Die Kosten für die Maut werden deutlich höher ausfallen als nötig, da diese aufgrund des Gleichheitsgrundsatzes eben auch für Inländer optional sein muss. Dadurch entsteht Kontrollbedarf eben auch für die Landstraßen, was einen erheblichen Anteil an den gesamten Kontrollkosten ausmachen dürfte. Wenn man die Kosten von 200 Mio dann dem fairen Mautanteil von Ausländern (gut 6,5% Anteil, entsprechend 210 Mio) gegenüber stellt, dann wird deutlich, dass sich die Maut überhaupt nur durch in der Summe gegenüber Ausländern diskriminierende Tarife rechnen kann.
It seems that the EU wants to make injunctions the default remedy in patent cases. This is quite troubling because of the hold up nature of patents: it means you could extort an disproportionate rent from accidental use of a minor infraction. It will mainly aid patent trolls, since it seems important safeguards are missing:
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You can pursue an injunction even before you have a ruling on the validity. Given how many crappy patents are issued, this is a huge problem.
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There is no proportionality with regard to the actual value of the patent. Many infringements happen because the invention is close to obvious and has been independently recreated. This means the invention should be considered nearly useless, and not be available for extortion.
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There is no recognition that the negotiation overhead for possible hundreds of patents needed for typical computer based techniques would be prohibitive for small companies, and could strongly inhibit innovations.
With the latest event, Apple has now provided us with its latest lineup. It is an interesting one:
- iPhone 6 Plus provides the paperback sized iPad experience, marketed as a phone with huge margins. Still surprised that it does not support the SD card reader.
- iPhone 6 is interesting in that the smaller 4" size has now been discontinued. I am still adjusting to this size, it is definitely less easy to use with one hand, but with some navigation changes in the software most of the problem could be overcome. Still hearing from people that it is too big and they went for the 5S instead.
- Retina iMac looks like a gorgeous and absolutely price competitive computer. Technically the most impressive advance.
- iPad has seen a small upgrade in the minis, lost the rotation lock on the Air, but gained a less reflective screen, and essentially provides Touch ID now. An incremental update, nothing you need to get, but a nice improvement if you had a pre A7 iPad. I am disappointed that the price for thinness seems to be the loss of rotation lock.
Overall it seems that with the new Watch, Apple is now willing to grow the surface of its devices, as the “glance and react/ignore” use case no longer needs to be so prominently served. The greatest advance this year is the better integration between the devices, making it much more seamless to move around work between the devices.
Wenn man sich den Entwurf zur Maut mal genauer ansieht, dann fällt auf, dass die Kontrolldaten ein ganzes Jahr gespeichert werden sollen. Und das alles, damit man kontrollieren kann, ob eine Erstattung der Jahresmaut wegen Nichtnutzung gerechtfertigt ist. Das ist völlig überzogen, da man stattdessen die originelle Maut optional machen kann, und sollte man sich irren, einen nachträglichen Erwerb ermöglichen könnte.
Die aktuellen Mautpläne sind noch immer viel zu kompliziert. Immerhin hat man sich zu einer elektronischen Erfassung durchgerungen, was deutlich gerechtere Erhebungsmodelle ermöglichen sollte: So wird die Buchung deutlich einfacher, und man könnte kürzere Mautzeiten anbieten. Natürlich werden sich mal wieder viele über die Datenerfassung aufregen, aber da werden deutlich weniger Daten anfallen als durch das Handy.
Mir gefällt überhaupt nicht, dass es keine kurzen Zeiten geben wird. Wenn man mal für einen Tag nach Düsseldorf oder Dresden will, dann kostet das vielleicht 9 Euro Sprit für die in Deutschland gefahrenen Kilometer. Und dann soll man dafür noch 10 Euro Maut draufzahlen?
Besonders wenn Inländer für ein Saisonkennzeichen eine auf den Tag genau berechnete partielle Maut zahlen dürfen, sprich eine Monatsplakette für maximal 11 Euro erhalten können.
Coming from an iPhone 4S, the 6 is quite a big change. The screen is huge enough that it makes one handed operation more difficult, but at least for my hands it just remains possible if you lay the phone flat in the palm of your hand. And for this position I highly recommend a leather case, without a case I would worry that the phone would slip from my hand. And if you require a firmer grip, a double tap on the home button will work well enough to bring the elements into reach. The problem is ironically the lower far corner, which I can only just reach with my thumb. This means that if your hand is smaller than the average male hand, you really should check in person if the 6 is not too large for you.
The screen on the other hand sufficiently compensates for these problems: you can see a lot more ( or if your eyesight is fading, you can activate a scaling mode to have a permanent zoom mode). It especially makes writing easier, with the larger keyboard targets, and should enable even fat fingers to no longer need landscape mode. It is an adjustment to get used to the new spacing coming from a previous iPhone, but while you are learning, autocorrect works quite well in guessing what you actually meant to write. The larger screen is especially welcome for watching videos, where the improved brilliance and viewing angles of the display also get to shine.
Scaled and native app with keyboard
Even with the larger dimensions, the 6 is a tiny bit lighter than a 4S, and still fits most pockets easily: only specifically tailored phone pockets will be too small.
Others [1] have written extensively about the new phone, so here are just my highlights coming from a 4S:
- Touch ID is a great win for security and convenience. My recommendation is to let 1Password generate you pronounceable password of about 16 letters, use that password for about a month without the sensor so that you have properly learned it, and then activate Touch ID.
- the camera is brilliant, the new manual controls very welcome, and it is just so much faster to start up and to focus.
- I really like the improvements to typing: the suggestions in the bar above the keyboard are good often enough to improve typing speed, especially one-handed, and the speech recognition is a good deal better, and now supports Dutch as well.
- AnandTech has the technical details, John Gruber provides detailed insight into its uses, and Rene Ritchie has a detailed iOS 8 review ↩
It will be interesting to see how Apple will price the different editions of the Watch. We know the starting point of $349, and we will have additional points above them. I believe it will largely look like this:
| Price | Edition |
|---|---|
| $349 | Sport |
| $499 | Standard with Sportband |
| $599 | Standard with Steelband |
| $699 | Standard with Leatherband |
| $799 | Standard with Milanese Loop |
| $899 | Standard with Leather Loop |
| $1999 | Gold with Sportband |
| $2499 | Gold with Leatherband |
The $499 for the Standard is quite likely, it is a very standard price point to cover. For the gold watch, we know that it will have a gold casing, but this casing will likely not weight more than 10g to 20g. Gold is currently $1250/oz, or $40/g, so the cost of the gold in the Watch will not exceed $500. Given the volatility of the gold price, Apple will charge a nice margin above that, so depending on the actual gold content we could have 1499 or 1999 as the starter price for the gold watch.
Printing is dying, as we are currently seeing the same transformation both with books and with photos: casual use moves from print to tablets, while at the same time getting high quality prints is getting more affordable and popular.
With photos we see that the typical print is now almost completely replaced by the tablet, or even the larger phones, which is not only cheaper but also has since the 3rd generation iPad a better quality. And since then the quality of the displays has only increased, with very good factory calibration, and now almost perfect color stability when viewed at angle. Combined with the convenience of the phone, now home printing only makes sense for larger prints, for those you want to keep visible in your home.
These are not that many prints, so it will be cheaper and likely of better quality to have them printed. And since the images you put on your wall are at least semi public, there will be no privacy problems with having them printed by strangers. These are bleak times for selling printers, as the retina iPad has also made reading normal documents electronically quite feasible; I have completely stopped printing any technical documentation since getting my iPad 3.
Books will follow the same path, the paperback will be replaced by the ebook, while we will keep some books around, more as keepsakes and for presentation than for actually reading them. It will become more like a special occasion, with paper ceding the entire middle ground.
On the low end we will likely continue to have flyers, as they are so much easier to use. You can grab a flyer with a hand, and stuff away in a pocket, with no need to take out your phone, figure out how to accept the flyer and then accept it. One must also not forget that the higher marginal cost of flyers act to limit spamming, and people are already fed up with email spam, they do not want seeing strangers popping up adverts on your phone while out and about, so I suspect that location based advertising aimed at passerby’s will mostly move into your maps and search apps, or maybe sales apps used to find good deals. Because you need to intentionally pull your phone out, it will aid more in augmenting the experience once you are already committed, instead of grabbing your initial attention.
While we still await detailed information on the A8 chip, we know the core parameters: 28nm to 20nm shrink, 1.3GHz to 1.4GHz speed increase, 25% better performance, 50% better GPU performance. This amounts to the smallest update in CPU performance the iPhone has ever seen.
It used to be that a die shrink would enable higher frequencies at the same power level, according to Denard Scaling. So we would have expected a 40% increase in frequency, instead of the 8% we actually got. But this seems to no longer be possible, as also evidenced by the slow progress Intel is making. This means that we are now reaching a significant slowdown in Moore’s Law, so getting better performance will require a different approach. One will need to use the huge transistor budgets now available to create accelerators for bottleneck functions, instead of relying on CPUs to become faster to run the software at a sufficient pace. And it seems that is what Apple has done, with the following uses for the extra transistors:
- 6 instead of 4 GPU cores
- improved CPU, likely including larger caches
- specialized functions for camera and video processing
- Metal provides an interface to the GPU to offload hugely parallel workloads
One wonders what this will mean for the future, and I suspect it will help Apple, as you will need to integrate hardware and software to achieve optimal performance, and it makes Swift an important part of the future, as it allows you to squeeze more performance out of the hardware.
It also means that Intel will have a problem, as they can no longer count on their process prowess to help them overcome the efficiency problems caused by the dated x86 architecture. What they need to do is create a new architecture, optimize the silicon for it, and provide a secondary decoder for x86 that can effectively feed legacy programs to the hardware. This is not easy, but in the current age of billions of transistors, it is feasible to create a dual decoder, where one can power gate the one not in use.
One of the interesting aspects of the Apple Watch is the large number of customization options coming with it. This takes it close to fashion. In fashion markets there are two important aspects: timeliness and prestige. In general we have fast changing items, really cool, but superseded fast again. These tend to be relatively cheap: lot of throwaway stuff. And then there is timeless luxury. Especially high end watches are jewelry to show off your status, and we justify the high prices to ourselves by assuming that they will not quickly deprecate in value.
The inherent deprecation coming from technological progress limits the appeal as a luxury. I wonder how long the replacement cycle must become before we start to be willing to pay huge premiums for personalization. Cars can last for decades, especially high end ones taken good care of. And we probably still have a couple generations of miniaturization before us before quantum effects make progress too expensive. But Apple has made changing the straps dead simple, the insertion point is flat enough to fit into less thick variants in the future, so you could treat the strap as the jewelry, and the watch as replaceable.
This however does not look like the current Apple thinking, if you survey the current lineup. But if you recall the improvements to the iPhone over the years, it is faster, and has better connectivity and a better camera, but has otherwise remained essentially unchanged. With the display matching the physical limits of our eyes, and processing that can be relayed to the iPhone, the Watch could be much more stable, and settle into a long enough replacement cycle to support luxury.