This seems head-slappingly obvious to me but I don’t see anyone talking about it. So let me explain my thinking, and at the end maybe you’ll slap your head too.

tl/dr:
1. The ‘5s’ (but it won’t be called that), similar to the 5 but with bumped specs.
2. The Big iPhone, 2.8 inches wide instead of 2.3, and up to 6 inches tall.
3. The free iPhone similar to the 5 but with a lower resolution screen.
4. It is all because of ‘lightning’.

There are lots of analysts who say that Apple needs to come out with a cheaper iPhone. Apparently completely oblivious to the fact that there is a cheaper iPhone (the previous two models, the most recent discounted substantially and the next older one free with contract).

Anyone actually paying attention to Apple knows this is stupid analysis, because there has been a cheaper iPhone on the market for years, and a free-with-contract iPhone on the market for many years too. They get ignored though because they are the ‘old’ iPhone models, the previous two years worth. This does not actually matter, since every phone back to the 3Gs can run the latest iOS version perfectly well. It is confusing enough to the punditry that they don’t see it.

This year is unique though. This is the year that Apple is in a hurry to kill the old connector and move everything over to the ‘lightning’ connector. This is a good move, having two standards out there is annoying. They knew it would be, enough so that they moved to update the iPad immediately last fall when the new connector was revealed. Changing the connector is not a simple swap and requires enough re-design of the electronics to warrant a new design for the entire package.

So given that they have to introduce a new connector anyway this would be the year to wipe out the old models. So I take it as given that as soon as the next iPhone is introduced, the 4s will be gone, not shifted to the free-with-contract slot the 2nd oldest phone would normally occupy. It may also ship sooner rather than later.

There is a bonus here for Apple. Instead of having the fairly pricey component list of the 4S in the cheapest slot they can move to a lower priced bill of materials. So we’ll get a ‘free’ iPhone, with a 4S equivalent speed processor on a die shrink, lightning, and other changes with some new name. I would not be surprised if it is *not* retina. This would keep the cost down and help Apple maintain real margin at a much lower price point. Possibly non-retina but with the longer aspect ratio of the iPhone 5 screen.

Second we’ll get a big iPhone. The shape and size of this is easy to figure out. Just as it was easy to figure out the size of the iPad mini, just in the other direction. The math for the mini was this: Take the screen resolution of the non-retina iPad and move those pixels to the same display material that is used in the iPhone 4. The big phone will work the same way; take the screen resolution of the iPhone 4 and up (325ppi), and move it to the material used in the retina iPad (264ppi).

This seems obvious once you give it a minute of thought. For the same reason the tap target size move from iPad to iPad mini worked fine it will work fine in the opposite direction without being ludicrous looking. In fact it will become very comfortable. The primary advantages to users of this larger size will be increased battery size and easier to see type. This will be hugely popular with a broad segment of the market.

The rough math gets you a phone that is 6 inches high and 2.8 inches wide, bigger than the Galaxy and Nexus 4. It will of course be the same thickness (0.3 inches) or thinner compared to the iPhone 5 and have 50–70% more battery. A phone that tall seems silly to me, and if prototypes feel silly in fact then don’t be surprised to see a larger screen with the same aspect ratio as phones prior to the 5.

And of course we’ll get the new phone, the ‘5S’ or more likely the ‘new iPhone’ for 2013. Don’t expect anything radical, just more continuous improving over the specs of the previous model; faster/more cores cpu, more ram, more storage.

Given the spread in models and names happening it would make some sense for the naming convention of phones to change this year. Dropping the number, as they have for the iPad last year, and for the Mac lines years ago, will look obvious in retrospect and will happen with this next rev.

So those are the three phones; all with lightning, two ‘normal’ sized phones, one probably not retina, and one big phone, all ‘new’ models. I won’t be surprised to see at least the cheapest one come in multiple colors similar to the last iPod touch rev.

Of course I could be completely wrong about all of this, there are no doubt economic and political forces at work within Apple at the scale they’re operating now that are beyond the ken of anyone outside it.

I don’t have much time right now but I wanted to share a couple thoughts while they’re bothering me. Maybe I can exorcise them and move on.

There has been some attention paid this past week to people being assholes on the internet. Nothing new there but surprising to some people because it was programmers ‘picking on’ another programmer. Others have covered it better, and Scott Hanselman had a thoughtful response (You are not your code, so true, I’ve said for years that anything I wrote, coded, photographed etc. six months ago is crap. When it stops being that way I’ll have stopped learning and it will be time to retire from creative endeavors) so go read them if you don’t know what I am talking about.

This scrapes at a scab our culture has. And I don’t mean programmer culture, I mean ‘big C’ Western Culture. I’ve opined in the past that school “beats the entrepreneurial spirit out” of people, and that college can be the capstone on the death of that spirit. Kids are BORN creative and entrepreneurial and then we spend 20 years grading them, their schools and their teachers until everyone is so afraid to ‘fail’ that they are also afraid to try anything that involves risk or creativity of any sort. The few kids who manage to stave it off get told they are ‘smart’ and ‘creative’ which causes another sort of small death in them as well.

Education is not something that comes in a bottle. It is not a quantity of ‘stuff’ that gets doled out by a teacher. I don’t have any brilliant insights here, but this is a problem that needs to be addressed above all other failings our educational institutions may suffer from. We’ve recognized that there is a problem, but we’re going in the dead wrong direction.

Great things come from creativity and wisdom, and those are born of foolishness and lessons learned from mistakes, failure, and ‘happy accidents’. We should all have permission to fail.

There are many and deep problems with the patent system as it exists today. I won’t bother rehashing it, but suffice it to say when patents are often weapons held by companies that produce no actual products, and people who are trying to develop new products are actively avoiding looking at existing patents to avoid having knowledge of them, things are seriously broken.

The standard by which something should be patent-able is this: Can a member of your peer group (i.e. your speciality of engineering/design/etc.) reverse engineer your invention. That’s it. If they can look at your invention and derive whatever novelty you have introduced as obvious then it should not be patent-able.

This satisfies the original intent of patent law; to ensure that in exchange for protecting your invention for a reasonable period of time as being exclusive for you to exploit, you divulge what is is that you’ve done to push forward the the knowledge of all mankind. If this were held to the volume of patents would drop a thousand-fold. This simple litmus test would drastically curtail bullshit patents that we endure today, restoring the value of patents to their holders, removing the intellectual mine field they have become, and making patents once again a place where new frontiers are pushed forward.

This week as I pondered various discussions at the Defrag¹ conference I found myself again frustrated that we do not yet have a bytecode interpreter as a standard browser feature.

It has been apparent for a long time that JavaScript is not a foundation we can grow forever on. The current ubiquity and reliance on JS is an accident of history, like so many ‘standards’. Efforts have existed for awhile to extend beyond the limitations of JS, Coffeescript being a better known example. The number of projects that have been created to compile other languages to JS² strongly signals the need for something better.

That something better is emphatically not Dart. Nor is it NaCl. Both of those projects stem from noble intent but are tragically misguided and interesting evidence of fuzzy mission and management.

We are in a dangerous place right now. Google makes a lot of noise about being ‘open’ but they are pushing ahead with non-standard web technology right at the moment when both Microsoft and Adobe, arguably the biggest offenders of proprietary web technology over the last decade, are coming into the HTML5 fold.

Interestingly there is already a bytecode standard and runtime we could use. It has an open standardized specification and very solid cross-platform open-source implementation that runs on everything from mainframes to cellphones. There are dozens of languages that compile to it. More than a decade of performance tweaking. First-class tooling support on Mac, Linux and Windows. It is even able to support multiple cores and has first class security sandboxing. Can you name it?

One of the best known stories about Steve Jobs is how he saw graphical user interfaces and mouse input devices at PARC and it inspired him to push for the efforts at Apple that became the first Mac.

It could be argued that the iPad and iPhone are also in a way inspired by PARC, (parctabs and pads) though it may just be that the guys at PARC saw an ecosystem that would make sense and we are just now catching up to it. That ecosystem was called Ubiquitous Computing and it has three major ingredients which are analogous to iPhones, iPads and iTV. All this TV talk is pretty boring though and misses the point; that ubiquitous computing (interfaces everywhere) is just as revolutionary a shift as general computing (one device that can become many things) was and goes way beyond media consumption.

That last device is one we have not seen yet, though speculation is now running rampant, especially since the SJ bio published this week has direct quotes from Jobs saying he “finally cracked it”. Whatever ‘it’ is, presumably a simple model for interacting with the display.

Joe Hewitt wrote an interesting piece¹ talking about how latency between the iOS device and the display would be a technical hurdle to overcome. I don’t think this is likely to be the case though; Airplay display mirroring exists today and works fine, but in the case of videos and music why would you relay a media stream through a mobile iOS device to the display? This may be what has been cracked; by moving everything to ‘the cloud’ here is no longer a relay issue, instead the mobile iOS device triggers the stream, but from that point the display is receiving the stream directly. The mobile device can stream directly, but in most cases won’t need to. This improves stream stability, means that the device doesn’t have to say involved full time, and saves on battery life and wireless traffic.

Others have been talking about how none of this can work from a logistical standpoint because of the mess of how broadcast and cable television works; that you can’t corral all these moving parts and get the various players to work with you to provide enough content. That you’ll have to provide at least a cable card connection. I would argue this fight is already past the middle thanks to the iPad and that the only connector an iTV will have is a power cord. Maybe an ethernet jack.

There are already multiple apps for the iPad that provide streaming video either from cable providers or directly from programming providers like HBO. You can already to pretty well with these on an iPad, certainly well enough for the early adopter crowd. There are already sports apps that provided nice real-time data, and live video is the obvious next step.

Apps that work across multiple devices and screens may become the norm. Your NFL app has stats and field positions, do-it-yourself replay and more in your lap while the larger display is tied into the video stream, but they are tied together so things can jump around as appropriate.

Your presentation software can be driven from your phone or tablet, but the display is seen by everyone. Your notes are on your screen, people are already doing this now, it just gets simpler when the wall display is standardized and well understood.

Stand in the kitchen and ask your display where your kids are. Hello the ‘family clock’² from Harry Potter.

There are many scenarios that will be possible, or more practical, and new ones will be invented. That is the point of general purpose computing, and now ubiquitous computing; that the devices are malleable, and new things will be created on top of them that their creators did not conceive of.

There is nothing necessarily brand new here, especially to hard core techies. “The future is already here, but unevenly distributed”. Just as I was time-shifting my video watching with a satellite dish and multiple VCRs five years before TiVo, and archiving video with a digital tuner to a server for years before iTunes and other services came along, so too do other ways of thinking about content and computing move from being esoteric to mainstream. People are growing accustomed to nice interfaces to their data and devices, witness the Nest thermostat that is getting buzz this week.

I suspect many techies will initially feel let down by whatever iTV turns out to be, but will gradually realize how revolutionary it is to have a “wall computer” finally be around when they start to show up in kitchens and board rooms.

Safari will often show a cached copy of a page that is several days old, even though it showed a current version moments before. I see it most frequently on news index sites like the Techmeme river.

To reproduce:

1. Go to site, may be in a new tab/page, view current version of page.
2. Follow a link and view linked page.
3. Hit back to return to page.
4. Page loaded is out of date rather than the version you were just looking at.

I have clearly observed this bug in Safari on iOS 5 over a dozen times now, on both an iPad 2 and iPhone 4.

I have been waiting since August 8th for enrollment in the Apple Developer Program. It is now the latter half of September. I am completely stunned.

Timeline:

August 8 — Initial application through online form. I also faxed in documentation of my LLC the same day as I knew this would be required. I received thank you emails in response to both actions, the first surely automated, the second must be in response to someone processing the fax and tying it to my application record.

August 18 — Ten days later I received an email requesting a letter providing a physical mailing address (my LLC in this case using a PO box address) and affirmation that I have legal authority to enter into agreements. Fax sent back within the hour.

September 1 — Thinking a reasonable amount of time has passed I send an email asking for status. I get back an email “We are currently reviewing your inquiry and will get back to you as soon as more information become available.”

September 1 — Later that day I received an automated follow up email asking how my support experience was. I respond with appropriate displeasure at the slow and opaque experience I’ve had so far.

September 18 — No further movement to date. I lose my shit.

I can understand if they are completely buried in applications, really I do. If that is the case I hope they are hiring quickly to add capacity. In the meantime how much trouble is it really to give some indication of how long the queue is? Am I waiting another week, another month?

Two questions:

1) Is this typical? Are other people who have applied in this timeframe experiencing similar delays? This should be pretty straightforward to figure out that the LLC is real and approve or ask for more information. Which leads me to believe nobody has really looked at my information yet.

2) Is Apple so buried in applications of questionable origin (i.e. app scammers looking to make a quick buck with shovel ware or stolen apps) that it has effectively become a DOS attack on the application system itself?

For most of the last 20 years I have primarily developed for and with Microsoft products. It is well known that Microsofts main strength is that they know how to support developers. This experience so far really highlights the contrast.

As predicted Android is dying fast. Surprisingly Google is helping it along. There has been a lot of stunned commentary since Google announced that it would acquire Motorola Mobility, lots of people questioning their sanity. I think this was their only move, they either had to abandon any pretense of controlling Android, or build their own stuff.

As I’ve argued before Android will become meaningless to consumers. Watch a non-techie and how excited they are about their iPhone, that level of brand recognition will not occur with Android as it exists today. Worse (for Google) the only company that is going to really get anywhere with Android tablets in 2012 is Amazon. And it won’t be an ‘android’  in any way that Google would want it to be, in fact they seem to be shut out.

So here we are, back to a ‘Google phone’ as they should have pursued in the first place. The Android misadventure has been interesting, and useful in that it blew all kinds of value out of the market and forced OEMs to rethink their strategies. Perversely Google also probably just secured the #2 smartphone slot for Microsoft in a couple years.

Bottom line for me in platform targeting: Apps on iPhone, wait and see on Win Phone 7 but be ready for it. Books on iPad, but get ready for the Kindle tablet. Not sure how to get ready for that, it may be an Android development stack, but it is very likely there will be a publishing kit for interactive books that does away with the app layer. To be seen…

It has been widely adopted by device manufacturers, happy to toss aside legacy firmware and licensing fees for something sleek and modern and with a Google subsidy. It is now reported at a 39% market share. It is specifically because it is widely used that it has rapidly become the commodity underlayment and is being fractured to pieces.

There are hundreds of people working for the various carriers and manufacturers who seem to think that their job is to create some sort of competitive advantage for their particular flavor of device. Instead of focusing on making the experience of the user as smooth and seamless as possible, which trust me is way more work than ‘differentiation’, they shovel cruft into the phone.

So we end up with huge compatibility problems. Apps that crash. Inconsistent user experience. Battery life that makes the device a toy.

The fundamental basis of a good user experience is TRUST. The user has to trust that when they tell the device to do something it will, that they don’t have to recoil in fear of doing the ‘wrong thing’ and destroying data, texting naked pics to the wrong person, having no phone because the battery died. The UI needs to be consistent so they can find their way around in a new screen quickly and intuitively.

Google had some inkling of this early on and tried to enforce standards, but they’ve since failed to hold the line. Now that horse is out of the barn and it is not coming back in.

The destiny of Android is huge market share as the layer under the cheap and inconsistent phones that will be replacing the ‘feature’ phone segment of the market. No more meaningful than things being Java based turned out to be. This is not a platform segment in remotely the same way that iOS is, or that future Win Phones have the potential to be.

Lion is here and it is very good.

I come to the Mac from a strange place. I’m not a ‘switcher’ in the sense that I am not a consumer user who when it came time to upgrade an aging Windows PC decided to try out a Mac. In fact I was very reluctant. Fortunately I have impeccable timing.

I can still recall very clearly the first time I saw a Mac (the original) and I an also recall seeing a Lisa very early on. In both cases they were in stores, the Lisa I don’t think was even powered on, sitting in what I think was the business center of Sears, back when Sears sold computers. The Mac was on, and I was able to play with it for awhile, I was enchanted with Paint. From that point on I lusted for a mouse, not necessarily a Mac as it was well out of any reasonable price range for my household. We did get a PC fairly early on, a Panasonic ‘luggable’ monster, and years before that we had a TI-99 4a that was the machine I cut my teeth on as a programmer.

PCs were where it was at for me, with a detour into Amiga land. But then there was NeXT and the cube. This was a damn exciting piece of hardware and software, and again vastly out of my reach. It was released while I was in college and I read avidly about it but it dropped out of mind as I moved on and started doing commercial development work on top of DOS and then Windows. I moved to Windows NT in the 3.1 era (1993–94 I believe) and from then forward Windows was unquestionably ahead on the engineering side of things.

More recently Vista got short shrift. I found it to actually be very solid when run on new hardware and configured well. I built an engineering department on it and had no issues that were attributable to Vista at any point. Windows 7 is the best OS Microsoft has ever shipped. It is Vista with only small changes.

All that time I ignored Apple. Yes, I got my iPhone the first week of availability, but I continued to scorn Apple engineering due to the miserable experience that is iTunes on Windows.  Proof enough of poor software practices and an often uneven and frustrating user experience.

At the beginning of this year I got my first Mac. Just a Mini, just to play with and see what was going on and to dabble with some iOS app ideas. It was a strange experience for me. At that moment in the evolution of OSX and Windows it was pretty clear that Windows was actually ahead in user experience. For all the praise that gets lavished on Apple for their great design it does sometimes come at a cost (case in point the sharp aluminum edges of my new Air that are digging into my wrists at the moment…) in actual comfort of the user. The experience of managing lower-case windows on the Mac desktop prior to Lion frankly sucks. Especially in comparison to the ease with which windows in Win 7 can be docked to screen sides and switched between via the task bar. Switching between windows on the Mac is kind of a joke.

But this changes dramatically with Lion. One very simple conceptual change; full screen apps are their own ‘spaces’. Spaces was never a concept your Mom was going to understand. Flipping between programs though, that makes sense. Grandma is doing it on her iPad, right?

When is a Mac not a Mac? The Mac ‘operating system’ was terribly primitive during the 90’s. Even the Win32 based versions of Windows were technically ahead, and there was no comparison with NT. The current Mac internals are something that fascinates me, because it is a NeXT station under there.  Obviously this has been the case for about a decade, but I missed the party. I’m glad I did. Now that I’m paying attention the Mac side of things and catching up with how things have evolved I’m pleased with my having missed much of the birthing pains that got us here.

I’m liking Lion a lot, and have a strong preference for apps that use the Lion way of going full screen. Fast switching between apps with a gesture is so natural. It is one of those things that makes you slap your head and wonder why things didn’t always work that way. It is so good that I will take it over multiple monitor setups. This is a big deal; I got my first 21″ monitor in 1994, it was $2000. I started using multi-monitor setups in 1996 when they were rare and exotic. I’ve had at a minimum two 21″ screens for most of the last decade, often three or four. Nice LCDs up on arms. I put my money where my eyes go. But now… I’m finding myself surprisingly happy with a single 13″ screen on this Air. Six months ago I would have told you it was impossible.