GigaOM » new iPhone

The Apple Roundup: Handicapping the arrival of new Apple TV

Erica Ogg — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 16:48:24 +0000

With so many people writing about Apple, finding the best stories and reports isn’t easy. Here’s our daily pick of stories about the company from around the Web that you shouldn’t miss:

We know from reports last week that Apple’s not having much success getting cable operators on board with its vision for Apple TV. And after meeting with Apple, analysts are confirming that this is the case: don’t expect a new and improved Apple TV soon. (via Fortune)
Bloomberg Businessweek looks at Apple’s potential for future growth, even after hitting a historic market capitalization milestone earlier this week.
More fallout from the Genius ad debacle? Shortly after pulling the ads from TV and the web, the executive producer behind Apple’s ads has quit TBWA/Media Arts Lab, the agency that’s produced Apple’s iconic ads for decades. (via Advertising Age)
We’re still awaiting the jury’s decision in the Apple-Sasmung patent case in California. But a South Korean court has ruled in a similar case between the two companies. Bloomberg reports that Apple was found to have violated two Samsung patents, and Samsung to have infringed on one Apple patent. Apple has to stop selling the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad and iPad 2 in South Korea, while Samsung has to pull the Galaxy S, Galaxy S II, Galaxy Tab and nine other products off store shelves in its home country.
It’s pretty clear Apple’s ready to introduce a new iPhone and a smaller iPad in time for the holidays. But will it be at the same time? John Gruber has a theory that Apple will hold separate events less than a month apart to maximize exposure of both gadgets.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

A late-summer iOS 6, iPhone launch would boost Q4 earnings

Erica Ogg — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 16:07:56 +0000

The rumors are flying fast and furious today: Apple is reportedly set to announce a new iPhone and a scaled-down iPad on September 12, and then release at least the new iPhone on September 21. That report comes courtesy of iMore, which has said the dates come from sources that have been “proven accurate in the past.” The report builds on the pile of rumors surrounding a new, smaller iPad coming sometime later this year, and the timing it lays out would mean both the iPhone and iOS 6 would arrive a bit earlier than expected.

Apple tends to do only one upgrade per year, per device: so a new iPhone put on sale 11 months after the release of the previous model would be a slight change of strategy. Additionally, a new iPad model would in itself be a significant update to the company’s product lineup, and releasing it six months after the third-generation 9.7-inch iPad hit stores (as opposed to waiting until the next iPad launch in March or April) would be unusual. However, it would set up Apple to better defend its tablet turf this fall against competitors, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon, undercutting the third-generation iPad in price and size by selling 7-inch tablets.

As far as the timing named in the report, on one hand, it makes sense: a Wednesday press event followed by a product release nine days later would echo the pattern Apple began with the iPhone 4S in October last year, just moved up a couple of weeks. But there’s something that doesn’t jive completely. iMore’s report says iOS 6 would be given a final presentation on September 12, and be released as a software update a week later, which would be September 19. Apple SVP of iOS Software Scott Forstall said at WWDC in June that iOS 6 will be released “sometime this fall.” If we want to be technical (and I think it’s fair to be with a detail-oriented company like Apple) fall doesn’t officially begin until September 22. So, these dates would technically make iOS 6, and a new iPhone, a very-late-summer launch.

Apple is obviously allowed to change its mind or deliver products earlier than expected. And delivering a new iPhone in late September would make for a lot of pleased customers waiting to upgrade their smartphones. There’s also a major benefit to releasing not only a new iPhone but perhaps a new, smaller iPad as well during that time frame: better quarterly earnings numbers.

In other words, timing the launch at the end of its fiscal fourth quarter would be one way to avoid repeating what happened in its fiscal fourth quarter last year – and again in its fiscal third, reported last week — with Apple seeing its iPhones sales dip while customers wait until October for a new iPhone. Even a late-in-the-quarter release (the quarter ends Sept. 30), would result in one of the company’s typically insane launch weekend numbers press releases, which would be encouraging to investors. While Apple is typically not a short-term thinking company, it’s proven itself under CEO Tim Cook to be more much more sensitive to the concerns of Wall Street.

Update: AllThingsD backs up iMore’s report, saying it’s also hearing that Apple “is currently planning an event for that week.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

IOS developers believe larger iPhone won’t cause big problems

Erica Ogg — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:15:32 +0000

If those pesky “people familiar with the matter” are to be believed, Apple will move to a larger screen with the next iteration of the iPhone, thought to arrive sometime this fall.

The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News reported separately last week that Apple will introduce a screen of “at least 4 inches diagonal” or “bigger than 3.5 inches,” the current screen size. What’s not clear is how Apple would go about this and satisfy both users — who may enjoy a larger screen but also want to keep the Retina display quality — and its army of third-party developers — who don’t want to have to develop for a wide variety of different screen sizes.

There are several theories out there as to how Apple could build a larger-screen iPhone. They include scaling up the screen and just dropping the pixel density a bit; changing the aspect ratio, increasing the screen height, and keeping the pixel density the same; increasing the width and the height; or going bigger than 4 inches and using a standard 16:9 resolution. Rene Ritchie at iMore has a good explanation of how Apple could get there.

But what do the developers who will have to deal with the implications of a larger screen think? I talked to a few iOS app makers, and interestingly, many of them are not convinced Apple would actually “pull an Android,” as one developer put it, and make it more complicated to design for a bunch of different screen sizes (iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4/4S and something new).

Sam Shank, the CEO of Hotel Tonight, a hotel-finding app for iOS and Android, said if Apple does change the screen size, he believes the phone itself would become slightly wider but not much taller. But he doesn’t believe Apple would mess with either the aspect ratio or pixel density.

“Changing the aspect ratio would be a lot of work for development teams. We found that maybe 50 percent of iOS development is [spent] in layout,” he said in an interview on Friday. “If we had to do two versions of that, the current aspect ratio and a new aspect ratio, and had to lay it out again, that would add considerably to our development time.”

Lenny Rachitsky, the CEO of Localmind, a social discovery app for both iOS and Android, said he doesn’t see Apple creating fragmentation problems for its developers. “We haven’t put a lot of thought into it yet, partly because we assume Apple isn’t going to pull an Android and fragment the device market unnecessarily. If they do, they must have a really good reason to do it, and we’re confident they’ll provide tools to make it easy to migrate. The last thing they want to do is put more friction in front of developers.”

Localmind’s lead iOS developer, Nelson Gauthier, sounded equally confident that Apple would make any transition, if needed, smooth. “Apple often changes the requirements for iOS applications but they usually give developers fair warning and decent tools to accommodate new devices. The transition to Retina display and iPad were both relatively straightforward,” he said.

Gauthier said in an e-mail:

A bigger display could mean a few things. It could mean that the display has a higher resolution while retaining the same aspect ratio. The new display might be a different shape. Finally, the display might simply grow while retaining the old resolution. But changing the resolution or aspect of the display need not have an effect on user interface elements, just their layout. Bars and controls could stay the same size while content areas expand to fill the additional screen real estate.

Apple might help developers transition between form factors by providing a system that would automatically adjust layouts for new resolutions and display aspects. Last year at WWDC, they revealed a component for Mac OS X called Cocoa Auto-Layout that allows developers to define layouts using fairly simple, freeform constraints. A system like this could also work on iOS.

Massive Damage Inc., which makes location-based iOS games, is also betting against major changes for developers. As CEO Ken Seto points out, there are already two resolutions many developers have to worry about for iPhone games: standard resolution for older iPhones and Retina for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S.

“I can’t quite imagine how they will introduce yet another retina resolution standard. Overall, I think if Apple does increase the screen size, they will be careful to not introduce too much fragmentation. They will likely keep the aspect ratio the same so developers won’t have [to] refactor their UI,” he said. “I have a feeling a bigger iPhone will automatically scale up existing retina resolutions as the screen would likely only get a little bit bigger.”

But the feeling that any changes would be negative isn’t necessarily universal. Donnie Dinch, the co-founder of iOS last-minute ticketing app WillCall, said because of the content of his company’s app, a screen size change may not have a huge impact for it, especially if Apple went the route of simply making the screen taller.

“It doesn’t really matter how tall it is for us, it’s probably a bigger deal for games . . . I think that a lot of the things we do is just list screens [of ticket information], so having a taller screen makes sense,” he said.

But lowering the pixel density to accommodate a larger screen? The screen is the most important part of the iPhone, said Dinch: “If they augment that in any way negatively, that would be insane.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Rumor roundup: A thinner, shinier LTE iPhone?

Erica Ogg — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 15:45:46 +0000

We’re likely still months removed from the introduction of the next-generation iPhone, yet predictably rumors about the device, its components, its look and feel and when it will arrive are already flying fast and furious.

Here’s our quick rundown of the scuttlebutt surrounding Apple’s highly anticipated next phone.

Apple might be using a thinner kind of display from Toshiba and Sharp. Using “in-cell” touchscreen displays for the new iPhone could make the device thinner than it is now.
Korea IT News says the new iPhone’s casing will be manufactured from Liquidmetal, a combination of titanium, zirconium, nickel, copper and other metals, that can be manipulated like plastic injection molding, rather than bent into shape like sheet metal. Apple already uses it in some other products, but casting the iPhone in the material would make the device’s case tougher and more scratch resistant.
The sixth-generation iPhone will work on LTE networks and use Qualcomm 28nm chips, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.
That same analyst was expecting the new device to be introduced in August (though it’s unclear why), but thanks to Qualcomm’s difficulty in manufacturing enough of these 28nm chips, he expects (another) October iPhone launch.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.