Sub Optimal Rumors Annoy Me

There was a rumor recently that Apple would be selling a seven inch iPad this fall for "as little as $200". This is the kind of rumor that annoys me for reasons I'll explain shortly. The rumor also said that this device would have eight gig of storage. In other words it would essentially be a Kindle Fire clone.

The primary reason this rumor and ones like it annoy me is that they make no sense. Apple is not in business to compete with Amazon toe to toe. They have a very different business model and if they were going to create and release a smaller form factor tablet I can guarantee you two things. It would not cost $200 or even $250 and it wouldn't come with only eight gig of storage.

It took awhile for companies that wanted to compete with Apple in the tablet space to figure out that Apple had set the price point for tablets. Companies such as Blackberry and HP came into the market late with products that offered less than Apple at higher prices. If you're going to go head to head with Apple you have to offer more for less or you might as well create a mountain of hundred dollar bills and burn it because the end result will be the same either way.

The flip side of this is that Apple gets to sell their products at a premium. That might not seem fair but it is reality. So, given that why would Apple sell a product comparable to the Kindle Fire for the same prices as Amazon? Obviously they would not. The base iPod touch goes for $200. Off the top of my head I'm going to say that Apple could sell a device similar to the Fire for $300 and nobody would blink. Apple has huge margins relative to the rest of the industry because they understand the value of their products and charge accordingly. Also keep in mind that investors know this and focus on those margins. Apple is going to do everything they reasonably can to keep their balance sheet numbers looking good. Getting into a price war with Amazon would be very counter productive to that goal.

Which brings me to my second point. Apple is primarily a hardware company but they are making a lot of money on applications and media as well. If you look at the iPod touch you'll see that while they do offer an eight gigabyte entry level model their next cheapest option has thirty two gig. I'm betting that the next version of the Touch will have a base model with at least sixteen gig of storage. The reasoning behind this is as follows. In a world of rich media storage space gets eaten up quickly. This is particularly true given the big bump in resolution we've seen on recent Apple products which exceeds 1080P in the case of the third generation iPad's. All those pixels eat up local storage quickly and the always connected world is still years away if it ever comes at all.

You could argue that the cloud paradigm makes local storage a moot point of course but in the US anyway you'd be wrong. Data caps are very modest and prices are high so even devices with cellular connections are going to be constrained when it comes to downloading video and large song archives. The more local storage a device has the easier it will be to manage all that content which improves the odds that the device will be used and additional content will be purchased. I've pretty much stopped buying apps, music and video for my Kindle Fire because I'm tired of constantly seeing the "Low Storage" warning.

There is a chance that Apple would have a eight gig entry level modal if they did a small form factor tablet but I tend to think they'll start with sixteen. Amazon needs to at least double the amount of storage on the next version of the Fire if they want to have any chance of getting my business and the same would go for Apple. I will not buy another tablet with eight gig of storage no matter what the price.

Some of you might be thinking "But they sell the Apple TV for only $99". True, but keep in mind that Roku's equivalent product goes for about $15 less and who do you think makes more money off of media sales? 

If you're going to make up a rumor its best to understand the business model of the company that the rumor is associated with if you want to be credible. It also helps to understand the product category, know who the big players are and be able to describe the business model of those other players as well. You may not be right about your guess/rumor but at least you'll come up with something that passes the ha ha test.

Of course I could be dead wrong on all of the above if Apple has decided to change their business model. I don't think that is the case however.

Business Model Triangle (Photo credit: Alex Osterwalder)

Related Articles:

• Apple Mini iPad to Come Out in October for $200 : Rumor (devicemag.com)
• Apple eyeing 7.85-inch iPad in ~$200 range for October release (edibleapple.com)
• Rumors of 8.9 Kindle Fire, front-lit Kindle eReader resurface (liliputing.com)

Amazon Kindle Fire, Some Thoughts After Extended Use

I received my Kindle Fire right after it came out. I've used it extensively since then and for the most part I've really enjoyed the experience. I'm going to talk briefly about the thingI don't like today, explain why I don't like it and make some suggestions for possible fixes.

When the Fire came out everyone wanted to compare it to the iPad and while there is some overlap I didn't see them as existing primarily in the same market space. My opinion hasn't changed. Size, feature sets and user experience all differ substantially enough to make it obvious that they have different use cases and thus different customers for the most part. Amazon isn't a dumb company. They never intended to go head to head with Apple with their first generation tablet. They had a specific niche in mind centered around media and application content delivery and they did a good job of executing to that.

There are some warts though. In keeping the manufacturing costs low Amazon delivered a product that doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles. The lack of hardware volume controls for instance. For the most part I can live with the limitations given the price point. The one thing I am finding frustrating though is the lack of storage. It doesn't take much to fill 8gig. A modest assortment of Apps plus a few hundred good quality MP3's and one or two half hour TV shows is enough to have the low storage message popping up constantly for me.

Given the intended niche for this product I can't help but think that Amazon has shot themselves in the foot because of that. I'd buy more stuff if it wasn't such a pain to manage my local storage. Yes, there is the Amazon cloud and while it is very nice the Fire is wireless only and I'm much more likely to be off the network than on when I want to listen to music, use an application or watch video.

There are a couple of different things Amazon could do to address this deficiency in the next generation of their product. The obvious one would be to up the internal storage. The better solution is to add an SD card slot. Apple differentiates their iPad models in part by the amount of internal storage they provide. Apple is primarily in the business of selling hardware with apps and media sales being a steadily growing side line. Amazon on the other hand has a business model where the hardware is just a means of enabling people to buy other stuff from them. This is very similar to the video game consoles where the hardware is sold at cost or for a small loss with the knowledge that sales of games in the future will more than make up for any losses on the initial hardware sale.

So in this case Amazon has no incentive to try to differentiate their hardware based on the amount of local storage. In fact they have an incentive to find a cost effective and simple way for people to up the amount of storage their devices have if this encourages additional sales of content and if my experience is meaningful I think it would. Adding an SD card slot would increase manufacturing costs modestly but would enable consumers to up the amount of local storage significantly. Amazon could also optionally bundle different sized SD cards with their next generation Kindle Fire which would make it easy for people to create a customized experience in this area.

So, the bottom line Amazon needs to find a way to make more local storage available on the Fire if they want to increase their after purchase revenues. All other concerns are secondary in my opinion.

I have some thoughts on a second generation Kindle Fire but I'll leave them for another day.

Amazon-New-Detail-Page (Photo credit: kokogiak)

Related Articles:

• Kindle Fire powers strong Amazon quarter (intomobile.com)
• Amazon Kindle Fire accounts for over half of all Android tablets (agbeat.com)

What If Apple Did Make a Television?

The persistent rumors that Apple is preparing to release a television have been cropping up for at least a few years now. Every time I hear them I have a tendency to want to scream for reasons that I've explained on Google+ and in previous posts here. To keep it short, Apple already has the Apple TV set top box and the margins on televisions are low while the competition is fierce so what would Apple gain by building a television?

The thing about opinions is that they should be reexamined constantly, particularly when new facts come to light. In this case there are two things that are making me reconsider.

Number one, this rumor won't die and I can't think of a good reason why it would keep getting resurrected. The regularly recurring 7 inch iPad rumors are easy enough to explain as your basic run of the mill spreading of FUD to suppress sales of competitors products. Not that I'm not accusing Apple of anything, just noting that it has been common practice in the industry for as long as I can remember. It doesn't even have to be Apple that is doing it. There are analysts and other third parties who have both personal and professional motivations to attempt to influence how many tablets are sold by companies like Amazon and ASUS.

The second thing that makes me think there may be something to this is the discovery that there are industry standards for video resolution above 1080p, though this isn't really a necessity if Apple wants to define their own resolution or go pure proprietary but it got me to thinking.

Apple has incorporated very high dot density displays into both their iPhone and iPad over the past couple of years. This has been made possible by both advances in display technology and video processing hardware, particularly in low power environments. These advances mean it is feasible to produce the displays at prices that make them affordable enough for mass market consumer products and that the supporting hardware can provide a good user experience at these much higher bit densities.

If Apple is going to produce a TV they'll do it in what is referred to as a differentiated manner. They won't want to compete on price as that would impact their industry leading margins and signal a change in their approach which is unlikely. Producing TV's with higher resolutions than the now standard 1080P would be one way of doing this. The obvious problem with that approach is there isn't much content right now that fully utilizes even 1080P. Producing a TV that supported QFHD or one or more of the 4K video standards would thus only be the first and in some sense least important step.

Here is where the late Steve Jobs connections to Disney and Pixar come in to play. Lets assume for a moment that one of Jobs last projects was to leverage his contacts and ownership stakes in media companies to get Apple access to higher quality sources for video. Realistically you'd need a really huge display to really utilize these higher resolutions but that is a secondary concern and one that most people won't care about. Bigger is always better and there may be other benefits as well to these higher resolution televisions like enhanced color reproduction and/or brightness.

So assume Apple has deals lined up for higher resolution video, what else could they provide? The 3rd generation iPad's 2048x1536 display has already provided significant motivation for iOS game and application developers to produce versions of their products that support this resolution. You're already ahead of 1080P right there and that is in a ten inch form factor screen. It's easy to believe that a next generation version of Apple's SOC (System On a Chip) could support even higher resolutions.

If you double the 3rd generation iPad's vertical and horizontal resolution you end up with something awfully close to Full Aperture 4K's 4096x3112 resolution. Keep in mind that an Apple television would have the advantage of being plugged into the wall and while power is always a concern these days, Apple would have a much easier time revving up the performance of their SOC if they didn't have to worry so much about their power envelope.

There would be some challenges though. Arguably the biggest one would be the limited amount of bandwidth most US homes have. Supporting QFHD like resolutions in real time would require copious amounts of bits to somehow make it into our homes and that is a problem. Many of us get our Internet from the local cable company which has a vested interested in discouraging things like this. It's increasingly common for bandwidth caps on the order of 250 gigabytes or less to be enforced. That sounds like a lot of data but it really isn't when you're talking about these kinds of resolutions. Apple would likely have to offer the ability to download content before viewing at least in the US. Other first world countries don't tend to have this issue so it might even be conceivable that Apple roles this product out some place other than the US first. Doing so would be a great way to shed light on the steadily developing bandwidth crises in the US.

So in summary, I'm now convinced that Apple might be working on a television. If they are it will be a differentiated product that compliments their overall strategy and product line. They are too smart to do otherwise. Is my vision above close to the mark? I'd like to think it is at least realistic but we'll all have to wait and see.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Related Article:

• Rumor: Apple to launch 4k video format? (tuaw.com)

Lytro Camera, Three Hardware Things I'd Change

I've had my Lytro camera long enough to have a fairly good understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. This time around I'm going to focus on my three biggest hardware related complaints.

To be fair, I love the industrial design of this product. It is sleek, attractive and easy to use. Lytro did a great job of putting together a next generation camera that doesn't sacrifice ergonomics and functionality in favor of aesthetics. There are some kinks however.

First off is the lens cover. I like the basic idea but it suffers from two major flaws. First of all the magnet that is supposed to keep the lens cap attached to the front of the camera is weak and the cover comes off very easily. This kind of defeats the purpose of having a lens cap in the first place. The second problem is that there is no way to attach the lens cap to the camera when the camera is in use. I was going to bevel one corner of mine and drill a small hole so I could attach a piece of string that would attach it to the wrist strap but I've already lost the lens cap for the second time.

My second complaint is the LCD. Yes, it's low resolution. I'm actually OK with that. The problem is its very dim when viewed from above and less than stellar when viewed from the sides or above. This makes it difficult to frame shots since the LCD is the only way to see what the field of view is for the picture you are taking. This problem is compounded by the fact that the LCD stays on when the camera is plugged in for download and charging. It takes a long time to download and process images from the Lytro camera so I generally wander away from my Mac and return hours or days later. In the meantime my Lytro's LCD has been on the whole time. I may be imagining it but I think it has gotten even dimmer as a result. Hopefully Lytro will update the camera firmware to automatically turn off the LCD after a few minutes.

My final complaint is also about the LCD. The touch screen isn't as sensitive as I'd like, particularly when I'm in creative mode. I'll get a shot framed and need to adjust where the focus is and have to touch the screen multiple times to get the right focus. Meanwhile the hand holding the camera has drifted in part due to the pressure I have to exert on the screen and thus I have to readjust.

If I had to pick only one of the three to fix it would be the LCD. That really is the cameras Achilles heel right now from a hardware perspective.

Into the Lens (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

More Lytro Thoughts

In my last post I spent a bunch of time talking about CCD's as a possible limitation on the capabilities of future Lytro cameras. As I posted in the comment section of that entry it turns out this shouldn't be an issue. Lytro CEO Ren Ng discussed CCD's in his 2006 PhD thesis and according to Ng higher density CCD's were unlikely to be a cost driver in the future.

It turns out that the Lytro camera is using a CMOS sensor rather than a CCD. I'm not knowledgeable about this technology but apparently the primary up side is faster transfer of data off the sensor. That can be a significant advantage for a product that wants to be an easy to use point and shoot. I've been impressed with the Lytro's cycle time between pictures and this probably helps explain why it is so fast.

Another potential problem I mentioned was optics. Based on an interview with Lytro Executive Chairman Charles Chi that I link to in the "Related Articles" section below this may not be an issue either. Chi notes that

What we're trying to capture is rays of light, and the more of them we have, the more interesting things we can do for imaging. There's a lot we can do for lens correction, aberration; we can do much more dramatic 3D effects, refocus effects.

The implication here is that while its nice to have high quality optics it isn't vital. Some amount of correction can happen as part of the post processing.

Given all that I think I'm finally keying in on the fact that the real strength, and weakness of the Lytro camera is the software. On the plus side much of the cameras functionality is in software so there is a good chance that those of us with the first generation product will feel like we have a brand new camera a year from now. On the downside, the computation that is required to make the Lytro tick is non trivial and may explain at least in part why some decisions about the cameras design were made.

For instance, that very small display? Yes, it is in part a side effect of the form factor but you might notice when you flick to the right to look at a picture you've just taken that a certain amount of time passes as the camera does something, about four seconds in fact. This happens once per picture so far as I can tell after which the preview happens instantly. My guess is that some amount of processing has to go on before the camera can do its fancy refocus trick. Something similar happens on import to my 2008 iMac. That process takes about a minute per picture. So, a higher resolution LCD might mean longer wait times for previews. If the time taken scales linearly it would take sixteen seconds if the display were 250 x 250 pixels which is four times its current resolution but still very modest by modern standards. It's easy to see that taking that much time wouldn't fly in a consumer product.

Would a GPU help? It seems like it would but right now I don't have enough of an understanding of the CPU in the current Lytro camera or how applicable the kinds of functions that GPU's are good at would be to light field photography. My instinct says very but that isn't my field or area of expertise so I could be way off.

Lytro photo of Stone River by Andy Goldsworthy at Stanford (Photo credit: Steve Rhodes)

Related Articles:

• Technologist: Q&A: Lytro's Charles Chi talks light field, battery life, and licensing (macworld.com)
• Thoughts About the Lytro and Photojournalism (gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com)

Lytro, What Is The Future?

This entry is going to be a combination of what I think I know about how the Lytro camera works and what that might imply for Lytro's future products. The information contained here was gleaned from various on line sources and conversations I had with several Lytro employees at a recent photo walk for first camera owners. Employees were happy to answer questions about the current model and enthusiastic but understandably tight lipped about future plans/products so there is no inside information here. Any errors are solely my own. I in no way represent the company other than being a satisfied and very intrigued customer and early adopter.

I've had several ah ha moments recently about the Lytro camera, the technology behind it and what all that means to the future. The first big aha moment was when I figured out that it uses a standard CCD which is the technology at the heart of all digital cameras. For those who don't know, a CCD is a piece of silicon that translates the light that comes into a camera into digital values that can be stored and processed by computers. CCD stands for "Charge Coupled Device" and if you click on the first occurrence of CCD above you can learn all sorts of interesting things about how they work.

When Lytro talks about their first camera they prefer to refer to "magarays", or the number of light rays they capture. There are multiple reasons for this. First this is a very different camera from anything we've seen before and the terminology really does need to change to make understanding the differences easier to explain. The other reason is that the actual 2D product that comes out at the end of the process isn't very impressive right now; more on that topic later.

The eleven megaray number comes from the fact that Lytro is using an eleven megapixel CCD. Most smart phones have between five and eight megapixel CCD's so from that perspective the Lytro camera is actually a bit ahead of the game. High end SLR style digital cameras have much higher resolutions but they have both more expensive CCD's and higher quality optics to support that increased resolution. The higher quality optics are needed because ever smaller imperfections in the lens will lead to noticeable distortions in the image captured as pixel density increases. With the exception of some very impressive additional hardware and software the Lytro camera is essentially an eleven megapixel camera but it can't cheat as many low price digital cameras do by using optics that are not as good enough to support the reported pixel densities.

The Lytro camera has a rather odd aspect ratio of 1:1. In other words it takes square pictures. The native format of Lytro images is proprietary but you can export a jpeg image. When you do this you get a 1080x1080 picture which is a bit less that 1.2 megapixels. This is an interesting number when you take into account the fact that the camera captures 11 megarays of light. What this implies is that it currently takes around nine light rays for each pixel in the 2D image you can export from the Lytro software. (11 megarays/1.2 megapixel final picture = 9.2 rays per pixel). I'm not an expert in CCD's but a bit of research indicates that the high end of commercially available CCD's is in the 36 megapixel range. That would translate into about 3.9 megapixel 2d images if such a part were substituted for the CCD currently in the Lytro camera. As noted above though you would probably need better optics as well and there would be other implications such as much larger file sizes which would necessitate more storage and faster processing. All of which could greatly increase the cost of the camera.

Cost is currently one of the things people note as a limiting factor in the Lytro cameras appeal. Because of that ~ 9.2 to one ratio of rays to pixels in the final image you need higher quality components throughout the camera to get a particular level of quality. To be fair though this isn't a traditional camera and the comparison I'm making here is essentially comparing the Lytro's biggest weakness with one of the traditional digital camera's greatest strengths. Still, cost is likely going to be a constant challenge for Lytro in regards to their products both because they are a small company and because their technology appears to require higher quality components. This would be particularly true for high end products that had pixel densities sufficient to satisfy professionals.

I can think of at least one way to lower costs on future models though. It should be possible to use multiple lower price/resolution CCD's to capture higher light ray counts. If you look at the image below of the internals of a Lytro camera I believe the CCD is just behind the small light blue rectangle about 2/3rds of the way to the right.

If I'm understanding things correctly the light field sensor is taking the incoming light and breaking it up into a series of regions that are projected onto the CCD and in turn saved. Later on software is used to generate an image from these stored light rays.

You could in theory combine several CCD's into one mega CCD. This wouldn't work in traditional digital cameras as there would be gaps in the image where the various CCD's joined. This wouldn't have to be a problem for the Lytro since the sensor could in theory be tuned to accommodate such an arrangement by directing light rays only onto CCD surfaces and ignoring the borders.

Another advantage of such an approach would be the fact that you would have N paths to storage where N is the number of CCD's. Depending on the architecture this could mean lower costs as the communications bus between the image capture engine and storage could run at a lower clock rate if it were able to write to memory in parallel.

I'm getting a bit esoteric and am out of my depth here but suffice it to say that Lytro has some challenges in the area of creating higher quality traditional images. Future improvements in their software may yield a better than 9.2 to one ratio of rays to pixels. That would essentially be a free upgrade for those of us who bought the first generation product.

Significant improvements are probably going to require new hardware though. This isn't to say that the current camera is bad, it's not. It is very useful as is and based on conversations with Lytro employees there is a firm belief that a lot can be done to extend the functionality of the current model. I've spent most of my time talking about hardware in this entry and while the hardware is set in stone the software is not. When you take a picture with a Lytro camera you are capturing information about the scene beyond what is currently being processed and displayed. Support for three dimensional images is one enhancement that has been mentioned several times and there will likely be others.

I'll close here with one last observation. The Lytro camera is very durable. I accidentally dropped mine last night onto a hard wood floor from several feet up. Other than a very small amount of distortion in the case on one corner of the lens end it is fine.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles

• Ten Things People Don't Know (Or Have Wrong) About The New Lytro Field Camera (photofocus.com)
• FCC Teardown Reveals Lytro Camera Secrets (wired.com)

Lytro Camera, First Day

There are a lot of things I love about this camera. There are also some things that I'm not very happy with. This isn't surprising given the fact that it is a first generation product with first generation firmware. Some of the limitations will hopefully be taken care of in future software upgrades but others will have to wait for next generation hardware. I'm fine with that. I've been on the bleeding edge of technology before so none of this is a surprise to me. I bought this camera knowing it was essentially a technology preview.

I'm going to insert a disclaimer here. I’m not a photographer, amateur or otherwise. I have only the vaguest notion of what an F Stop is and please don’t quiz me on any of the terminology because odds are I’m going to fail badly on any such test. Keep that in mind when reading anything I write that gets into the realm of photography.

As it stand now the Lytro camera is a fantastic but very limited tool. It is NOT a general purpose camera. The cost is too high and the features are very limited. Want to take pictures at night or in low light situations? It’s going to be difficult to get good results. You’re most likely going to have a lot of graininess and poor color. There are other problems as well, all of which have been discussed fairly thoroughly elsewhere so I won't go into them here.

One thing I really like is the macro capabilities of the camera, particularly when you go into creative mode where you can pick your focus point. Of course you can change the focus as much as you want later but it is still nice to be able to compose and see your shot right away.

What really excites me though is the promise of the future. All of the software feels more than a little unfinished but Lytro appears to have big plans. Support of rendering three dimensional images and infinite depth of field for instance. Lytro has some heavy hitters backing them so there is a pretty good chance they'll be given the opportunity to polish their first offering and continue to deliver additional products in the future. I certainly hope so. I'd be very surprised if Lytro is cash flow positive at this point but I think they can be some day. Whether they do it solo or partner with one of the big players will be interesting to see. The much less desirable outcome would be an eventual liquidation with somebody else picking up the IP later.

Image via Wikipedia