Apple != Invention

When discussing Apple, sooner or later somebody will disgustedly ask what Apple ever invented. The question itself is easy to answer: not much. The PC, the GUI, PDAs, MP3 players, touch screens, smartphones and tablets all existed before Apple released the first product in the category. Apple did not invent them. In most cases, though, their releasing a product fundamentally changed the playing field in the category. (As the inclusion of the PDA shows, this is not universally the case. And they needed two attempts for the GUI.) This is because Apple are not an invention company. Their strength is taking the technical basis for an existing product, and then transforming it into an Apple product. This entails leaving out any features that do not work well enough yet, cutting any other features they deem not essential to the core experience, and polishing what remains. This polishing includes all parts of the experience, from packaging to casing to small details of the UI and UX. They then apply a bit of pixie dust (aka the reality distortion field) and market the hell out of it. It is this entire chain that makes Apple, not any particular huge inventive step. Accusing Apple of not inventing new technology thus misses the point of the company entirely.

Pioneer One Percent

Internet distribution has not only opened up possibilities for distribution outside of the established channels – it’s also opened up the possibility of zero-infrastructure distribution. Put something you’ve produced up on a filesharing service such as BitTorrent, and if it becomes popular the consumers themselves will provide the bandwidth for the distribution.

A project that is using this method of is the independently produced science fiction series “Pioneer One”.  The 720p version of the fifth episode has, at the time of writing, about 25,000 seeders. (For torrent size, that is on par with a popular torrent of a current episode of a major TV hit show.) The website claims over 250,000 downloads for the episode, and 3.5 million downloads total. All distributed at next to no cost for the makers.

Of course there still has to be a budget. Cameras are cheaper than ever, the cost for film material and development has vanished with digital production, and the technical means for post-production are there in the form of a standard PC and free software. Everything outside of the technology hasn’t joined the race to zero cost.  Even if all people involved in a project donate their time, there are still items like paying for props and locations, renting lights and other auxiliary equipment, catering and so on. Film production is amazingly complex and expensive.

There are quite a few ways of raising money on the internet for projects like this, and “Pioneer One” is employing a few of them. You can pay for online streaming access, with different price points that give you better quality and added digital incentives. Then there are the donations that give you things up to producer credits and mentions on the eventual Blu-Ray/DVD release. So far only 2100 tickets have been sold, and $ 33,000 collected.

This is a conversion rate in the range of 1%. I have no idea whether this is good or bad for an internet media project. If it is about average, then it might just be that you need viewer numbers on par or in excess of that of a conventional TV show to get equivalent budgets. Crowd-support is not an easy thing.

The packages on offer start out low enough at $ 5 that every fan of the series should be able to afford one.

The average payment/donation was around $ 16, with the last ten contributions listed showing only two $ 5 ones and one $ 50 one (and being relatively close to the average). So once somebody is willing to support the project financially, they are probably willing to spend more than the bare minimum contribution amount. How much more may then just be a question of clever incentivizing. “Pioneer One” is not doing too well on that. I spent $ 10 after watching the first episode, but that was a gesture of goodwill. The silver ticket I bought gives me nothing I want over the episode itself that I torrented (and I watched the torrent instead of streaming, which just doesn’t work while on a train). Even more importantly, the  $ 50 and $ 100 donations are hardly used. Credits may be appealing to some, and it’s possible somebody gifts a stream to a friend, but generally it might the web comics route of offering some physical goods such as T-shirts at a significant markup over cost seems like a better idea.  These are on offer, but not linked to in any obvious way from the streaming website that I first landed on. Clearly there’s room for improvement here.

The series itself? I’ve only just watched the first couple of episodes. The limited budget and production means generally are visible at every point. They’re keeping location shots to a minimum, going for lots of close-ups instead. The dialogue could have needed a more professional script doctor, the acting is often so-so, and even on no budget, the initial voice-over is really, really bad. But overall? There’s a story there, or at least enough hints at one, it’s got a heart, and it’s in the right place. It’s amazing how often this is lacking in modern series storytelling. The minimalist means  also lead to a style that is often refreshingly relaxed. There’s something to be said for a complete lack of Hollywood show-off and just telling what you have to tell. And, most importantly: it’s a SF series, and there aren’t too many of them around to watch. I’ll certainly watch the other episodes once I find the time. If that keeps up the standard, and they offer me a nice coffee mug, I’ll be happy to contribute more, to do my small part to keep the show alive.

Technology giveth …

… and in the case of the transition from VHS to DVD it gave plenty. There is no respect in which DVDs are not vastly superior to VHS tape. Much better picture and sound quality, faster access times, extra soundtracks, optional subtitles,  and all in a smaller form factor. DVDs are not just a better, they are a really good physical storage medium. The transition was swift, and nobody looked back.

The transition from DVD to streaming and downloads is a much less clear-cut case – and not one of just more and better. There are birthing problems such as size of repertoire, DRM is a bother (but hey, you’re renting, not buying, so less bad than with music or books), and the pricing is often unrealistic. But there’s no denying some of the obvious advantages, such as the huge convenience of being able to instantly access the movie you want when you want it.

Except for the fact that I actually can’t. Germany is one of the countries with a large enough market that the atrocity if dubbing movies and TV programmes into German makes economic sense. We also have a deep tradition of doing so. What gets released on the German market if not the movie I want – it’s an adaptation, and almost universally a tarnished one. The DVD age brought with it multiple audio tracks – and usually one of these was the original audio. There were also subtitles that I could use for anything non-English.

Technically multi-track audio is not a problem with online video, and neither are subtitles. But where technology giveth, it also taketh away: Currently, there is virtually no inclusion of the original audio in the German market. There’s the very occasional “original version”, advertised separately, but this falls far short of making the overall selection a viable proposition. With the markets for online video strictly segregated along national borders, the only workaround would be a VPN tunneling provider and the uncertain possibility of paying for a British or Irish service with a German credit card. That’s a couple too many hoops for me for the time being. For now, for my legal consumption of video,  I’m stuck with the anachronism of rotating optical discs.

Gaps in my diet

I don’t watch television or listen to radio as part of my media diet. Once upon a time that would have meant not consuming any content produced for either. There were no alternative release channels for broadcast content.  Today, with the close-to-zero overhead and the low costs of online streaming and downloads, abstaining from broadcast media is increasingly merely a decision against this particular form of distribution.

What made me take this decision is the end of the tyranny of place and time. You needed to be in front of a device with reception at the time the programme was aired. I enjoy the freedom of watching and listening when I want, where I want and on the device I have with me at the time. Air times are now as absurd to me as the notion of a book that you can only read at preset times.

What gets lost is, of course, the social focus that programmes provided. You knew that anybody who was into a certain programme would have watched it at the same time, and thus assume it as the basis for a conversation. Now such basis has to be established on a case-by-case basis. Maybe this is something that social networks are going to ameliorate or fix. I can only speculate – there is no way yet to work around the effects of me not being on Facebook.

Linkage: The Android patent infection

Android’s patent problems have attracted the attention of the mainstream press, and are about to influence actual product availability in several markets.

My take on some of the aspects in connection with this can be found in a post at unwiredview.

 

Locked into a feature

As I’ve previously said here, it’s often the smaller features that make or break a device for me. The lock mechanism is of these. Since the unlock/action brackets every other interaction with my phone, it’s something that needs to be done right.

The slider on the N8 is exactly the kind of control I want there. It enables me to lock/unlock my phone with a single action. It’s located almost directly under a finger when I hold the phone – so it doesn’t require much movement or effort. Because it is a mechanical slider with some resistance, it doesn’t get triggered accidentally. Operating it gives the kind of nice, haptic feedback that modern phones (especially touch slates) usually lack.

Both the Android and the iOS mechanisms of a button press followed by a slide across an on-screen element are clunky by comparison. Two different actions, two different fingers, two different locations on the phone. They require twice the effort and have twice the complexity. For now, the simplicity of unlocking my N8 is one of the reasons that I’m still locked into Symbian.

AMOLED for the time

In a lot of ways it’s a toss-up between AMOLED screens and LCDs. The deep blacks on AMOLED screens are wonderful, but the oversaturated colors are not everybody’s cup of tea, as is the fact that less protective layers are needed, and the interface appears as printed on the surface of the device. The sunlight legibility beats most regular LCD screens, but is in turn eclipsed by transflective LCDs. Energy consumption is lower than for LCDs when lots of black and dark colors are used, but when browsing the web with mostly white web pages this advantage is lost. In these respects, AMOLED is a question of usage scenarios, and, more importantly, taste.

The reason I’m firmly in the AMOLED camp is a single feature that Nokia have implemented on their phones with AMOLED screens, and which can’t possibly be replicated on a LCD screen: the lock-screen clock. It takes very few dots to make our pattern recognition kick in and see shapes – in this case a display of the current time. With AMOLED pixels are lit individually, so these  very few dots consume very little energy. With a LCD, where the screen is backlit as a whole, this display of the time would necessitate the screen being permanently on – and kill the battery in no time.

Not having to press a button on the phone to see the time might seem like a small thing, and it is, when taken as a single action. Summed up across a day, a week, a device lifetime of use, it adds up to a substantial advantage. But it’s not just saving a few thousand taps on a button – it changes the nature of the time telling. Not requiring any interaction is a fundamental difference from requiring even the simplest one. It is no longer just a device that can tell you time when you request this information. The fact that all you need to look,  that the time is right there for you to see makes the phone into a real replacement for a watch and a clock.

Extending the electronic dictionary

They are wonderful things – electronic dictionaries. No bulky lumps of paper to carry and much quicker look-up are a given in any implementation. Beyond that, features vary. Some implement more of the features of a paper version, e.g. underlining and highlighting within entries. Others expand over the paper version using on the fact that storage is cheap, e.g. the integration of a big corpus of examples of usage in the Collins Cobuild Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (a godsend to all of us non-native speakers who want to be really sure of actual usage). Then there’s, of course, the feature of playing back a recording of a word – which already goes beyond anything that’s possible with paper. What is unused in any dictionary that I’ve used so far is the ability to record user interaction with the program and transform this into extra value.

A simple yet very effective application here would be to support the user in actually learning the words he looks up. The program could easily keep track of the words the user searches for, and transforms these into flashcards for the user. More frequently looked up words could be presented with greater frequency as part of the review, and a user looking up a word again would mean that it’s back in the current deck for review. Since some dictionaries contain information about word frequency or word importance, these factors could be included in the weighing of which cards to present, and at which frequency.

Sure, I’ve seen an implementation that allows the user-initiated transformation of an entry into a flash card, but that’s not something you really do every time you quickly look up a word, just as you didn’t write a paper flash card of every word you looked up. It’s exactly the kind of easy-to-automate task that computers are there for – and a missed opportunity for the makers of electronic dictionaries.

Brandings are forever

I don’t watch TV, don’t listen to the radio, hardly ever go to the cinema, read less and less print media, and surf with an ad blocker. Practically the only advertising that gets through to me are billboards, posters, in-store displays and the increasingly more frequent flat-screen panels around. My contact with these is mostly minimal, and I try to reduce it as much as possible. Contacts beyond that with advertising are beginning to be slightly alienating. The only ad slogans I know anymore come from the billboards – and these, thankfully, tend to be for products and services that I don’t want or need. I sometimes come across new products in the supermarket that by the looks of them must have had launches with major advertising campaigns.

That is how I judge these new products: by the looks of them. There’s power in the branding here, in the design and packaging. It’s apparent what is well-thought out and what’s hastily or cheaply put together. I’m still victim to that in that I’m definitely willing to pay more for something that looks nicer, even though I’m often aware that there is no real difference in quality. For bigger purchases, or ones that mean an investment of time, like movies or books, ratings on the internet are a main factor in my decision-making, as is advice from my friends. There branding has often been relegated to an afterthought.

Overall this means I have a much nicer shopping experience nowadays. I’m less driven to things that wanting to buy has been hammered into me, and more by my needs. It would be even nicer if the old brands disappeared. There are decades of marketing still at work inside of me regarding these. I may not have seen an ad for them for years, but the old ones still resonate somewhere inside of me. Take ‘Maoam’, a German brand of chewy, chemical-ersatz-fruit-flavoured sweets. The current packaging is terrible, but every time I see them I remember a commercial that’s so old that the original isn’t even on YouTube – and sometimes this, mixed with childhood memories, still leads to a purchase of a product I don’t really like much.

This power is unlikely to ever disappear. Branding is something that gets into us very deeply. I have to live with the brands that decades of media consumption carved into me. All I can do is try not to let their number increase much more.

PS: Nothing in my media abstinence has been an ideological decision. I just find that in almost all cases there are much better ways to get at the content I want, and I have no time to waste on content I don’t want.

PPS: For those willing to risk brand-exposure: I found a remake of the classic Maoam commercial . I guess the damage from watching it once won’t be too severe – so it’s OK to go ahead and view it!

Tick-tock – Apple goes Intel & other thoughts on the iPhone 4S launch

Just a few thoughts about the launch of the iPhone 4S, in no particular order:

Tick-Tock

Five iterations of a product are not a lot to base this on, but it seems that Apple has adopted for its design something like the ‘tick-tock’ approach that Intel uses for its processor designs: alternating between a complete change of the product and an efficiency/smaller upgrade.

This is disappointing for all the industry pundits who were getting bored of the old iPhone, and for those Apple fanboys eager for an immediately distinctive upgrade to prove their cool, but to me it shows how Apple want to position the iPhone: as a product that is complete enough, and has enough value to the customer, that they don’t need to devalue the older models each year with a complete change of the lineup. For them there is no reason to enter the race of fast upgrade cycles and the technical spec wars, as they position the iPhone as something outside of the feature-sheet comparison buying decisions.

A good example for that type of comparison can be found at engadget . In the end, Apple count on the majority of users not caring what the precise battery capacity is, but whether a charge gets them through a day, and not whether the front camera has more than VGA resolution, but that they can actually make a video call using it. How utterly out of hand the spec comparison can get, with the necessity to have a category ‘winner’ highlighted in green there’s a chart at gsmarena, where the old iPhone wins over the now one because it is 3 grams lighter. 3 grams are an academic difference, not noticeable to anybody who doesn’t own a precision scale and bothers to actually compare them.

Hardly surprising

On the hardware side the biggest surprise was that there were no real surprises. Faster processor, better camera, more memory – all logical upgrades. The improved antenna was really a necessity. ‘Antennagate’ didn’t really influence the sales of the iPhone 4, but to let the problem remain in the next iteration would have been shameful. The ‘world phone’ aspect is interesting in that it has CDMA and GSM, but of more relevance to Apple in that they can now have a single production model than to the consumer. It won’t make switching carriers in the US, the market where this technical change would matter most, any easier.

Still a phone camera

“The best stills camera on a phone.” is something that has yet to be proven in independent comparisons (yes, that’s the N8 owner in me). My guess is that the increase to 8 Megapixels is Apple’s concession to the megapixel race, and that they would have preferred to just increase the sensor sensitivity. In actual use better low-light performance is worth more to users than higher pixel count. Still, I have no doubt that the new camera is an improvement, and that this is another nail in the coffin for standalone consumer digital cameras below the high end.

Fairy dust

Apple continues to integrate concepts and services that they see as proven on other platforms, and apply the magic of Apple branding speak to them. This time round it’s Google Latitude (and all the other lesser known ones that came before), which has the fairy dust of ‘Friend Finder’ applied to it.

Postcards of children

The marketing fairy dust seems to have failed for the snail-mail greeting card service. In addition to apparently lacking any snappy branding, is did seem confusing for young phone bloggers why this is something Apple would add. Really it’s just a sign of what the iPhone has become: an everybody phone, not something targeted at geeks and early adopters. Among the everybodies, the iPhone users with children who can now send a great photo to the grandparents will be glad. A relatively limited use case? Sure, but it is a service that makes perfect sense for Apple. It’s a simple concept that is self-contained,  feature-complete, easy to use, builds on existing, proven infrastructure (online photo services), and is something that will prove indispensable to a subset of iPhone owners who use it. Plus there’s a very respectable profit margin there.

Computer – execute

My first thought about Siri was just: another attempt at voice search. Then I wondered about the branding. It’s not an ‘i’ service, it isn’t descriptive, using one or more common English words (see the above ‘Friend Finder’). ‘Siri’ is an anthropomorphization of the service. It really is intended to be an assistant, not just a piece of software, and, most importantly, not just voice search and simple voice commands for the phone. In view of this the naming does make sense. You traditionally talk to people, so talking to your phone should involve at least some feeling of this being similar. And if you expect some kind of intelligence in the service’s reactions to your requests, then casting it as something quasi-human is probably going to happen automatically anyway. Just witness the people who ascribe a personality to their voice-guiding satnav units.

Regarding the functionality I’m sure that Apple integrating this means that they’re confident it works well enough for a large number of use cases. In principle there is a lot of value in this. Setting an alarm via voice has a real speed advantage, and things like conditional notifications (the ‘remind me after work’ example) are greater help. We’ll see what else Apple offer in terms of functionality at the moment, and how discoverable what the service can and can’t do is going to be.

The general problems of voice operation remain:

• The adaptation to additional languages is a lengthy and expensive process. This goes first of all for the speech recognition side of things, but also for the background semantic parsing of the input. A lot of this is sure to rely on sheer volume of previous data to compare to, of human-curated or human-accepted responses, and there’s no easy transitioning this to another language – and cultural context. This is entirely a problem of resources and roll-out speed, but some languages for which localization of the interface has been commercially viable will remain uncatered for.
• The problem of language variation extends within what is formally seen as a single language.  Germany, for example,  is in fact not really a single market you can address entirely with one adaptation. I studied in Regensburg and students from other parts of Germany (native Germans most of them) often didn’t understand the locals. So people there might equally find that their iPhone’s don’t understand them.  Granted, Germany has a particular high variance in its dialects, but I’d expect there to be equal problems in parts of Great Britain, and in other places around the world.

• Voice control needs situations where clear recording of audio is possible. Construction sites, factory floors, loud bars, the tube or windy streets are all highly problematic environments. This alone means that voice control can never be the sole input.

• Voice control needs situations where it is possible to speak to the phone. There are two aspects to this: privacy and social acceptability.
• I may not want others around me to know the content of my interaction with my phone, or the fact that I’m interacting with it at all (e.g. during a meeting).
• In a lot of situations it is not socially acceptable to be talking much, it at all: open plan offices (without much telephone activity), at the library, or even in most public situations (think Japan). Further at the moment it might be acceptable to talk to another person, but talking to a machine would be seen as weird.

Taken together this means that the utility of something like Siri will vary hugely depending on the user’s everyday contexts. Somebody who drives to work and back alone in his car and has an office to himself is at the high end of the scale, while somebody using loud public transport and working in a shared, possibly noisy space, will be at the low end. As @disruptivedean tweeted: ‘Siri: designed for countries where people drive a lot & need to talk to devices while at the wheel. Not places with crowded public transport.’

So it remains to be seen how well this works in practice, and for how many people. Personally, I’d really like something like this – but with the addition of a text input box that I can type in in all situations where I can’t talk to the phone. Oh, and a desktop version, too. Neither is problematic in principle, and I guess both will come eventually.

Nothing new on the player front

The iPod touch hasn’t been updated. Together with the introduction a the 64GB iPhone model, this means that the biggest internal iOS storage is no longer exclusive to the iPod touch. An update to 128GB would have been easy technically, and wouldn’t have cut too much into the financial margins with the usual $ 100 price increase for the doubling of memory. Maybe Apple no longer sees local storage as that important?

Ranging from the expensive…

Apple now has a range of iPhones, from the 3GS via the 4/8GB to the 4S with different storage capacities. Does this mean they have the all-conquering Nano, the half-price iPhone? Seen from the US perspective that Apple announcements invariably adopt, they had that before, with the 4/3GS paring: $ 199 and $ 99 on contract. Now they have something unbeatable: an iPhone for $ 0! The iPhone 3GS directly competes with low-mid-tier smartphones like e.g. the Samsung Galaxy Ace or the HTC Wildfire, and it’s going to kill most, if not all of the competition there.

In the rest of the world, where operator subsidies are lower, or not the norm, things are different. Looking at the German pricing (which, as usual, translates the US dollar prices to euros 1:1, meaning a hefty markup even once the sales tax in the US is considered), the 3GS is listed at 369 €, the 4 at 519 € and the 4S as starting at 629 €. (Curiously this puts the 4 with 8BG above the current retail price for the 4 16GB – so go figure. I’ve never understood Apple’s German pricing anyway.)

So if you look at it within Apple’s price range, then the 3GS could be seen as the Nano. It’s more than half price, but it is significantly cheaper than the current model. If the prospective buyer is dead-set on getting an iPhone, then this significantly lowers the entry barrier. The problem is that the widening of the smartphone market is driven in large parts by people who don’t have the money to buy even the entry level iPhone. Plus it doesn’t do anything to convince people not yet committed to iOS, who shop based on such prosaic aspects as screen size and resolution, processor speed, camera quality, the ability to play back any video file they throw at it, or need more integrated memory.