3,145,728 Pixels

Richard Gaywood for The Unofficial Apple Weblog on the next iPad’s Retina Display:

2048x1536 is an incredible number of pixels – 3,145,728 of them, in fact. That’s only 17 percent less than the 27“ iMac or 27” Cinema Display, and it’s 52 percent more pixels than a 50” 1080p television screen!

While the Retina Display on the iPhone 4/4S was quite an achievement, doing the same thing on the iPad is a much, much bigger deal. 2048 x 1536 is a lot of pixels. In fact, I’ve never owned a screen with that many pixels. The most interesting part of the announcement next month will not be the display itself, I think, but the rest of the internals that are able to both drive such a display and fit inside an iPad.

164 Megabytes Of Text

TorrentFreak on the 164 MB backup of The Pirate Bay:

Recent history has shown that when a site is threatened with shutdown, or censored, the Internet is very quick to come up with a workaround. And with thousands of backups of The Pirate Bay floating around, it will be very hard at this point to get rid of the famous torrent site.

What’s perhaps even more striking is that the greatest arch rival of a billion dollar entertainment industry is nothing more than 164 megabytes of text.

An Argument For The Mac Pro

Many are predicting the end of the Mac Pro, but this would mean the end of desktop computing for Apple. True desktop computing, that is. The kind where awesome, high-end video cards can be used along with the top-of-the-line workstation CPU. The kind where multiple hard drives can be built into a single system. The kind where a computer can be built with an obscene amount of RAM. The kind where games can be played on the highest graphical settings without a drop in frame rate. The kind where high-end graphics programs run buttery smooth no matter what.

The iMac and Mac Mini lines do not offer these things. While they are technically desktop systems, they are really just glorified notebook computers inside. Both, despite being desktop systems, try to be as small and thin as possible from an industrial design standpoint. This results in the use of laptop components instead of desktop components. The top-of-the-line iMac is essentially a high-end laptop. How can you tell? Just look at its graphics card. The best graphics card currently available in an iMac is the AMD Radeon HD 6970M. That ‘M’ stands for “mobility”. That’s right: it’s a graphics card for notebook computers. And it’s not even the best graphics card in that class!

If the Mac Pro ceased to exist tomorrow, the best graphics card available on a Mac would be a notebook-level card.

This is a scary thought. While the iMac and Mac Mini are decent machines that meet the needs of many people, there will always be that top-tier group that need real desktop graphics. These cards are bigger than their mobile counterparts, and produce a lot of heat. You can fry an egg on some of them. Therefore, the computer cases housing them must be big enough to include sufficient cooling systems. Cooling is often the driving factor in desktop case design. The Mac Pro is the only box Apple makes that can house a real graphics card. It would be a shame (nay, torture) to have to buy a Windows or Linux box just to get desktop-level graphics.

While it might sound silly for Apple to care about the Mac Pro in a world where mobile devices are increasingly dominant, I would argue that if they are going to make trucks at all they might as well make a big, formidable one. After all, if you’re going to be sitting at your desk using a desktop-only machine, you might was well have one that is as powerful as possible! It’s not like that space under your desk (that a Mac Pro would occupy) would have been used anyway. Apple is in the business of offering complete solutions. Therefore, it should offer machines at every point along the computing spectrum. Not having a workstation-level desktop would leave a gaping void in the lineup. Until Apple can cram that kind of power into a smaller package, the Mac Pro should live on.

Instead of putting an expensive Intel Xeon processor into it’s lowest-end Mac Pro, Apple should start with an Intel Core i5 or i7. This could drive the entry-level price of a Mac Pro down to $1,999, resulting in higher sales. Intel’s current line of Core i5 and i7 processors have become so powerful that its Xeon line is only necessary for a small niche of users. The Mac Pro would then be a more feasible alternative for people who want an iMac with better graphics.

Slinging With Friends

Drew Millard at Kill Screen captures the essence of Words With Friends:

You’re just slinging shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.

Called It

I tweeted last week that the next release of Mac OS X would be called “Mountain Lion”. Looks like I was right. Even John Gruber couldn’t predict it, but it seemed fairly obvious to me. My thought process: Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Snow Mountain Lion.

Totally called it.

The Wrong Path

Path, it seems, is uploading your address book to its servers. I tested this app out a few weeks ago, so I apologize to everyone in my address book. I had no idea. And that’s the problem. I can’t say that I’ll be using this app in the future.

Previous Track

Marco Arment acutely points out that hitting the “previous track” button on the iPhone should not go to the beginning of the track. That is, if the track you are listening to is a podcast. Skipping to the beginning of a podcast loses your place! Why would you ever want to skip to the beginning of a podcast you are in the middle of?

There is a better, simpler solution than the one Marco proposes, however. All tracks synced from iTunes have metadata associated with them, so the software knows if it is a podcast or music. If the current track is a podcast, the “previous track” button should save your place and skip to the previous track. Otherwise, it should keep its default behavior of first skipping to the beginning of the current track. Nobody would ever be annoyed by this new behavior, because nobody wants to skip to the beginning of a podcast anyway. And pressing “previous track” while listening to music would still yield the current behavior.

The rule would apply to iTunes U lectures and audiobooks as well. If there is a rare exception, where someone needs to go to the beginning of a non-music track, dragging the playback position to the beginning is still an option.

It's Got A Pen? This Is Awesome!

Peter Pachal at Mashable on the Samsung Galaxy Note Super Bowl commercial:

Since Samsung put so much emphasis on the stylus (“It’s got a pen? This is awesome,” a character says at one point), it was inevitably the focus of the backlash on Twitter, with many users pointing out the irony of Samsung promoting “the next big thing” with technology that was popular in the ’90s. The hashtag #palmpilot even briefly became a trending topic right after the ad aired.

And as you can see in The Verge’s review, this thing is big. Really, really big.

The (Not So) Special Editions

On January 31, 1997—fifteen years ago today—Star Wars: Special Edition was released in theaters. Not many people remember this date, but I remember it vividly. I had been looking forward to the rerelease of my favorite movies, with added computer-generated special effects, for months. I poured over every detail I came across in magazines, television, and the web. As a child it seemed they would never come out.

Unfortunately, they did.

My attitude towards the special editions wasn’t overly negative at first: I loved many of the changes. The original Star Wars movies—especially A New Hope—contain many special effects that simply don’t hold up well. That’s the downside to being so innovative, so bleeding edge. Having many of these issues fixed and polished felt good. It felt right.

But there were two major things I didn’t like:

First, there were many errors and issues that weren’t fixed in these original special editions. There were matte paintings, for example, that were still annoyingly off in their perspective. There were spaceship shots that still looked fake. Lightsabers were still the wrong color. Most of these issues were eventually fixed in subsequent editions of the films, but why release a buggy, spotty special edition in theaters? Was there not enough time or money to clean everything up?

The answers lie, perhaps, in the second thing I didn’t like: George Lucas went beyond polishing to adding extra scenes. A computer generated Jabba the Hutt meets with Han Solo in one added scene. It’s flashy and new, but ultimately adds nothing to the experience, ruining the pacing of the film in the process. It was baffling and distracting to see Jabba sliding around like that. Oh, and then there is the “Han shot first” debacle. It is extraordinary how a single second of tweaked footage can completely destroy a beloved character.

The more I thought about these additions—even as a kid—the more I hated them. What I wanted was a cleaned-up version of my favorite movies, but that’s not what I got. Today, the recently released blu-ray editions of Star Wars still retain these changes, and add even more. A quality, high definition release that respects the original vision of these movies may never be released, and it’s one of the most shameful things to happen in the history of film. These three movies deserve much better treatment than they’ve received these past fifteen years, treatment that has been anything but special.

Big Quarter

MG Siegler reflects on Apple’s latest quarterly earnings report:

A company this big is not supposed to be able to nearly double revenue year-to-year. Nor are they supposed to more than double profit. But Apple did both. The numbers are so big that they almost seem like they should be typos.

If you haven’t heard, Apple is doing quite well for themselves, announcing their best quarter by far this week. Such an immensely profitable quarter has the tech world abuzz. Why is this quarter so much better? Siegler nails the answer in his followup post:

A new iPhone plus holiday shopping season is apparently like gasoline on a fire. Now we know.

And knowing is half the battle.

Cultural Black Holes

Perhaps the best story The Onion has ever done, a family found alive in the suburbs:

Upon discovery, the family was rushed back to civilization. Attempts to reassimilate the Holsapples into metropolitan living with a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago and dinner at a nice Peruvian restaurant were met with resistance.

“When we got to the museum, the family became quite agitated,” psychologist Dr. Allan Green said. “Jay kept calling all the modern art ‘weird’ and Meredith said, ‘If we wanted to look at art, we could just go to Deck The Walls at the mall.’”

Green feared that the family was not ready to rejoin urban life after having received little or no cultural stimuli in the suburbs for nearly a decade.

Indeed, the suburbs are cultural black holes, sucking dry everything interesting about mankind. In its place: cars, gigantic streets, parking lots, bigger cars, 23¢ off toothpaste, carefully manicured street medians, stores that are 150 yards or more from the street, even bigger cars, and rows and rows of lawns.

Surely the epitome of suburban life is the lawn: an utterly useless and void patch of grass. Too small to use as a field for recreational activities. Just big enough to warrant the purchase of a gas-powered lawn mower. A facade of country living at best, the suburban lawn drains time, money, and resources from its owners, giving nothing in return.

Futhermore, lawns push everything farther apart. Lawns cover more surface area in the US than irrigated corn. Farther apart means more time spent in cars, driving around. Arcade Fire put it well in their album, The Suburbs, where this lyric is found in two songs:

First they built the road
Then they built the town
That’s why we’re still driving around
And around and around and around and around
And around and around and around and around
And around and around and around and around

Less time in real places. With real people. Two things the suburbs were engineered to keep us away from.

Futurecop!

Futurecop!, the duo that loves to cultivate 1980’s nostalgia in the form of electronic pop music, now has a website. Their Adventures Of Starpony EP is one of my favorites from last year. Futurecop!’s first LP will be released later this month. Dubbed Futurecop! - The Movie, the full-length release will work as the soundtrack to a fictional 1980’s movie. As a child of the 80’s, I love this stuff. Can’t get enough of it.