April: New Mac computers (some may not available until May due to Intel’s availability and product release schedule this year)

June: At WWDC, Apple introduces AppleTV (with an actual television built in). Why at WWDC? Because there is an API!

September: Apple revises iPods and introduces the iPhone 5

November: Minor Mac refreshes.

There is a nice almost-every-two-months cadence here.

If we look at Apple’s iPhone (and most cellular phones in general), the most disappointing facet of the device is often the carrier, specifically data traffic; followed closely by battery life (that’s another article entirely). So what is it that Apple can do to drive additional revenue as well as provide it a leg up on the competitions devices – tablets and phones, plus anything else they may think of in the future? It would need an end-run around the current cellular carriers. And this means owning and operating a cellular network.

This is initially difficult to do on a worldwide scale because of licensing issues. Each country has their own spectrum authority (FCC here in the USA), and the same slice of spectrum can be allocated for different uses around the world with the main exception of unlicensed ISM bands (2.4Ghz and 5Ghz for WiFi). Steve Jobs reportedly wanted to build their own network using these unlicensed ISM bands, but it was easy to see that it wouldn’t be technically possible.

Clear?

In the United States the obvious choice would be for them to acquire Clearwire’s spectrum and assets. Its market cap is incredibly low (less than $2B) and it doesn’t need a whole lot of cash to fix up ($900M in the next few years to build and operate a new LTE network), and is in desperate need of cash to pay its debt obligations, even choosing to skip a debt payment recently. Cheap considering how much spectrum they’re holding on to in major cities across the USA – 192MHz in many cities, 125MHz in NYC and as low as 75MHz in Detroit. The difficulty is that its majority owned by Sprint, however Sprint is in need of cash too and I expect it will have to be acquired by Verizon within the next five years if they don’t get their act together. Sprint seems less interested in Clearwire lately, especially since they announced they’re going on their own with LTE (using their own spectrum and Lightsquared spectrum instead of Clearwire spectrum). The downside to using Clearwire’s spectrum is that it is in the 2490-2690MHz band, which doesn’t have the best propagation characteristics (e.g. going through walls, into basements, etc). Apple would need to use their extensive antenna engineering knowledge to build a device that will still get fantastic reception even with poor signal strength.

The phone will still need (and should use) the voice networks from the old carriers. There is no need to build up that infrastructure again. Apple would roll out the TDD-LTE-Advanced (rel. 10) network on Clearwire’s 2.5-2.6Ghz spectrum in 2013 and provide tremendous speeds to end users – better than any of the current network carriers could offer. While LTE offers 10Mb/s down, the enormous spectrum holdings of Clearwire would allow speeds up to 50Mb/s on a regular basis, and peak speeds well above that. Putting their spectrum to use in a 50MHz TD-LTE-Adv configuration provides for over 250MB/s raw throughput (downlink, 2×2 MIMO) with user speeds around 20-50Mb/s and upload speeds around 10-15Mb/s.

How would the carriers react? A mixed bag – they’ve invested money in building up a network to handle tons of data, and while they might welcome Apple taking a load off their network (their CapEx would slow down dramatically, for a few quarters at least after rollout), they aren’t going to be happy with Apple taking revenue away – presumably because everyone could switch to no data plan or a minimum data plan for roaming outside of Apple’s initially incomplete network. But Apple recently just took a bite out of their revenue pie by introducing iMessage, reducing carrier revenue from text messages, though that is an order of magnitude smaller than the equivalent data revenues.

Killing Cable?

It also offers a hand in creating their own mini-cable system. With an abundance of spectrum, a separate 20MHz channel could be used just for broadcasting their own live TV on multicast – a 20Mhz channel (2×2 MIMO) with a 87:10 down/up ratio would have 120Mbs down, enough for 10 12Mbps 1080p feeds, the 8Mbps upstream channel would just be for device authentication and updates only. In true Apple/Pixar fashion, they’d only be showing a few choice channels with high quality content. During the low traffic periods of the day (would Apple sell informercials? I don’t think so…) they could turn off a few channels and stream prime content to the devices to be “unlocked” as prime-time TV shows. If they needed to increase throughput, they’d move to 4×4 MIMO and change the ratio to 90:7 for 255Mb/s down (21 channels 1080p channels) and a small control channel up.

Technical Difficulties

Apple would need to build dual-SIM devices, it would need a carrier SIM for voice and SMS, but an Apple SIM for data. However, Apple was rumored to be building a SIM replacement. This would allow for still one SIM card and Apple’s SIM would be based in software.

Building a network is no easy task, and considering that Clearwire is moving to a co-located configuration with Sprint (the same tower would have Sprint’s and Clearwire’s transmitters), any buy out might negate that cost-sharing benefit.

But overcoming one of the last poor aspects of the smartphone experience would be a huge deal, and give Apple a leg up on both other cellphone vendors and their carrier partners, at least here in the US.

I’ve been thinking to myself about why its taking so long. What is Apple waiting for that has extended the window for the iPhone 5 out this far. Lets look at all the different components of the phone…

• If it were the rumored larger display, there are tons of other manufacturers with qHD screens (960×540) out there that close to 4″ in size so manufacturing them isn’t the issue.
• A rumored milled aluminum case might cause an issue with signal strength – signal moves through plastics better than aluminum.
• Flash memory is not an issue, especially for a larger phone where there is more circuit board area on which to mount flash chips. Since the iPhone 3GS, Apple has even made the flash chip surface area smaller, rather than add more storage.
• Battery technology is probably not an issue since Apple can make their own batteries in whatever shapes and sizes. Battery performance increases at about 8% per year, so a similar sized battery would have slightly better capacity.
• Building a phone that would work on all the networks – this one is a bit trickier. Apple would love to build one phone and have it work on all its partner’s networks without modification. This requires a number of switches and radios for GSM and CDMA operation. And more space on the circuit board. Perhaps this is the driver on making the phone itself larger? Perhaps you cant just cram all of the parts necessary into an iPhone 4 case?

To me there are really only two reasons to hold back the iPhone 5 launch. Waiting for iOS 5 to be complete (rather than shipping iOS 4.x) or waiting for the first batches of the 28nm LTE chips necessary for an iPhone 5 LTE to hit the market.

iOS 5 – if the new OS isn’t going to be out until October, then why bother releasing new phones until then? The only time I remember a major iOS software upgrade not timed to the release of new hardware was the iPad iOS 4.2 upgrade (from 3.x). And that had more to do with Apple’s super secretive process than a business decision to decouple them. The goal for holding back the iOS launch would be to make sure that 100% of the new phones from the get-go are iOS 5 and iCloud enabled. This is Apple’s big cloud push and they want everyone on board who buys a new phone. No getting iOS 4.x now and then having to deal with the hassle of upgrading to 5.0 when it comes out – rest assured, Apple’s telemetry shows them that not a lot of iPhone users upgrade operating systems manually, rather their OS upgrade comes in the form of a new iPhone.

This is the more “common sense” reason that I can think of – waiting for iOS 5.0 makes sense. However there is some circumstantial evidence for another option…

4G LTE – I’m guessing that TSMC is fabricating the Qualcomm chip (MSM9615) necessary for an LTE iPhone now. TSMC supposedly started “risk production” in June 2011, so the first batch would be done by now.

The circumstantial evidence for this is ample, but again its circumstantial. First, the complete lack of rumors and pictures of leaked models for the iPhone 5, save for the case diagram and proliferation of leaked case pictures. If Apple has only has a few models to test with then the phone isn’t out in circulation in the field for testing. Likewise, you usually start to see device info showing up in logs for apps and websites and that hasn’t happened either. Second is the rumor that availability of the iPhone 5 would be tight into next year, and not just because of incredible demand. The ability for TSMC to pump out the chips necessary to satisfy demand would be pretty high for such an early part of the fabrication lifecycle (this early into the 28nm move). Other 28nm partners are still working on their chips (AMD/ATI and Nvidia), perhaps they’re at the back of the line, behind Apple’s wad of cash. Third, Apple recently signed a deal with TSMC for its next two generations of chips, presumably both will be fabricated at 28nm using the same techniques as the Qualcomm chip (the rumors states A7 at 20nm but thats pushing it). If Apple was happy with how TSMC pulled things off with Qualcomm that could have sealed the deal. Fourth, it is logistically possible. TSMC said its low-power process was qualifiled in September of 2010, 52 weeks ago. If Qualcomm had to go through 3 revisions of the chip, that is 36 weeks, plus another 12 weeks to get the first final production chips back and thats 48 weeks, or August 2011 for the first production chips to roll off the line. Just enough time for final testing and getting ready to go. While yields are likely to not be that great, it should be good enough after this many revisions to be capable to put in enough phones to keep people interested, but the chips will be expensive. Fifth, a more marketplace/timing related theory, is that if Apple waits until October 2011 to release a 3G-based iPhone with a slightly bigger screen, does that mean we wait until October 2012 for an LTE iPhone? Even August 2012? Considering the amount of advertising I’ve seen lately for 4G LTE phones, AT&T launching their LTE network this weekend in 5 cities (with 10 more before the end of the year), and the plethora that will be introduced at CES next January, waiting another 12 months to release an LTE iPhone puts Apple way behind the curve. When it was a 2G iPhone no one cared because they only sold 4.5M of those devices over the course of the year, while now Apple sells that many every three weeks. Apple die-hards will stay, as will those who have invested in the ecosystem, but for those who are given a choice to peel off at this point and get a faster LTE phone or a slightly warmed over iPhone 5 may choose the LTE, especially for the long suffering users of the AT&T network in the US who jump to Verizon.

Both – it could always be both. These options aren’t mutually exclusive in any way.

But what if we didn’t have to put up with that garbage anymore? What if we just added new music to our iTunes collection – either through buying it at the Apple store or adding in iTunes – and it showed up on all of our devices? And our iDevices were smart enough to know what music we like, what music we listen to, and just use the local storage as a cache. It seems to have the following benefits…

1. Increase usability of iTunes store – purchases are sideloaded into your cloud storage, and then pushed down to your devices automatically if you’re on wifi (and manually if you’re on 3G). Amazon lacks the hardware device to make this work, and Google’s music store doesn’t really have any traction.
2. Increase usability of iTunes app – now you don’t have to manage your music syncing preferences, it just goes and does its thing. As long as Apple’s caching algorithm is smart enough, it’ll be fine.
3. This can also extend to apps & app data, podcasts, etc. Everything except for movies, which are too large to sync over Wifi/3G (though they could be re-encoded to lower bitrates and streamed to devices like the AppleTV and iPad over fast home broadband connections and WiFi).

Doing a mental “full stop” on the current way iTunes works an rethinking how to architect it with the iTunes Store and iCloud at the center seems to make it really compelling for all of the non-experts who buy Apple products because they’re easy. Put another way, I can teach my parents how to do this – buy songs from Apple music store, wait 30 seconds, music shows up on iPhone, hit play, listen.

The big question isn’t whether or not the concept of the cloud will work, but rather whether people are that in to music to do this (especially with a monthly fee), and can Apple pull it off without any glitches (like MobileMe had)? We’ll see in the next few weeks.

Remember, Apple’s ultimate goal isn’t necessarily to sell you another service to add to their revenue, its to make the iPhone more compelling than any Android, RIM or Windows phone. To get users to say, wow, that is really amazing, I need to get an iPhone because it fits me and my lifestyle.

[Edit: and at WWDC, Apple announced support for delta updates, which should mean I don't have to download the entire OS image to upgrade my iDevices]

So far this year I’ve downloaded at least 18.8GB of Apple updates over my home internet connection. Consider I have three Mac OSX devices and four iOS devices. Here is how it breaks down…

OSX 10.6.6 update: 143MB

OSX 10.6.7 update: 475MB

iPhone/iPad 4.3.0: 670MB

iPhone/iPad 4.3.1: 666MB

iPhone/iPad 4.3.2: 662MB

iPhone/iPad 4.3.3: 600MB

Times all the devices I have, is 12.2GB worth of software updates in five months, or about 2.4GB per month. This doesn’t include the OSX software updates or iOS app updates. iPhoto 9 (which has been through at least one revision since I bought it in February through the app store) weighs in at about 900MB, so two downloads to three OSX boxes is another 5.4GB. iTunes is comparatively smaller, 75MB or so times four computers (3 Macs and a PC) times four updates so far this year is 1.2GB. Plus many other smaller updates – from app updates to printer driver updates, etc. So lets round it up to 20GB total in five months. Thats 4GB per month. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but its more than the monthly cap I have on my AT&T iPhone, and likely to squeeze out any chance I have using some alternate wireless ISP, leaving me with only DSL and Cable to choose from.

Ever since the first MP3s were distributed the Internet in the late 90s on IRC and eventually into the mainstream with Napster, the main cry against DRM and the music industry’s continual lobbying for more power over the Internet was, “the RIAA won’t be happy until we have to pay every time we listen to a song!” Now, we’re practically there. While we aren’t paying per listen, and I doubt we ever will as long as there is such a thing as personal property (and we can still buy CDs through Amazon and Best Buy), “enhanced cloud services” are probably the closest thing we’ll get to paying the recording industry each time we hear music. We’re paying the music industry a recurring fee to listen to our already purchased music through the cloud.

It would be one thing if we were just paying Apple for the service of storing and streaming (as the regular cloud-based music lockers with Google and Amazon), but Apple has made a deal with the labels that pays them money to allow the service to exist. Apple has negotiated concessions like exchanging lower quality files with higher, and likely will substitute various quality AAC to facilitate streaming to 3G devices – playing a 256kbps or a 128kbps AAC makes a big difference if you’re AT&T’s network.

Why the industry isn’t trying to jump on board faster, I don’t know. Its a huge no-risk, all-reward opportunity. People who already have pirated music are still listening to those tracks now, at home and on their iDevices, while people who legitimately pay for music are going to pay again to store that same music in the cloud. As far as cloud music services go, fighting piracy is really an orthogonal issue – cloud services wont make pirated material any more or less attractive.

But for the rest of us, it amounts to paying a tithe to the record industry for the privilege to listen to music we already own. At least its not forced on us.. yet. Another 10 years and ubiquitous high speed Internet could leave us with no downloads of any kind – everything always in the cloud.

1. Notifications are awful. Redo the system so they aren’t modal and I don’t have to dismiss them before I continue. Also rework some OS level quirks, like if you’re recording video or audio and a phone call comes in, don’t have it cancel what you were doing, let the app keep working and if you hit reject its like the call never came in.
2. Sync basic information (e.g. calendar, contacts, sms/mms, but not movies, music, pictures) over wifi to your PC/Mac. Alternately sync that same basic information up to the cloud via mobile me. I lost a weeks worth of SMSes a few weeks ago when I had to reinstall the OS on the phone after it wouldn’t power back on for some reason.
3. A nice, professional sounding text message notifier sound. One that I can have go off in my office and not be embarrassed that isn’t tri-tone. All the guys I know use tri-tone and the girls I know use the ringing bells. And that’s it. Or just let people set it themselves.
4. I want to be able to read/reply to text messages that land on my iPhone from my iPad or Mac when they’re in close proximity (or at least in my house). Right now, my iPhone is downstairs and I’m upstairs with my iPad and Mac. I’m always near one of my devices but that notification isn’t passed around. This may necessitate a multi-user approach for the iPad, since I wouldn’t want to let my friend use my iPad and have my text messages sent to it if he is using it (both annoying and an invasion of privacy).

Thats it! We’ll hopefully find out what Apple is up to on March 2nd.

However I’m inclined to believe Apple may not yet unify the GSM and CDMA iPhones, especially given the size footprint of the Qualcomm CDMA/EVDO/HSPA+ chipset inside the iPhone 4 (CDMA). Without a significant redesign Apple just cant put all those chips necessary for a dual-mode phone, plus the Micro-SIM slot, plus the Qualcomm chip inside on that tiny PCB. Given recent rumors, the next iPhone isn’t expected to be a big overhaul. Anandtech was smart to point out the space limitation…

Though the baseband supports dual mode operation, upon looking at more of the CDMA iPhone disassembled, it’s quickly apparent why that isn’t put into use. There simply isn’t space for the required power amps as the mainboard is organized right now. Though there’s definitely space picked up from losing the SIM slot (which, as an aside, explains why Apple seemed keen on losing SIMs entirely – it’s starting to become a huge chunk of real-estate), but the MDM6600 is simply larger than the Infineon X-Gold 618. Unless you can get in there and add both the signaling for the SIM and necessary RF components, there’s no way the CDMA iPhone is becoming dual-mode anytime soon.

To make a dual-mode phone that would work on both AT&T and Verizon, you’d need 3 more RF amps, a 10-way switch, and numerous other parts (along with paying for both CDMA and GSM/HSPA licensing fees to the respective patent owners for every phone, an extra cost of up to $20/unit). While keeping the phones separate means paying less money to patent holders for technology the user may never use (how often would an AT&T customer use the CDMA parts of the phone – I cant think of any exclusively CDMA countries, even South Korea has a 3G GSM network).

So in comes Intel’s (neé Infineon), the provider of the RF baseband chips in the iPhone, 3G, 3GS and 4-GSM models with a new 3G/HSPA+ RF baseband chip. The specifications are impressive – 21Mb/s down and 11.5Mb/s up, which translates roughly to 5-6Mb/s down and 2.5Mb/s up in the real world on a good network. But more importantly there are two features Intel is really pushing about the chip that make this seem to be custom tailored for Apple.

First is the power efficiency. The previous chip (in the 4-GSM model phones) was built at 65nm, and the new chip is 40nm. To those that understand semiconductor fabrication technology know those numbers mean a huge leap in terms of power consumption – for the same workload the new chip may consume as much as 65% less power than the previous generation chip, since the fabrication technology has gone down 1.5 “nodes”. This is something Apple, in their never ending quest for battery life and usability, could benefit tremendously from. I’d estimate it buys an extra 30% on 3G talk time, and 15% on 3G web, bringing Apple’s stated totals to 9 hrs 3G talk and 7 hrs 3G web.

Second is the package size. Intel is pushing hard that the chip’s footprint is very small, which is appropriate for Apple’s notoriously small circuit boards. The goal to make the chip small allows Apple to make the circuit board smaller, and make the battery larger (or just the same volume, just thinner). Making the package smaller could also accommodate larger/alternate amps and radios, to possibly accommodate other GSM bands (perhaps even T-Mobile’s AWS band?).

Anyways, just some wishful speculation. To me its always made sense that Apple not unify their product line at the iPhone 5 from a cost perspective. We’ll see the first unified phones when we move to LTE in 2012, and if Apple can get their way, no more SIM card either.

First, I’m sick of getting a text, or think I’m getting a text, when its one of however many other people in the room that have iPhones.

The other SMS tones, even the new ones provided in iOS 4.2 are a joke. They’re for children. They’re twice as long as they need to be. The only one I can see having set and not being embarrassed if it goes off in a public place or at work in my cube is the default “Tri-tone”.

Would it be that hard for Apple to make a few more different sounds that were short in duration (2-3 sec.) that sounded somewhat professional? C’mon Steve! You’ve got $50B in the bank, you can spend a few thousand for new, professional sounding SMS tones.

Its an engineering marvel. The first MacBook Air was a revolution in that they finally had the idea to minimize the circuit board inside that houses the CPU, memory, etc. and then try and fit it in such a thin design. Though the UFO/Flying Saucer design was novel, it wasn’t until after Apple had more experience assembling things in tiny form factors (see iPad and iPhone 4 circuit boards and how small they are compared to the rest of the interval volume being occupied by batteries).

Now that Apple had figured out how to cram everything you needed for a real laptop on a tiny circuit board, it was time to revise the housing and design of the MacBook Air. This was the result. And it was good.

The more (but not completely) square design allows for ports on both sides of the unit. Eliminating the door that was needed by the flying saucer bottom of the laptop. This adds a second USB port, display port out, and SD card reader on the 13″ version. I don’t have a need for the SD card slot, but I’m sure if I was more artsy or hip I’d have a 13MP DSLR and take moody photos and need to unload my SD card somewhat frequently into iPhoto.

When Apple says its the future of laptops they’re right. Intel’s next CPU has a graphics processor on the same piece of silicon. It wont be long before the large areas needed for two separate packages now can be combined into one package. With the advent of the Mac App Store, people will need less CDs and DVDs so optical drives start to disappear. Side note: I wouldn’t be surprised to find large vendors with lots of units (e.g. Microsoft, Adobe) looking to cut special deals with Apple ($99 copies of Microsoft Office Home Edition with Apple taking less than 30%, probably 20%), with the clear goal of going 100% digital, with the side effect of reducing piracy.

People don’t need anything much faster than a 2GHz Core 2 Duo for using the internet, especially if the video they are watching is decoded using the GPU (and less power than a CPU), which it is on the MacBook Air and other Mac laptops with the Nvidia 9400M and 320M chips. Sure if you’re running AutoCAD for the Mac, Photoshop, or Maya you’ll need more horsepower. But then I don’t think this is the laptop you want – you’ll fit better with the 15″ Macbook Pro.

Despite being a niche player in terms of market share, Apple never acts like a niche player. They target their hardware to the broadest possible audience in the segment they’re trying to address. Its why we don’t see Apple quad-core laptops, its why we don’t see more exotic high end video cards (I’m just glad we get decent video cards now – I still have my old Macbook with the GMA950 video, bleck!), its why there aren’t dual SSDs in RAID, etc.

The big push here seems to be the cloud. The problem is that Apple doesn’t have a lot of cloud services to offer – just MobileMe which isn’t that good – I feel like I get better service with my free Google Apps account – email, calendar, docs, etc, and I pay only $20/yr for my domain name for it.

There are only two downsides to this laptop.

First is an artifical restriction by Apple – to get the fastest CPU in the 11″ or 13″ class you have to pick the largest SSD. This isn’t much of a price increase on the 11″ model (64 to 128GB) but on the 13″ model, the jump to a 256GB SSD is a $300 price premium. My original desired model was the 13″ 2.13Ghz with a 128GB SSD. However Apple doesn’t make any in that configuration. So I had to fork over the $300 (ouch) to get that faster CPU. I’m tempted to find someone who has an 11″ model who wants to send me the $300 and their 128GB SSD and I’ll swap them the 256GB.

Higher resolution 13″ display. This might be a pro for most people (and I will list it below under the positive points), with my and my constantly deteriorating eye sight, I have to blow the font size on web pages up pretty high to read the screen on my old Macbook, and with the higher resolution screen I have to hit Command + one extra time.

While there were a number of upsides…

Stereo speakers. And I think Apple applied what they learned with the iPad to make the speakers on this sound decent. I think they’re doing a Bose-like setup (speaker -> small “acoustical chamber” -> output).

Higher resolution screen. As I mentioned above, its a negative for me but a positive for just about everyone else.

Solid state drive. During the keynote Steve said it was 2x as fast, but in reality its much faster than that for the types of disk operations your average application is going to be having compared to a 1.8″ or 2.5″ HDD.

Weight. The laptop is very light. You could carry one around in a backpack all day and not notice it.

Summary:

For the sufficiently techie looking for an ultraportable (11″) or small (13″) laptop, isn’t averse to paying for a Mac and going without an optical drive (or leeching from a Mac or Windows PC with one), and isn’t looking for a laptop to do heavy lifting, the MacBook Air is the new standard.

I can see the future in the MBA line – in two years when Intel is at 22nm and can put a much faster dual core CPU (in terms of performance, it wont be much faster in terms of GHz) and a built-in sufficiently fast GPU and SATA 6Gb/s with an even faster SSD, we’ll wonder why people hung on to those heavy, chunky laptops for so long. With another 15% of battery life (Li-Ion batteries improve about 8% per year) we’ll see another hour or so of battery life too.