Apple
Steve Jobs’ Legacy Is Missing Clue to Apple Tablet
Dec 13th
I really like this Essay by John C. Abell. He makes an interesting argument about how Steve Jobs’ vision and track record for creating paradigm shifts in struggling industries could be the ultimate motivation for an Apple tablet.
Give the Essay a read if you have the time. Its worth it.
AT&T sets the date for MMS on the iPhone
Sep 3rd
So AT&T has finally set the date for when it will enable iPhone users to send MMS messages (test messages with photo/video/audio content). That date is September 25th. TUAW has a good article up about this which includes quotes from AT&T representative Brad Mays.
These are some of my favorite talking points:
We support more iPhone customers than any other carrier in the world so we took the time necessary to make sure our network is ready to handle what we expect will be a record volume of MMS traffic. [...] The unique capabilities and high usage of the iPhone’s multimedia capabilities required us to work on our network MMS architecture to carry the expected record volumes of MMS traffic and ensure an excellent experience from Day One. [...] We’re riding the leading edge of smartphone growth that’s resulted in an explosion of traffic over the AT&T network. Wireless use on our network has grown an average of 350 percent year-over-year for the past two years, and is projected to continue at a rapid pace in 2009 and beyond. The volume of smartphone data traffic the AT&T network is handling is unmatched in the wireless industry.
This illustrated my earlier post about AT&T (and the other cellular service providers) not being ready to handle the demands of data-rich smart devices on their networks. If it took this long for AT&T to be ready to handle MMS from the iPhone what will happen as the market expands? Are the other cellular providers learning from AT&T’s mistakes, or are they going to encounter the same problems when the iPhone or other smartphones begin to saturate their networks?
Snow Leopard will change the world
Sep 3rd
Let me start by saying that I don’t yet have 10.6 Snow Leopard running on my home system. I’m still on a PPC Mac, so I don’t get 10.6 at home until I get a new Mac. That being said, I’m lucky enough to have access to a whole range of the latest Macs all of which are now running Snow Leopard. 
Through my own use and observations, as well as the in-depth reviews I’ve been reading online I have come to the conclusion that 10.6 will be looked back upon as the OS that changed OSes.
Yeah, Snow Leopard on the front end is a more polished version of 10.5 Leopard; but it’s the back end plumbing that really makes Snow Leopard special. Three things in particular make this the OS that will change everything:
- A new Xcode that makes developing multithreaded apps as painless as possible
- Grand Central Dispatch which makes multithreading a real world possibility
- OpenCL which leverages numbers 1 and 2 to provide developers an easy way to harness all the silicon in modern computers
For the first time we have an OS that was designed to truly take advantage of all the capabilities of today’s multi-core, multi-GPU computers. This really is going to change everything. The really exciting thing is that as nice as Snow Leopard is right now, it’s only going to get better.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The technologies in 10.6 are so new it will take a while for apps to be developed that can really take advantage of the plumbing Snow Leopard has implemented. But, when they start coming out… Man! It’s going to be awesome.
