Computerworld – Apple’s next big thing may be a video platform that combines cameras in the next versions of the iPhone and iPad with the giant data center the company’s building in North Carolina, an analyst said today.

During a quarterly earnings conference call with Wall Street and industry analysts Tuesday, Apple’s chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer cited “future product transitions” as a contributing factor to the anticipated decline from a 42% margin for the year’s first quarter to a 36% margin for the quarter ending June 30.

The conservative guidance isn’t unusual: Apple typically underestimates its margins for upcoming periods, and often explains that “future product transitions” are one reason why it won’t clear as much profit.

But one analyst read more into those tea leaves.

“They seem to be saying that there’s more to the next quarter than the introduction of a new iPhone,” said Ezra Gottheil, senior analyst with Technology Business Research, referring to the expected launch of Apple’s next iPhone this summer.

Gottheil thinks that Apple is ready to make a major move into video, and based his bet on a series of clues in the company’s upcoming hardware, as well as the $1 billion data center in North Carolina that’s now hiring personnel.

Gottheil’s prognostications have been spot-on at times, off the mark at others. A year ago, he bet that Apple would enter the netbook market with an “iPod Touch on steroids,” a good description of the eventual iPad. In December 2008, however, he predicted that Apple would launch a pair of netbook-style systems the following month, something Apple did not do.

“The front-facing camera in the next iPhone is something we’ve always wanted,” Gottheil said, referring to this week’s disclosure by tech blog Gizmodo that the 2010 iPhone will have two cameras, including a new one that faces the user. “But that also makes sense if Apple is going to push into video conferencing, video social network or video social gaming.”

Calling that market a “kind of white space,” Gottheil sees it as one of those opportunities that Apple has historically grabbed. “Apple is the kind of company that could make that a big deal,” he said.

The current iPad, which lacks a camera — one of the pieces that was on most wish lists before the tablet debuted — also seems to have space in its current design for a front-facing camera, Gottheil added. Others, including teardown expert Aaron Vronko of Rapid Repair, have also speculated that the next iPad will sport a camera. “It looks like it’s all ready for the camera, even including a hole in the glass for the lens,” said Vronko, who earlier this month tore apart the first-generation iPad. “Apple probably made a game-time decision not to include it.”

Also in play, said Gottheil, is the $1 billion data center that Apple began building in Maiden, N.C., last year. Apple currently has 15 positions listed on its jobs site for the data center.

“That’s a humongous data center,” Gottheil observed. While others have speculated that the center will power an iTunes music streaming service or store customers’ iTunes libraries for everywhere access, Gottheil as a different idea. “Apple needs to get into the online services business, but it can’t be plain vanilla,” he said. “That’s not what Apple likes to do.”

Instead, he believes Apple will craft a video platform that other developers can use to build video-enabled iPhone and iPad applications, then use the data center as the switchboard that, for a fee, routes the ensuing data traffic. “They’ll build the platform, make an application or two — maybe a game where people see each other as they play — and then provide some kind of switchboard service. That’s exactly the kind of thing that they like to do.”

In a follow-up research note that Gottheil sent to clients today, he also hammered on the idea. “By providing critical applications and a platform for third-party development, Apple could create a compelling and very sticky subscription service,” he wrote.

Not everyone buys Gottheil’s theory on video and the data center. Brian Marshall, an analyst who tracks Apple for BroadPoint AmTech, agreed that the next iPhone would have a camera, and believes a refresh of the iPad with a camera will appear in time for this year’s holiday season. But he has different plans for the data center.

“That’s for their cloud-based service,” Marshall said, “which will probably be hosting iTunes libraries in the cloud. That will let customers access their iTunes [music] from anywhere, and untether it from their computers.”

Nothing about parsing Apple is easy, said Gottheil, who acknowledged that his conjectures could come to naught. “They’re always manipulating us with their guidance,” he admitted, talking about Apple’s tendency to under-promise and over-deliver, and the often fruitless attempts by outsiders to penetrate the company’s veil of secrecy. “But this could be a place for Apple to play in online.”

The original article can be found here.

Brendan McElroy’s living room in an apartment on the top floor of an East Village walk-up is crowded with anxious patients, each one jiggling a knee, or gnawing on a fingernail or lip.

The original article can be found here.

Now that the iPad has been unveiled to the public and in the hands of an elite few, what more speculation can we conjure about those crazy kids at Cupertino?  It just so happens that I got a call from Aaron Vronko at Rapid Repair.  As the service manager, Aaron and his team dissect roughly 500 iPhones and iPods per week.   Who better to speak on mythical Apple products than someone who rips their guts out all day?

He has a few thoughts on what the blogosphere has been creating, have a read after the jump.

MM: Hey Aaron, thanks for taking my call today, can you give me a bit of background info on you and Rapid Repair?

AV: Hey Fabrizio, I’m the service manager for Rapid Repair, our company was founded 6 years ago and we repair mobile devices, gadgets, ipods, iphones, zunes, video game consoles and handheld consoles. We get shipments from all over the world and repair close to 500 a week. We also contribute to our general knowledge-base by buying the latest gadgets, taking them apart, and putting out repair guides on our website.

MM: That’s great, thanks. So lets get down to business, what do you think Apple will do with the iPhone 4G?

AV: I think that the big changes to expect for the iPhone 4G (4G meaning 4th generation, not the network), in contrast to the iPhone 3GS, will be the exact opposite. The iPhone 3GS changes were focused on the hardware, the horsepower, the core of the device and the kind of performance it can offer. It was basically 95% the same phone as the 3G, just a faster version of it. With the iPhone 4G it will be more or less with the same hardware capabilities, but totally revising the design of it and heavily tweaking, revising and adding to the software functionality but not necessarily in the core applications, but in the most common periphery apps.

MM: Can you tell me more about what you think the direction will be with software?

AV: The thing that made the iPhone successful in the first place was that it did about four applications that everyone who wants a smartphone wants, and it did it better than anyone else ever had. Those four or five applications will be about the same, its just the next 80 or 90 they will improve functionality on.

MM: How do you think the iPhone 4G will be compared to the iPad in terms of platforms and hardware? Will there be any cross-platform integration?

AV: I think its interesting to see to what extent they want to integrate iBooks, they probably most likely want to avoid that. They’ve got another market they are trying to create with the iPad, trying to offer the same functionality on the iPhone, and with that small of a screen size is not that effective for reading books (even though I think they might bump the screen size on the iPhone 4G). I wouldn’t be surprised to see it more focused on reading periodicals, daily news, weekly news. Perhaps expanding on the content delivery that the iBooks content delivery will use. Which I think is a great move, that’s one big piece that the iPad is missing is just one killer app and that it’s not way better than any other device that has come before it.

MM: Well we don’t know that for sure just yet.

AV: Yeah, based on what was shown. It’s not a better e-Reader than Amazon’s Kindle, its not a better computer than the MacBook Air, so far there is not one thing that’s better than everything else.

MM: How about hardware?

AV: I do think the iPhone 4G will use the same processor that is in the iPad. The new Apple A4 as they call it, or it may be called the A3, when it comes down to the hardware it will be the same basic design. The CPU inside that application processor will be an ARM Cortex-A9, the graphics processor will be a PowerVR SGX, probably a 535 or 540. But what they will do, instead of running that CPU at the same clockspeed as the iPad, they will just underlock it to about 600Mhz on the iPhone 4G. The reason they would do that is to save significantly on power.

By comparison, the processor that is in the iPhone 3GS is also running at 600Mhz, the new processor set could easily be 25% more powerful even if they ran it at the same clock speed. In fact, they could even slow it down to 500Mhz and it would still be a more powerful processor set, and it would use maybe half the power as the iPhone 3GS processor and still get just as much done. And thats a result of using a newer and more powerful processor design. Largely due to using a smaller manufacturing process.

MM: Do you think Apple would open up the iPhone 4G for multitasking?

AV: No, I would say not. They didn’t indicate it in the iPad so I would think not. They won’t want to change it from the iPhone 3GS. They have a pretty good history in doing this with the iPods. In one cycle they change the design, the next cycle they beef up the hardware with kind of the same design, and then the next cycle they change the design again. The really good reason for that, which makes a lot of sense for phones, is every 2 or 3 years peoples contracts expire and they can get a new phone when that expires. So it makes sense for Apple to make a device with substantially different capabilities, but nothing more than that. If you make phones with substantially different capabilities every year, then you end up with too many classes of applications and too much confusion of compatibility.

MM: What do you think about these “touch-sensitive case” rumors?

AV: The touch sensing case rumors are interesting. A design concept I think Apple might be playing with, but not an enhancement that would be in the next iPhone, this sounds like something what would more suit the iPad. I believe they will however tweak multi-touch, so you can come up with new gestures, but nothing changed at the core. The case should be an aluminum uni-body.

MM: How about hardware specifics, what will be inside this iPhone 4G that we haven’t talked about?

AV: Memory will be at 512MB, the cost is right and I couldn’t see Apple staying at 256MB for the cost differences. I think storage capacity will be in the options of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. No removable battery, if the iPhone is thought of as having a 2 year life cycle. On a 2 year basis most people are reasonably happy with their battery life.

MM: When do you think Apple will release the iPhone 4G?

AV: I would expect it to be close to the typical annual release, unless there is something groundbreaking that no one would expect there’s no reason that it couldn’t be out. The iPad is going to be out in March with that processor already on display, so processor production shouldn’t really hold them up. But they will need more for iPhone’s, I would say early June to mid-July. Whoever the fabricator is for the iPad A4 chip, will be the fabricator for the iPhone A4 chip. OLED screens are already available in the size Apple would want to use, the only thing they may want to be waiting on is Samsungs newer generation of OLED screens which are 25% brighter. They are in the mobiel handset form factor where you might get a reasonable level of performance in direct sunlight.

MM: What will it cost?

AV: It’s going to be the same or less. Certainly not more, $99, $199 and $299 are the most likely targets. Going any lower to that doesn’t net them any additional sales and thats the price point for most mobile phones, and they could make a killing on it because they are not upgrading most of the hardware inside, its a year later and a year cheaper and for the same price.

MM: There are rumors of video conferencing, what are your thoughts on that?

AV: I don’t think Apple is convinced that the customer they design for (North Americans) demand this feature.  Our mobile networks, (especially the beleaguered AT&T) are nowhere near ready to handle the heavy network demand and usage of these technologies, meaning it would be a WiFi only app and Apple doesn’t want to make their headline feature one that “just works… sometimes.”

MM: Anything else you might want to touch on, perhaps gaming, whats it all really about?

AV: I think its more about design and form factor, not performance on this. They are using newer chips, but thats mainly to increase battery life. Thats the trade off, you can increase battery life and increase performance with some level of trade off. I think you could see some pretty awesome games and battery life. If they use an OLED screen with the A4 chip, clock it all the way down to 500 or 600MHz, you could double the battery life in pretty much all applications from what the iPhone 3GS was. Or they could make the battery smaller and take it off the size and weight of the device with still a 50% increase.

MM: Well Aaron, thank you for your time and our readers will definitely appreciate your thoughts on this.

The original article can be found here.

Computerworld – Maybe the hoopla over the iPad put a crimp in the schedule, but Apple finally got around to begin pounding the iPhone drum.

In this case, that means Apple’s iPhone OS 4, the next version of the company’s mobile operating system, which was previewed yesterday to reporters, bloggers, analysts and industry watchers.

Apple’s a few weeks late — the last two years it’s touted the new iPhone OS in mid-March — but it’s not so late that it puts a mid-summer release at risk. The company’s vast network of developers still has plenty of time to start building apps that will take advantage of the new before Apple does its usual unveiling of a revamped iPhone.

So, what’s in iPhone OS 4? A lot of catch-up, say some, a whole lot of goodness, say most. That’s the quick analysis, anyway, of the next generation software that will add a bunch of features, including a few, like multitasking, that users have been yapping about for years, to the growing collection of Apple’s mobile devices.

iPhone OS 4, like its last two predecessors, has more than a single FAQ can cover; this will play out from now until June, the presumed ship date for the next iPhone, and long after. But we wanted answers to the off-the-bat questions right away.

When do I get iPhone OS 4? True to form, Apple was no more specific than “this summer” for the upgrade’s release, although developers got their hands on a beta and the SDK (software developers kit) yesterday.

But only iPhone and iPod Touch users get the new OS this summer. iPad owners have to wait.

Wait? Wait until when? iPhone OS 4 won’t reach the iPad until “fall,” said Jobs today. But he didn’t say why.

Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, wondered whether the delay was to give Apple time to set some hardware ducks in a row. “I’d like to be able to scan [photos] into the iPad,” he said, and noted that others have asked for direct printing from the iPad, rather than requiring users to e-mail files to or sync files with a PC or Mac.

In fact, Apple may already be vetting hardware vendors, said Aaron Vronko, CEO of Rapid Repair, an iPhone repair firm and experienced teardown expert. There’s a USB controller inside the iPad, says Vrnoko, who disassembled an iPad last Saturday. The evidence is Apple’s online store, where the company’s selling a kit that connects s camera’s USB port to the iPad’s sync and charging port.

Vronko’s bet? Apple will allow select hardware manufacturers to access the controller — again the Apple’s control of the iPhone/iPad ecosystem — for, say, printing.

f these experts are right, maybe Apple requires time to line up those vendors, who need to write drivers, and will add those drivers to iPhone OS 4 between its release for the iPhone and iPad.Or Apple’s just jerking the chain of every iPad owner. Hard to tell.

How much will I pay for the update? Apple didn’t say today, but in the past it gave away upgrades to iPhone owners and charged iPod Touch users $10.

However, there’s a good chance that the upgrade will be free to everyone. Last year, Apple received approval to change its accounting practices so that it could recognize iPhone revenue immediately, rather than spread the income over 24 months. That older accounting method was what Apple used to justify the upgrade charge to iPod Touch owners. With that now moot, Apple’s in a position, accounting-wise, to provide free upgrades.

What’s in iPhone OS 4? Not surprisingly, Apple said the upgrade is a big deal.

Yesterday, the company boasted that iPhone OS 4 includes over 100 new end-user features, although it described only a handful. It also claimed that the OS offers developers more than 1,500 new APIs that can be used to add limited multitasking, open e-mail attachments, access the iPhone’s calendar and more.

What’s the most important, or at least most impressive, new feature? As always, your mileage may vary, but multitasking would be our pick.

With iPhone OS 4, some apps will be able to offer multitasking for specific purposes. The Skype VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol), for example, can use one of seven new APIs to craft a new version that receives calls while other apps are in use, and lets users put callers on hold while they check something out in another app. The Pandora and Rhapsody music-streaming services, on the other hand, will be able to play tunes in the background, just like the native iPod app does.

How will I switch between apps that multitask? Double-tapping the home button brings up an app-switching tray that shows the active programs. Think of it as a dock for multitasking apps that slides up from the bottom of the screen.

While analyst Gottheil drew comparisons to Windows’ task manager, Jobs disagreed. In a Q&A session after the preview presentation, the Apple CEO denied any similarities. “In multitasking, if you see a task manager…[Apple's designers] blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.”

So I can finally switch between apps without closing the first, pressing the home button, then launching the second? Yes, you can.

Apple, in fact, called its “fast app switching” the biggest news within the big news of multitasking. “This is probably the easiest for developers to adopt, and probably the most important,” said Forestall.

Software that uses Apple’s fast app switching API can be put into what Forestall called a “quiescent state” in the background. We’d call it what it is … suspended. The app is frozen in place — “It’s not using any CPU at all,” Forestall said — and then resumes when you return.

“Most people don’t need multitasking,” said Gottheil of Technology Business Research. “They just want a way to quickly switch between programs.”

Will my instant messaging app use multitasking? What about Tweetdeck? Not really.

Apple is still, pardon the phrasing, pushing push notifications, the feature that debuted with iPhone 3.0 last summer. Push, sort of a poor man’s background processing, has the iPhone pinging Apple’s servers to see if there are, for example, new messages waiting for your instant message client. The upside? Push consumes less battery power than true multitasking.

Apple did add what it called “local notification” to iPhone OS 4. By using a new API, app developers can push notices from within the device, from their own apps. Until now, all push has come from Apple’s servers, sent to the iPhone. Scott Forestall, Apple’s senior vice president of iPhone software, showed how a television programming guide could ping you when “The Colbert Report” was about to begin.

But that won’t really help out the Tweetdecks of the world.

Why is Apple doing multitasking this way? Why not just do it full bore? Battery and performance, said Scott Forestall, Apple’s senior vice president of iPhone software.

“How are we adding multitasking while preserving battery life and performance?” Forestall asked, then naturally answered his own question.

Apple has long cited battery drain and processor strain as the reasons why it didn’t implement multitasking on the iPhone, a feature familiar not only to computer users, but to smartphone owners. Google’s Android operating system, offered multitasking from the get-go.

Concern about the battery was also the reason why Apple went with the “multitasking lite” push notification last year.

But I’ve heard only some people get multitasking in iPhone OS 4. What’s up with that? You heard right.

iPhone OS 4 brings Apple’s form of multitasking to the iPad, iPhone 3GS and the third-generation iPod Touch, which first went on sale in early September 2009.

Have an iPhone 3G or iPod Touch from the line that debuted in 2008? Sorry, Charlie. You can upgrade to iPhone OS 4, and according to Jobs, “run many things” with the older hardware, but not multitasking.

Apple said nothing about the original iPhone, the one that doesn’t do 3G, or the first-generation iPod Touch. Here, the expression, “No news is good news” probably doesn’t apply. Don’t expect to run the new OS on the oldest devices.

This isn’t the first time that first-in-line customers have been stiffed. Last year, for example, iPhone 3.0′s new MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) support wouldn’t work on the 2007 iPhone hardware.

I want more than multitasking. What else does iPhone OS 4 have?

• Folders, finally, to organize apps into some semblance of order. You can drag-and-drop apps to and from folders.
• Universal inbox that drops messages from Web mail, MobileMe accounts and multiple Exchange accounts (that last also a first) into one place.
• Support for BlueTooth keyboards. The iPad has this now; iPhone and iPod Touch get it this summer.
• iBook. Apple’s bringing its iPad online bookstore and e-reader app to the iPhone and iPod Touch, albeit scaled to fit the smaller screens. It offers Kindle-esque features, including bookmark and last-page-read synchronization between devices.

Is there a list somewhere of the 100+ new features? No, that would make it too easy, wouldn’t it?

As is Apple’s wont, it only touched on what it considers the highlights of the upgrade, but didn’t recite, or provide, a full catalog of changes. Apple hits those same notes on its Web site, and gave a bird’s-eye-view of some of the new APIs on the iPhone developer site.

And I’ll be seeing ads in my apps, is that right? Yes, indeed.

Jobs talked for quite some time yesterday about the new iAd mobile ad service that Apple’s kicking off with iPhone OS 4.

He took a swipe at now-fierce-rival Google when he got started. “On a desktop, search is where it’s at,” he said. “But on mobile devices, that hasn’t happened. Search is not happening on phones. People are using apps. And this is where the opportunity is to deliver advertising is.”

Apple’s plan: Ads run within apps — that’s where the eyeballs are, Jobs essentially said — and those ads can be interactive and include video. Apple will sell and host the ads, then drop them into cooperating apps. Developers, said Jobs, can add iAd capability to their software in “an afternoon,” and get the big end of the 60%-40% split with Apple of the advertising proceeds.

From the demonstrations that Jobs gave yesterday, many of the ads will resemble, if not apps exactly, then apps within an app.

Will you see ads? You bet you will. Yesterday, Jobs claimed that the iPhone-iPod touch-iPad universe could provide as many as 1 billion ad impressions — one impression is one person seeing an advertisement one time — each day. Say that again: 1 billion ads each day.

How come we didn’t hear about a new iPhone? Not the time, wouldn’t be prudent.

The last two years, Apple has trotted out a preview of the next version of the iPhone OS in March, but waited until June to announce new hardware, then three to five weeks later, put the brand spankin’ new handset in stores.

So Apple’s just following iPhone protocol.

The original article can be found here.

The original article can be found here.

Stay tuned for a shocking tear down of the new Apple iPad.

http://www.rapidrepair.com/guides/ipad/ipad-repair-guide.html