A world of change

There’s a lot of speculation about what’s inside the A4, Apple’s custom and ultra-power-efficient chip that powers the iPad. Nobody knows for sure because, like all their products, it’s a seeeeeecret. Until now.

According to Jon Stokes’ well-trusted sources, there is no Cortex A9 dual-core inside Apple’s A4, but just a single Cortex A8 and a PowerVR SGX GPU. According to Jon, it’s probable that Apple has taken out a lot of the communication, image, and video blocks that the Cortex A8 uses, making it an extremely lean and efficient processor.

He also says that the people from PA Semi—which Apple acquired in 2008—are probably building a custom ARM-based core for future products.

Do you have to care about this? No. As Jon says, the important thing about the iPad is not its specs and how many polygons it can push or how many cores it has. That doesn’t matter to normal consumers—that just matters to feature-list-obsessed geeks.

What is important for consumers is that the iPad provides an smooth experience, using a new user interface paradigm. As Jon points out, what’s important about the iPad is that it may be the new Wii. Just like Nintendo’s console opened gaming to a huge amount of normal consumers who don’t have their brains wired to a game pad, the iPad may do exactly the same, simplifying computing for that giant and silent majority of users who dislike or don’t really understand the current user experience of Windows and Mac OS X. [Ars Technica]

That’s what this RBC/ChangeWave’s surveys says. Back in April 2007, fewer people were interested in buying the original iPhone compared to those wanting to buy the iPad on February 2010. Does this mean the iPad would be a bigger success?

Not necessarily. It may mean that, but we don’t really know for sure. First, back then the iPhone was completely unknown. A new, unproven product, with no user base whatsoever. Today, the iPhone and iPod are well known, so one could even argue that—given their massive popularity—a higher percentage of people would be interested in buying the iPad. In other words, who knows. Let’s wait until Apple actually makes the iPad available on their site.

There are other interesting data points. One is the version people are most interested in: The lowest end and the highest end win, with 19% each. With the 64GB Wi-Fi getting only 8% and the 16GB Wi-Fi and 3G version getting 9% of the interest.

Another interesting one: 68% of the people interested in it want to surf the internet, 44% for email, 37% for eBooks, 28% for the reading magazines and other periodicals, and only 24% for watching video. [Digital Daily]

That’s what Alan Kay said when Steve Jobs asked him about his thoughts on the iPhone. Knowing who Alan Kay is, you better listen up. Updated

Alan Kay is one the greatest minds in the history of computing. He worked in the 70s at the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he said that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it!” He did precisely that. This is what he wrote in a 1971 memo:

In the 1990s there will be millions of personal computers. They will be the size of notebooks today, have high-resolution flat-screen reflexive displays, weigh less than ten pounds, have ten to twenty times the computing and storage capacity of an Alto. Let’s call them Dynabooks.

He was right. His Dynabook design was the first laptop and tablet concept ever. And his idea of always-connected mobile computing is exactly what we have today. Not only he came up with these ideas out of nowhere, but he was also responsible for the overlapping windowing graphical user interface of the Alto. That GUI was the base for the Macintosh, and all the computer user interfaces we use today—except for our iPhones and Androids. Or the iPad, when it comes out.

Lately, however, Kay doesn’t seem to love the windowing GUI concept as much as he did back in the 80s, when the Macintosh came out. This is what he said to Om Malik in a recent interview, before the iPad was introduced:

When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.

I didn’t see the quote back then, but his judgement seems to me spot on. The quote was in a presentation by Evan Doll, from his class at Stanford about designing user interfaces for the iPad. In that slide, Doll quotes Kay, listing then why the iPad’s user interface will change computing as we know it (something that I also said before it came out. Obviously the magic rainbow pills are working).

It’s an interesting slideshow, even without his oral explanations, which covers how the “gulf of knowledge” is making many so-called experts ignore the extreme complexity of computers today, and also ignore why the iPad is the computing device for 95% of the population. Doll makes a great case for this, pointing out the uses of the iPad, and where it would fit in our daily lives—including the inevitable toilet factor:

Beyond Doll’s rationale, however, I find particularly interesting that Kay—the guy who invented mobile computing and the windowing interface—is now behind the idea of a modal, always-connected tablet. Hopefully, he will be right as he was with the Dynabook.

Update: You can watch Doll’s presentation through iTunes. [Gigaom via Slideshare - Thanks Kimmo de Gooijer!]

While I’m the first person who wants a webcam on the Apple iPad, this is just ridiculous: A Kansas-based repair web site is claiming that they just got the iPad’s frame part, which shows a hole for the camera. Really?

The question here is: How some obscure repair shop got parts for the Apple iPad when nobody has the Apple iPad itself? The fact is that, while some China part wholesalers start offering parts before the product becomes available, it’s highly unlikely that this is the case here.

The iPad has been kept under extreme secret until now. The production just started ramping up now to avoid any kind of leaks, which is the cause of the 60 and 90 day availability timeframe. For that reason alone, I doubt that anyone will have access to any repair part at this time, much less to ship them to a random repair site in Kansas only a few days after the JesusTablet was revealed.

That is, unless some Foxconn employee risked his life to smuggle a whole 11-inch frame out of the factory. Up his butt.

We will see what happens when the usual suspects get the iPad for dissection. [Mission Repair]

Trumpets playing, bloody moons, seas of fire, cats cohabiting with dogs, and Windows 7 running on the Apple iPad right on the day it launches. That’s how the Universe ends, my dearly beloved, and you can blame Citrix for it:

It turns out the 9.7 inch display on the iPad with a 1024×768 screen resolution works great for a full VDI XenDesktop. Windows applications run unmodified and securely in the data center, and even multiple applications at once.

The iPhone restrictions of screen size and small keyboards are overcome with the iPad. The iPad looks to be an ideal end-point device that can empower users to be productive wherever they are and IT will be able to safely deliver company-hosted virtual desktops and apps without worry.

Those are the wet words of Chris Fleck, the vicepresident of virtualization and remote software company Citrix. And what you are seeing above is Windows 7 running on the iPad SDK simulator, thanks to Citrix Receiver and XenDesktop 4—running meaning that it’s executed on a server and remotely displayed on the iPad at full resolution.

Fleck sounds excited on his blog, and points out that the software will be ready for the launch of Apple’s JesusTablet. Personally, I can’t wait for other remote desktop applications to be adapted for the iPad full resolution. [Citrix via PC World]

When I picked up my iPhone over the weekend, I had an epiphany. I was using the LinkedIn app to confirm an invitation to connect, and it hit me: This is the future of mobile computing, the mobile web — the mobile experience.
No, I’m not saying the LinkedIn app is the future per se (that’d [...]

Do you know why this guy is singing? Because he’s happy. And do you know why he is happy? Because he won an Apple iPad in our Apple Tablet Sweepstakes. His name is Chris Kratzer.

Like we said in the sweepstakes rules, we eliminated the questions that didn’t have a clear answer. In some cases, like the screen size, we took the the closest answer as the correct one (10.1 inches is near enough 9.7 inches).

Only nine people out of 37,382 were right. We put those in a list sorted by date, and then ran a random number generator, which gave us the number three. Chris was in that position.

Chris works in ITS at Auburn University-Montgomery, where he’s also a senior in Marketing. I asked him what was his answer process and he said that he “went with my gut on most of them, and rumors that you guys posted that seemed likely.” He believes the is “gorgeous, and the ten hour battery life is really amazing.” Like many, he was “really shocked that it did not support background apps” but, also like many, hopes that “will come with the next OS update.”

The tablet “is nothing that I need, but everything I want…” he says, but at the end, he wants it mainly for “watching movies and reading books.”

Congratulations Chris, and thank you all for playing!