iPad and obvious flaws... the next iMac

One of the oldest tricks in the political book, is to put an obvious flaw into something so you can then control the conversation.

Perhaps (and I do stress perhaps) the next generation iMac, will be an iPad with Mac OSX on it and the internal guts of a MacBook Air. This way he can have tons of haters and free press about the iPad and its lack of user freedom and control. This is the kind of press money simply can't buy. Imagine an entire internet up in arms about the denying of iPad apps, raging madness from some about the closedness of the platform, only to then turn around and say a year from now... "we listened and here is the new iMac". Everybody in elation goes out and buys an iMac in much greater numbers than if he did it the straight forward way as more people than ever were aware.

Jobs isn't stupid. He knows that tablets, laptops, and portability at large is the future of personal computing. By limiting Apple to a closed solution like the iPad, he is simply waiting for some good competitor (google?) to come along and blast them out of the water. (and they will eventually, it is only a matter of time). He won't let that happen, so I think he will provide both closed and open solutions. The only question is when?

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Of course, the opposite argument is that a closed solution that you control entirely is what all capitalists salivate over. In general, control like this equals money. If he can pull this off, and do it while keeping everybody happy, then Apple will be absolute. de facto. save a few small-time competitors which take up the other 15% of the market. I don't really like this however.

I would like to hope that a computer revolution birthed in openness and freedom will stay free and open.

Batteries

I love portable electronics, but I hate batteries with a passion. My iPhone, I end up having to charge every 3 days or so, and for the last day and a half I'm always thinking, "I don't want to use the phone because I don't want to lose my battery if I really need to call somebody". Has there really been significant progress in batteries over the last 10 years? Seems like the best people can do is be more power efficient and use larger batteries. Its 2010... I'm supposed to have jetpacks by now, but I'll settle for a battery that lasts 2 weeks. I only hope that carbon nano-tubes will save me from my battery hell.

Has Steve Jobs lost his Mojo?

Maybe its just me but, the iPad doesn't really look very interesting. The hardware looks very interesting, but the software has come up very short. They really should have put mac-osx on it, but in their ultimate greed to control things for their own personal gain, they may have killed a beautiful product. Perhaps they went too far on the greed spectrum that it blinded them of what consumers really want. Consumers expect that a computer of that size to have more freedom. Freedom in applications, freedom in choosing to browse the web with flash, freedom to run many programs at once, freedom to run a development environment if they so choose. (I'm a bit biased with the latter obviously).

Of course, one of the most interesting things is to pay attention to the marketing campaign that they are doing for the iPad. The marketing is stronger and uses more intentionally subconscious cues than the iPhone or any other previous Apple product I can remember. I think this is very telling. They know that the iPad isn't very good, and they are scared.

JPEG Format Alpha Channel

I occasionally wonder why JPEG doesn't support an alpha channel. Its really quite a drag sometimes.

Malpractice Insurance and Health Care Costs

The right wingers tend to say that the rising health care costs are directly related to malpractice insurance. I think that would make sense if the costs of health care aren't increasing dramatically every year. Just this year our private policy went up 30%. Thats crazy, but I don't think that malpractice insurance is the whole picture. If it was, then that means that doctors are screwing up more often every year or that they are screwing up more severely every year. Both points are unlikely to deviate too much from the standard. So what that means is that more people are getting sicker every year.

Old people aside, I think though that the likely case is the following (from my own experience with doctors, hospitals and potentially life threatening illnesses), is that there is a negative feedback loop in effect. Doctors do not take the safest routes first, far from it they always go straight to the big guns before trying out safer procedures. For example, they will opt for a CAT scan over a MRI almost every time, however a CAT scan gives out huge doses of radiation and is very dangerous as it can cause cancer and such. MRIs on the other hand are entirely safe. So, in effect, I think that this, in combination with improper long-term testing of drugs, is the cause of our health woes. Improper long term testing of drugs causes problems which in turn they use drugs of which those effects cause problems later on which when those take affect etc..... The chances of avoiding any serious illness this month is good, but over your entire lifetime is bad. Therefore everybody will eventually enter the cycle of poorly thought out medication policies and poorly tested long term effects of drugs entering the medical system.

The other possibility which I think is a contributing factor, is that we are treating more illnesses which are just minor inconveniences now than we did before. AKA People don't like being uncomfortable. This still falls under the "there are more sick people" umbrella. Perhaps its a combination of the two which are the cause of our current predicament.

If I didn't miss anything (and I likely missed something), who is to blame for this?

I blame capitalism. But before you go and tweet about this, lets think about this for a second together. For one, I am not against capitalism. Some companies should definitely be for-profit and some should be not-for-profit companies. Any company which deals with the health of the general public should be non-profit. Their sole concern should be the safety of their products and the usefulness of their products. Quite frankly a for-profit drug company encourages this negative feedback effect as it makes them more money. A for-profit drug company for example doesn't really care about curing diseases as there is far more money in just cleaning up the negative affects and forcefully addicting the people on their drugs. Just like any other greedy optimization algorithm, if you let one measurement metric go wild (profit in this case) then it will go crazy and optimize that, however that does not always produce the best results over the long term.

Opinions? Please comment, I'd like to hear it.

CES 2010 -- 3D TVs

Any 3D TV which requires glasses is doomed to ultimate failure. Sure, lots of TVs will have it, but ultimately people aren't going to want to sit down on the couch with these glasses on for everything. Movies, perhaps, but everything, no. For example my wife cooking in the kitchen while having 3D glasses on so she can watch her favorite shows while she cooks. uhm, no. I don't think this is going to take off like people want it to. That is, until the TV allows 3D without glasses. Only then will it really hit mainstream.

My Perhaps Controversial View on Video Game Piracy

I personally look at piracy like this. Piracy is the will of the future imposing itself on the present. The game is changing, companies need to change with it. If they do not, they will be swept up in the wave of change and likely die. The change is this, people want things differently than they did before.

Some developing trends...
#1, they want easy, instant access to video games and at a reasonable price.
#2, they want free to play games where perhaps part of the content (which does not restrict play, only enhance it) as the paid part.

When more and more people play the free-to-play games and their quality subsequently improves, games that charge an admission fee will have to increasingly justify that, and likely they will fail over the long term. Its hard to beat free. Google if nothing else has proved that.