Planet Berry LLC: December 2011

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Year of the iPad 2

The late Steve Jobs called 2011 “the year of the iPad 2″ and almost a year after it was introduced, almost 2 years after the original iPad was introduced, it remains a product selling in the tens of millions with absolutely no competition in sight.

And that’s a shame because, as a consumer, the one thing I want most is strong, meaningful competition for the iPad.

It’s become a cliche to say “there’s no tablet market, there’s only an iPad market”, but like most cliches there’s more than a little truth to it. Very few people want a tablet. Not in the 10 years prior to the iPad when Microsoft sold Tablet PC to almost no one, and not in the almost two years since when Apple’s competition has tried to differentiate themselves by being more like PCs.

The simple truth is, the iPad was never designed to be a tablet. It was never designed to be a PC crammed into a slate form factor. Like they did with command line on the Apple II, and graphical interfaces on the Mac, and multitouch on the iPhone, Apple strove to make something that was more mainstream, more accessible than what had come before. It just turned out to look like a tablet.

For many people, PCs — personal computers — are anything but. They’re complicated, impenetrable stacks of boxes and webs of cables, with mice that never move right, buttons that never click right, windows that hide other windows, programs that make little sense, and files and folders that are as frustrating to find as they are to figure out how to use. They’re like cars back in the days when you had to be a mechanic to own and operate one, and very few people did.

The iPad is the opposite of that. You turn it on. You click home. You tap an app. You click home. You tap another app. You know where you are and if you get lost you’re always only a click away from getting back to some place familiar. It’s more approachable. It’s more understandable. It does 80% of the things 80% of the people need 80% of the time and that, it turns out, is a huge swathe more than most PCs could ever do for most people.

That’s why Apple is selling a so many of them, and why their competitors aren’t.

To compete with Apple, everything from RIM’s PlayBook to Google’s Android Honeycomb tablets offered more specs and more desktop-class power. To the exact people who wanted anything but.

Powerful multitasking metaphors don’t help people who think their internet is gone because their browser is lost behind their word processor. Flash doesn’t help mainstream consumers who have no idea what it is, even if their more obscure web video sites don’t play without it. Tegra II processors don’t help wives who just want to know whey their messages won’t scroll without sticking and stammering. Bezel gestures and on-screen widgets don’t help people who just, for once in their technology plagued lives, want simple controls, for a simple screen, that does one app at a time and does it very, very well. Copying the iPad’s look won’t help when the software running it doesn’t work with anything approaching the same simplicity or feel.

Apple understood this back in 2005 when they started work on the Safari Pad concept, and while even they didn’t full get it when they made it manifest in 2010, they got it enough to release the iPad, and they got it even more in 2011 with the iPad 2, iOS 5, and iCloud.

It’s not about being thinner, or lighter, or faster. It’s not about specs or about content. It’s about experience. And now, as we enter 2012, as Apple is poised to release an iPad 3, not a single one of their competitors have gotten that yet.

Until they do, until Amazon or Google or someone else puts the mainstream customer first, every year for the foreseeable future will be the year of the iPad.

iPad 2 hero

Source: TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch blog

Samsung's new ad looks just like an Apple ad, uses one of the same actors too

Samsung has seemingly stepped up its spat with Apple by releasing an ad that not only resembles an iPad ad but incredulously even uses one of the same girls that Apple has used in one of its ads.

The new Samsung ad is for its Galaxy Tab device, it shows a young girl using the device for various tasks like reading and gaming. Apple used the same girl originally in one of its iPhone 4S advertisements. The Samsung ad is definitely shot in a very similar way to an Apple ad too. This is either one amazing coincidence or more likely Samsung is going out of its way to provoke and copy Apple. The iPhone 4S ad is below so you can see the same actor in both ads.

Source: TNW

Source: TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch blog

Switching to Renewables No More Expensive than Upgrading Fossil Power, Says UK Government's Climate Change Scientific Adviser

Various arguments — some exaggerated, some plainly false — have been made over the years by those opposed to rapid expansion of renewable energy. They say solar and wind energy won’t work, or that they can’t supply consistent power, or that they can’t be expanded fast enough to meet our needs. Fortunately, one by one, improvements in technology have proven these arguments to be untrue.

Recently, though, another argument has been frequently heard: that renewable energy is too expensive. At a time of squeezed household budgets and rising fuel costs, support for renewable energy — whether through direct government subsidy or through feed-in tariffs that are effectively paid for by energy consumers — can be placed at a lower priority than keeping costs down. That’s at least part of the reason we’ve seen subsidies for renewable energy cut in Britain, the Netherlands,Â and elsewhere.

But according to a new study by the UK government’s chief scientific adviser on climate change, Prof David MacKay, switching wholesale to renewable energy won’t be any more expensive than replacing aging fossil fuel-driven power stations.

Prof MacKay, who’s the chief scientific adviser to the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, made the calculation using a nifty open-source analysis package he created called the 2050 Pathways Calculator. He estimates that the cost of converting the UK’s energy infrastructure to low-carbon sources by 2050 would be around Â£5000 per person per year. A more ‘business as usual’ approach, based on upgrading existing fossil fuel power stations and importing large amounts of gas and heating oil, would cost around Â£4600.

The calculator also lends some support to the argument that nuclear power is too expensive. A scenario based largely on expanded nuclear power costs around Â£5500 per person per year, making it amongst the most expensive scenarios.

Of course, none of the assessments offered by the calculator bear in mind the actual costs of climate change itself. The Guardian points out that the Stern review, the high-profile study of the economics of climate change published by the UK government in 2006, estimated that cost as equivalent to Â£6500 per person per year.

But, of course, the UK could take the low-carbon route and still face the additional climate change costs if other nations don’t do the same.

Then again, the calculator also doesn’t take into account other health and environmental costs that UK citizens have to pay for going to high-carbon route.

It’s ironic that David MacKay should be the brains behind this strong evidence in favour of strong support for renewables. He’s best known for a 2009 book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which itself argued that the UK couldn’t meet all its energy needs with renewables and needed to expand nuclear energy.

In fairness, though, it’s worth noting that other energy economists have questioned MacKay’s approach. Professor Dieter Helm, of Oxford University, told The Guardian that the similarity in costs between low- and high-carbon approaches that MacKay predicts “is indeed the result you get if you take conventional wisdom on fossil fuel prices and assume no major technical progress. But these are precisely the two assumptions which would make a difference.”

You can come up with your own carbon pathways for the UK at the Carbon Pathways Calculator website.

Source: The Guardian | Windmills via shutterstock

Source: CleanTechnica

Friday, December 30, 2011

Apple SVP of Design Jonathan Ive gets official knighthood

Apple Senior Vice President of Design, Jonathan Ive has been made a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE), in recognition of his work at Apple and contributions to the industry.

He described the honour as “absolutely thrilling” and said he was “both humbled and sincerely grateful”.

Mr Ive added: “I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making.

“I discovered at an early age that all I’ve ever wanted to do is design.”

Ive was previously made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2005. Known to have been one Steve Jobs‘s closest friends and co-workers, he’s been responsible for making manifest everything from the original iMac to the iPhone, MacBook Air, and iPad.

Source: BBC News

Source: TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch blog

China and India Ineligible for Carbon Capture Funding?

It looks like China, India, Ghana, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and South Africa may be eliminated as eligible countries for Clean Mechanism Development (CDM) funding for Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CSS) projects, in negotiations at the Durban climate talks.

Unfortunately, these are among the very countries that need it most. These countries are now considered too developed to qualify as Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and CDM funds are going to only be allowed for projects in the most undeveloped countries.

The EU, which is currently the largest funder of CDM projects that offset emissions at home, has said that beginning in 2013, they will only allow CDM-funded projects in LDCs. (Egypt and Morocco have been recipients of generous CDM funding from Europe, which has jump-started huge solar and wind projects that will ultimately make Morocco 42% solar powered, for example.)

Until the Cancun climate negotiations, only clean energy or efficiency was included in CDM projects. CCS was not even considered an eligible form of climate mitigation, and so thus was reliant on unreliable government funding that comes and goes.

But under the Kyoto Protocol, which was just extended till 2017 (or 2020) at Durban, CCS projects are included for the first time. (In 8 years, every nation will be bound in the same legal arrangement, so this rule will essentially just continue and expand after 2020, creating funding for CCS.)

The reasoning behind allowing CCS to qualify is that any new coal would then be cleaner (from a climate point of view) than what is on the grid now. Of course mining coal is still a filthy and dangerous endeavor for its many immediate health risks, but it is the combustion of coal that presents the real climate danger over the coming centuries, which is what the climate legislation deals with.

But after years of failed negotiations resulting in international inaction, the danger to the climate from a smothering blanket of CO2 has become more pressing as time goes on. Beggars can’t be choosers. Along with more sensible forms of clean energy, mitigating the climate impact of the inevitable burning of coal is now also essential.

The Saudis fought for including CCS as CDM-eligible, and finally got it at Cancun.Then this year, at Durban, the policy was refined to cover the risks associated with CCS; with an agreement to define rules on how to cover long term liability, the permanence of sequestration, and the risk of leakage.

But now, with CCS finally included, like any other CDM, it will only be allowed in true LDCs.

The irony? It has taken so long to include CCS under the Kyoto Protocol, that China and India, that would have been among the former least developed countries; now no longer qualify.

Draft procedures