There have been recent reports about the decline in global PC sales. Laptops replaced Desktops are the most common "PC" platform 5 or more years ago. What impact on the market will this have?
Showing posts with label apple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apple. Show all posts
2011/11/30
Apple needs to invent 'The Brick': screenless high-performance CPU, Graphics and Storage
Two new things appeared in my world recently:
Can Apple afford to cut-adrift and ignore the needs of good folk who rely on their product for their business/livelihood, some of whom may have used Macs for 20+ years?? Would seem a Bad Idea to alienate such core and influential users.
Clearly Apple look to the future, and like the floppy drive they expunged long ago in favour of Optical drives (now also obsolete), Desktops as we know them are disappearing from mainstream appeal and usefulness.
I think there are two markets that Apple needs to consider:
The simplicity and elegance of Just One Plug of the iMac makes it unbeatable in certain niche applications, such as public use PC's in Libraries or battery workstations in call centres.
Can Apple produce a "power" laptop with the processing, graphics and storage size/performance that meets the needs of High-end Media folk?
A: No, never. Because the fastest, most-powerful CPU's, GPU's, most RAM and largest/fastest storage only ever come with high-power and big footprint: you need a big box with a big power supply: The definition of a Desktop or Workstation.
One solution would be to licence OS/X to "tier 1" PC vendors like Dell or HP for use on certified systems. But that's not going to happen, Apple is a hardware/manufacturing company - they will never go there.
Hence "the Brick" that is mainly accessed via "Remote Desktop".
My suggestions are a modular design, not dissimilar to the NGEN's expandable 'slices':
It can live in a (locked) cupboard, or many can be hosted on a server cluster as one of many Virtual Machines. For even a modest operation, high-power servers running VMware makes operational and economic sense. VM's mean another licensing deal. Perhaps VMware, part of EMC, might have the clout to do a deal like this with Apple. Or not.
Jim Gray authored a paper in 2004, "TerraServer Bricks" as an alternative architecture. The concept is not new/original and more than the usual low-power appliances.
An aside on "Jump Desktop", it uses well established (and secure) remote desktop protocols (RDP, VNC). But for Unix/Linux users interested in security and control, this is important:
- A friend showed me Google 'Jump Desktop', connecting his iPad to his Desktop. [Apple have their own 'Remote Desktop' product which I haven't researched. Not sure if it works over the wider Internet as well.]
- Joe Wilcox's piece (Jan-2011) on Apple dumping desktops sometime (soon) as they become less relevant.
Can Apple afford to cut-adrift and ignore the needs of good folk who rely on their product for their business/livelihood, some of whom may have used Macs for 20+ years?? Would seem a Bad Idea to alienate such core and influential users.
Clearly Apple look to the future, and like the floppy drive they expunged long ago in favour of Optical drives (now also obsolete), Desktops as we know them are disappearing from mainstream appeal and usefulness.
I think there are two markets that Apple needs to consider:
- One they haven't won yet: Corporate Desktops, and
- One that's been part of their core business for decades: High-end Graphics/Media
The simplicity and elegance of Just One Plug of the iMac makes it unbeatable in certain niche applications, such as public use PC's in Libraries or battery workstations in call centres.
Can Apple produce a "power" laptop with the processing, graphics and storage size/performance that meets the needs of High-end Media folk?
A: No, never. Because the fastest, most-powerful CPU's, GPU's, most RAM and largest/fastest storage only ever come with high-power and big footprint: you need a big box with a big power supply: The definition of a Desktop or Workstation.
One solution would be to licence OS/X to "tier 1" PC vendors like Dell or HP for use on certified systems. But that's not going to happen, Apple is a hardware/manufacturing company - they will never go there.
Hence "the Brick" that is mainly accessed via "Remote Desktop".
My suggestions are a modular design, not dissimilar to the NGEN's expandable 'slices':
- CPU's and RAM in a housing with capacity to gang together for scale-up.
- GPU's in a PCI-slot chassis, with Thunderbolt available for physical displays.
- Local storage via e-SATA, SAS or Thunderbolt.
- remote bulk storage over the network
- External power-supply, or part of a base-unit (CPU, RAM, PCI-slot, network, Thunderbolt).
It can live in a (locked) cupboard, or many can be hosted on a server cluster as one of many Virtual Machines. For even a modest operation, high-power servers running VMware makes operational and economic sense. VM's mean another licensing deal. Perhaps VMware, part of EMC, might have the clout to do a deal like this with Apple. Or not.
Jim Gray authored a paper in 2004, "TerraServer Bricks" as an alternative architecture. The concept is not new/original and more than the usual low-power appliances.
An aside on "Jump Desktop", it uses well established (and secure) remote desktop protocols (RDP, VNC). But for Unix/Linux users interested in security and control, this is important:
Jump also supports SSH tunneling for RDP and VNC connections which also adds a layer of encryption but this must be configured manually.
2011/09/14
An App too far? Can Windows-8 gain enough traction.
Summary:
"last to market" worked as a strategy in the past for Microsoft.
But "everything is a PC" is probably false and theyll be sidelined in the new Mobile Devices world.
"last to market" worked as a strategy in the past for Microsoft.
But "everything is a PC" is probably false and theyll be sidelined in the new Mobile Devices world.
2011/06/12
Why Apple won't add peer-peer to iCloud
The sister post to this speculates that Apple could add peer-peer protocols/functionality to its iCloud service, and the benefits that would flow.
I'm firmly of the opinion that Apple won't go there, not soon, not in-a-while, not ever.
They have too firmly entrenched attitudes about constructing and maintaining "full-control" over the euphemistically named, "User Experience".
Apple don't do "collaboration", sharing their technology or allowing the mere User to tinker with its Gorgeous Stuff. It'd no longer be "their Design" and they anathema to Apple.
Apple are into "control", which in itself is not a bad thing, but severely limits their software and system design decisions and implementations.
This isn't some simple "we know best" thing, but much deeper, intimately tied to their focus on High Concept Design and a finely crafted "User Experience". Which also means controlled experience.
Apple could make huge inroads into the PC market by licensing OS/X - something it could've done anytime in the last 10 years. Now that "classic" computers are under 25% of its business, Apple could let go of its stranglehold on its computer hardware and light the fires of innovation: "let a thousand roses bloom". But they cannot and won't.
This translates to iCloud in two ways:
So they will build and run some very large datacenters to run iCloud.
The trouble with this approach is they are leaving the field of Innovation open to their competitors.
We know Microsoft won't embrace it, but Google and Android will and do.
Even Great Design can be copied and tweaked, sometimes even improved.That the British lost it home-grown motorcycle and motor car industries, know for radical and innovative design, to the Japanese and their "continuous improvement/refinement cycle" demonstrates this thesis.
In 10 years, will the "iPhone 15" be a patch on Android and the gazillion services/applications it runs?
I suspect not. The most amazing and usable devices are unlikely to come from the standalone corporations.
It could be Google and Android, it could be something completely new.
It just won't be Apple at the front, again.
Think how they blew their advantage of the Apple II. They've got form and the same fixed, rigid mindset is still rampant. That's good for Bold New Steps, poor for continuous stepwise refinement.
I'm firmly of the opinion that Apple won't go there, not soon, not in-a-while, not ever.
They have too firmly entrenched attitudes about constructing and maintaining "full-control" over the euphemistically named, "User Experience".
Apple don't do "collaboration", sharing their technology or allowing the mere User to tinker with its Gorgeous Stuff. It'd no longer be "their Design" and they anathema to Apple.
Apple are into "control", which in itself is not a bad thing, but severely limits their software and system design decisions and implementations.
This isn't some simple "we know best" thing, but much deeper, intimately tied to their focus on High Concept Design and a finely crafted "User Experience". Which also means controlled experience.
Apple could make huge inroads into the PC market by licensing OS/X - something it could've done anytime in the last 10 years. Now that "classic" computers are under 25% of its business, Apple could let go of its stranglehold on its computer hardware and light the fires of innovation: "let a thousand roses bloom". But they cannot and won't.
This translates to iCloud in two ways:
- they haven't thought of the idea themselves, and
- they probably couldn't model the response times of torrent-like service and would baulk at any service which is in the least unpredictable, perhaps sometimes not-quite-perfect.
So they will build and run some very large datacenters to run iCloud.
The trouble with this approach is they are leaving the field of Innovation open to their competitors.
We know Microsoft won't embrace it, but Google and Android will and do.
Even Great Design can be copied and tweaked, sometimes even improved.That the British lost it home-grown motorcycle and motor car industries, know for radical and innovative design, to the Japanese and their "continuous improvement/refinement cycle" demonstrates this thesis.
In 10 years, will the "iPhone 15" be a patch on Android and the gazillion services/applications it runs?
I suspect not. The most amazing and usable devices are unlikely to come from the standalone corporations.
It could be Google and Android, it could be something completely new.
It just won't be Apple at the front, again.
Think how they blew their advantage of the Apple II. They've got form and the same fixed, rigid mindset is still rampant. That's good for Bold New Steps, poor for continuous stepwise refinement.
Apple iCloud and peer-peer (Torrents)
Will Apple add a torrent like ability to its iCloud offering??
iCloud is a remote filesystem with a lot of metadata and does 4 things:
Apple could create an Internet-Scale "Content Delivery Network" with iCloud if ran a peer-peer network, something like the hugely successful bit-torrent protocol/service.
Because you've got authorised content and validated entities/logins in a vendor controlled environment, there isn't a direct copyright or leakage problem, just the ever-present and non-removable "analogue hole".
There is scope for scanning never-before-seen files to see if they are recodings, subsets or 'analogue rerecordings' of know files.
What action then? Automatically remove the file, "Bill the User" or send a Summons?
'Backups' of already known files take the time to transfer and compare the checksum/identifier. That's a incredible compression ratio/speed-up. Those checksum/identifiers also are the natural keys for both the 'torrent' and backing-store key.
Storing the per-machine file/directory structure is another layer and doesn't yield to the same de-duplication/compression techniques.
If I were implementing the local filesystem, I'd do two things:
This enables two services usually only seen at Enterprise scale:
As bit-torrent shows, using distributed {storage, net-bandwidth, CPU} scales, amplifies 'Server Effectiveness' and gives apparent 100% uptime/availability to services.
It's really cheap and easy for the content provider, though causes more traffic on the ISP network.
BTW, this isn't limited to Desktops and mobile devices.
It scales to IP-TV and on-demand content services.
Your Apple-TV box effectively has infinite & perfect storage...
Internode has announced 'fetchTv' - so these services are on the radar for ISP's.
It also has significant consequences for Ozzie customers who pay per Gb.
You really don't want your iPad on a 1Gb wireless 3G plan acting as a torrent server. A nasty $2000 bill surprise!
There are serious performance issues with local congestion (POP, ISP, backhaul, main-site) inter-network links and dealing with ADSL bandwidth characteristics.
The NBN is going to be a Layer 2 network, (2-level VLANs or 802.11 "Q in Q").
The presumption is ISP's will offer PPPoE to begin with, as for the current ADSL services.
PPoE is not well suited to distributed data/torrents:
Which gives you so many single-point-of-failure/congestion/saturation that it isn't funny...
If the other person is across the hall or across the road, this incurs a massive and needless overhead, not to mention delays and multiple local resource contention.
The wikipedia PPPoE article discusses problems and current solutions
So, if iCloud becomes a torrent-like service, will it overload the NBN??
iCloud is a remote filesystem with a lot of metadata and does 4 things:
- provides "second copy of my precious data" (for files I've generated)
- allows synchronisation of those files across the multiple devices/platforms a user connects. This is the aspect Apple 'sells': email, contact and calendar sync and restore/recover.
- mediates the enforcement of copyright and content distribution
- does Internet-Scale data de-duplication.
- By data volume, the Internet is a 'Viewing Platform'.
- 1 upload == zillions downloads [write once, download ~infinite]
Apple could create an Internet-Scale "Content Delivery Network" with iCloud if ran a peer-peer network, something like the hugely successful bit-torrent protocol/service.
Because you've got authorised content and validated entities/logins in a vendor controlled environment, there isn't a direct copyright or leakage problem, just the ever-present and non-removable "analogue hole".
There is scope for scanning never-before-seen files to see if they are recodings, subsets or 'analogue rerecordings' of know files.
What action then? Automatically remove the file, "Bill the User" or send a Summons?
'Backups' of already known files take the time to transfer and compare the checksum/identifier. That's a incredible compression ratio/speed-up. Those checksum/identifiers also are the natural keys for both the 'torrent' and backing-store key.
Storing the per-machine file/directory structure is another layer and doesn't yield to the same de-duplication/compression techniques.
If I were implementing the local filesystem, I'd do two things:
- calculate and store checksums on-the-fly and store in the metadata.
- make sure part of the metadata was as whole-file checksum or UUID-type identifier.
This enables two services usually only seen at Enterprise scale:
- Document-Management-System like controls, searches, functionality.
- user collaboration: tagging, comments, hilighting, edits/recuts + mashups, annotation, linking, etc.
As bit-torrent shows, using distributed {storage, net-bandwidth, CPU} scales, amplifies 'Server Effectiveness' and gives apparent 100% uptime/availability to services.
It's really cheap and easy for the content provider, though causes more traffic on the ISP network.
BTW, this isn't limited to Desktops and mobile devices.
It scales to IP-TV and on-demand content services.
Your Apple-TV box effectively has infinite & perfect storage...
Internode has announced 'fetchTv' - so these services are on the radar for ISP's.
It also has significant consequences for Ozzie customers who pay per Gb.
You really don't want your iPad on a 1Gb wireless 3G plan acting as a torrent server. A nasty $2000 bill surprise!
There are serious performance issues with local congestion (POP, ISP, backhaul, main-site) inter-network links and dealing with ADSL bandwidth characteristics.
The NBN is going to be a Layer 2 network, (2-level VLANs or 802.11 "Q in Q").
The presumption is ISP's will offer PPPoE to begin with, as for the current ADSL services.
PPoE is not well suited to distributed data/torrents:
- your source device puts packets onto your LAN,
- your firewall/router fields those packets and pushes them to your ADSL modem which encapsulates packets into PPPoE, then puts these new packets onto the wire
- the bytes go down your line to the DSLAM
- are routed down the 'backhaul' link to the ISP's nearest site
- into the 'Access Concentrator' to become a public IP addr
- then routed towards the destination public IP address, which could be on the same Concentrator, the same POP, the same ISP, a shared 'Interconnect', or an upstream provider
- into the destination Access Concentrator
- down the backhaul, DSLAM, ADSL model, firewall/router and eventually appear on the destination LAN to the receving device.
Which gives you so many single-point-of-failure/congestion/saturation that it isn't funny...
If the other person is across the hall or across the road, this incurs a massive and needless overhead, not to mention delays and multiple local resource contention.
The wikipedia PPPoE article discusses problems and current solutions
So, if iCloud becomes a torrent-like service, will it overload the NBN??
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