Coming back to the issues with app store purchases, there is one small decision that makes the issue more problematic than it needs to be: password caching has only one setting for both the App Store, and in-app purchases, and Apple has created a very strong incentive to turn this setting on: if you don’t, you must enter your password for every single app update.
Drew Crawford wrote an interesting analysis about the speed of mobile web apps. Basically the JITs are roughly 5 times slower and the use of garbage collection means that effectively available memory is 4 times lower because otherwise performance becomes way too slow.
The performance impact of javascript is actually worse for data/image manipulation, since 1) you always have range checks for every access and 2) you cannot access that great parallel coprocessor, the GPU, and it is by design. As for memory performance, the only way out would be to move the large objects over to manual allocation to reduce GC overhead. This means using small handle objects under GC pointing to a large native buffer with explicit dealloc.
The big question raised is: when will web apps become good enough? Hardware wise performance per watt for single threaded tasks improves roughly linearly with process size reduction, while parallel performance would ideally raise by the cubic of the reduction. This means that single thread performance should rise enough within the next 4 years. But we now have reached a plateau with regard to raw speed, and the feature width has come down to only 100 silicon atoms. This means that we will see an end to Moore’s Law in the not to distant future. On the one hand, we are nearing the size where quantum effects and simple thermal degradation will become too much; on the other hand the PC crisis shows that many people see performance as being good enough, and this, together with the cloud now available as a backup for the odd difficult job, will reduce demand and so the capital available to fund fast progress. I’d guess that 25 atoms (5.5nm) would pose a limit, meaning only a 16 fold increase in transistor count and 4 fold increase in speed would still be available, so that we will have to rely on software improvements as well to achieve sufficient performance.
There is a limit to how fast we can make JavaScript without impacting safety: We need to guarantee that even a malicious program cannot cause problems, especially that it cannot access memory it does not own. Combine this with a very dynamic language model that makes inlining a pain, and we will need to see some progress in automatic proof techniques to reduce the performance gap to native code. And with the reliance on software, we need to keep in mind that every platform vendor has an incentive to maintain a performance gap to native apps: They want easy access to the web and simple web front ends, but the real work apps should stay native.
We have basically three categories of apps: entertainment, social, and productivity. In general, only productivity apps are able to generate platform lock-in: entertainment is consumed, and rare are the games that keep our imagination for more than a few months, while social depends on providing the largest audience and so has a very strong incentive to be cross platform.
This makes productivity apps extremely important for platform owners, but we can see on the Apple App Store that they are playing second fiddle to games. The problem is that for such apps to thrive, they need recurring revenues, so that they can be improved to stay relevant, while the store has grown from selling songs, and so lacks upgrade pricing, and especially mechanisms to check out apps before committing to them.
I wonder what Apple’s thinking about it is. The complaints have been known for years, and not much has improved. Apple continues to dominate the productivity category with excellent apps sold for relatively low prices, and one wonders whether Apple is afraid of dominant apps emerging on the store, having been burnt when Adobe pretty much abandoned them for Windows.
This means that you need to work around a relatively hostile environment when you want to sell productivity apps into the mass market. The only category working well already are tax preparation packages, as you need a new version every year to follow tax changes, so it makes prefect sense to sell a new package every year. For all other software a subscription model would work best, but it is only tolerated as long as you have a server component with it as well; also there is the issue that customers do not want to pay a permanent rent to be able to access their own files.
What to do now
The only way you can get a trial version into the store is to provide a full version that can only handle one document (or for social apps be limited to 10 contacts). If this does not fit your app, your only chance is to provide a good video demonstration on the app website.
Upgrades are not supported, so you will need to put a new version into the store, and inform your old customers with a notification that the new version is now available, and that for the first weekend it is on sale to ease upgrades. This should be the only sale you are doing, so that people are not starting to wait for the price to drop again.
What Apple can do
Everyone would love to see upgrade pricing, but I doubt that Apple will provide this: they want software to move to the newest iOS for "free", so that users can easily upgrade to new hardware.
A great help would be the ability to provide upgrades to apps no longer on sale, as long as the same app is also made available for sale on a different sales ID. This would enable a slightly longer support cycle: For every major iOS release you put a new version on sale, and remove the older ones from sale. You provide the current version as an update to your old customers for two or three additional iOS revisions, before stopping with updates. Once you have provided your last update, say for 6.1.3, and 7.0 is out, you could then put the old version back on sale for old devices, with a clear statement that it will not see any updates anymore.
There is also quite some room to improve app discovery on the store, enough to warrant its own post later.
Now that Apple has presented iOS 7, we can start to speculate which hardware Apple will present in the fall. My guess is that the new lineup for iPhone and iPad will be:
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iPhone 6
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iPhone 5
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iPhone Touch
4" Retina display, $350 without contract, larger battery, 8GB -
iPad Retina
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iPad mini Retina
The iPhone 4, 4S and iPad 2 will be dropped, as Apple will want to stop selling 30pin connectors and non-retina displays. With advances in screen technology I believe that the mini can now support a Retina display, and the large iPad will loose 80g thanks to them. Also the large iPad will now come in sizes 32/64/128GB.
Now that Apple has presented its new iOS version, it is obvious that this update basically requires a retina display to function well. This shows especially in the reliance on fine typography, a feature that only works well on high resolution displays, and I believe it telling that OS X has not seen a similar update yet. The updated interface makes a very refined impression, apart for several icons which are visually too strong for my taste.
A few other thoughts:
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I believe there is a good chance that we will already see a retina iPad mini in the fall, with a lighter update for the full version and the removal of the 2, given the extent to which iOS 7 works better on a retina display.
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The Mac Pro depends a lot on how extensive Thunderbolt support will be to provide extension options, and how pricey they will be.
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No MacBook updates, is Apple waiting on 4K display support? Or has Intel supply issues and Apple wants to concentrate on the one model that would profit most from the new CPU?
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The added support for game pads for iOS/OS X could be the first step to make Apple TV also into a gaming console.
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600 million iOS devices is a huge installed base, and more than large enough to support a vibrant app ecosystem. Actually the higher prices Apple charges are a good way to self select the best paying customers, and help iOS attract the best developer talent.
Samsung convinced the ITC to issue an import ban of older iPhones. Which feels pretty strange: Samsung could not (because they are standard essential patents) demand that nobody else use their patents, so they were restricted to demanding an extortionate FRAND rate (about 2.5% of sales). So it would have been sufficient, until a court determines a reasonable rate, to demand that Apple should post a bond covering their demands, and enforce the ban only should Apple be incapable of providing the money. After all, SEPs cannot be used to exclude someone wanting to license it, the only discussion will be about the appropriate rate. So as long as the licensee can guarantee that it will be able to meet a court determined rate, there is no legitimate interest in an import ban for the holder; it is useful only to extort a much higher license fee than otherwise possible.
If we compare Android and iOS security, we see that Google has copied Apple’s approach quite extensively, so that only two important differences remain:
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iOS uses the 256bit version of AES, while Android uses the 128bit version
In theory this is not such a large difference, because the key schedule for 256bit is not especially good, but 2^65 bits are still 4 million terabytes working memory for the shortcut.
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iOS has a unique device AES key fused into the hardware.
It prevents people from easily using a specialized computer for cracking, and you can only check one key every 80ms on device. You could extract the device key by checking with an electron microscope, but this is very expensive, error prone, and destroys the chip. Or you can still brute force it, but then you will search for a random 256bit key. 2^128 operations would need 10^19 years on a parallel cracker doing 1000 GigaOps per second.
This means that in practice iOS is much more secure than Android, because almost all passwords have much lower entropy than 128 bits; a password consisting of random letters and numbers would need to be 25 characters long to achieve it.
If we look at the currently offered cameras, we see a wide range of sensor sizes, as seen in the table below as a multiple of the smartphone sensor size.
| Size | Example |
|---|---|
| 1 | iPhone |
| 2 | Typical Compact |
| 3 | Premium Compact like Canon S100 |
| 9 | Sony RX100, Nikon 1 |
| 16.5 | M4/3, e.g., Olympus E-PL5 |
| 29 | Fujifilm X100, Nikon DX |
| 66 | Full Format, e.g. Leica M9 |
If we look at these numbers, we immediately see why sales of compacts are collapsing: they do not offer a sufficient improvement in quality compared to smartphones, especially when we consider that the typical phone has a fast fixed lens. And whatever little extra in quality compacts can provide is more than compensated for by the easier sharing available from a phone, and the much more intuitive interface provided on the phone.
This leaves only the enthusiast market for the dedicated camera makers, for models from the RX100 upwards. The opening they have come from these improvements:
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Better low light sensitivity, as the phones become quite grainy with sunset, let alone typical indoor lightning
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More choice than a fixed focal length
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Higher image quality thanks to inherent advantage of larger optics and shallower depth of field
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Better focussing speed
The good news for camera makers is that, apart from speed, these are inherent advantages from making larger cameras, and that smartphones would become too clunky were they to follow this road. The bad news is that the smartphone is good enough for display on a Retina iPad when the image was taken in sunlight. On the other hand the improved tablet screens will make the quality deficits of a smartphone camera more visible, and so increase demand.
Jobs Still Available To Dedicated Cameras
So which jobs regarding image capture cannot be sufficiently done by the smartphone?
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The always with you camera that will give good quality even in bad light
This is what the RX100 excels in, with the X100s and RX1 as options with more weight in return for more quality.
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The travel camera
This is one of the most important reasons people want a better camera. Here weight plays an important role and makes M4/3 a very good option, for example with a 14-140 zoom and a f/2.0 or faster pancake, when you need something better than the RX100.
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The kids/sports camera
Both demand quick focus to follow the action. This is the one area where the phase detection in mirror cameras still is an advantage. But with them slowly moving onto the sensor as well, this advantage will remain short lived. The Nikon 1 already has amazingly fast autofocus.
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The reporter
As far as quality is concerned, a well served market. What can be improved is the speed with which images can be processed and forwarded. This mainly calls for fast and frictionless transmission of images, where there is still quite some room for improvement (background download of images onto the iPad/iPhone, for example).
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The exhibition camera
Here people have time to compose their shots, and they want the best technical quality, e.g., for product shots. This is where you go larger and larger until you no longer can handle the mass efficiently. This is where the best image quality is still analog, from a large format with the film scanned. But it is also a niche that is very difficult to serve, as 36 MPixel at 200 dpi are already 45×30" (112x75cm).
The UX Trap
The greatest problem facing all camera makers at the moment is that they do not really understand how to create easy to use software. There is still an immense potential in using displays to make cameras easier to use, to better integrate with phones to make sharing images easier (and maybe even move advanced settings over to their larger screens), to rethink camera operations like Camera+ on the iPhone did, to leverage the iPad as an advanced remote trigger with live view, e.g., for macro photos.
There are so many obvious points to improve upon, for example:
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Why do DSLRs still use a primitive LCD display in their finders, when they could use a Retina class color display? It would require a custom cut, but with a roughly a million units annually this should be possible to get. And it would make it so much easier to display all relevant information in them, making us more productive.
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Why is Wifi/Bluetooth 4.0 not standard, downloading small jpegs in the background to your phone so that they are immediately available for sharing? Why can’t we use the iPad to browse and process raw images, before sending them on, without requiring us to move a card?
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Why do cameras still have so many image processing functions on board when these can be done much better on a phone or tablet with their larger screens? Why do we not have any help with filtering our photos for the good shots?
Dave Addey has written a nice piece about App Store pricing. The pricing is not much of a problem with games, where Apple allows developers to make progress painfully slow unless you regularly fork over some money: Real Racing 3 is such an example.
Productivity apps should copy this model, and ask for gold for every document you create. Then give everyone one free document, and offer 5 document, 50 document, and infinite document packs as IAP options. Or for your social apps limit the amount of people you can connect to. The few apps that do not fit are either conceptually simple enough that you can make a convincing video demonstration or they live off data for which you can sell a subscription.
Interestingly Apple permits quite a bit on the App Store which I regard as clear violations of the developer agreement: in game currency violates section 2.1 of the IAP addendum (it is a prepaid account), the Perspective app violates section 2.3 as a subscription service. I suspect these are a symptom of Apple looking to allow people to make money, and hopefully will mean some official changes coming in the future.
There is also a more fundamental problem in app discovery: The App Store is so large that it is quite hard to find what you want. What you want in addition are curated stores that only carry the best software, say one for teaching science. They should not replace the main store, but be a complement, a specialist that is allowed to drop stuff it finds irrelevant, while the big store carries everything.
The earnings for this quarter are in, and we essentially see cheaper iPads fueling unit growth, with a corresponding loss of gross margins, while the more expensive models show no or maybe even negative growth.
The iPhone numbers are a strong indication that we are approaching a stable level in high end unit share, with people now feeling that they have mostly enough iPhone in their pockets. Still when we look at the Verizon numbers, which show a roughly even split between iPhone 5 and older models this quarter, we see that there is a large segment that strongly prefers a two year old iPhone to a current Android phone for roughly the same price. This indicates that the Apple ecosystem still commands a significant premium, but it is more for overall ease of use, instead of for new features, essentially saying that older hardware is already enough phone for most.
There is still a strong incentive for carriers to push phones using the 4G networks, as they are much more spectrum efficient, but after that the incentive for subsidies is gone unless a new model creates fresh bandwidth demands, and this will mean increasing pricing pressure on the iPhone.
There are three behaviors affecting the iPhone:
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people would keep their phones for longer, maybe replace the battery after a while, but still remain loyal to the iPhone.
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people will switch over to cheaper, good enough alternatives.
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people will decrease spending on the iPhone because they now own an iPad for mobile computing.
Because of the huge margin on the iPhone, Apple has quite some room to reduce prices and still maintain 30% gross margins. And their quality is still sufficiently better than the competition to maintain these margins, after all we are only talking about a few hundred dollars for people spending $1000 or more every two years for phone service.