Mobile Forward

The PC is Passé. What Now?

Jean-Louis Gassée, on Monday Note, the blog he runs with Frédéric Filloux:

Whether through Apple’s long-term vision or the growing realization of an opportunity, iOS has become the OS in Apple’s future. iOS has already shipped on more than one billion devices; where Macintosh unit sales are measured in millions per quarter, iOS devices are multiples of tens of millions. Built to fit the constraints of the first iPhone’s limited processing power, iOS is still much smaller than OS X: 1.3 Gigabytes for the latest release, versus 8.41GB for my MacBook’s System Folder. iOS has a lot of room to grow into a fuller, richer OS, unencumbered by past sins.

If we accept the scenario of an iPad evolution into an iOS-based laptop, or even desktop, what happens to the Mac as we know it today?

Picture (no pun intended) digital cameras. With its ubiquity, connectivity, performance, and photo editing software, the smartphone has swallowed the point-and-shoot market, but it’s not a replacement for the pricey DSLR that’s beloved by the hobbyist and essential for commercial jobs such as sports, product, or food photography.

By analogy, even if an iOS-based laptop comes to serve many needs, there are jobs where a 27” iMac, its 5K display, 4GHz Intel processor, 64 GB of RAM, and terabytes of disk storage is irreplaceable – and will stay so for some time. The two will co-exist just like smartphones and DSLRs.

Sounds right to me.

Google RankBrain: AI in Search

Jack Clark, for Bloomberg:

RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries. […]

The system helps Mountain View, California-based Google deal with the 15 percent of queries a day it gets which its systems have never seen before, he said. For example, it’s adept at dealing with ambiguous queries, like, “What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain?” And RankBrain’s usage of AI means it works differently than the other technologies in the search engine.

“The other signals, they’re all based on discoveries and insights that people in information retrieval have had, but there’s no learning,” Corrado said. […]

In the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query, he said.

Tim Cook on Cars

When I look at the automobile, what I see is that software becomes an increasingly important part of the car of the future. You see that autonomous driving becomes much more important in a huge way in the future. And so a lot of the major technologies in the car shift – electrification, etc. – they shift from today’s combustion-engine-centric kind of focus. And so it would seem like there will be massive change in that industry, massive change. […]

The interface in [the car] is probably not the thing – if you listed out the top ten things you love about the car – it would probably not be on the top ten list. […]

– From Brian R. Fitzgerald’s coverage of Tim Cook’s appearance at WSJDLive 2015

I do think that industry is at an inflection point for massive change, not just evolutionary change.

– From Geoffrey Fowler’s coverage in the WSJ live blog of the event

__________

Related Slides & Posts

For a high level view on change in the car industry, see the two slides below:

Mobile Forward 00401 2015-09-29Mobile Forward 00396 2015-09-22

 

 

 

 

 

 

And their respective posts:

Cars: Better than Ever. Worse than Possible. (Part 2)

Apple Car: Navigating the Transition

A Search for Another Run-Time Model

Benedict Evans, in his blog post titled “Mobile is not a neutral platform”:

Really, what we see here is a search for another run-time. We had the web, and then we added apps, and now we look for another. Notifications? Siri/Now? Messaging (as forWeChat in China)? Something else? But each of the previous run-times lacked search, discovery and acquisition as a fundamental part of the architecture – they had to be added later (and arguably that’s still not there with apps). On Facebook’s desktop platform, in contrast, both halves were there almost from the beginning. The next run-times on mobile might have both halves too.

Related to the notion that the importance of the homescreen is diminishing.

How Tesla is Ushering in the Age of the Learning Car

Katie Fehrenbacher for Fortune:

At an event on Wednesday Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk explained that the company’s new autopilot service is constantly learning and improving thanks to machine learning algorithms, the car’s wireless connection, and detailed mapping and sensor data that Tesla collects. […]

“The whole Tesla fleet operates as a network. When one car learns something, they all learn it. That is beyond what other car companies are doing,” said Musk. When it comes to the autopilot software, Musk explained that each driver using the autopilot system essentially becomes an “expert trainer for how the autopilot should work.”

Nobody Can Override the Director

Clifton Leaf, for Fortune:

So how exactly does the studio manage to pull off one monster winner after the next, Fortune‘s Michal Lev-Ram asked Catmull? […]

When any bunch of Pixar creatives begins a new project, he said, “it always sucks—and I don’t mean that in a self-effacing way. I mean, it always sucks.”

To get beyond that, Catmull relies on what he calls “the brain trust,” a notion that he says he arrived at by accident. The brain trust isn’t one specific cluster of individuals, but rather any group that follows these four golden rules:

1. Nobody can override the director. “Basically we remove the power structure from the room,” he says. “If they know that John [Lasseter, chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios] or I can override the director, then they will enter the room in a defensive way.”

Focused authority eliminates the waste (of all sorts) that happens when people are uncertain who has decision rights, or when people think they can vie for them. With that clarity, people can focus on moving the work forward, instead of jostling for position.

Focused authority also increases the odds that decisions get made, at a healthy pace, and that the final product reflects a single vision, a coherent set of priorities. It’s not a guarantee, but it helps. Without focused authority, the end result can appear like it was designed by committee. Such products can sometimes be good, but they will seldom be great.

“But isn’t Pixar’s ‘brain trust’ essentially a committee?”, you might ask. Not at all. It combines the ideation power of the group with the decision power of the individual leader. It’s the best kind of creative team a product can have.

Read the rest of the article for the main Ed Catmull point that Clifton Leaf wanted to amplify. And for the three other rules Ed Catmull lays out. All insightful.

Apple’s Bold Platform Risk

Steve Cheney, in his interesting and good post entitled “On Apple’s Insurmountable Platform Advantage”:

In 2007, when Steve Ballmer famously declared “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance”, Jobs was off creating a chip design team. If you study unit economics of semiconductors, it doesn’t really make sense to design chips and compete with companies like Intel unless you can make it up in volume. Consider the audacity back in 2007 for Apple to believe it could pull this off.

Read the whole piece. It’s great.

John Gruber commented on Cheney’s post, and one thought that struck a cord with me was this:

We should clarify one point from Cheney’s headline — Apple’s lead is formidable, not insurmountable. Nothing in tech is insurmountable.

Why did I notice that bit? Perhaps because of my view on this.

Toyota Executive: “Toyota has to change its ways” to Move Forward

Yoko Kubota, for The Wall Street Journal:

“It wouldn’t be easy for gasoline and diesel cars to survive,” [Toyota Senior Managing Officer] Mr. Ise told a media briefing in Tokyo. “With such massive decline in engine-powered cars, it’s like the world is turning upside down and Toyota has to change its ways.”

Toyota’s vision highlights its bet on hybrids and fuel-cell vehicles as pollution concerns grow and auto makers compete to identify what could be the dominant next-generation technology to power cars.

I know this is likely a PR-influenced piece, but it’s not a bad sign when a company says it “has to change its ways.”

Intel Working on an iPhone Modem: New Chatter

Mark Sullivan, for VentureBeat:

Intel now has a thousand people or more working to outfit a 2016 iPhone with its lauded 7360 LTE modem chip, sources say. If all goes well, Intel may end up providing both the modem and the fabrication for a new Apple system on a chip. […]

Apple may dual-source the LTE modems in its new iPhones from both Intel and Qualcomm. Today, Qualcomm’s 9X45 LTE chip is baked into all iPhone modems. […]

One source said Intel needs a small army of people on the Apple account because of the importance of the project to Apple’s future in the mobile market, because of the complexity of the project, and because Apple is a demanding client with an extremely popular phone.

You can be sure this modem meets a lot of Apple’s specific requirements, especially in terms of power. If any other OEMs purchase the same (or similar) part from Intel, they may benefit from some of those attributes, but not from all. When you’re as effective and important as Apple, you can shape product requirements in a way that helps you stay ahead of commoditization, even if others can technically buy the “same” part.

Sullivan’s sources also speculate that Apple may, eventually, integrate this modem into the system-on-a-chip (SoC). At that point, the combined function, power, and performance characteristics (of the modem alone) will be difficult for others to emulate.

Windows Laptops Need Better Engineering, Not Better Marketing

Vlad Savov, for The Verge:

The chief marketing officers of Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Lenovo, and HP will gather to host a webcast introducing a major new advertising campaign for the PC. It will mark the first time that the five biggest names in the PC industry have come together around a single, unified message to the consumer. […]

The PC industry really needs saving from itself, because its recent history has been one of either price wars that lead everyone to cut corners or, alternatively, the pursuit of high-margin gimmicks with low chance of success.

Apple gets the fundamentals right in a very serious and rigorous way, and then it gets fancy with its marketing spiel. PC vendors have tended to do the opposite, going for outlandish and gimmicky ideas in their designs, but presenting them in boring and clichéd ways. […]

Except for Apple, personal computer vendors use a common OS, common parts, and have a common approach and speed to computer innovation. It’s no wonder they can’t differentiate themselves. And now, it’s to the point that they’re desperate enough to use common advertising. Will one more “commonality” help? Unlikely.

The irony: PC makers have avoided custom R&D to, essentially, save money. Instead, it’s cost them so much that they’re doing this common marketing campaign. And this brings us full-circle to Savov’s title. Great title. Great point.

On Robot Creativity and Imagination

Rachel David, for The Guardian, asked two scientists and two artists for their views on robot creativity. My favorite is from Michael Osborne, associate professor in machine learning, University of Oxford:

Another problem is that it is difficult to automate the combination of ideas from many different sources that forms the source of much of human creativity: you might find inspiration from an interview with a neuroscientist in designing a new office layout. Putting some evidence to our thesis, we found, for both the UK or the US, that almost 90% of creative jobs are at low or no risk of automation.

Thank you to Jarno Kaponen (@ilparone on Twitter), who Tweeted about this.

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