Good luck Apple!

So iOS5 and iCloud is set to launch tomorrow - October 12th, with the iPhone 4S being released a couple of days later.

I would not like to work at Apple over the next few days. Just imagine the amount of work that has gone on leading up to this, and the amount of co-ordination required to launch.

Just some of the things that need to happen, starting tomorrow (a partial list!):

iOS5 - updates to all iOS devices including iPhones, iPads and iPod touches.

OSX Lion - 10.7.2 to be released with iCloud support

iWork for iOS5 - Updates to iWork for iCloud

iWork for OSX - Updates to iWork for iCloud

iCloud - North Carolina Datacenter into full production

MobileMe to iCloud migration - User account migration

Find my Friends - New service rollout

iTunes - iCloud enabled iTunes to be released

iLife on OSX - iCloud enabled iLife including PhotoStream for iPhoto

Aperture - Photostream for Aperture

Apple TV - Firmware upgrades to enable PhotoStream and iOS5 Airplay

And I'm sure there are lot's more I've left out plus many, many background engineering and deployment tasks that are hidden from public gaze.

I'd just like to say good luck to all the people working at Apple at such a busy time, especially having to deal with the obvious strain put on them by dealing with losing Steve. It can't have been easy getting through this week, and keeping focus.

I really hope it all goes well tomorrow, and I know if anyone can pull off such an audacious plan, it's Apple.

The Aftermath...

So, that was a strange one.

I have to confess I didn't see the full keynote until this morning, but I sat in a room with 70 other mac geeks last night and watched the "Let's talk iPhone" event by proxy.

On a side note, apologies if you tuned into MacBreak Weekly to see what was happening in the LMUG pub. We managed to make a fleeting appearance on the show, but the network connectivity in the pub just wasn't up to it, so we had to abandon the live feed from London to Petaluma.

Apologies!

So some random thoughts about the event and the announcements...

I was impressed with Tim Cook's composure and delivery during the introduction. Imagine the kind of pressure the guy was under, with it being his first product launch, the eyes of the World's press bearing down plus the not insignificant pressure of following in Steve Jobs footsteps. I think he did a great job. A little bit slow in places, but a great first official appearance as CEO.

However, I do feel that Apple really need to keep the introductions under control, as they are starting to become a little bit tiresome. Good numbers are always good to hear and I appreciate they need to relay them for press coverage but still!

I'm not sure the videos of store openings are doing them any favours either. Yes, it's a fun time and excitement is high, but if I'm starting to feel they are a bit jarring, imagine how non-Apple fans and Apple haters are feeling. The over zealous, and slightly disturbing imagery, only panders to the irritating accusations of the Cult of Apple.

Tim did report some pretty spectacular numbers, as well as an impressive number of Keynote slides showing #1 slamming into the ground. Message received and understood.

As expected, iPods took a bit of a back seat, but Apple are still quite insistent that they are an important part of the business, especially in attracting new people to Apple products. The updated Nano looks quite neat and I would expect to see a metric ton more watch straps on the market soon!

Cards? Cards? Let's pass on that one. Again, yes, I know the keynote is aimed at consumers but really?

No surprises with iOS5, but we knew that anyway - a great update with lots of new functionality.

iCloud also pretty much covered the same ground as in WWDC, but did I notice a slight change in the functionality of iTunes in the Cloud to now stream music to iOS devices?

But the main event was the announcement of the iPhone 4S.

Yep, the iPhone 4S

No, messing about, no lengthy lead in, just straight out with the new name.

What a shocker!

And then the realisation that it was the same form factor as the iPhone 4.

Immediately, I thought that iPhone 5 could possibly be the one more thing, but as the updated feature set emerged, it became obvious that this was it. Just one new iPhone and that was the iPhone 4S

There was no new form factor to be announced. The best Phone currently available, upgraded in virtually every aspect plus some new spectacular features, but no new form factor.

Shocker!

I won't regurgitate the features as you're probably well aware of them, but basically, pretty much everything we wanted or expected (with the exception of NFC and a bigger screen) all wrapped up in the same form factor as the iPhone 4.

Once all the information was available and I'd had time to process it, I felt that Apple had delivered the iPhone 5, they just didn't go to the trouble and expense of repackaging the device in a new and shiny enclosure, or calling it the iPhone 5. And this is what seems to have upset most people.

The huge technical improvement in every area of the iPhone, in addition to the groundbreaking technology in Siri should have impressed, instead, much wailing and moaning ensued, with some pundits even labelling the event an Apple FAIL! Streuth.

Even so, I have to own up to saying that my initial reaction on the night was one of slight disappointment.

I put this down to one main reason. I wasn't able to see the announcement in the form it was intended. Being drip fed information by live blogging just didn't cut it. I fully appreciate just how difficult it is to live blog these events, and some did a great job on keeping us up to date on what was being announced, but by the very nature of the medium, the messages were somewhat diluted and in some cases disjointed.

If there was ever a announcement that needed to be live streamed, this was it!

After finally watching the announcements in full, I'm excited by the improvements contained in the iPhone 4S and I'm sure it will be even more successful that the iPhone 4 over time.

But my main take away from this event, is that Apple really need to go back to streaming the events live to manage the message. The negativity generated by the event will probably dissipate to a large extent, once the device is available, but why generate it in the first place.

Apple do themselves no favours and upset and offend the many legions of Mac fans by excluding them from such events.

And yes, of course I'll be getting an iPhone 4S

Now about the iPad 3 and iPhone 5 next year.....

Today's the day!

There's not really much more to be said about the Apple iPhone event scheduled for later today.

The absence of any credible "leaked" iPhone 5 photos, does give me concern that we may not see a redesign of the iPhone form factor.

I had hoped we'd see a restyling of the iPhone based on the iPad - thinner, metal back, slightly bigger screen. I figure that Apple needs to differentiate the new release of the iPhone from the old, especially since it's been such a long time since the release of the iPhone 4.

Who knows, perhaps Apple have been even more stringent on security since the stolen iPhone debacle, and we will see a new form factor in the brand new iPhone. I certainly hope so.

Based on the amount of press, it looks like a new iPhone 4S is on the cards. Cheaper but more powerful than the existing iPhone 4, but with only 8GB storage (Yes, I said RAM before it was pointed out to me - I'm old school).

This would be the perfect phone for all those people with iPhone 3GS's who don't want the top of the range device.

It may well be that the hardware is not the primary focus of today's announcement.

If Apple are ready with "iPhone Assistant", it is possible that this could overshadow the iPhone announcement and be a huge deal.

Don't just think voice recognition, think Artificial Intelligence.

Think total control of your device and full voice integration with local and web applications - could be huge!

Since Apple's purchase of Siri several years ago, we've been waiting for the emergence of this technology and the strap line of the invitation for today's event - "Let's talk iPhone" - seems to be the clearest indication yet that it's now ready for primetime. Unusually, Apple haven't updated the current iOS5 beta in over a month, another clear indication that something is being rolled into the build that they don't want anyone to see until launch. I expect the iOS5 GM to be released today.

The other facet of today's announcement which may prove to be significant, but which isn't getting much press is iCloud. I expect Apple to release more details about iCloud and the official launch date. This will be wrapped up with iOS5, the new iPhone(s) and the release of OSX 10.7.2 with support for iCloud baked in. Not forgetting new versions of iLife and iWork with full support for iCloud. The iLife and iWork may not be announced in the Keynote but they will soon follow. It will be interesting to see if they take the opportunity to enhance the applications or just release iCloud enabled versions.

If they could release a version of iWork with significantly upgraded features, full iCloud integration to seamlessly sync documents between the Mac and all your iOS devices plus the bullet proof autosave and versioning of Lion on the Mac, they could turn iWork into an even more capable business tool that it is now.

The question remains, will the iPods get a look in?

What about Apple TV?

Possible but unlikely.

The iPods may get a mention, just to introduce changes to the range for Christmas, but I don't think the Apple TV will get a mention.

As far as personalities, my bet is that Tim Cook will open up with the business side of things and say some nice things about Steve. The individual segments will be handled by Scott Forstall (iOS), Eddy Cue (iCloud) and Phil Schiller (Lion).

But who will announce the iPhone?

My gut feeling is that it will be Tim Cook or at a long shot, Jony Ive. Previously only appearing on video, I wonder if Jony has the presentation chops (or has been coached enough) to start to take more of a role in the public eye?

We'll know all these things soon enough.

See you at the LMUG meetup!

Real Life MacBook Air 11" Benchmark - Video Encoding

Ok, so we've seen lot's of raw processor speeds and "GeekBench" benchmarks for the new 2011 MacBook Air, but how does it stand up in "real-life" usage?

One of the first things people said about the 2010 MacBook Air was that it was a powerful machine, "but you really wouldn't want to use it for video editing".

To be honest, the video editing is fine, it's the video encoding that might give cause for concern.

Video encoding is one of the most processor intensive tasks you can throw at a computer. As well as maxing out the processors (the more cores the better), it also stresses the i/o of a machine.

For maximum video encoding speed, you need multiple processors and speedy disks.

As part of my standard production workflow, I routinely produce huge "master" video files of the ScreenCastsOnline tutorials, then encode them into multiple resolutions for distribution. For fun, I thought I'd take one of my production master files and run it through Handbrake on various machines, to see the relative video encoding performance of each machine.

I chose a 20 minute screencast, with a resolution of 1280x720 encoded with the lossless animation codec at 25 frames per second and millions of colours. The "master" file weighed in at 3.8 GB.

Using Handbrake, I selected the standard Apple TV preset, bumped the resolution up to 1280x720 with a constant quality of 25.

Handbrake is a great encoder, running at 64bit and optimised for multiple cores.

Here is how it played out:

Obviously, the 8 core MacPro with 16GB of RAM and a striped RAID drive crunched though the file pretty speedily, with all 8 cores powering through the encode.

However, I was shocked at the performance of the 2011 MacBook Air 11" with the 1.8 GHz Intel Core i7 - It only took 3.5 minutes longer compared to the Mac Pro.

That's nearly twice as fast as the 2010 MacBook Air.

I don't think you need to worry about video encoding on a 2011 MacBook Air.

Will be interesting to see what a difference using Thunderbolt attached storage would make!

Update: Here is a screenshot of the MBA showing all the processor maxing out. The Intel Core i7 is a dual core chip, but uses Hyper-Threading which makes it appear as a 4 core chip to the OS. Hence the 4 displays.

New 11" MacBook Air...

After careful consideration, I ended up replacing my existing 13" second gen MacBook Air with a new third gen 11" MacBook Air. This post really isn't an exercise in justifying the machine upgrade to myself, I don't really need to do that, but more to answer some of the questions on Twitter on why I upgraded.

Previous MacBook Air
The previous MacBook Air has been a dream machine, with very few faults and with an impressive responsiveness and turn of speed. I've been using it as both my primary mobile machine plus as my dedicated ScreenCast recording machine. It has a 256GB SSD drive and is repartitioned into three separate partitions:

• My primary work partition
• A test Lion partition
• A dedicated ScreenCast build to record

Performance has been superb, with the exception of background rendering on Final Cut Pro X. Not that I expected to do any serious work using FCP X on the machine, but I did record both episodes of my FCP X tutorials on the machine. The machine runs FCP X just fine if you are prepared to wait for the rendering to catch up.

Portability has been great, although the 13" MBA is just a tad too big to use on a plane seat tray (economy or coach of course). I've mentioned before my frustration of wanting to do some work on the 13" MBA on a long haul flight to SF but couldn't, whilst across the plane, someone else was working away on an 11" quite happily.

One thing I really missed, which I wasn't really expecting to, was the back lit keyboard. A really strange glaring omission by Apple on the second gen MBA, especially if you'd been used to it on the MacBook Pro.

Connectivity wasn't really an issue with the addition of a second USB port on the second gen MBA, although, the Apple USB ethernet connector was a bit of a poor performer. The number of times I forgot to pack it..... The 13" does include an SD card slot which I've used two, possibly three times.

So on the whole, I was delighted with the 13" MacBook Air, so why change?

New MacBook Air
The spec I went with was the top of the range 11" - 1.8GHz i7 processor, 4GB RAM, 256 GB SSD. As far as I was concerned, this was only available BTO (Build To Order) from the online store, but being in close proximity to my local Apple store on Sunday, I was delighted to find that they had that build in stock!

Reasons for change...

Well new and shiny had a lot to do with it but....

Performance - The boost in processor power means it is a serious contender to be a portable editing machine. In the tests I've seen, it looks like the processor can crunch though some tasks at between 1.5x and 2.5x my current machine. Still need to do some tests, but for my purposes (HD ScreenCasts) editing and rendering should be fine at a pinch. I probably wouldn't want to edit RED footage, but I should be OK.

Portability - The 11" form factor will allow me to use the MBA in places I couldn't before. My carbon footprint over the next 18 months may well be excessive as there is a lot of business (and leisure) travel on the horizon.

Backlit Keyboard - Welcome back, I really missed you. Working when travelling involves early morning starts to catch up on emails, inevitably in darkness, with Mrs Don still in the land of nod. Surprising easy to work without switching the lights on with the backlit keyboard ;-)

Connectivity - Hello Thunderbolt! This is really investing in the future.

I've never paid the Apple tax on monitors (except for a 20" Cinema Display bought 5 years ago - which is still in perfect working order by the way), deciding instead to go with Dell monitors. These are now 4 years old and starting to show their age. I can well see in another year or so swapping my primary 30" Dell monitor with an Apple Thunderbolt monitor and utilising all the built in Thunderbolt goodness. Also looking forward to the release of Thunderbolt enabled audio gear to create the ultimate portable screencast studio with the MBA.

As far as what to do with the current 13" MacBook Air, well Mrs Don has dabs on that. We have two desktop machines setup in the studio, one for me and production and one for her for email and customer service.

Unfortunately, when I'm recording, she get's evicted!

So the 13" MacBook Air becomes her primary machine so she can work in or out of the studio.

Sorted!

I'll report back on real life performance, battery life and working with an 11" screen once I've had the change to use it for a while.