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I have now used my iPad Air for some time, and it is a huge improvement over the old iPad. This almost all down to the weight and the size: having lost 180g it is now light enough to hold comfortably in your hands for a long time. Even holding it in one hand is OK, not for more than a few minutes, but when you switch hands holding it, you can easily support it. The iPad also lost some width, just enough that together with the reduced weight you can now easily type away on it while standing or walking around. It has become a much more mobile device, and I recommend you resist the temptation to use a cover, so that the extra weight does not hinder you.

The Air allows you to create a remarkable variety of output, and you should plan accordingly. Almost everyone who has a basic iPad with 16 GB has come up against capacity problems, so you need to get at least 32GB, and should go for 128GB. If money is tight, stretch your replacement cycle by a year: it is much easier to live with a somewhat slower, but still plenty fast computer for a while than to constantly bump into a capacity limit and needing to go through hoops to keep everything you want on the iPad. It is also a good idea to spring for the cellular version, having data and GPS on the go is a nice convenience.

Almost every review of the iPad mini notes that the reason why you should get one is its small size, a size that makes it easier to handle. But they also note that the small size makes the mini less than ideal when you want to use it as your main computing device. This strongly suggests that they not really prefer the mini, they actually look for an even smaller device that can provide an iPad like experience.

I believe Apple should kill off the mini, and replace it with a much smaller device. The use case people want the mini for is for reading stuff, and doing some social networking, but not for analyzing a lot of data. It would be more of a PC companion than a replacement that can stand on its own. And shedding the role of a full tablet, it could shrink to become much more pocket friendly, and even easier to hold with one hand.

It would also remove the strange tension we currently have with iPad apps: you can design them for the mini or for the Air, but the size difference is just large enough that on the other device it would feel off, still serviceable, but not really right. And in the end neither Apple nor it’s customers are really well served with software that just works well enough, instead of brilliantly.

As with the iPod mini, it should be replaced with an “iPad nano”. We want it as portable as a paperback, and as easy to fit into a pocket, so we would look at a 6.5" screen, with a 1680×1260 resolution. It would measure 162 by 114 mm (6 3/8 by 4 1/2 inches). The weight could get down to 230g (8 oz) as well.

The drawback would be that it would require new software to become fully useable. But if this is the price to pay to get optimal software for the device, than it is the right decision to make in the long term. And Apple has done a lot of work in the last two years to improve its auto layout support to make this transition easier for developers.

The transition until the software has caught up would be somewhat messy, and dropping the mini would shock many, but in the end, this is the device the mini fans really want. Introduce it during WWDC, to give developers enough time to prepare updates, and it likely will have a good library of optimized titles ready for the Christmas season.

It was interesting to watch the presentation for the new Apple computers. A few observations:

• Tim Cook makes ad hominem attacks against those who doubted the iPad. Why on earth is he wasting time crowning about the past?

• Apple still feels confident in iPad pricing. With the huge markup on flash memory they still continue to charge, they must be pretty certain that there won’t be a credible alternative for serious tablet work in the next year. But it provides a pricing umbrella for the serious tablet crowd, to the tune of $250 for a 128GB model.

• Mavericks as a free update now pays for itself from Apple’s cut on the App Store.

• iWorks everywhere seems to be the Apple play to weaken Microsoft. Interesting that the iPad versions now have full compatibility with the Mac, so that you can take your work anywhere. “Use the device that best fits you right now, and continue seamlessly on your other devices” Unfortunately that solution depends on iCloud; without a data center there, this would make it illegal for European firms to use it for anything containing even a trace of customer data, and there is quite a lot of distrust towards American cloud providers since the NSA revelations started.

• A very nice price drop for the MacBook Pro, with the top end model now a cool $500 cheaper than a year ago, with an extra 256GB Flash thrown in. Unfortunately still no 4K @60Hz support, even though Thunderbolt 2 would have the bandwidth.

• Still no upgrade for the Thunderbolt Display. Is there something in the pipeline with 4K displays? The reduced glare of the new iMac screens would be a huge improvement for them, so it is odd that they do not get that update yet.

With Apple presenting their new iPads tomorrow, I should document what I hope for as the new line up:

• $499 A7X based large iPad, starting at 32GB, with 64/128 options

• $399 A7 based iPad mini with retina display, again in 32/64/128 options

• $299 for the old iPad mini, only available with 16GB

This would roughly match the iPod Touch strategy; if they want to kill off the old mini, I suspect they will make a $329 Retina model with 16GB and no back camera. Let’s see how far I’m off…

Already it is quite clear that we see extremely long waits for the 5S of 5-8 weeks outside the US, which we likely will reach in the US as well once everyone is awake. On the other hand the 5C remains quite available, with just a few days for delivery. Is this now because of limited availability of the 5S or much higher demand compared to the 5 launch?

I still suspect that the 5S will carry the majority of the demand, as it provides a far better value than the 5C:

• TouchID solves a very real user problem, and makes using your iPhone so much better.

  I feel that this is the biggest advance in iPhone usability since the Retina display. You are can now have security without the inconvenience.

• A doubling of performance at the same frequency makes the iPhone much more future proof.

  I believe that from next year we will start to see much lower annual performance improvements, as the A7 has roughly caught Intel in performance per clock cycle. And they are now only improving at a pace of 10% to 15% per year in performance per cycle. This kind of makes the iPhone 5S the first phone again that you can safely keep for 4 or 5 years before replacing.

Apple is the first company to provide a chip with the ARMv8 architecture. They say it provides double the performance of the A6, this will come from architecture improvements, as well as from the new process. For the process, we were provided with a doubling of the transistor count and only a 10% increase in die size, which gives us 24nm instead of 32nm, close to the 22nm used by Intel for Haswell. The other improvement will come from ARMv8, which has cleaned up the instruction set, and provides twice as many registers. The new architecture has 64 and 32bit versions of most instructions, allowing the processor to save power when working with small data types.

The A7 is a remarkable piece of engineering, but I suspect that from now on we will see the hyper charged speed improvements on mobile to slow down to Intel pace: processes have caught up with the state of the art, so will improve a good deal slower. And architecture wise there is not much left to improve single threaded execution speed.

The chip should have a GeekBench score of around 3200, this compares to 3800 for the 2009 MacBook Pro with the 2.8GHz dual core, and 12000 for the MacBook Retina at 2.7GHz. It is remarkably close to desktop class performance, actually a four core version of the A7 with doubled frequency would match the fastest MacBook. This causes people to believe that we will see a transition away from Intel in the near future. Now the A7 will almost certainly already be running OS X as a safeguard, but would it make sense as a product?

• Unlike with the PPC to Intel transition, the A7 would be at a performance disadvantage given Intel’s process advantage.

  Who wants an irritating transition where any emulated Intel programs will be irritatingly slower, when there is no speed bump to reward users in the end?

• It will effectively mean giving up on Windows compatibility.

  Intel will certainly not give Apple a license to implement their instruction set in silicon, leaving only slow emulation. Especially in business the ability to run Windows is still important for many jobs, an ability even Apple advertises. And while Windows will slowly wither, giving up jobs better suited to a tablet or phone, there will remain room for providing a large information canvas, with Apple not interested in becoming the default choice.

• There is close to no benefit from extending battery life beyond 12 hours

  Intel have just in time realized how important battery life is, and can now provide this. So users are not missing anything important.

• Apple would need an equivalent to the Xeon, and generally more cores than on iPhone/iPad.

  The numbers for several of these products would be quite small compared to iPhone and iPad, giving Apple a significant scale disadvantage compared to Intel.

I believe it much more likely that Apple will extend the iPad line to allow it to fulfill more roles.

Verizon has reported a rise from 2.7 to 3.8 million iPhones sold y/y. This means that there is still some growth in the US market, but it is special in that all carriers heavily subsidize.

The German market for example is much more price sensitive. While is the US a 2GByte plan with unlimited minutes sets you back a minimum of $60 prepaid or $100 postpaid with $200 for the iPhone 5 16GB, you can get such a plan in Germany for 40€ without subsidy or for 65€ with 29€ for the iPhone. German prices are all including a 19% sales tax, without it prices correspond to $45/m or $72/m + $33.

No sane person would be using a postpaid plan under this circumstances in the US, they do because of share everything. Extra phones come from additional lines, which cost you $40/m + $200 for the phone, which is a pretty good deal, and would account for much of smartphone demand in the US. Since there are no shared plans available without a phone subsidy, it means that for a large segment of the population they have no economic choice but go with device subsidies.

The important difference between the US and rest of the world is that devices cannot move between carriers. This means that carriers have a huge incentive to subsidize the phone to make switching less painful, and this has so far prevented the creation of separate markets for wireless service and phones, and has been the prime cause US carriers compete much less on price, and it also allowed Apple to cream off a lot from the carriers.

Now that we have seen the numbers for Apple, it gives another strong indication that the US is driving a lot of iPhone demand thanks to share everything: Americas revenues are up $1.6bn y/y, while iPhone revenues are up $2.3bn y/y. In addition, they said that US numbers increased by more than 50%. Assuming the rest remained flat, then US sales a year ago had to account for 40% of all iPhones sold to explain this, and this matches the current Americas share of revenue. Or looking at iPhone numbers, they grew 5.2m. If Verizon has 35% of the US, then its numbers indicate 3.2m added in the US alone.

The carriers are not making much money on extra phones on share everything: probably just $20/m after subsidies, and they have to provide unlimited minutes from them. This makes one wonder for how long they will want to continue to provide them.