Solipsism Gradient

Whew. It’s over. This year’s WWDC was certainly one of the most intense – and one of the most promising – that I can remember.

It started on a somewhat sad note: Steve Jobs was clearly unwell, moving slowly and his voice was unusually weak. He was onstage for only a few minutes before turning things over to his VPs. Then, towards the end, when he talked about iCloud (which is obviously something he put a lot of energy into) he got better. Still, I have a feeling that this might have been Jobs’ last keynote; he’s clearly not going to be around for many more years. However, the general impression I had was that everybody feels that Apple is now synchronized enough with his mindset to go on indefinitely without him.

This WWDC was clearly about pointing out future directions. And it was all about software. Many commenters are pointing out this or that added feature in (say) Mail, or in the Finder, or in iOS 5. Others are bemoaning the lack of hardware announcements. Of course there have been the usual comments about Apple copying this or that from Windows. Still others are gleefully pointing out how the iPhone 5 (for instance) has been delayed – this when it hasn’t even been announced, but they apparently believe in each other’s rumors!

Let’s put the hardware issue away first. As I’ve been saying for a couple of years now, Apple’s heavy investment into Clang, LLVM and connected technologies like LLDB is now paying off. This trio will very soon be Apple’s main developer tools backend. They’ll be free from overweight, ancient, license-encumbered stuff like gcc and gdb and the results are very encouraging. Without going into details (NDA ahem), suffice it to say that fellow developers have seriously agreed with me that the new tools are better – this or that detail notwithstanding – than anything else on the mobile or desktop market today.

Also Apple is now free to make hardware details irrelevant. When Apple switched to Intel six years ago, I wrote:

Winners:

• Apple, of course. As I commented below, they’re free (or will be, in a year) of the CPU-architecture-as-a-religion meme. They get a literally cool CPU/chipset for their PowerBooks; although I suppose they won’t use that name in the future; how about IBook ? They get dual-core CPUs right now, and a 64-bit version in the future.

And this is still true. At that time, too, some people saw Apple “imitating” the Wintel machines by adopting Intel CPUs as a negative thing (or even as positive, depending on their bias). Now with Clang/LLVM becoming Apple’s mainstream tools, they could switch CPUs anytime without users noticing; the new Intel-based Macs were still normal Macs, and normal users didn’t care which architecture the ran on. And indeed, lately rumors have abounded about ARM-based MacBooks. But, as I wrote at WWDC 2005:

…it’s a new type of freedom. Freedom of architecture. IBM underperformed, they’re out; at least for now. Intel works better now, they’re in; at least for now. Next year, some other chip may be hot, Mac OS X will be on it, and recompiling will be even easier. We’re free!

For the normal user, hardware specs aren’t that important anymore beyond a certain threshold – if they’re sufficient for the job, the details are unimportant. As the old joke goes:

A lady stands in front of an enclosure in the London zoo and gestures towards one of the hippopotami, asking a passing zookeeper:

“Please, can you tell me if that hippopotamus is male or female”?

“I’m sorry to say that this information would be of interest only to another hippopotamus…”

As Jobs said in the keynote, now it’s all about “devices”. Desktops, laptops, iPads, iPhones – all are equal devices in the iCloud. Few people think of their iPad/iPhone as a computer; the innards are of interest only to those of us who have to develop software or hardware to (ahem) “mate” with those devices. Will the next iPhone or laptop use Apple’s A5 chip, or will there be an A6? My mom doesn’t care, and yours shouldn’t – unless she’s a fellow developer. Not even if she’s a stock analyst!

Next: software directions.

And another dual-screen device, the Entourage eDge:

(also check my previous post on the subject.)

This one’s different in that the screens aren’t identical; there’s an e-paper display on the left, and a LCD on the right. Both are touch-enabled.

Looks like Toshiba has released a device called the Libretto W100:

Compare with this image from the tablet proposal by Mario Amaya and myself (posted August 10th, 2009):

Fun! But I like our hinge better… 🙂

Posted by richardl:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

Via John Gruber, I just saw an interesting post by Steve Cheney:

It?s pretty evident that Apple isn?t wed to individual suppliers. Not only are they back to creating their own chips, but they are also one of the only ‘compute’ companies to have used each of the top 3 processor architectures over time – ARM, x86, and Power PC.

…This week Apple confined developers to a specific set of tools (XCode [sic]).

…By telling developers to move to XCode tools, Apple is setting the stage to potentially switch architectures.

…In 2003, Apple advised developers to switch to XCode tools. …2 years later Apple moved to Intel across its entire Mac line.

…perhaps the A4 is NOT an ARM architecture. In fact, it?s highly possible that the A4 is a dual core Power Architecture…

The last sentence is of course false, as Gruber says; the A4 does run ARM code.

While I don’t think that forcing developers to switch to Xcode (which is the correct spelling_ means that Apple will soon be switching architectures on their iPad/iPhone line, or on their desktop/laptop line for that matter, Xcode does offer developers a future-proof environment that hasn’t been commented on by other observers: the Clang/LLV project. Briefly, Clang is a compiler frontend for C-based languages, backed by LLVM – which stands for “Low Level Virtual Machine”. Both projects are heavily backed and staffed by Apple.

Clang has been increasingly supported by Xcode as a substitute for the gcc compiler toolchain. The details are quite esoteric, but one interesting capability is that C-based languages – C, Objective-C and C++ – are compiled to the LLVM bytecode, which is then translated into native machine language by a back-end. The last phase could even happen in a just-in-time fashion, allowing apps to be distributed in LLVM code (therefore running on all current and future Apple machines). Some groups are even working on chips that execute LLVM bytecode directly.

In other words, it’s no coincidence that Apple is now instructing developers to switch to Clang-supported languages and their Clang-wrapping IDE (Xcode). There may not be an architecture switch coming soon, but Apple will have much more freedom in doing their own CPUs for iPad/iPhone, and more ammunition in negotations with Intel and other top-end chip companies.

Rainer, it is interesting to note that Adobe built their ActionScript/Flash compiler for iPhone on top of LLVM.

http://cs.illinois.edu/news/2009/Oct8-2

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html

Via John Gruber, I just saw an interesting post by Steve Cheney:

It?s pretty evident that Apple isn?t wed to individual suppliers. Not only are they back to creating their own chips, but they are also one of the only ‘compute’ companies to have used each of the top 3 processor architectures over time – ARM, x86, and Power PC.

…This week Apple confined developers to a specific set of tools (XCode [sic]).

…By telling developers to move to XCode tools, Apple is setting the stage to potentially switch architectures.

…In 2003, Apple advised developers to switch to XCode tools. …2 years later Apple moved to Intel across its entire Mac line.

…perhaps the A4 is NOT an ARM architecture. In fact, it?s highly possible that the A4 is a dual core Power Architecture…

The last sentence is of course false, as Gruber says; the A4 does run ARM code.

While I don’t think that forcing developers to switch to Xcode (which is the correct spelling) means that Apple will soon be switching architectures on their iPad/iPhone line, or on their desktop/laptop line for that matter, Xcode does offer developers a future-proof environment that hasn’t been commented on by other observers: the Clang/LLVM project. Briefly, Clang is a compiler frontend for C-based languages, backed by LLVM – which stands for “Low Level Virtual Machine”. Both projects are heavily backed and staffed by Apple.

Clang has been increasingly supported by Xcode as a substitute for the gcc compiler toolchain. The details are quite esoteric, but one interesting capability is that C-based languages – C, Objective-C and C++ – are compiled to the LLVM bytecode, which is then translated into native machine language by a back-end. The last phase could even happen in a just-in-time fashion, allowing apps to be distributed in LLVM code (therefore running on all current and future Apple machines). Some groups are even working on chips that execute LLVM bytecode directly.

In other words, it’s no coincidence that Apple is now instructing developers to switch to Clang-supported languages and their Clang-wrapping IDE (Xcode). There may not be an architecture switch coming soon, but Apple will have much more freedom in doing their own CPUs for iPad/iPhone, and more ammunition in negotations with Intel and other top-end chip companies.

Tomorrow, Apple will present their new product. It’s all but certain that it will be a tablet-like device, but all else is speculation.

I’ve been rereading my August 5 post here, detailing what I at the time thought reasonable guesses. A follow-up post had some lovely mock-up images (courtesy of Mario Amaya), which I still consider some of the best so far – pity they got relatively little linkage from elsewhere. Here’s a sample:

where you can see that my hunch at the time was of a folding dual-screen device, each screen having about 7″ diagonal and 1280×720 at 200ppi, 1024×576 at 160 dpi, or even 800×450 at 120 ppi resolution – this depending on the technology used and the price point the device aims at.

I also thought that allowing the screens to fold back-to-back would give us a nice videogame mode, and using it vertically would allow it to be used as my favorite reading device – a mass market paperback. (It would also have the exact dimensions of one of those.)

My main ideas here still stand: the device would be aimed at the ebook, portable videogame, and portable film-viewing markets, with a secondary use of web browsing, email and the usual stuff done on a netbook.

Of the thousands of speculations published elsewhere – I regret not having had the time to bookmark more than a few – a quite well-reasoned one is one by Channeling Design. The conclusions are mostly quite different from my own, though; well worth a read.

In the months since I wrote about this, some interesting new screen technologies and devices have been talked about: AMOLEDs, Mirasol, Skiff, Pixel Qi, and so forth. For an ideal tablet, we should have 200 ppi, color- and video-capable, readable in direct sunlight but with low-power backlighting, touch sensitivity, video camera built in between the screen pixels, and a surface that is both hardened (like Gorilla Glass) and smudge-rejecting. Of course, it should also be extremely thin.

The puzzle is, essentially, which combinations of these properties have been deemed necessary and economical for a generation-1 device. I don’t doubt that Apple (meaning, Steve Jobs) has both the cash and the persuasion ability to buy the entire output of one of those manufacturers for a year or so; perhaps even to convince them to hide the fact that their display has progressed beyond the prototype stage.

Regarding the rest, I have mostly negative reasoning to offer. I don’t think the device will be an iSomething; there’s already too many of those, and none of the proffered names seemed convincing (except iBook, which has been used in the past). A Magic Something would, perhaps, pick up the trend of the Magic Mouse, and signal a departure from the iPod/iPhone/iBook era.

I also don’t think it will be a cellphone – meaning, a device sold and partially subsidized by cellphone companies – the iPhone already fills that niche quite well. It will have a few wireless connections of course, but not all of them, and that won’t be its primary function. I also expect Apple to pitch the device for functions that can be done by iPods, iPhones or MacBook laptops, but it will be at its best doing things that aren’t done well by any of those; reading ebooks is the obvious one here. (As an analogy, consider that when the iPod came out, you already could play music on Mac laptops and desktops with iTunes – it just wasn’t their primary function, nor was it convenient to do so in the context the iPod was aimed at.)

The device will run “OS X” in some new incarnation, but it won’t be the iPhone OS X nor the Mac OS X – though it may, perhaps, run apps for the iPhone in emulation mode.

That’s as far as I care to speculate before the announcement… after all, part of the thrill is actually seeing the magician pull the rabbit out of the hat.

The new iMac (27″, i5, 8GB) has arrived and is awesome. Most everything is now transferred to it and working; I had to merge my Home folder from the Time Machine backup I did of the old iMac I sold in September, before our Asia trip, with things I did in the 4 months on the MacBook Air that has been my only machine since then.

Small glitches:

– connecting an external monitor over MiniDP works, but (for me) it flickers distractingly every 5 minutes or so. The dreaded main display flicker is absent, though.

– the enclosed Magic Mouse is great; I loved the scroll-by-touch feature. Alas, after 1 day of click-intensive work, my hand started to hurt, so I’ve gone back to my el cheapo Pleomax mouse. Maybe I’ll try again later; my guess is holding the thing between thumb and little finger is straining some never-used muscle. It also has surprisingly sharp edges at those points.

I’ve also gotten my old Core Solo Mac Mini back and am setting it up. It still runs 10.5.8, so I’ll finally be able to debug running stuff on Leopard again.

If any of you still read this after nearly 50 days without posting, I’ve been tempted to do this:

Click on the comic to see the original at http://www.makeuseof.com/tech-fun/internet-cant-ignoere-grammar/ (via http://www.halfapixelshort.com/).

In other news, my trusty but overloaded MacBook Air proved unable to cope with serious developing (or even the usual mixture of stuff I do when procrastinating working on other things). Less than half an hour (often much less) after I connect to the Internet over either USB/Ethernet or WiFi, connect an external USB drive, an external monitor, or whatnot – much less all of these at once – the fan turns to full blast and soon thereafter the dreaded “kerneltask” begins to use 99% of both CPU cores, slowing typing and even mousing to a crawl.

Closing the Air for 10 to 20 minutes usually but not always allows resuming work for another short time, but sometimes a reboot is necessary. Must be global warming

Anyway, my new iMac 27″ quad-core i5 with 8GB of RAM (squeee!!!) is due to arrive tonight and all should be back to normal Real Soon Now?.