So Apple would never be the right answer, from this aspect of the business perspective.
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That is a big part of it. Any given night, in the US, on Prime Time TV, you're more likely than not to see an ad for the iPhone. I don't recall ever seeing an ad on TV or in print (outside of maybe a "geek" oriented rag) hawking any Nokia phone. They aren't featured in phone stores, either, in the way that iPhones, Android phones, or even Blackberries are. Nokia just never tried here... I have no idea why.
Apple's got an 18% market share, but it's still growing. Not as fast as the smart phone market itself is growing, but growing. Nokia seems to be losing share. RIM's been flat lately, Android is growing fast, but it's still pretty small overall. WinMo has been shrinking for a long while. Palm's going up and down... probably up this quarter, thanks to moving to Verizon, but also very small, at least in their modern form.
The iPhone dominates the world of BUZZ, not the actual real world of telephones.
But their market share has been growing. The iPhone was the first real smartphone for end users. Not even really when it shipped... it was more of a "feature" phone. But with the apps, definitely targeted at regular everyday consumers.
WinMo? Not yet, definitely in "Windows Phone 7"... following the iPhone, of course. Palm? Maybe a little in the past, but old PalmOS didn't even come with a media player... WebOS, targeted directly at consumers... with Palm, Inc. full of ex-Apple guys, all the way to the CEO. RIM? If you're not forced to use a Blackberry by your office, there's little to recommend it. Android? Well, sure... Android was stated by guys from Danger, Inc. and WebTV... definitely consumer targeted, but it didn't get out until after the iPhone. Nokia... a few geek oriented devices, some smartphones so basic they're hard to tell from feature-phones.
So yeah, Apple's the one folks are looking at. In a large part, because so many of the established phone concerns have been looking that same way. That doesn't mean the iPhone nailed it, only that they really did fill a gap that, three years ago, few established phone makers believed existed.
The 0xdeadbeef article definitely states Mozilla's position... though they use incorrect language. H.264 is NOT a proprietary CODEC. It's a published ITU standard...the specs are available to anyone. Same idea as HTML4, 802.11, 802.3, JPEG, USB, PCI, 1394, Open Document Format, 1284, etc... an open standard, managed by a recognized standards body.
"Proprietary" would be something like the old RealMedia CODEC, Microsoft's WMV prior to their opening it as the VC-1 standard (SMPTE), the Cineform or Apple Intermediate CODECs used for HD video editing, Adobe Flash, etc. In short, the details are a trade secret, at least some of them. Patents may or may not actually be involved, but either way, the only chance you have of supporting such things legally is a clean-room reverse engineering of the proprietary item (which, in some countries, Germany for instance, is a protected right... it's a bit more dubious in the USA, particularly if they tossed in some encryption, to kick the DCMA into effect).
What they don't like about H.264 is really that it's "patent encumbered"... that it's still covered by patents, at least in those parts of the world that recognize software patents. To be taken seriously, they really should use correct terminology... this article makes the author seem rather ignorant of the whole H.264 situation. I'm fairly certain he's just using "proprietary" because it's a scare-word, particularly to radical FOSS types.
Or maybe this one: http://www.schleef.org/blog/2009/11/11/theora-on-ti-c64x-dsp-and-omap3/ (your link failed for me).
Yeah, they're using the DSP, and that's something. But the H.264 acceleration is more than just DSP code on these TI parts. There are hardware units used to accelerate various parts of the video decode pipeline. This is clear from his demo: despite Theora being a lighter weight decode, he's limited to a somewhat jerkey 640×360/24p, which he pronounced "good enough". Perhaps on an iPod, but if you're using a DROID or another modern smartphone, you're going to want the full 848x480/30p... which plays perfectly on mine, from AVC.
The problem, of course, is supporting this all over the place. All modern phones have hardware acceleration for H.264, but they get it in different ways. The OMAP 3430 is probably your best bet for Theora acceleration, because of the DSP just sitting there. On the iPhone, they're presumably using the PowerVR H.264 acceleration hardware, which is much less flexible... maybe it maps to the needs of Theora (certainly, H.264, Theora, WMV, and MPEG1/2 are all DCT-based compression schemes), maybe not. But is Mozilla really taking on every platform? Won't they have the same problem with low-levels docs on these as they did on the OMAP?
Huh? Google has been saying "Flash is coming for Android, 2010" since mid-2009 if not sooner. Adobe just announced AIR and Flash for Android: http://www.pcworld.com/article/189338/adobe_shows_flash_and_air_apps_for_google_android.html
Apple doesn't want Flash, Air, Java, or any other means of loading applications onto an iPhone. They want total control, and as many commercial apps as possible, so they get paid. That's the only reason they're not supporting Flash, Java, or other defacto web standards on the iPhone, despite the fact that's currently making the iPhone a lower-class web client.
Microsoft is the only proponent of Silverlight, a competitor to Flash that's just as proprietary. So it's quite natural they would not be supporting Flash themselves on their WinMo devices... 'scuse me, their "Windows Phone 7" devices... a new name with each revision. Of course, had you read the link you posted carefully, you would know that Microsoft is working with Adobe to allow them to release Flash for "Windows Phone 7". I would estimate, at this point, Microsoft will do everything they can to not screw up their new platform, and "better web experience than iPhone" will be one of the standard targets of, well, everyone but Apple.
And in fact, it is Adobe's job to push Flash. They're doing that, too, even on Linux .. they recently joined the LiMo Foundation, and play to support Flash on Linux phones and other devices: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000072-264.html
Google's YouTube is moving away from Flash, for very good reasons: they're a video site, and Flash is just extra baggage, once you have standard video. That's very different than Google saying "no Flash anywhere". YouTube is an entirely different concern than smart phones and tablets.
Open != Free (as in beer).
Open standards are, well, open standards. H.264, VC-1, AC-3, USB, 802.11, 802.3, etc. They're published standards, anyone is free to implement them. This is entirely aside from whether there are patent entanglements or not.
And in fact, you probably know whether there are patent entanglements in published standards, because there's a licensing body that both takes your licensing fees (independent of any other corporate control -- thus, still open, same deal for all comers), or it's 20 years old, thus, no patents left. Other things, well, you may expect it to be without patent entanglements, but do you really know? VP3 was patented by On2, but Xiph has a free license for those patents. But it's only ten years old... are the really in the clear with Theora going back before 2000? Have they added any improvements over VP3 that might be newly entangled? And most of all, if I'm a big company and start using Theora, who's paying the settlement costs if someone does come out of the woodwork and sue me?
Yeah... except, the Mozilla folks have already said they're not going to do this in Firefox:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html
To summarize: there are functions in the OS that do these things, that every other piece of software uses, that have been in the OS for over a decade, and that do these functions better than a CODEC embedded in our Web Brower ever will. Thus, we refuse to use those interfaces.
I suspect next, Mozilla will be writing their own video drivers, file system, PDDs, etc. since they can't trust any of those to be 100% functional. Or maybe, they should just write the stinkin' web browser, and use the parts of the OS that are written by folks who know those functions better than Team Mozilla.
Of course, what'll really happen is that someone will hack Firefox to use the OS routines, and before you know it, Firefox will be about as popular as Navigator is today. Or it may slip completely, overtaken by Chrome. Religion is like that... it's a guaranteed fail, when it's put up against rational thought.
if you actually WATCH the videos it's not hard to see that the theora encode looks FAR worse than the h.264 on practically every frame
Indeed. And consider... this is the Xiph web site.. these are the Ogg Theora development people. So what you're seeing there is the best argument they could construct, and it still fails.
Theora is at an inherent disadvantage, and always will be. It was, after all, based on On2's VP3, which they tossed out there for free once VP4 was shipping. They're on VP8 now, and recently bought by Google. Anyway, they are inherently limited by the improvements they can add, because they're likely to trip on any number of video encoding patents that have been filed in the 10 years since VP3 was released. This, in fact, is one big concern from the big companies involved in HTML5... if you're an MPEG-LA licensee, you're covered should any new patents emerge on H.264, as unlikely as that is. But Theora hasn't been all that tested.
I have absolutely nothing against some open source CODECs being available, I think that's great, and would put pressure on the MPEG-LA to keep H.264 free. But Theora is the wrong answer. Right answers? Well, it needs more work, but the BBC's Dirac CODEC is more competitive, if just as much of a problem on handheld gear. Google could release VP8 to the FOSS community, which is said to be noticeably more efficient than H.264 at lower bitrates. Both still could have patent entanglement issues, however.
Not to mention other things. H.264 is used in satellite and cable television. It's the recording CODEC for nearly all tapeless HD consumer video cameras, some pro cameras (Panasonic's AVC-Intra) and an increasing number of digital still cameras with video. Some smartphones record in H.264. So you're going to want interchange... if I ever buy a "tablet" computer, it'll be able to dock to my camera or camcorder, and play back 720p (camera) or 1080p (camcorder) on that 10" screen... or I'll wait for a tablet that can. H.264 is the standard CODEC for the early 21rst century. If it's replaced, as it's has largely replaced MPEG-2, that will take something substantially better. Not something worse.
The main reason you might not be able to hardware decode for Ogg Theora is simple: these devices already exist, they don't necessarily have the hardware, and certainly not the software, for accelerated Theora decoding. So it's going to take some work to even discover if some reasonable percentage of today's devices could decode Theora. Which means you need a real incentive to get device manufacturers and OS creators to do this.
Now, look at who these folks are. You have Google. Apple. Microsoft. Palm. RIM. Nokia. Does anyone have a strong incentive here, unless somehow, magically, Theora DID become the web standard? Not to mention that the hardware's already cast, and may simply not be retargetable to Theora so easily... the acceleration in the ARM/PowerVR and TI SOCs was designed with H.264 specifically in mind. It's a bit different on desktops... much of the very good H.264 acceleration you get today is done by graphics cards, using more general purpose resources.
Then, you have video streaming guys like Google... they're happy with H.264, and do not want Theora as a standard, because it's less efficient. That means real money to them... YouTube's primary expense is the cost of streaming video. In fact, Google recently bought On2, ironically the company responsible for the VP3 CODEC upon which Theora is based. On2 has VP7 and VP8 CODECs today... supposedly, VP8 is even more efficient than H.264, particularly at low bitrates. It's quite possible Google's planning to switch from H.264 to VP8 on YouTube in the not too distant future... that would actually save them fairly big bucks, if VP8 is as good as claimed.
Yup.
Basically, the HTML power-that-be set out to establish video as a first-class thing within HTML, via the tag. Much as with , they would not dictate precisely what kinds of video would be supported, but basically allow the browser to play it or fail. BUT... there was general consensus that, as with JPG and GIF, originally (and later, PNG) there ought to be known standard formats that everyone supported.
The Mozilla folks, backed by Opera and a bunch of FOSS entities, back Ogg Theora as the video CODEC that should be "built-in" on all web browsers. They do this because Theora is open source... it's based on On2's VP3.2 CODEC, which was released as open source after they had produced their VP4 CODEC. They gradually opened the source even more, eventually granting the Xiph Foundation a "do whatever you like with it" BSD-like license, including the free use of any governing patents. "Theora" is named for Theora Jones, a character from the "Max Headroom" series.
Anyway, the opposition, including Apple, Google, and various others back H.264 instead. Some of this is de-facto.. H.264 is already the standard used in most modern video these days: satellite and some cable TV, European HD broadcast, YouTube, iPhone/iPod, etc. It is, of course, not free, but administered by the MPEG-LA, the same licencing organization that deals with other MPEG and related IP. The FOSS folks reject this because it means no built-in free H.264 CODEC, and as well, potential frees for internet broadcast, even per-view fees (which have been promised, but regularly rolled back to date).
Big companies are also somewhat concerned about the patent implications of VP3 and Theora... there aren't tested in court, and there's no organization like the MPEG-LA ready to take the legal heat if there's any new patent exposure. It's so far just a fear, but not a trivial one. The other is for streaming video: companies like YouTube spend nearly all their money in network fees... the cost of delivering video. Ogg Theora is less efficient than H.264, so switching to H.264 would result in a quality loss or much more costs, neither of which is deemed acceptable.
I actually understand both positions. But Mozilla takes it one step further... they won't just not support H.264 as a built-in, but they do not intend to support external video CODECs. That seems to be a very stupid position: video CODECs for many different kinds of video are now a standard part of every major OS, just like device drivers moved from hacks or in-application to in-OS back in the 1980s or so. Many OSs (for example, Windows 7 and MacOS X) ship with H.264 drivers built in. It's actually important to at least have the option of using an OS driver in preference to anything you might build in to your application, simply because OS-level drivers can very often use your hardware better.
A couple examples. It's impossible to play 1080p H.264 in software on a 1GHz ARM A9 processor. Yet, in the nVidia Tegra 2 chipset, you can not only play 1080p H.264 video, but you can play it at very low power, around 200mW. They have a rockin' accelerator for it... same as most every handheld device today. Another one... most desktop PCs play 1080/60i or 1080/30p pretty well, as long as they have dual core or so CPUs. But 1080/60p is pretty challenging. I have been shooting 1080/60p video for sports video, much better. It'll play in VLC, sort of... it's choppy, and using 40-60% of my total CPU, this, on a Q9550 PC. Running in evil old Windows Media Player in WIn7, I get perfect 60fps, full screen on one of my 1200p monitors, using 12% CPU. Why? That video CODEC is tapping DXVA 2.0, which is offloading much of the work to my nVidia 8800GT, which would otherwise be sitting around, all 118 stream processors given nothing to do.
So with Mozilla, it's not just sound open source philosophy, it's religion. There's no reason they shouldn't support OS-level CODECs, they're just trying to leverage Firefox's popularity to force others to adopt Theora as the one and only default CODEC.
Most modern mobile devices have a screen resolution of at least 800x480, so we're just fine with those old hard-coded 800 pixel pages. These forthcoming tablets will probably have at least 1024x600.
Sure, it's better to reformat on the fly where possible, and support some lower resolutions. You may want to support a custom tiny, feature limited version for limited devices like iPhones and Blackberries. But a minimum of 640x480 has been around for 30+ years... no need for normal web pages to consider anything smaller. Most desktop users have 1024x768 or better, and should get to use that while navigating web pages.
After some years of using a TI Silent 700 dialup, an Exidy Sorcerer, being on hardware design team of the Commodore +4, years of using standard hardware PCs, using HP-UX, UNIX Systems III, IV, and V, Amiga UNIX, Sun Solaris, AmigaOS, BeOS, BSD, many flavors of Linux, and also designing Macs back in 1997, I have come to the conclusion that you're an idiot to rely on any company's proprietary hardware for something as important as your computing needs, unless there is no other choice. So maybe at the very high end, no other choice. On the desktop, plenty of choices.
For music, I've gone from "Six transistor!!!" radios, home made AM receivers, a dozen boomboxen and another dozen portable CD players, MP3 CD players, half a dozen dedicated MP3 players (including an iPod), another bunch that quality as PMPs (including a Zune), and finally ended up with the Motorola DROID. This is the one device that really replaces all those little pocket boxes with LCDs attached: GPS, cheap camera, Palm T|X, cellphone, guitar tuner/chord book, PMP (with greater than SD resolution), MP3 player (with my choice of fully functional player apps, such as Museek and Pandora), web terminal (on par with the small Nokias as far the browsing experience goes), etc. No software is locked out, anything can run as a daemon or background program, multitasking works just dandy, and I still get longer battery life than iPhone users. I can download the SDK, put an app up on my web site if I like, and every Android user can use it, no hacking the system needed. And even more amazing, it even works very well as a phone.
Apple is the wrong way. It's a throwback to the 1970s/1980s, when everyone made their own proprietary computing environments. Apple's done a fine job tying up the hardware so you have to pay 2x-3x as much fo the same PC you can buy from anyone else. Now they're working hard, not on the Mac, not yet, but elsewhere, to eliminate price competition in software, and have absolute say about what you may and many not run on your purchased software.
Actually, TiVo did well by getting there first, and delivering just the one function people needed at the time: smart digital VCR, aka DVR, aka PVR. It was so simple the computer and even smart TV challenged could use it, and it just did the one thing well. Sure, they've added a few features, but it's not intended to be an applications platform.
Early cable and satellite company DVRs were actually so horrible, they sold TiVo and Replays. But they fixed that. It was inevitable that "DVR" become a function of other hardware. And that's why the cable and satellite units sell... they bundle the DVR free. Their goal isn't selling hardware, it's keeping customers happy enough to keep paying that monthly fee. So they toss in a workable PVR, and folks just use it. My fairly ancient Dish Network model 4000 receiver (used in my office, not my media room) died a few weeks ago. Dish sent me a fee-free PVR/receiver to replace it.
MythTV has failed to catch on for many reasons. A big one... it needs a PC. I can have an STB drawing a few watts in standby mode doing my recording, or I can have a full fledged PC. Even a scaled down (Atom or VIA) PC is going to suck 10x-20x more power than a modern STB.
Then, well, ok. I can order parts at NewEgg and build myself a low power PC in a nice CE-lookin' box, track down one of the better tuners that's working ok these days, download and install Mythbuntu, etc. Then again, I used to design personal computers from scratch.. this is pretty easy. But where do my Mom or sisters go to get a MythTV box? Then, how to they get it working with their cable or satellite systems? Ok, now how do they do that in HD?
The iPad certainly will cater to the stupid, and the naive, and the.. well, those who don't know any better, and are in the thrall of Apple. For awhile, anyway.. but some of that's because the uses for a tablet, versus a smart phone or laptop, have not quite been established in the consumer's mind yet. But they will, and as this happens, the iPad will come up increasingly short.
Look at the Smart Phone.. this has replaced a pocketful of devices. My DROID can do most anything you'd find in a stand-alone "digital appliance" with an LCD screen. It does the PDA-thing, and currently most of it better than my old Palm T/X or Treo. It's a decent enough phone, for all I care about cellphones. It's a better music player than an iPod or a Zune, largely because I ran change the music player.. run Museek to get my random plays tweaked to my mood, run Pandora or streaming internet "radio", etc. It's a better pocket video player than these devices, too, higher resolution, and with interchangeable memory cards, to I can carry as much video as I like. It does the GPS thing very well, and a bunch of location-based cool things that no GPS device does... like finding moves playing where I am, or showing me the prices of an item online and in the surrounding stores. It plays games... I only have a few stupid ones like Majhong, but for pocket entertainment, better than the Palm. It's a fine guitar tuner and chord library (yeah, I actually do have numerous little boxes doing those functions), and I can store and view my song library (chords and lyrics) on the device, too. It's a fine internet pad, about as good as those little Nokias... no replacement for my 24" screens, but it beats the crap out of the Treo or the iPhone. And the list can go on.
This "tablet" thing is interesting for a few reasons, but it's always going to sit between "laptop" and "smartphone/PDA". So, what can get out of this device I can't get in my PDA. The iPad seems to be shouting about eBooks. Maybe. Real eBooks reflow, and yeah, I have the Aldiko reader on my DROID, and it's not actually that bad. Inside... it's useless outdoors, and it's going to suck too much power to keep on all the time. Well, hey, same with the iPad... you know that screen's going to power down after awhile, and it's just as crappy in the bright sunlight. So iPad fails even on the main premise Apple seems to be pushing, other than "ru
> Why in the hell do I need 3 fucking USB ports on an underpowered toy?
So you can hook in a mouse or keyboard. Or your digital video or still camera, to preview what you just shot on a big screen (Epson sells specialty devices that do this for $500+). To access additional information from USB storage devices, keys or HDDs. To download routes to your car GPS unit (they're not all wireless yet). To download music to your media player. USB is a dandy thing to have... Apple as bone stupid to not support at least one USB port in the iPad.
> What well-adjusted person would connect a fucking tablet to a TV? What is the benefit of running 1080i video on this tiny ass screen?
The 1080p output is for the HDMI connector.. obviously, you don't run full resolution on a smaller screen. The reason you'd want to hook this to a TV? Same reason you would want to hook any PMP to a television -- you have this portable media player with you, and hey, look, a TV. Same reason I can hook every one of my camcorders to a TV. Apple was bone stupid not to offer HDMI out on the iPad.
The whole point of a general purpose tablet computer is to replace a bunch of things done by "digital appliances" today. It's an eBook reader. And a PMP. And a photo/video previewer. And an internet tablet. And anything else you want it to be.
Ever used a smartphone? If you use one for awhile, you'll notice it's not really so much a telephone anymore, it's a general purpose pocket computer. It's a GPS, It's a PMP/MP3 player. It's an organizer. It's a mobile search engine. Same thing here with a well designed tablet. This is a well designed tablet.. in fact, perhaps the first one with the hardware necessary to actually deliver more than just "fat iPod" functionality.
I agree. There are several things I must have an in eReader, to even bother with one. It needs to work on the beach, and it needs at least an easy day of life of book reading. I also want color and decent resolution on the display, so that magazines and datasheets are at least possible to read. This seems to be the first device that does that, thanks to the Pixel Qi display (been following that one for awhile).
The nVidia Tegra 2 chipset, though, clearly makes this more than an eReader. They've done a great job on the hardware.. as long as they're supporting each of these OSs correctly (nVidia hasn't been great in the past, but they are really serious about being a force in the device market), they were delivering 16+ hours of 1080p video on the devices that were floating around CES this year. This also has HDMI output, so it's definitely going to work as a larger-screen PMP-style device. That's also a dual-core Cortex A9 in the Tegra 2.
I'm wondering about storage... I kind of expect them to go with internal flash rather than a 1.8" HDD, particularly after seeing the size of the thing. I didn't see a memory card slot either, but at least you could "dock" with a USB drive of some sort. That's also key to allowing the device to act as a video/photo field accessory... if I can offload photos and video to it (at least MP4/USB video, I don't imagine I'm getting to hook an HDV camcorder to it), then it's additionally useful in the camera bag.
In short, this one's very exciting to me... and seems to have corrected most every mistake they made on the Apple iPad.
Java is the high-level language, at least assuming you're using the standard SDK. Dalvik is the byte-code/virtual machine model. There may be other ways to generate Dalvik byte-code in the future.
There was no NEED to do three traces between pins. They just didn't want to fork over the dough for an extra two layers or so. And while that density might have been "unheard of" at the time in the emerging PC industry, it was SOP in industry and aerospace, even back then. You're talkin' about what, 8/8mil traces, maybe even a bit fatter, assuming the gigantic ICs they had back in the 70s.
Right. And Apple had their own internal needs for a browser they controlled, obviously (well, obvious in retrospect). They timed Safari to be ready when their support deal with Microsoft on IE for Mac ran out.
It was important to establish desktop cred for Safari, at least among Mac users, so when it moved to the iPhone, it would be accepted as a better handheld browser than you typically had on a portable device. Which it pretty much was. Not because Safari was any great shakes, but because most of the mobile browsers just sucked.
Not marketing to business seems to have done Apple just fine, anyway. The iPhone has done so well precisely because it was the first smart phone really made for and marketed to consumers rather than business users. They get into business much the same way Macs do... individuals bring them to work. Doesn't mate with every business need, but at least in engineering, I'm surrounded by the frickin' things. Though lately, more DROIDs are showing up.
Well, a couple of things. On the average, most of your friends don't have Macs.. they're 5% of the global desktop computer market. Secondly, it's a reasonably upgrade.. going to the new MacOS X "Snow Leopard" costs you $29. There's just one version. I thought the $50 upgrades to Windows 7 I bought last summer were reasonable-ish. So I spent $150.. with Mac, it could have been just that $29, if I wasn't honest.
But here's the thing... updating actually benefits Apple. They're not really big enough to use Microsoftian bad behavior to push upgrades, but they also don't want to support older OSs forever. So upgrades are very good for Apple, even if they don't make money on every one. Not so for Microsoft..
Apple never did business/enterprise correctly, or well.
But they used to be a powerhouse in education. And they're not just losing that market, they're intentionally walking away.
The future trend is one computer per student. They've been doing that at my kids' high school recently. This was completely enabled by the rise of Netbook PCs. Every kid in school borrows a Netbook for the year.... that's possible with $300 Netbooks, impossible based on the lower Apple iBook prices. In fact, Apple's prices are all over crazy... the average price paid for a laptop, excluding netbooks, was about $550, 4Q09. Where is Apple's $500 laptop, much less their $300 laptop. Without they, they're walking away from one of their traditional markets.
My guess is that Apple just doesn't care.. they like the high margins on the Apple laptops.. they're getting twice as much money per computer as Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba, etc. That's got to feel good, but also, I think Apple doesn't quite believe that the Mac is their future.
You clearly have network problems.... I'm no fan of Word (it's a wordprocessor entirely optimize for simple 1-25 page documents and memos), but I've been forced to use it at many companies over the course of my 27 year career, and have not once found anything remotely close to the issues you're describing. Even between mixed versions of Word, and quite often, Open Office.
With that said, I really have problems with the idea of Word Documents being used as the company standard for document distribution. And yet, it's often the standard.
Back in the 90s, while leaving a company to form another, I was writing up a formal document (150+ pages) describing details of the 100,000 line-or-so program I had written during my three years there. I was forced to use Word (our documentation group had revolted and moved to something else, everyone else still used Word), and it was a heinous boondoggle.. barely functional. I would have been better writing it on the Commodore 64... I'm not being satirical. One assumes they have fixed it.
But the proper in-house standard for documentation is PDF. That's the rule I set when I get to make those decisions. Otherwise, individuals or groups use their wordprocessor of course, though these days, I'd demand an ODF file checked in to match that PDF. In the past, as long as the company owned a license for your WP of choice (I found buying you your favorite, versus forcing Word on you, was a no-brainer cost savings, at least where engineers were concerned).
Actually, Apple has bought most of their media content creation software from other companies. These didn't have anything to do with locking out the PC... the PC market is crowded. Yeah, the program that became Final Cut was Macromedia's video editor before Apple bought it. But there are at least a half dozen pro-level video editors on the PC: Media Composer, Premiere, Vegas, EDIUS, SpeedEDIT, eQ/iQ/sQ, etc.
They also bought Emagic.. sure, it was to acquire Logic, and sure, they cancelled the PC version, but it's not as if this was a blow to the even-more-crowded PC audio market. Same goes with the TOW DVD creation companies Apple bought to deliver today's DVD Studio, or any of the others.
Apple started this back in the days when PCs were better than 2x as fast as Macs, period (eg, not just based on prices), and Apple was seriously in danger of losing their media content creation niche. They started becoming another Adobe, in a sense, just to ensure the Mac remained viable, even if companies like Adobe and Avid left the Mac. Which they were.. Adobe was cutting back on Apple support in the latter days of the PPC Mac, and recommending migration to PCs to their customers. Once Apple went to x86, they recanted.. even before Apple as able to regain some installed base.
And while my Apple Fan quotient is zero, I can't support a falsehood... they have evolved most of the programs they have acquired in good if not earthshaking ways. Some of these were bought years back, but they still produce decent new versions. Some of this was smart behavior by Apple.. they kept the original development teams. Same thing Sony did when they bought Sonic Foundry, which has kept me on the Sony tools for my own video and audio work. Those guys were the best in the business on any platform, before Sony, and the remain unequaled (unpaid plug).
Sure, there are other companies still supporting MacOS. If you're doing UNIX stuff, it's pretty simple to support MacOS, and at 5% worldwide, on the desktop, they do represent the largest, if oddest, UNIX-based installed base. Media content creation software companies have to walk a fine line.. the Mac is more viable than it was some years back, which is good. If you have a great new product, they might buy you. But they might also buy your competition. That makes your head explode, in thinking of Mac support versus a presence in the Windows market (eg, is that wasted effort or your exist strategy?)
Apple is counting on user and group demand to get into business.
For example, they have good traction in some media content departments. Most professional media organizations standardize on a set of tools, and stick with them for decades. If you go to video production houses, you'll generally find they're "Sony shops" or "Panny shops".. they don't mix and match camcorder gear. Same applies to video editing suites and at least OS platforms if not necessarily (on the PC side) PC vendors.
In short, Apple keeps their adherents, and they have virtually no chance of selling Macs to a PC/Vegas, PC/Newtek, or PC/Grass Valley shop, and not a very good chance of selling to PC/Avid or PC/Adobe shop. Similar things in audio work.
Outside of content creation, it's even more difficult. There's lots of talk of corporate email and maybe even desktop apps, and if that's all you're doing throughout your organization, maybe Apple stands a chance. If you're doing software development, sure, you might be able to run on the Mac... at least as a Linux replacement. But once you get to non-FOSS development, you probably can't get that special compiler for a NXP ARM or TI DSP on Mac. Windows may the only target.
Going on to hardware development, it gets even more severe... there are no good hardware tools for MacOS, and for any reasonable hardware development environment, you don't just need one, you need dozens of tools. This is the same reason peopl use Windows and MacOS for media content creation over Linux.. it's not just one tool, it's potentially dozens (I do hardware development, software development, video and music... the PC is the only possible answer).
Now, get back to larger companies.. you have to hire a sysadmin. He may not need to do much in the engineering group, but his department is going to manage computers in marketing, sales, finance, office support, documentation, etc... definitely all the non-tech departments. Unless you can do each and every one of those things on the Mac, the PC wins by default.
And then there's the smart business decision. If I'm building a new company, I need gear. I'd like to establish a relationship with a hardware vendor for any medium sized company or larger. If I pick Apple, I have no recourse... I take what they give me, and that's that. It's an expensive platform shift to move to another platform. If I buy a PC, regardless of the software platform. I can change hardware suppliers any time I like. Which gives me much more leverage with them. So Apple would never be the right answer, from this aspect of the business perspective.