Published on
August 15, 2006 in
Apple.
I had an interesting discussion some days ago: will the iPods move to more storage (e.g. the Terabyte iPod) or more bandwidth (Bluetooth, EDGE, Wifi). Let me sketch what those two scenarios for the future iPod look like:
2009 iPod as personal media storage
That new iPod ‘3D’ might not be much bigger than the current 60GB iPod video, but it has a better 16:9 screen, and way more storage. It ships with a 500GB Flash card that is replaceable. You typically buy more storage cards: 1 for all your music, 1 for essential movies (with that Hitchcock and Tarantino collection), 1 for TV series (one season is around 15GB) and fill them up from your 50TB home media set-up.
The sleek white player has wireless USB and uses wireless battery reload (with magnetic holder) so you don’t need a cable for anything. Your 5.1 headphones: wireless. Copying from that 50TB iTunes/Tivo media station: wireless. Hooking it up to an HD-TV: wireless. Sure, it has Gigabit Wifi too (which is really only around 250Mbps, but we’re used to that from the 802.11 guys), but not everyone uses that yet, certainly not in that Ardennes village where you booked that small hotel for your “24″ marathon (12 seasons, who would have thought? Thank god for the 2x hi-speed viewing mode).
It can obviously play the new “3HD” (3-dimensions) standard, which is really neat if you have one of those new holographic projectors. If you have subscribed to the (rather expensive) iTunes ‘Premium Hollywood’ service, you get all new movies on your iPod at the same moment when they are released in the cinemas. You only get them at consumer-grade HD resolution (2048×1080 – looks OK on that 50″ screen), not at the new DCI 8K standard for movie theatres (8192×4320 with HDR) but who’s complaining.
2009 iPod as personal media receiver
Continue reading ‘iPod in 2009: more storage or bandwidth?’
1982
25 years ago, the last real proof of innovation coming from the recording industry:
In 1979 Philips and Sony decided to join forces, setting up a joint task force of engineers whose mission was to design the new digital audio disc. Prominent members of the task force were Kees Immink and Toshitada Doi. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the taskforce produced the “Red Book”, the Compact Disc standard. (…)
According to Philips, the Compact Disc was thus “invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team.”
from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc
Three years of constructive working and a new technology was developed that was revolutionary superior.
In August 1982 the real pressing was ready to begin in the new factory, not far from the place where Emil Berliner had produced his first gramophone record 93 years earlier. (Deutsche Grammophon, Berliner’s company, had by now become a part of PolyGram). The first CD that was pressed in Hanover was a recording of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauß. In January 1983, 500 working days after the start of production, half a million CDs had been made.
from research.philips.com
The CD was an instant hit and made a lot of companies a lot of money:
Continue reading ‘Invent, don’t inhibit’
I have to buy a new PC for my parents. I want to reuse an existing 19″ screen, so I am only looking for a desktop. My dad has been using a PC for a couple of years and don’t feel like switching to Mac. So a Mac Mini is not an option. So I started looking for a PC that was as simple and beautiful as that, at the same or smaller price. I was in for a disappointment…
The baseline
First off, the original Mac Mini
sleek, square, white, with just a minimal CD slot and no buttons or logo on the frontpanel.
If evolution would build a PC, this is what it would look like. Now let’s take a look at what ‘intelligent design’ has to offer:
Continue reading ‘Who makes a pretty PC?’
When Apple reinvented the photofeed, they actually were a bit sloppy. Instead of building upon standard RSS and the Media RSS extensions backed by Yahoo!, Feedburner et al., they decided to do what Microsoft has always been accused of: they made a different, non-compatible RSS format.
cf http://static2.podcatch.com/blogs/gems/snedit/rss.xml
It’s pretty bad. There are lots of errors, the date formats are wrong, there are elements that are not in RSS that aren’t in a namespace.
via scripting.wordpress.com (Dave Winer)
from static2.podcatch.com/blogs/gems/snedit/rss.xml
- First of all, it looks like they made a ‘wallpaper-cast’ instead of photocast. The RSS extensions are called www.apple.com/ilife/wallpapers.
- The RSS feeds are only accessible with a specific UserAgent, i.e. only with Apple Safari. Try to open it in any browser and you get an error message. (Update: actually, while I was writing this, the behaviour seems to have been changed to delivering the RSS with
Content-Type: application/octet-stream. So this is more or less fixed – application/rss+xml would have been better)
- The dates are not conform the RFC822 standard: “2006-01-11 16:43:22 -0800″ should be “Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:43:22 -0800″. Most RSS parsers will have no problem with this, but if there’s an official RSS specification, why not follow it.
- They put the image URL in the
link field, which does not allow extra attributes like type or size. Why not use enclosure?
- For all the date related metadata (photoDate, cropdate), why not use Dublin Core dcterms?
Continue reading ‘Apple creates RSS the Microsoft way’
“Eigen lof stinkt” as they say in Dutch, but who told you back in August of 2005 that RSS + images made sense (‘Photofeed: image podcasting’)?
A major new feature of iLife ‘06 is what Apple calls “Photocasting.” Described as podcasting for photos, photocasting makes it possible to share photos over the Internet using one mouse-click. The photos are updated to your .Mac account, where users can subscribe to them using Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
from macworld.com
and
Take Photocasting, for instance. A brand-new feature in iPhoto 6, it lets you share full-resolution photos with friends and family who subscribe via an email invitation you send using your .Mac Mail account. As you update photos in a Photocast album, they appear in your subscribers’ iPhoto libraries automatically — ready to print or add to iPhoto books, calendars, or greeting cards. And anyone can subscribe to your Photocasts: even if they don’t have iPhoto, they can still access your photos via any RSS-compatible web browser.
from www.apple.com/ilife/dotmac/
Photocasting, photofeed, tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to, whatever. It’s great to be right! Just send that MacBook Pro my way, Steve.
Continue reading ‘Apple reinvents photocasting in iLife ‘06′
Muster said that within five years, Apple could release an iPod with one terabyte of storage — that’s almost 17 times the maximum amount of iPod storage Apple currently offers.
Munster envisions a one terabyte iPod as a portable, “coffee table” media center that would allow users to store hundreds of movies and thousands of photos and songs.
cnn.com
A 1000 GB iPod, that is
- 200 movies or 370 hours of full quality DVD
- up to 2000 hours (almost 3 months non-stop) at DivX/Xvid/MPEG-4 quality
- using the H.264 video compression: 120 days or 4 months of video!
- 1500 music albums of full quality CD (which means, no Sony XCP)
- 15.000 albums if your rip/compress them to MP3 first, maybe 20.000 if you use WMA/AAC (that is over 2 years of audio to listen to!)
- 2500 episodes or 100 seasons of TV series like Lost, L-Word, Desperate Housewives, Sopranos, … in compressed format (hey, it’s a 2,5″ screen, who cares about HD?)
- If your terabyte iPod breaks down and you buy a new one, it will take you between 3 hours (FireWire 800 Mbps) to 2 days (Wifi 802.11g) to fill it up again (from the backup you of course had put on your snug little home 10GB RAID-5 storage cluster thingy).
If by then all portable devices have 10-Gbit Ethernet built in: 15 minutes will be enough to fill ‘er up.
- Our then-standard 48 megapixel camera would create 72MB RAW images, of which the iPod could store 14.000, or if you would compress them to 5MB JPEG: 200.000 pictures.
Other predictions: the iPhone (or Apple as mobile virtual network operator) and the iTIVO, a media-center/time-shifting/TV/video/DVD hub , all in the next 12-24 months. Let’s hope this inspires some people to seriously vamp up their design/user interface teams (Nokia, Microsoft, I’m looking at you!).
Technorati: terabyte – ipod – bandwidth – portable – data
There’s good news and bad news. First the good: Steve Jobs just issued a wake-up call to the movie industry. He already has shown everyone how to sell music (fixed price, basic DRM, no limits on burning) and hopes to do the same with video. The new iPod video looks great, and is clearly gonna end up on my desk in the near future.
Continue reading ‘“Lost” in iTunes: good and bad news’
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