Solipsism Gradient

Leopard is delayed for 4 months – until October. John Gruber has a good analysis, as does Daniel Jalkut.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote:
Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

Even so, people who have not seen anything of Leopard beyond some leaked screenshots wrote excitedly about a MacWorld release, then about a March release, then when their wild predictions aren’t confirmed start to moan that “Apple’s been having trouble getting Leopard out” and now, even, that “Leopard had reportedly been delayed until October”. I really hope that Apple will show more details before WWDC, but I won’t be too surprised if they don’t.

The reference was to this DigiTimes story, which I didn’t even want to link to at the time because it sounded so absurd. Well, looks like they got it right, although the excuse for the delay is the iPhone, not Boot Camp. Although this is not stopping some people arguing that one of things apple will do during the extra months is converting Boot Camp into a Parallels-style virtualizer – something I’d previously described as likely to be implemented in firmware, until they took the TPM out of newer Intel Macs.

In retrospect, it’s not too surprising. Unusually, Apple is releasing 3 major products this year – TV, iPhone and Leopard – and all run some form of OS X despite having very different target markets and form factors. (Also unusually for Apple, all 3 were pre-announced.) So far, only the iPhone hasn’t been delayed, and clearly Apple felt that delaying all 3 would be a serious PR loss. Ergo, putting people to work on the iPhone makes some sense, supposing Apple managed to avoid the mythical man-month effect.

It’s still difficult to assess what this means for the upcoming WWDC. Sure, a feature-complete build will be available there, but unless something revolutionary new thing is revealed, it may not have much impact. Launching the iPhone there won’t be a big thing for developers unless a SDK is announced. I won’t be able to go this, so it seems I won’t miss much…

Folks on the #macsb IRC channel were talking about testing if an application was being run from a disk image, and it occurred to me that some code from XRay (already being adapted into XRay II) would be suitable for that. They suggested making a category on NSWorkspace, so here it is.

So the sample app project has a category on NSWorkspace which takes a path argument and returns a NSDictionary with some details about the volume and device. The app shows the attributes for its own path first, then you can check any others. Easy to test if the path points into a disk image or network drive, too. Please read the “ReadMe” file for details and caveats.

Suggestions are welcome. Please test this on your system and on any weird disk images, external drives or network volumes, and send me the results if they don’t look OK.

Wow, 15 days without a post. It’s been a slow couple of weeks, news-wise, and I’ve been distracted by off-line problems; sorry about that.

Of course the TV has finally shipped, there’s been tons of reports about it, and Apple’s stock price even got a good boost from that. Still, it’s a device I find it hard to comment upon, either positively or negatively. I rarely watch TV or even DVDs, our TV is an old model that has none of these new-fangled inputs or features (I think), and even if the device were available here I’m not in the target market. What does seem slightly interesting is that it apparently runs Mac OS X (not the “lite” OS X many expected), and therefore some people have already twiddled it to install additional video codecs.

Other than that, I’ve just read an excellent piece by former Apple manager John Martellaro, essentially arguing that Apple has first-class engineers and designers and doesn’t (at least not nowadays) do anything dumb, although it may look like it from the outside standpoint:

What I’ve noticed is that there is hardly a single writer, including myself, who has complete insight into Apple’s reasoning and design decision for a product.

…when you get a lot of smart people together in an Apple conference room, and let them fight it out, good things happen. One person will invariably have insight and hindsight that’s lacking in the others. By the time the dust clears, and a lot of scribbling has been done on the white board, a pretty good solution will have been worked out. Gotchas will be discovered and diagnosed. Experience with the customer, intimate knowledge of Mac OS X internals, and next generation technologies coming down the road will lead to sound engineering judgment from the group.

…Just remember, no matter how experienced any one writer is, they can seldom out-think a corporation as good as Apple.

Indeed. There are many young pundits, journalists and developers out there that are way too eager to jump on the “Apple is obviously brain-dead” bandwagon – of course “young”, nowadays, describes almost everyone from my viewpoint . In contrast, I think that, today, most questionable decisions from Apple can be blamed on limited human resources. Doing insanely great stuff takes time and needs first-class people.

Another never-ending discussion is the Leopard shipping date. I stiil agree with Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng that Leopard should ship at WWDC. However, people have been picking up a rumor that Apple is delaying Leopard by several months to (supposedly) get Macs to boot Vista. Huh? This completely illogical reasoning is aptly skewered by Daniel Eran at RoughlyDrafted:

Apple didn’t exactly scramble to get iTunes working on Vista, and iTunes is an important part of Apple’s business. That being the case, will Apple hold up the release of Leopard for months in order to support Vista in Boot Camp, a product that Apple makes no money in providing?

The story is so absurd on so many levels that it’s hard to find a place to start pointing out why it’s so stupid.

It really is very strange. Apple says they will ship in spring (these local seasonal references are really obsolete in a global context, but that’s another rant). Spring in Cupertino goes until a week or so after WWDC, people tell me. Even so, people who have not seen anything of Leopard beyond some leaked screenshots wrote excitedly about a MacWorld release, then about a March release, then when their wild predictions aren’t confirmed start to moan that “Apple’s been having trouble getting Leopard out” and now, even, that “Leopard had reportedly been delayed until October”. I really hope that Apple will show more details before WWDC, but I won’t be too surprised if they don’t.

Now that the waves around the iPhone have mostly died down, and we’re in a “silent period” between announcements, some further musings.

My earlier ideas about OS X in other products and a second-generation “tablet” device have percolated into the punditosphere. The trigger seems to have been the recent surge in larger or faster solid-state memory devices, as well as shipment of the first hybrid flash/disk drive. See, for instance, Jason D. O’Grady commenting about another analyst’s write-up:

There are numerous reasons why a diskless MacBook (or nanoBook) is the next logical progression of the notebook computer…

What’s interesting about the Reuters piece is that [it] claims that the nanoBook would run the stripped down, multi-touch version of Mac OS X that will ship with iPhone as opposed to the full-blown version…

In an included poll, however, 76% of voters said they’d want such a sub-notebook to run the full version of Mac OS X, and only 10% claim to accept with OS X (Lite). Others are skeptical of wider use of flash memory, even for larger iPods:

There is one brutally limiting factor to flash, though: cost. Flash is almost ten times more expensive than hard-disk memory. Although significant adoption of flash over the last 12 months has seen prices drop enormously, it’s still too costly to buy in the quantity needed for video iPods. Apple has a good relationship with its flash manufacturers though, and may secure a helpful price reduction it can pass on to consumers. But will that be enough to justify vanquishing the hard disk completely?

Still, I agree that prices are falling fast and that such a device may well be pre-announced at WWDC in June for shipment before the end of 2007. On the other hand, when so many financial analysts agree that such a device is in the works, it makes me suspect that they must be wrong…

Speaking of WWDC, only some radical holdouts (and a few financial analysts) still believe in an end-of-March launch of Leopard. I can’t say much about it because of NDAs; but to put Leopard on the market by the end of this month – meaning that, because of manufacturing and shipping times, it would be have to be ready about today – is impossible. Yes, some of the aforementioned radicals say that Apple has secret advanced builds in their labs and all the seed versions they sent out since last were just a cover. Hah. I’ll believe that when I see it; maybe not even then.

Borkware Quickies is a highly recommended collection of small, useful code snippets. Mark Dalrymple has been so kind to post one of my own there: “Making naked memory autoreleased”. Here’s a shorter and even more useful, though sometimes slower, version:

static void* tempCopyOf(void* data,UInt32 size) {
   void* buffer = calloc(1,size);
   if (buffer) {
      if (data) bcopy(data,buffer,size);
      [NSData dataWithBytesNoCopy:buffer length:size freeWhenDone:YES];
   }
   return buffer;
}

So, you can call this as:

void* thing = tempCopyOf(&myStructure,sizeof(myStructure));

which will give you a temporary copy of myStructure, or as

void* thing = tempCopyOf(NULL,someSize);

which will return a zero-filled buffer of someSize for you to fill in as you want.

Since the beginning of the year (or, perhaps, more germanely, the beginning of the hot season) the hard drive in my iMac G5 would have a little clicking fit. This is usually the first sign of impending drive failure, but as it usually would stop and get back to work in a few seconds I did nothing except resolve to backup more often than I usually do. Just FYI, it’s a 20″ iMac G5, the last series before the iSight model, with a 250GB Maxtor SATA drive.

The last few days it’s been hotter than usual – often around 33C during the day – and around the middle of last week the clicking started to happen more often, and it would sometimes take minutes to recover… this only happened when I was booted from a certain partition, and never when booted from the other partition, so I tended to spend more time in the latter situation. I also installed Marcel Bresink’s excellent freeware Temperature Monitor, which told me that the iMac’s built-in hard drive temperature sensor showed 54C, while the drive’s own SMART sensor said it was at 70C. Which of course is somewhat beyond the usual rated operating temperature of 60C…

I finally got some free time to actually do something about it and proceeded to do a full backup of my home folder and of selected other folders to an external hard drive. I then tried to do an erase-and-zero-data operation on the internal drive, which (after 10 hours!) failed with an I/O error. And the drive temperature went up to 72C while the external sensor still said 54C! Something was very wrong.

Well, clearly this meant the drive was no longer reliable and I proceeded to find a replacement. Only a few months earlier I’d phoned around to find a larger backup drive, finding out that nobody had anything larger than a 160GB IDE in stock, and that an exorbitant price. SATA drives were “about to come in”. This time, too, the first stores I tried had no large drives available, until the nice people at TecMania pointed me at WAZ, where I promptly found a 320GB SATA drive for about US$210.00, not too bad for someone in a hurry. So on Saturday I was the proud owner of a new Western Digital WD3200KS, and gained several dozen GBs space, not too bad.

The new drive’s power consumption specs were about 20% lower than the old Maxtor’s, so I was reasonably confident that it wouldn’t overheat as badly. Still, after installing it, I looked closely at the way the temperature sensor was mounted on the drive bracket. It turns out that the bracket on that side is a thin metal strip fixed to the drive with two mounting screws, and the sensor is glued on near the middle. However, even with the screws properly tightened, the metal strip arches out a little in the middle, so that there was a small air gap between the sensor place and the drive itself – clearly not a thermically optimal solution, and this might explain the huge 18C difference between the internal and external temperature readings.

I googled around and some people had indeed run into the same problem. A few had mounted external fans onto the air inlet and/or outlets, and some had even cut into the iMac cover to do so! This seemed a little radical to me, especially as it would drastically cut resale value. Another user recommended cutting off the sensor and re-gluing it onto the drive body itself, something which I actually considered doing, but I found the sensor cable would be too strained if I did so.

The actual solution I implemented is shown here:

I added the round-headed Philips screw in the middle of the mounting bracket, which goes into the center (previously unused) hole on that side of the drive. I also spread a thin layer of thermal heatsink paste onto the mounting bracket, in the space between the two holes on each side of the sensor. The air gap was completely eliminated, and indeed after I fired the system up and restored my backups, the temperature gap between internal and external sensors was reduced to a much more reasonable 4C.

This means that the drive peaks at about 58C; still within the nominal operating range of 60C max, but uncomfortably close to the upper limit. By coincidence while I was doing this, I became aware of a Google paper (pdf) about disk failures. Very interesting; they investigated an awful lot of drives, and concluded that elevated temperature wasn’t necessarily a factor; then again, their operating temperatures were below 50C.

Meanwhile, I’m monitoring the drive closely and think of alternate methods to make the sensor’s temperature track the drive’s temperature more closely (which would make the cooling fan kick in a little earlier). My first attempt, putting a piece of tape over the sensor to take it out of the fan’s airstream, didn’t make any appreciable difference.

Update: Another paper on disk failures just came out. Also very interesting.

I just heard the news; it seems the rumors were right. This year’s WWDC is now officially set for June 11 to 15, 2007. As I said below, this further reinforces my belief that the availability of Leopard and of the iPhone will be announced simultaneously by Steve Jobs at the keynote – June 11 – and, very probably, that the Leopard DVD will be distributed to every developer after the keynote. Let’s hope an iPhone developer’s kit will be thrown in… and that I will be able to attend.

I’ve finally had time to look up Apple’s patent on embedding a camera inside a screen. Here’s the brief at New Scientist and here’s the original patent. Looks very interesting. For the current iPhone and screen technology it’s of course still in the labs; as you would usually have one camera sensor pixel for every screen pixel, or some submultiple even, to get iSight resolution (640×480; VGA) the screen would have to be double the size (or double the pixel density). But I don’t doubt this is coming in some future version of the device, and certainly it may make its debut in one of the laptops, where there would be only one sensor for every 4 or 6 screen pixels.

VGA is good enough for videoconferencing, but it’s barely 0.3MP when used as a camera. So it would still make sense to have the camera/screen facing the user and a higher-resolution camera on the back of the device. Two hi-res cameras, one on each side? Expensive. Moving cameras, twistable prism/mirror, zoom lens? Expensive and it would need moving parts… the iPhone is certainly a further design move towards having no moving parts at all, not even buttons if possible.

Speaking of moving parts, I’ve been told that practically everywhere it’s mandated that a phone’s SIM card be user-removable. I’ve checked the keynote and at the 39:20 mark Steve Jobs, discussing the top of the iPhone, says that there’s a “tray for the SIM card”. However, no opening, slot or door is visible. Sure, that might have been left out of the few prototypes – some reports say there are only a handful in existence. And the seam on the back of the device, between the black part and the metal, looks unusually wide; perhaps the phone slides apart there. If so, having a removable battery there would incur little extra cost, incidentally removing one of the objections that have been voiced.

In any event, much may change in the 5 months before the final model is in the stores, so I’d say both the doomsayers and the fanatics need to take a step back and relax for now.

Personally, I’m much more interested in the implications of “OS X” and the iPhone UI for Leopard. The zoom in/out gestures can now be seen as an evolution of the recently introduced control/scroll wheel zooming feature in Tiger. Couple that with higher pixel densitie, a fully resolution-independent interface and a larger trackpad on laptops (and perhaps a trackpad-like area on desktop keyboards or desktop mice?), and you’ll have easy zooming built into all versions of OS X/Leopard.

Still on the OS X topic, several people are swearing that the TV also runs OS X. While I’ve been unable to find any mention of this in either the keynote or Apple’s site, it would make sense. Unfortunately at the Apple booth at Macworld, people weren’t allowed to look at the configuration screen.