Solipsism Gradient

Some more thoughts about the Air.

I finally saw the pertinent parts of the keynote and paid attention to the shots of the Air’s interior and of the main board. Wow, that thing is cramped; 2/3 of it is battery. There’ve been serious announcements of progress in battery technology and for the next years we can expect even slimmer machines and/or longer capacity; still, it seems that Apple now considers 5 hours (if real) as a good compromise between bulk/weight and battery life.

The Air no doubt makes use of Apple’s recent patent (sorry, no time to find a URL for it) for glueing together a precision-cast aluminum chassis – meaning very few internal mounting screws and posts, much tighter tolerances, and serious amounts of weight and dimensions shaved off, as well as better heat distribution. It also means that the case feels like a single unit; it’s significant that people who’ve handled the Air report that it feels very solid, not at all fragile like it looks. Especially the moveable port door is said to feel solidly reliable.

People calling for a removable battery no doubt are unaware that such a thing would mean a huge case opening, meaning extra ribbing elsewhere to counteract the rigidity loss, mounting screws and a good lock, what amounts to a double wall inside the unit when the battery is mounted, a pair of connectors and so forth. Meaning perhaps 200g extra in weight, 4mm in depth and $50 (at least) added to the bill of materials… all to accomodate maybe 10% of users who need an extra battery for flying tourist class?

I remember from my hardware design days how there are cascading design choices like this. Someone comes in and says “can’t we do such-and-such” and they fall off their chair when you explain the consequences. Another example is the much-bemoaned lack of peripheral ports. But consider FireWire. Yes, Apple pioneered FireWire and it’s a great technology… but check the power requirements:

…[it] can supply up to 45 watts of power per port at up to 30 volts…

That would be the entire 45W of the external power supply right there! Admittedly Apple’s other laptops already lower that to about half by supplying less voltage. For instance, the FireWire developer note says for MacBooks:

The MacBook’s six-pin FireWire connector provides unregulated 9 V to 12 V power with a maximum load of 0.75 A. Developers should design to use 7 W sustained power, or less.

Contrast this to the new MacPro, which can supply 18W per port (28W total on all four ports), and you see how laptop power design considerations are important. Supplying 0.75A to get the standard 7W on a FireWire connector would have meant larger board traces, probably a thicker board, an extra power supply chip for the higher voltage, extra dissipation, cooling… not worth it. Lowering that requirement to 5W or less would mean many external drives not working properly.

The same reasoning applies to USB. A standard USB port must supply 0.5A continuously at 5V – 2.5W. The new MacPro and the latest revisions of the laptops (including the Air) support a special high-power mode where one port can supply 1.1A (5.5W). This was meant originally to allow the keyboard to work as a powered hub, supplying the regular 0.5A on each of its ports. The Air probably needs it for its external DVD drive, although the USB Developer Note says this only works for the keyboard – and supposedly the Air’s external drive doesn’t work on other Macs. Time will tell, but here too an extra USB port would have meant beefing up the machine, though not as much as a FireWire port would have.

Somewhat more puzzling is the limitation of the 80GB 1.8″ drive, as there are larger drives sold in iPods. Either Apple is already supply-constrained for those, or the slight differences in thickness and power consumption are significant; in any event, I expect the Air’s next revision to offer larger drives. Same for RAM; coming back to the pictures of the main board, notice there’s no space for extra RAM chips, meaning that 4GB will only be possible when the next chip series doubles capacity. (And a RAM socket? With a door? Forget it.)

Finally, all this is a great opportunity for acessory makers; expect a 4-port USB hub (powered, of course) with built-in gigabit Ethernet and media slots, for instance. Even for Apple itself, it might be interesting if Time Capsule allowed a plug-in DVD drive for remote access; it would just mean a firmware update, but I suppose the Air’s drive would be too much for the Capsule’s power supply.

kiltbear wrote:

I think it could quite easily be the primary machine for a decent sized share of the market. I think we geeks forget about how most normal people operate. Surf, email, sync the iPod nano or iPhone. For the “average” user, I think a MacBook Air (with external optical), Time Capsule, and iPhone offers an easy to use elegant combination that will meet most all of their needs.

True, but wouldn’t such a “normal person” be equally well served by a MacBook, at less cost? Not that I remember what such a person is like…

Now that the specs are out, some fast comments on the MacBook Air.

I think most complainers about missing features are seriously mistaken; they’re thinking it’s a replacement for the current MacBook and MacBook Pro lines (and if it were, they’d be right). But it’s a matter of demographics. The Air is perhaps the first Mac specifically designed as a secondary machine – though I suppose it might be OK as a primary machine for some small segment of the market.

The comments remind me a lot of the reactions to the Smart ForTwo car. It just seats two people, its luggage space is very small, it’s not ideal for long trips, and (at least here in Brazil) the wheels are too small for driving on the usually bumpy/potholed roads and highways. But that’s comparing it to larger cars, which makes no sense. As evidenced by its success in Europe, there is a market for it that usual cars can’t even compete in. I’d buy one (or two) if I could afford it – as they’re imported, they’re actually more expensive than locally-built full-size cars.

See, the market for the Smart is very specific. It’s an excellent second car for urban commuters – no sense firing up the family’s large car (or [shudder] SUV) just for driving to work or to the grocery, or for dropping the kid off at school; at least if it’s one kid only. It’s great for people who need to rent a small car for a few days in a foreign city; inexpensive and easy to park. Childless professional couples would get two.

Same thing applies to the MacBook Air. My main working machine is an iMac G5 with a second display; getting a little old but still usable. Every couple of days I copy my working folders to my laptop (currently a PowerBook G4), work on them somewhere, and return in the evening and copy the changed files back. I also use the laptop on trips, mainly for a similar purpose.

Now this is quite different from the days where that PowerBook was my main working machine; then, I needed (and got) maximum RAM, the largest hard drive on the market, lots of interfaces, and a DVD drive. Now, I need very little of that: a good screen, a normal-sized keyboard and a network interface (which can be wireless) is enough for me. I don’t need speakers (headphones are OK), audio input, or even an optical drive.

So, the MacBook Air is aimed right at my demographic. In other words, it doesn’t substitute or update the existing MacBook/Pros; it’s a machine for a specific segment that didn’t have a “lightweight” model directly aimed at it.

I’m glad I didn’t post anything before the just-finished keynote. From my point of view, the only interesting part was the MacBook Air; looks like a great machine for traveling with. So, back to work…

Rumors say Apple may switch the iPhone main processor to Intel’s upcoming Moorestown.

It’s too early to speculate until details come out, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to hear that Apple is considering this. And it would explain the closedness of the iPhone/iPod touch architecture… after all, once Apple allows third-party apps in, and publishes a toolchain/SDK, they’re pretty much locked into the current architecture, and switching to a new one is a major/slow/costly undertaking.

Consider the previous iPods as a counterexample. Apple has switched architectures there – we can’t even say for sure how often – without any users noticing. With only the UI visible on OS X, and no toolchain/SDK or even documentation of the innards, Apple is free to change things radically between software updates. By all accounts, the 1.0.x software is pretty much a work in progress, and 1.1.1 has probably changed a lot.

So, keeping things closed for now means the software hasn’t stabilized, and very probably the hardware hasn’t stabilized either.

Conclusions:

– the current generation of iPhone/iPod touch will remain closed forever, just like the first generations of iPods;

– an SDK is likely to come out only after everything (especially the hardware) has stabilized;

– Apple is unlikely to invest efforts into implementing TrustZone in the current generation, unless Moorestown (or whatever else they might adopt in the future) has a similar security feature – and maybe not even then;

– the fabled OS X tablet will come out when the new hardware is ready; by that time screens will be ready in the proper sizes; Sony showed an 11″ OLED TV recently, remember…

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Rainier Brockerhoff on the State of the iPhone

Rainier Brockerhoff’s State of the iPhone is an excellent read. Even though, as a Canadian, I can’t get an iPhone here (damn you, Ted Rogers, knuckle under already you greedy bastard), I really want an iPhone SDK. I might even pay for one,…

Grubered! (thanks, John… that explains the sudden traffic peak.)

Small addendum. The complexity of the whole updating process also explains two things; first, that some non-modified iPhones are also affected, and second, that Apple, busy with debugging Leopard which should come out this month, didn’t want to invest additional resources into reverse-engineering and QAing every hack that’s out there.

Regarding non-modified iPhones being affected – I hear from some quarters that the quantity of those are comparable to “bricked” hacked phones. If true, one more indication that a modern version of that famous saying should be “never ascribe to malice or incompetence that which can be explained by complexity”…

Update: forgot to thank Michael Tsai who linked here first.

Update#2: another interesting take on the subject of software complexity is Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code, which I’ve just ordered.

Slightly over two years ago, shortly after the Intel switch announcement, I wrote:

…the current installed base is something over 30 million PowerPC Macs (or even more, depending on your sources). By the end of 2007, Intel Macs will be perhaps 15% of that. It will take at least 5 years, probably more, for Intel Macs to surpass the PowerPC Mac installed base.

I’m pleased to see that Mac sales were so good that this milestone – equal number of PowerPC and Intel Macs – will apparently be reached before the end of 2007. At that time, some people feared developers would start releasing Intel-only versions of their software soon; as far as I know, except for natural exceptions like Parallels and VMWare, this hasn’t happened.

And, while recent news indicates that the upcoming Leopard’s hardware requirements have been upped a little, most recent G4s and all G5s will still run it well. Older G4s will, I suppose, be more disqualified by video speed restrictions than by CPU speed as such.