I’ve long compared Apple punditry to Cold War-era Kremlinology — to predict or analyze an opaque, secretive organization, you’ve got to read between the lines of the few things they do say, and you’ve got to know how to interpret silence. So, let’s go deep and severely overanalyze and jump to unfounded conclusions based on two things that struck me regarding the just-released-yesterday preliminary schedule for WWDC 2012 (which schedule is, alas, available only to registered attendees).

ADA

First, the Apple Design Awards have been moved from their traditional spot Wednesday evening to a prime time spot Monday afternoon at 3:45. It doesn’t take a genius to interpret this as Apple increasing the attention and emphasis on the ADAs. On Mondays, WWDC is a single-track conference: the public keynote in the morning, the “technical keynote” (which used to be called the OS State of the Union, but is now called the Platforms Kickoff, but really, you can simply think of it as a second keynote¹ focused on technical details rather than marketing and product-level announcements) after lunch, and then there was one more spot. That spot used to be for the Developer Tools Kickoff, but this year, that’s been moved to Tuesday morning at 9am.

The idea is, Monday morning’s keynote is for the public; Monday afternoon is for the stuff that applies to all 5,000 WWDC attendees. New product announcements in the morning; new technology details and developer tools in the afternoon. The rest of the week, WWDC is a multi-track conference — at any given time, there are usually six concurrent sessions and a slew of labs where attendees can ask questions and get help from Apple engineers. After Monday, Apple even changes the configuration of the third floor of Moscone West. The big room, the one where the keynote is held, is called “Presidio”, and on Monday it’s far bigger. From Tuesday through Friday, Presidio is still the biggest room in the building (hold that thought for the second part of this piece, below), but it’s nowhere near as big as it is on Monday. They break out partitions to add a few smaller rooms to the third floor for Tuesday through Friday.

So not only is Monday afternoon a better time slot for the ADAs — holding it in the evening meant the ADAs were up against dinner plans, parties, and the feeling that one needed to just plain take a break from Moscone — it’s also a bigger room. The ADAs are a big deal and the event is always well-attended, but this year it’s safe to say just about every attendee is going to be there.

Think of it this way: there are only three events on the schedule for Monday, all three of which will have the attention of all 5,000 attendees, and Apple is using one of them to promote third-party apps. Why? I say go back to the iPad 3 introduction in March, and Tim Cook’s segment at the beginning, where he compared apps like Twitter and Yelp on the iPad versus Android tablets. The explicit message: third-party apps look better and offer a better experience on iOS.

Higher-profile better-attended Apple Design Awards will emphasize the same message. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for winners that aren’t exclusive to iOS and OS X.)

TBA

Second, there are an unusually high number of “To Be Announced” sessions on the WWDC schedule this year. There are always TBA sessions on the preliminary schedule, because there are always some sessions pertaining to new stuff that will be announced on Monday. But this year there seem to be more TBA sessions than usual — particularly in Presidio, the aforementioned biggest room for sessions in the building.

On Tuesday morning, Presidio is booked for the Developer Tools Kickoff, Game Technologies Kickoff, and What’s New in Cocoa sessions. After that, Presidio is pretty much entirely “TBA” from Tuesday afternoon through the end of the day Thursday. And that’s just the big room — there are dozens of other TBA sessions on the schedule.

This implies not just that Apple will be announcing new stuff (duh, it’s WWDC), but new stuff that will fill the biggest room in the building with two-and-a-half days worth of sessions.

Of course, this is Apple, so this could be nothing. Could well be that when the TBAs are filled in on the conference schedule on Monday June 11, we’ll look at these sessions and have no idea why they were “TBA” on the preliminary schedule. Secrecy just for the sake of secrecy.

But I think something’s up.

To me, this is what a preliminary WWDC conference schedule would look like if Apple were set to announce a new developer platform, like, say, apps for Apple TV. Apps for Apple TV is just a guess — I’ve heard not a single whisper about such a thing from any Cupertino area little birdies. (Cf. the aforementioned Tim Cook quote about Apple doubling down on secrecy.) But it’s one of the few things I can imagine that would be big, new, and different enough to warrant that much attention at WWDC. Combine these holes in the session schedule with Jonathan Geller’s report today at BGR — “Apple to Demo New TV OS at WWDC in Two Weeks” — and I’ll put five bucks down on this actually happening.

Note, too, a second quote from Cook at D10 yesterday, regarding Apple TV sales: “But last year we sold 2.8 million Apple TVs. This year, in the first six months, we’ve sold 2.7 million.” That’s at least 100 percent growth, and probably more if we assume that Apple TV is like the iPod and sells best in the holiday quarter. [Update: Horace Dediu notes that Cook was likely talking about Apple’s fiscal year, not the calendar year, in which case the 2.7 million units “this year” do include the holiday quarter, which in turn means growth is probably less than 100 percent year-over-year since they’ve already booked the biggest quarter.] Apple’s “hobby” is catching on, and I can’t think of anything Apple could do to make it more interesting and popular than to open a new branch of the App Store for it.

The previous wave of buttons for Delicious and Digg and Co. vanished, Facebook and Twitter and G+ might vanish or they might survive, but the buttons will vanish for sure. Or do you seriously think that in ten years we will still have those buttons on every page? No, right? Why, because you already know as a user that they’re not that great. So why not get rid of them now? Because “they’re not doing any harm”? Are you sure?

Update: I don’t think “sleazy” is the right adjective for these buttons. I’d just say they’re distracting, which to me is problem enough.

Best line from Cook: “We’re going to double down on secrecy on products.”

Why do they think Apple has so much less room to grow than Amazon?

First, a big difference: Apple’s founder is no longer with us while Bezos is very much in command. This is no criticism of Tim Cook, Apple’s new CEO. A long-time Jobs lieutenant, the architect of Apple’s supremely effective Supply Chain, a soberly determined man, well liked, respected and healthily feared inside the company, Tim Cook is eminently credible. But traders are cautious; they want to see if the Cook regime will be as innovative, as uncompromisingly focused on style and substance as before.

I agree that investors are taking a wait-and-see approach to Tim Cook as CEO, but, I think overall, the Jobs-to-Cook succession has been a good thing for Apple’s share price. Investors dislike uncertainty and Steve Jobs’s health had been a source of uncertainty for years. Steve Jobs’s value had been drained from Apple’s share price years ago. Apple has reported great numbers so far under Cook, but they’re not that different than the numbers Apple has been reporting quarter-after-quarter for years now. I think one of the biggest reasons Apple’s share price has gone up under Cook is that there were so many investors who truly worried that Apple would fall apart without Steve Jobs.

• You should follow The Talk Show on Twitter.

• A new network means a new RSS feed URL. If you were subscribed to the old 5by5 feed, you’ll need to update your subscription in iTunes or whatever app you use for listening to the show. Here’s the new URL for the RSS feed, and here’s the new URL for the show in iTunes.

• Speaking of iTunes, please write (and rate) reviews of the show. Be honest, that’s all I ask. As I did during this week’s show, I’ll read the reviews ranked “most helpful” live on the show this week, no matter what they say.

• Speaking of the new network, I want to say thanks to everyone at Mule Radio Syndicate. They’re a pleasure to work with and I’m delighted to have them hosting the show. And be sure to download the excellent (and free) Mule Radio iPhone app, built by our friends at Black Pixel. You should write and rate reviews of the app, too.

• I’m selling sponsorships for the show directly. Two spots per episode, $2500 per spot. The next two shows are already half-booked, but after that the schedule is clear. If you have a product or service you’d like to promote to the most-discerning podcast audience in the world, send me an email.

I can’t thank the show’s debut sponsors enough — Rogue Amoeba and 37signals the first week, Bare Bones Software and Red Sweater Software this past week. It means a lot to me that all four got on board before hearing an episode. I also want to thank my first two guests, John Moltz and Adam Lisagor.

Along with those things, I want to thank Dan Benjamin for doing both of the previous incarnations of The Talk Show with me. Dan’s a natural born co-host, and we did an awful lot of good (and occasionally, dare I say, great) shows together. Two years ago, Dan had the idea to launch and grow a podcast network targeted not necessarily at the biggest tech/nerd audience, but rather the best tech/nerd audience. He was right, it worked, and I’m proud The Talk Show was a part of that. Lastly, to long-time listeners of the show, I want to express my sincere appreciation for your support, feedback, and attention.

The value of RIM’s in-house supplies grew 18 percent last quarter alone, a faster rate than at any other company in the industry, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. And that doesn’t include the BlackBerrys gathering dust at RIM’s carriers and retail partners. Apple Inc., meanwhile, saw its inventory decline 11 percent in the period from the previous three months.

The latest version features super-resolution data, additional radar products, and more.

This week enjoy 33% off the Mac version of RadarScope.

They won’t be available again until the end of the year. Thanks to everyone who’s ordered already.

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook will not be earning dividend income on the more than 1 million shares to which he is entitled, which will cost him about $75 million. Apple said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday that Cook had asked to be excluded from a recently instituted company program through which employees can accumulate dividends on their restricted stock units that are still vesting.

Asked why Cook was doing this, Apple declined to comment beyond the filing.

One can only presume he did this to avoid any suggestion that he instituted the dividend to enrich himself personally.

What they came up with — cropping Cook’s head from the photo on his bio page at Apple.com, and putting it on someone else’s body in a contrived pose — isn’t just goofy-looking, but I’d say downright disingenuous. To the casual observer, it looks like a cover photo that Cook posed for, when in fact he didn’t participate in any aspect of the story.

If anything, Apple under Tim Cook will embrace efficiency to an even greater degree, especially as the company grows bigger and more complex — to the dismay of those who think techies should rule the roost. “It looks like it has become a more conservative execution engine rather than a pushing-the-envelope engineering engine,” says Max Paley, a former engineering vice president who worked at Apple for 14 years until late 2011. “I’ve been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management,” he says. “When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority.”

It might also simply be the result of the shift in scale at which Apple is operating today. They sold 35 million iPhones and 12 million iPads last quarter. Is it not inevitable that global-supply management would grow in importance and influence with numbers like that? The question to ask is whether these changes are because of the differences between Tim Cook and Steve, or the differences in the size and scope of Apple’s business a decade ago versus today.

I don’t think any of the changes Lashinsky describes would be any different if Steve Jobs were still alive and at the helm (with the possible exception of the stock dividend and buy-back, which don’t pertain to the company’s culture and processes).

The Government sides with monopoly, rather than competition, in bringing this case. The Government starts from the false premise that an eBooks “market” was characterized by “robust price competition” prior to Apple’s entry. This ignores a simple and incontrovertible fact: before 2010, there was no real competition, there was only Amazon. At the time Apple entered the market, Amazon sold nearly nine out of every ten eBooks, and its power over price and product selection was nearly absolute. Apple’s entry spurred tremendous growth in eBook titles, range and variety of offerings, sales, and improved quality of the eBook reading experience. This is evidence of a dynamic, competitive market. These inconvenient facts are ignored in the Complaint. Instead, the Government focuses on increased prices for a handful of titles. The Complaint does not allege that all eBook prices, or even most eBook prices, increased after Apple entered the market.

As usual from Apple, plain straightforward language, and few minced words. (Via Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica.)

I picked up a phrase some time ago that I think applies: “The next big thing is always beneath contempt.” Implication being that it is, of course, until it isn’t. Until it’s too big to ignore. This has happened over and over again in our society. In the middle ages, people assumed that no serious discussion could happen in anything but Latin — the so-called “vulgar” languages had no merit. And writers assumed that nothing interesting or lasting would come from this new medium of television. And, I think, people assume right now that nothing important will be created from a 10-inch touch screen without a keyboard (let alone a tiny 3.5-inch screen).

(Via MG Siegler.)

So the Sofa team got to Facebook a little under a year ago, and I’m guessing, soon started work on Facebook Camera. A year ago, building a Facebook version of Instagram sounded like a good plan. “We should have an app like Instagram for taking and sharing photos on our social network”, more or less. But after another year of growth, I think Mark Zuckerberg saw that an app was not enough. Instagram’s own fast-growing social network was a threat. That their own well-made, well-designed Instagram-like app was on the cusp of release made no difference.

Yahoo had a chance to buy Google in 2001 but then-CEO Terry Semel didn’t pull the trigger. I don’t think Instagram is the next Google, but Zuckerberg sure as shit doesn’t want Facebook to be the next Yahoo.

Special guest Adam Lisagor joins John Gruber to discuss the whole thing with the show leaving 5by5, spitball ideas Apple might add to iOS 6 and iCloud, and gush over the trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming film, The Master.

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Analysts and media types insist that Apple needs to bring a smaller tablet to market to ward off the threat from Amazon.

There are a couple of things to consider with this argument. First, people that use that as the basis for the release of a 7-inch iPad are full of shit. Second, using that argument shows they don’t understand Apple and how the company works.

I believe that many Apple observers have been too invested in picking off the low hanging fruit of obviously out-of-touch commentators, columnists, and analysts. Apple is winning. It’s fun to pick on the idiots, and we do tune in for the affirmation that engenders, but that’s not insight. It’s a tag team wedgie patrol. It takes a clever intellect to dismantle bullshit but, ultimately, it often just ends up with pantsing the dumb guy. Rather than doing that let’s aim to pants the A-grade quarterback.

Here are the top three problems I believe Apple faces in the near term.

Great piece, with much to ponder. I wish I’d written this first. Perhaps I would have if I weren’t guilty as charged, spending too much time dismantling bullshit.

More than 208 million phablets, a hybrid device that is larger than a smartphone but smaller than a tablet, like the Samsung Galaxy Note, will be shipped globally in 2015.

I prefer the term “big-ass phones”. Anyway, noted for future claim chowder.

I think @gruber misunderstands “inexpensive” since MacBooks cost double [those of its] competition.

Let’s put aside arguments about whether Macs are, today, price competitive against similarly-equipped PCs. I’ll just point out that it’s no coincidence that Apple’s Mac business has thrived financially as the prices have gone lower. You can get a MacBook Air for $999 — that’s pretty amazing in the context of historical MacBook/PowerBook pricing.

Woz wrote, “To me, a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use and inexpensive.” He wrote that in 1977 about a very different machine, but that’s a perfect description of the iPad.

The HP team responsible for Enyo — webOS’s HTML5-based application framework that debuted on the TouchPad — will be leaving the company and starting at Google shortly, The Verge has learned. What this means for the future of Open webOS is unclear; Enyo and the developers supporting it are central to HP’s open source strategy for the operating system going forward, and it’s hard to say whether this move will have any effect on the planned late 2012 release for version 1.0.

The other major feature in Airfoil Speakers is the new Enhanced Audio Receiving option. With an inexpensive in-app purchase, your iOS device becomes a full-fledged mobile AirPlay receiver! That means you can stream audio from one iOS device to another, or even send from iTunes directly to iOS. Why spend hundreds on a costly third-party AirPlay device, when you can use the iOS device you already have?

As I understand it, it’s not that Apple yanked Airfoil Speakers Touch after it had been in the store for three years. It’s that they yanked version 3 after it had been in the store for a month, and the issue is the above-quoted new feature.

Apple doesn’t provide APIs for apps to serve as AirPlay receivers. Rogue Amoeba backwards-engineered the protocol, and coded their own iOS AirPlay receiver implementation using (they claim, and I have no reason to doubt them) only public APIs. I think the bottom line is that Apple is saying that apps are not allowed to act as AirPlay receivers on iOS, but there’s no App Store guideline that explicitly forbids that. So they’re citing App Store Review Guideline 2.5:

Apps that use non-public APIs will be rejected.

And rule 3.3.1 from the iOS Developer Program License Agreement:

Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

“Non-public APIs” and “private APIs” are the same thing. Rogue Amoeba claims — and I don’t doubt them — that they’re not using private APIs in this app. So perhaps it’s better to focus on this clause in rule 3.3.1: “in the manner prescribed by Apple”. That’s a pretty broad stick to swing. As I read it, rule 3.3.1 effectively means “You may not use private APIs, and you may not use public APIs to do things we don’t want you to do.”

That’s simultaneously unsurprising, and, a little crazy. Unsurprising because the implicit rule 0 of the App Store has always been that Apple isn’t going to publish an app they don’t want in the store, and that’s that. Crazy, though, because if Apple has a problem with the potential uses of a documented public API, is that not an indication that there’s something wrong with the API?

None of this is new, though. My favorite — no sarcasm intended — App Store rules are the plain-English “broader themes to keep in mind” at the top of the App Store Review Guidelines, and the last one of those seems apt:

This is a living document, and new apps presenting new questions may result in new rules at any time. Perhaps your app will trigger this.

It’s not enough to comply with the letter of the rules; developers must comply with the spirit of them as well. Finding a loophole in the letter of the rules doesn’t grant you a Get Out of Jail Free card in the App Store. It will (hopefully) just lead to Apple adding a new rule to close the loophole. (This is not to imply that Rogue Amoeba saw themselves as taking advantage of a loophole; rather, I think it was a reasonable misunderstanding of the spirit of the guidelines. But that’s the heart of the problem for third-party developers: nobody who didn’t write the rules knows what the “spirit” of the rules is.)

Considering that the only Apple-sanctioned way to play an AirPlay audio stream from iTunes or an iOS device is with the use of a “Made For iPhone” authentication hardware chip that requires an approval process and licensing agreement with Apple, it doesn’t take a deep thinker to suspect that a reverse-engineered software AirPlay receiver might be something Apple doesn’t want in the App Store. But it’s also easy to see how this slipped through the App Store review process — the app (correctly) passed Apple’s automated tests that check for private API calls, and to anyone who isn’t particularly familiar with the encrypted and undocumented nature of AirPlay audio streams, Airfoil Speakers Touch’s new “Enhanced Audio Receiving” option simply looked like a cool new feature added to an app that had been in the store since 2009. After hitting the store, though, eventually it was bound to be noticed by someone at Apple who is intimately familiar with AirPlay. The app may not be using a “non-public API”, but it is decrypting a non-public streaming audio format, and Apple perhaps considers “non-public API” to cover all “non-public Apple technologies”, not merely literal application programming interfaces. I think that’s the bottom line.

Lastly, I’ve seen a few people speculate that perhaps Apple removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the App Store because it’s about to be obviated by a built-in “use your device as an AirPlay receiver” feature in iOS 6. That, so I have heard from several well-perched little birdies, is not the case.¹ It certainly doesn’t sound like how Apple works. Apple does add features to iOS (and Mac OS X) that obviate/compete with third-party software. But when they do so, they let the chips fall where they will. E.g., if Apple adds offline support to Safari’s Reading List feature in iOS 6, they’re not going to remove Instapaper from the App Store.

To me, a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use and inexpensive.

Talk about a company that has stayed true to its roots.

Update: Don’t miss the PDF scan of the original magazine article.

If you’ve used Siri yourself, however, you know the disclaimer of “Sequences shortened” is more than an understatement. They’ve edited out the inevitable “No.…NO.…NO!” as well as significant quantities of exasperated sighs. After hearing Jackson say the word “hotspacho” for the umpteenth time, I decided to run a little test.

Last month, we introduced Airfoil Speakers Touch 3, which added the ability to receive audio directly from other iOS devices, as well as iTunes. Users and reviewers alike have loved Airfoil Speakers Touch, particularly the new version. For our part, we’ve been thrilled to be able to provide this much-desired functionality.

Today, we’ve been informed that Apple has removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store. We first heard from Apple about this decision two days ago, and we’ve been discussing the pending removal with them since then. However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch. Needless to say, we’re quite disappointed with their decision, and we’re working hard to once again make the application available for you, our users.

As far as we can tell, Airfoil Speakers Touch is in full compliance with Apple’s posted rules and developer agreements.

However cruddy it is to have an app rejected during the review process, it’s worse to have it yanked from the store after it had been approved. Rogue Amoeba’s been promoting this new version to users for a month now.

I can’t imagine what Apple would object to with this app, or why they wouldn’t provide Rogue Amoeba with a precise explanation before removing the app.

Update: I just posted a brief follow-up after some interesting back-and-forth with a few informed sources. In short: I think this is not as mysterious or capricious as I first thought.

Two years ago, Microsoft declared that the future of video on the web would be powered by HTML 5. Today, however, a lot of web video content is still delivered via Adobe Flash technology. So, in a somewhat surprising move, Microsoft is integrating Flash directly into Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 and doing so in a way that does not undermine the safety and reliability of the Metro environment.

Skating to where the puck is now, rather than where it’s going to be.

Let’s further assume that this new iPhone will not be announced until later this year, say, around October, just like the 4S last year. How might Apple get developers on the right track to support a new aspect ratio at WWDC next month while maintaining their standard radio silence regarding as-yet-unannounced products?

The easiest way: By doing nothing at all. iOS 6 could be announced next month without Apple saying a word about supporting multiple aspect ratios. Then they could just announce the new iPhone in October and expect developers to get on board ASAP. Apple says “Jump”; iOS developers ask “How high?”

But, keep in mind, iPhone apps are already expected to be at least somewhat flexible in height. Use a well-written app while you’re on a phone call or making a recording with the Voice Memos app, and you get a double-height status bar (green for phone calls, red for recordings). But the double-height status bar doesn’t cover the content of most apps. Springboard tightens the spacing between its rows of app icons. Apps like Mail, Safari, and Calendar move the top of the window — the UINavigationBar — down to account for the double-sized status bar. The same is true for third-party apps.

In short, “windows” on iOS resize like windows on a Mac. Except instead of the user being able to resize the window in both dimensions to any arbitrary size, on iOS “windows” are expected to resize only in one dimension. (Will Hains is thinking along similar lines.)

What has occurred to me, though, is that Apple could, with the (presumed) upcoming WWDC introduction of iOS 6, further encourage developers to be flexible in this regard by changing the way notification banners are displayed. As it stands, notification banners are shown one at a time, and cover the content of the underlying app. WebOS seemed¹ more elegant in this regard — WebOS notification banners stacked on screen, and the current app shrunk to fit the remaining space.

If Apple introduced something like this in iOS 6, they could encourage iOS developers to adopt the recommended APIs to be responsive to changes in available vertical screen space. For now, they could pitch this in the context of shrinking screen space in response to on-screen notification banners, but, come October, apps that do the right thing would automatically be responsive to, say, a new device with 176 more pixels.

Why Bother?

We can argue about just how difficult supporting a new iPhone screen size would be for developers, just how much complexity it would introduce, but no matter how easy you think it may wind up being, there’s no doubt that it would add some extra work, and some extra complexity. So why do it?

I suspect the answer is, why not? The design tension in post-iPhone mobile phones is between screen size (where bigger is better) and device size (where smaller is better). You want a physical device that is small enough to fit easily in your pockets and is comfortable and easy to use while holding it in one hand. But you want a screen that’s as big as feasible, so you can see more content — more words in email messages, web pages, and e-books; bigger pictures and video.

If Apple indeed increases the size of the next iPhone’s display to 4 inches, I do not expect them to increase the physical size of the device itself. There is plenty of room on the current iPhone for the rumored 4-inch display — just shrink the non-display areas on the front face. On the iPad, the thick bezel area surrounding the display serves an essential purpose — it gives you a place to rest your thumbs while holding the device. The non-display “forehead” and “chin” on the front face of the iPhone serve no such practical purpose. All Apple needs is enough room for a home button at the bottom, and the speaker, camera, and proximity sensor at the top.²

Why didn’t they start with a 16:9 display at the outset, in 2007? Who knows? They’ll never explain themselves. Maybe they couldn’t pull it off technically at the time. Maybe they’ve simply changed their minds. If Apple’s designers think 16:9 would be better today, they’ll switch. It’s that simple.

What Apple Won’t Do With Those Extra Pixels

Judging from my email, the most common theory out there about what Apple might do with those extra pixels is to make the app-switching dock a persistent system-wide presence. That way developers wouldn’t need to do a damn thing — apps would still get the same 960 × 640 screen area, and the switching dock (the thing you see when you double-press the home button) would be on screen all the time.

I say no way.

First, this would be antithetical to the iOS aesthetic. iOS apps get the whole display, minus only (and optionally!) the status bar. When you launch an app, the device, conceptually, is the app. A persistent app dock would ruin that.

Second, practically, this would be a disaster. An erroneous tap on the icons in the dock would instantly zap you out of the current app. Think about where it would be — right under the keyboard. Miss the space bar by a few pixels and pop — you’re zapped to another app, mid-sentence. I’ve experienced this problem firsthand with Android phones with soft keys underneath the display. It’s a usability disaster.

Third, making the switching dock a persistent on-screen element would solve no problem. Needing to double-press the home button to invoke it is not a hardship.

In 2006, Ford pledged its famous logo, along with virtually all of its U.S. assets, as collateral to secure a $23.5 billion loan to restructure its ailing business. At the time, Ford was criticized for betting the company, including all its factories and other trademarks like Mustang and F-150, to take on more debt, but the loan ended up being Ford’s savior, providing an important cushion that allowed it to escape bankruptcy a few years later, unlike General Motors and Chrysler Group.

Under terms of the loan, all collateral would be released when two of the three major credit rating agencies restored Ford’s debt rating to investment grade. Standard & Poor’s upped its rating on Ford a few weeks ago. Today, Moody’s did the same, raising Ford’s senior unsecured ratings to Baa3 from Ba2 and Ford Credit to Baa3 from Ba1.

Sure hope I never have to hock #4a525a.

Opening a laptop from the wrong end is a self-correcting problem that only lasts for a few seconds. However, viewing the upside logo is a problem that lasts indefinitely.

I remember this change being surprisingly controversial. It wasn’t about being confused how to open the laptop, but about to whom the Apple logo should look “right” — you, the user and owner of the machine, or everyone else while you’re using it. Today, this seems to be a settled debate. Does any laptop maker still orient their logo the other way?

Update: Lenovo ThinkPads, for one, still orient the logos the other way. As for which way is “right”, Daniel Jalkut has a good analogy.

The result? LiquiGlide, a “super slippery” coating made up of nontoxic materials that can be applied to all sorts of food packaging — though ketchup and mayonnaise bottles might just be the substance’s first targets. Condiments may sound like a narrow focus for a group of MIT engineers, but not when you consider the impact it could have on food waste and the packaging industry. “It’s funny: Everyone is always like, ‘Why bottles? What’s the big deal?’ But then you tell them the market for bottles — just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market,” Smith says. “And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.”

Really is a little freaky.

Basically, the ’104 patent covers a way of improving the software compilation — the process of translating programming code into an executable application. The method described uses “symbolic references” to identify data during compilation rather than numeric memory locations. Oracle argues that Dalvik uses symbolic references, but Google says it doesn’t.

The jury has been deliberating over the claims for a week now, and on Tuesday, it had two more questions for the court, and both were related to the nuances of “symbolic references” and how they apply to data retrieval.

How could a randomly-selected jury possibly decide this? No knock intended against the jurors themselves — and it sounds like they’re doing their best to make an informed decision. But there’s a difference between a jury of your citizen peers and a jury of your technical peers.

Our notebook business contracted 10% as we saw a more aggressive competitive environment particularly in the entry level and emerging markets. We believe some of the tougher competitive environment can be attributed to channel inventory rebuilding, following the hard disk issues of the past two quarters. In addition, we are seeing more consumer spending diverted to alternative mobile computing devices.

Dell’s market cap closed today at $26+ billion.

Hard to believe this was just six years ago.

For example, today I could easily tell someone shopping for a laptop that a good sweet spot to look for in a premium 13-inch laptop is a screen resolution of 1600 × 900 pixels. In the future, would I have to suggest 1600 × 900 if a laptop is from one list of PC makers with one type of DPI technology, and a second set of recommended resolutions for brands that use different DPI settings? Good luck fitting all that on the shelf tag at a brick-and-mortar retailer.

I can’t tell if this is a joke, parodying the antiquated specs-driven process of buying a Wintel PC, or if Ackerman really has zero clue about how Apple works, and why people buy Apple products.

Here’s how Apple will sell retina display MacBooks: by telling us and showing us that they’re jaw-droppingly beautiful. That’s it.

Both of these phones sport a new, larger display that is 3.95 inches diagonally. Apple will not just increase the size of the display and leave the current resolution, but will actually be adding pixels to the display. The new iPhone display resolution will be 640 × 1136. That’s an extra 176 pixels longer of a display. The screen will be the same 1.94 inches wide, but will grow to 3.45 inches tall. This new resolution is very close to a 16:9 screen ratio, so this means that 16:9 videos can play full screen at their native aspect ratio.

We’ve also heard that Apple will be taking full advantage of their new pixels. Apple is currently testing builds of iOS 6 that are custom-built to the new iPhone’s display. These builds include a tweaked home screen with a fifth row of icons (besides the stationary app dock) and extended application user interfaces that offer views of more content. Apple is able to pull this off with the same sharpness as the current iPhone Retina Display because of the additional pixels.

What I’ve heard from a couple of little birdies is only that Apple has been noodling with increasing the height of the display, keeping the width and pixel density exactly the same as on the iPhone 4 and 4S. I had not heard an exact pixel number for the new height. 1152 made some sense, but doing some math after reading Weintraub’s report, 1136 makes a lot of sense.

First, at 1136 × 640, you get a diagonal of 1,303.877 pixels after applying the Pythagorean theorem. There are no such thing as fractional pixels, but what I’m talking about here are pixels as a unit of length, equal to 1/326 inch. Divide 1,303.877 by 326 and you get 3.9996 inches. Boom, a “4-inch” display. I’m sure if Apple instead went to 1152 pixels in height — which works out to 4.042 inches — they’d still just call it a “4-inch” display, for the sake of neatness, but it’s at least somewhat interesting that 1136 is the closest they could get to precisely 4.0 inches.

Second, aspect ratio. With a 640-pixel width — which everything I have heard and seen reported suggests is set in stone — there is no way get to precisely 16:9:

(16/9) × 640 = 1,137.777…

You can’t cut seven-ninths of a pixel. 1138 × 640 would be a tad closer to 16:9, but 1136 × 640 is within five-thousandths of an inch of exactly 16:9. So I think Apple would be safe to bill an 1136 × 640 display as sporting a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Update: 1136 × 639 would be exactly 16:9. One pixel away.

Another good source for iOS feature predictions has been to survey the competition and identify the areas where iOS was lacking. Those items from last year, for example, were areas where Android was ahead.

iOS is by no means feature-complete. But it’s getting harder to identify the low-hanging fruit — the things you just know Apple has to be working on, not just the stuff you hope they are. The biggest one left is mapping. Today brings a report from 9to5Mac that Apple is set to switch the back-end data in iOS’s Maps app from Google to its own mapping services; John Paczkowski confirms it, quoting a source who claims the new Maps will “blow your head off”.

Here’s the thing. Apple’s homegrown mapping data has to be great.

Mapping is an essential phone feature. It’s one of those few features that almost everyone with an iPhone uses, and often relies upon. That’s why Apple has to do their own — they need to control essential technology.¹ I suspect Apple would be pushing to do their own maps even if their relationship with Google were still hunky-dory, as it was circa 2007. (Remember Eric Schmidt coming on stage during the iPhone introduction?) But as things actually stand today between Apple and Google, relying on Google for mapping services is simply untenable.

This is a high-pressure switch for Apple. Regressions will not be acceptable. The purported whiz-bang 3D view stuff might be great, but users are going to have pitchforks and torches in hand if practical stuff like driving and walking directions are less accurate than they were with Google’s data. Keep in mind too, that Android phones ship with turn-by-turn navigation.

What else remains hanging low on the iOS new-features tree, though? I can think of a few:

• Clever inter-application communication. Seems crazy that iOS, the direct descendant of NeXT, doesn’t have anything like Services, which were one of NeXT’s most touted features (and rightfully so). It’s also worth noting that Android has a pretty good Services-esque system in place, called “Intents”, and Windows 8 has an even richer concept called “Contracts”.

• Third-party Notification Center widgets. Like the Stocks and Weather ones from Apple — information at a glance, without launching an app.

• Third-party Siri APIs. Let other apps provide features you can interact with through Siri.

But that’s about it. And even the Siri API idea seems more like a “nice to have” feature idea than a low-hanging “Apple really has to do this sooner or later” idea. Again, I’m not saying Apple’s iOS to-do list is empty; I’m just saying the list of obvious they-gotta-do-it stuff is getting short.

HTC reports that net profits blasted up to $504 million, a 197 percent increase from the previous year. Revenues were in the $3.5 billion range and the company shipped 9.7 million handsets, a 192 percent increase over Q1 of last year.

One month later, HTC announced support for open bootloaders:

“There has been overwhelmingly customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones. I want you to know that we’ve listened. Today, I’m confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices. Thanks for your passion, support and patience,” Peter Chou, CEO of HTC.

I think it’s safe to assume that the “customers” and “people” who wanted access to open bootloaders did not include the executives at major mobile carriers.

Flash forward to one month ago. HTC is no longer flying so high:

Net income before tax in Q1 2012 was NT$5,551 million (approximately $180 million), while net income after tax came in at NT$4,464 million (roughly $151 million). That’s a staggering 70 percent decline compared to net profits the company booked in the same period last year.

As Horace Dediu so ably documents, HTC is not alone in seeing its handset profits dwindle. The difference between HTC and companies like Nokia, RIM, LG, and Sony is that, as of a year ago, HTC was still seeing its share of the industry’s profits rise. The others have, since 2007, mostly seen their share of the industry’s profits fall.

Which brings us to today, and HTC’s new flagship phone, the One X on AT&T:

Yesterday, MoDaCo noticed that the bootloader on the AT&T version of the HTC One X was locked and that HTC’s online tool for unlocking it didn’t work. We reached out to HTC on the matter, it it looks as though the smartphone will not be participating in HTC’s bootloader unlocking program. […]

It seems pretty clear that AT&T is behind the “restrictions” here.

I’d say it seems pretty clear HTC is now listening to a different set of “customers”.