What TechCrunch Doesn’t Get about Retina Display MacBooks

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This post in TechCrunch about the rumored/expected retina display MacBook Pros is incredibly stupid.

The first question is, in short, why do we need a Retina MacBook? Presumably it would be a superior experience for video and photo editing and offer designers far more real estate on a large screen, especially when viewing photos at lower resolutions. As evidenced by the iPhone’s Retina display, gaming will become considerably more compelling. This presupposes a rich and vibrant OS X gaming ecosystem.

via Begun, The Retina Wars Have | TechCrunch.

I love my iPad’s retina display, I’m holding off on my next MacBook in the hope/expectation a “retina” display will be available, and I’d love a “retina” monitor at my desk, but WTF is Biggs talking about?

“Retina displays” are awesome for text, and other fine detail. The resolution is also nice for UI elements, but the limitation on how densely you can pack controls isn’t display resolution, it’s Fitts’ Law. For photos and other continuous-tone images, its nice, but less important. For moving images, I think its low value, just look at how crappy a single still frame from an HD video can look to see how much the brain filters out. For 3d games, well, it might reduce the need for anti-aliasing, but game developers will often sacrifice resolution for frame-rate and other aspects of visual quality when the 3d hardware isn’t up to the task, so I question whether it is a big win.

In short, a retina display macbook will be awesome, but not for the reasons John Biggs thinks.

Another Reason not to Use Carbonite

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In case you needed another reason to choose Crashplan over Carbonite for your online computer backups:  Carbonite sponsors that low-life bully, Rush Limbaugh. (see the update below)

Carbonite addressed the controversy over their sponsorship of Limbaugh today in a blog post by their CEO, David Friend. It’s clear that El Rushbo has offended more people than usual this time. I hope Carbonite goes beyond merely “impress[ing] upon him that his comments were offensive to many of our customers and employees alike.” and actually pulls sponsorship. Rush, like Newt Gingrich, has been a standard bearer for the disfunction, uglyness, and extremism that have marred our national politics for the better part of two decades.

Update:

It looks like Carbonite’s CEO let thinks sink in a bit and realized what a wretch Limbaugh is.  The updated the blog post I mentioned above with the following:

“No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady. Mr. Limbaugh, with his highly personal attacks on Miss Fluke, overstepped any reasonable bounds of decency. Even though Mr. Limbaugh has now issued an apology, we have nonetheless decided to withdraw our advertising from his show. We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.”

Intel’s Foundry Business

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Intel is starting to offer 3rd parties the opportunity to build chips on their cutting-edge “fabs.”  I’m not surprised to see this happening. With each new generation of fab, Intel has more transistors they have to sell in order to recoup their costs and get an ROI. Intel themselves haven’t been that great at creating products to sell those additional transistors. If they are going to keep investing in their process leadership, they have to find a way to pay for it. If they don’t keep investing in their process leadership, they are going to be disrupted by ARM and its licensees.

Intel is opening up its manufacturing facilities to third parties, as it takes the further tentative steps toward building a chip-to-order foundry business. The microprocessor giant announced last year that it would build FPGAs for Achronix Semiconductor, and on Tuesday a second FPGA designer, Tabula, said that it would have its chips built by Intel.

In its announcement, Tabula emphasized that it would be using Intels cutting-edge 22nm process with 3D trigate transistors. Intels manufacturing capabilities are world-leading, with none of the established microprocessor foundries—including TSMC, UMC, and AMD spin-off GlobalFoundries—able to match the companys process.

Compared to the 28 and 32nm processes offered by the competition, Intels 22nm process should offer higher speeds with lower power usage, at lower cost. The company will start shipping its first 22nm x86 processors, codenamed Ivy Bridge, in the coming months.

via Ars Technica.

Whether they can actually sell enough of their capacity without opening their fabs to competitors remains to be seen. At some level FPGAs already compete with Intel’s products, in that they take a different approach to creating general-purpose chips that can be used for a variety of applications.

Why I blog on Geekfun.com

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I’ve been blogging on Geekfun for a little over a decade, and from time to time I question the whole enterprise. Actually, that isn’t entirely true, sometimes it seems I spend more time questioning the whole enterprise than I actually spend blogging. Other times, I manage to do both at the same time. This post is an example of the latter.

I was again thinking about why I have this blog, and what I should do with it, and I thought I’d try and put those thoughts in writing. That is the essence of this blog. This blog is me writing down what I’m thinking about. Doing so helps me focus and clarify my thoughts.

Often, that is all it is, but sometimes, it is an opportunity to share my thinking, or what I’ve learned, with other people. This blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic, so it is a stretch to use “popular” to describe anything I post here, but the most popular posts on this blog tend to be those where I’ve shared some little practical tip.

But getting back to the role of this blog as part of my thought process, it could be even more useful in that regard if it was also a way to solicit other people’s comments. Occasionally a post will provide fertile ground for discussion, but more often than that, they are sterile islands of thought. My thinking benefits from writing them, but that is as far as it goes. I could start to remedy that by posting links to places where friends and acquaintances will find them, like Facebook, Google + and Twitter.

Mountain Lion and the Future of Apple

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Johnathan Gruber has a big post today about Apple’s announcement of Mountain Lion, the next version of OS X.

My reaction to the news: “finally.”  I’ve been waiting for OS X to fully embrace iCloud since last year, when I thought it would happen with the initial release of Lion, but it looks like it will finally happen this summer, when Mountain Lion is released.

Gruber’s post is worth reading. He gives his impressions of a pre-release copy of Mountain Lion he’s been using for the past week, and also ruminates on how Apple orchestrated the announcement. They used a new technique; VP Phill Shiller did one-on-one presentations to a dozen or so tech writers a week before the official announcement.

Among other things, Gruber considers what this announcement says about the current state of the relationship between OS X and iOS

[recounts a few years ago when Apple delayed an OS X release to devote resources to iOS]

 

Putting both iOS and OS X on an annual release schedule is a sign that Apple is confident it no longer needs to make such tradeoffs in engineering resources. There’s an aspect of Apple’s “now” — changes it needs to make, ways the company needs to adapt — that simply relate to just how damn big, and how successful, the company has become. They are in uncharted territory, success-wise. They are cognizant that they’re no longer the upstart, and are changing accordingly.

It seems important to Apple that the Mac not be perceived as an afterthought compared to the iPad, and, perhaps more importantly, that Apple not be perceived as itself considering or treating the Mac as an afterthought.

I don’t think this goes far enough.  What stands out for me is not just that OS X is (back) on an annual release cycle, its that the cycle is in close sync with iOS’s annual release cycle; both are released in the summer, rather than at, say, a six month offset. Why?

I think the reason is obvious, OS X and iOS are part of the same product. The promise I saw in iCloud, iOS 5 and Lion last summer was the arrival of a pervasive computing environment that spanned devices. Moving between a Mac, and iPhone and an iPad was close to becoming seamless. A Keynote presentation you started on your Mac would automatically be sitting in your pocket on your iPhone, waiting for a quick review while waiting in line for lunch. Without a second thought, you could open your iPad on the bus-ride home and finish up the last few slides. And that is just the beginning.

iPod Touch and the Kindle Fire

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When Amazon first announced the Kindle Fire, many people heralded it as the first tablet with a chance in the market against Apple’s iPad by virtue of the fact that it was less than half the price, and more portable, with a 7″ screen.

Those predictions were recently validated, with Amazon selling an estimated 5.5M in the first quarter of release. Not bad, but we learned today that Apple sold 15.43 Million iPads, a 111% increase over the same period last year. It is an interesting contrast, but I wondered how the Kindle Fire’s sales compared to those of the iPod Touch.

My reasoning in comparing the two is that the Kindle Fire competes more directly with the Touch than the iPad. The iPad has a 10″ screen. When the first 7″ Android tablets hit the market, Steve Jobs said that Apple had considered smaller tablets, but found that the iPad was the smallest device they could make that allowed a significantly broader range of interactions than the iPhone. You can type on an iPad, as well as create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The Kindle Fire, on the other hand, is a lot like a big iPod Touch. The bigger screen is better for reading and browsing the web, and perhaps a little better for viewing movies. On the other hand, the iPod Touch is significantly more portable; it fits in a pocket, the Fire, in a purse.

I wondered how Kindle Fire sales compared to iPod Touch sales. Apple reported that iPod sales were down 21% to 15.4 million, but over 10 million of those were iPod touches. With a little digging, I found that Apple sold about that many iPod Touches during the same period a year prior. So, even without an update, the iPod touch is selling about twice as well as the similarly priced Kindle fire. Of course, the Fire seems to be on an upswing, while the Touch is just holding steady.