It seems there isn’t a lot that isn’t yet known about the next iPhones, if you can believe the published reports that is. Almost every day, you see a supposedly leaked photo of what the high-end iPhone 5s, and the expected low-end version, the iPhone 5c, looks like. The specs are already being revealed, such as the claim that Apple’s alleged new A7 chip will be 31% faster than the A6 on today’s iPhone 5. You’ve also seen reports about the camera, and other internal workings.

So what’s left?

Well, the iPhone 5s will almost surely look essentially the same as the iPhone 5. That’s in keeping with Apple’s decision to make major form factor changes every other year. Certainly there’s good reason for this, one of which is that Apple can amortize development costs over a longer period, and the second benefits accessory makers, who don’t have to rejigger their designs quite as often. It also increases the market of potential customers for those accessories big time.

However, that doesn’t mean all or most of the internal components aren’t being changed. From processors to batteries, Apple could completely replace the parts to deliver better performance, improved battery life, and enhanced reliability. But lots of critics will nonetheless complain that the changes are minor. It’s all about the case; they can’t see anything beyond the spec sheet without tearing the thing apart. And that would be a stretch. Besides, such online repair portals as iFixit will do the job for them.

One possible added feature for the iPhone 5s is fingerprint recognition. This would be a safer way to lock your device against intruders. But it also brings to mind the grisly action movies where someone’s fingers, minus the rest of the body, are placed on a sensor to open a door, or activate a computer. To be serious, Apple bought a company that handles fingerprint recognition, AuthenTec, so it’s clear there’s a game plan afoot, and this seems the most logical choice.

The “lesser” iPhone 5c has also been described in a fair amount of detail, with the chatter suggesting that components will largely mirror today’s iPhone 5, which helps reduce R&D expense. Since there will supposedly be a plastic case, relying on much simpler and less expensive construction methods, the sale price may be in the neighborhood of today’s iPhone 4, about $450. But it’s also possible Apple will be able to bring the price down even further, say $349 or $399, to make the low-end iPhone a bit more palatable to people on a budget, particularly citizens of developing countries who don’t have ready access to subsidized wireless plans.

All this and more has already been published. The new mobile, OS, iOS 7, has already been demonstrated, and developers have revealed the ongoing changes from beta to beta. We appear to be in the final stages ahead of release.

So what does Apple do to surprise anyone?

I suppose Apple could deliver more standard storage. Go to 32GB for the low-end, and offer 64GB and 128GB options, but not $100 extra for each step; maybe $50. The existing price structure is a rip-off when you consider the cost of raw materials, which continues to decline. Apple shouldn’t rely on obsolete solid state storage price schemes, despite the higher profit margins.

Perhaps the main surprise would be to deliver unexpected product introductions. There’s talk that the new iPads are being rushed for launch on September 10th. That seems ahead of the game, but with iPad sales apparently declining, it’s a great way to boost sales. However, The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple has already shot down this rumor. He’s well-connected, so take him seriously.

There’s also more talk, yet again, about an iWatch, even with preliminary sales projections. That’s a stretch for a product not yet announced. One report dares to suggest that the iWatch would replace the iPod, but that doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. iPod sales may be on the decline, but tons of them are still being sold, particularly the iPod touch. However, recent rumors suggest you want see an iWatch or some other Apple wearable appliance until the latter half of 2014.

One reason to take the iWatch concept seriously is because Apple has trademarked the name in some countries. That lends more credibility than reports of allegedly hiring people to work on the project. That a new gadget is under development doesn’t mean that it will ever see the light of day.

But it would be curious for Apple to throw everything at the wall for a single pre-fall media event. Better to stretch it out, perhaps with another event in October to focus on Macs, particularly the launch of the overhauled Mac Pro. Other Macs could be refreshed at the same time, and it might be a suitable place to release OS X Mavericks.

What’s left? Other than some unknown product that might be revealed somewhere along the line, there is the Apple TV and the rumors of an Apple branded TV set. That could fuel yet another media event in early November, just about in time to fuel holiday sales. And don’t forget the iPad.

Yet I still wonder if, after all the rumors and allegedly informed speculation, Apple’s expected September 10 media event may be slick and all,  the products will be terrific, and sales will soar. But with so much already out there, what’s left? It’s a sure thing, though, that Apple’s critics will be out in full force. Take that to the bank.

While a figure of 13 million sales for a single product would be a huge deal for most tech companies, to Apple, that number, tallied over the six-year life of the Apple TV, means it’s still just a hobby. True, more than half of those sales occurred in the past year, which means that it is becoming a very popular hobby. After all, it wasn’t so many years ago that six million sales of new Macs in a single year was a huge deal.

In any case, Apple remains coy about the Apple TV end game. Some choose to predict there will be a full-fledged TV set of some sort, focusing on Apple technologies and seamless integration of all your devices. Well, at least the devices that have the Apple logo on them. It remains to be seen how such a gadget would integrate with a Blu-ray player, DVR, gaming console, or a surround sound audio system.

However, it’s clear that Apple TV is slowing getting better, at least when it comes to content offerings.

So this week, Apple added five more dedicated channels that include Vevo, a music video site, Disney Channel, Disney XD, Weather Channel, and Smithsonian Channel. All right, maybe not so compelling. But in June, Apple pushed out HBO Go, WatchESPN, Sky News, CrunchyRoll and Quelle. Add to that the previous offerings, including Hulu Plus, Netflix, some sports channels, Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr and the Wall Street Journal.

What’s more, the new apps, or channels, generally don’t require downloading a software update. They just appear the next time you access your Apple TV.

But it was never just about iTunes, although that service still remains first among equals. To be sure, iTunes remains a compelling competitor to the standard Pay Per View fare from your cable or satellite provider. Indeed, when I’m faced with the choice of choosing the former or the latter, I tend to select iTunes, unless DirecTV has a special offer for a particular movie. And don’t forget AirPlay.

There’s also a published report that Apple is trying to entice Time Warner Cable to join the crowd. And bear in mind that some of the existing Apple TV channels, such as Disney and HBO Go, require that you authenticate as a subscriber to a supported cable or satellite service. So if Apple is already dealing with them, might as well include dedicated apps for the carriers too, right?

If that happens, it would make Apple TV a dead-on competitor to TiVO, as a third-party aggregator of your cable or satellite provider’s content. While it’s reported that the carriers are being stubborn about signing deals with Apple, it would seem to me they benefit. After all, they keep their customers regardless, but it would also mean that they’d have to establish cloud-based storage systems to replace the DVR, which uses local hard drives to store the shows you’ve recorded.

Sure, maybe Apple wants to use iCloud to store all that content, but that would also mean the content delivery systems would have to allow Apple to manage that programming. Possible? It might still require reworking deals with the TV networks. It’s all so complicated.

Meantime, it’s clear Apple is testing the waters by making Apple TV more and more indispensable as a part of your entertainment diet. But, as some have suggested, Apple is still playing second fiddle to the cable or satellite company, assuming you’re not a cord cutter. How does Apple work around that problem? One way would be to organize Apple TV as a central hub that would manage all your connected TV peripherals. Another would, naturally, require apps for your cable or satellite company.

Yes, I realize Apple is also rumored to be working on their own TV subscription service. But that would require a new set of complicated agreements, and it would seem that they’d want to do it in a way that improves upon the current DVR paradigm. Can they unbundle? The cable and satellite companies and the networks still haven’t worked out a feasible way to make that happen.

Yes, it would be nice to just tell them that you want a dozen channels, free and premium, and that’s all you have to pay for. But that also means that hundreds of other channels, which now vie for your attention, never get a chance to shine. Quite often they are discovered randomly from an online listing, TV Guide,  your local paper, or just surfing the channel guide. But if you can’t pick from a diet of loads of channels, you won’t stumble upon them. Many networks that today get decent audiences would remain undiscovered. So maybe bundling is the better way, assuming both sides aren’t too greedy.

Besides, however Apple continues to manage Apple TV content, it doesn’t eliminate the possibility of a smart TV set. But that’s a market far more saturated than digital music players, smartphones and tablets before Apple got involved. I still think all or most of what an Apple TV can do doesn’t require creating and selling the whole widget. But that won’t stop the speculation.

Some people are stuck in a rut, others are stuck with specs. So when doing comparisons among products in roughly the same category, they will put some numbers up on the screen, pronounce the ones with apparently higher numbers superior, and somehow believe something positive has been accomplished.

You can find offenders of this lazy approach even among supposedly respected media outlets, such as Consumer Reports. That publication has repeatedly pronounced tech products better more because of having more features than on actual performance. Take a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, with loads of space-clogging junkware. Even when many of the features barely work, or are mostly useless, somehow that counts for a positive in CR’s narrow point of view of the tech universe.

So it seems that a certain international business publication, which will go unnamed because their tech writer is so clueless, wrote an article that purports to demonstrate the three ways Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 somehow beats the iPad mini. It’s all about being lame and desperate.

So they start with the statement that the specs somehow overwhelm the mini, although that is subject to debate. It’s not that the writer actually explains how at least two of the perceived spec advantages manifest themselves in real world use. That would require work.

First and foremost, there’s the alleged CPU advantage. The iPad mini has a 1GHz dual-core A5 with 512MB of RAM, which the author compares to a 1.5GHz dual-core CPU and 1.5GB of RAM on the Galaxy Tab. However, he conveniently eliminates any real-world performance tests between the two products. A lot of that would be an iOS versus Android efficiency comparison, and it’s well known that the only workable way to deal with the laggard performance of Google’s mobile OS is to beat it down with more powerful hardware.

In order to make the Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 appear to offer usable storage than the iPad mini, the author cites the fact that the former has a microSD expansion slot. OK, that’s a nice feature, but Apple does have iCloud to help reduce the need for onboard storage. The author doesn’t seem to know iCloud exists, or maybe that fact is conveniently ignored.

Factor number three is pixel density. Neither tablet has a Retina or HD display. The 7.9-inch iPad mini’s pixel density is “only” 162 ppi, whereas the Tab 3 8.0 has 189 ppi. Not mentioned is whether that makes any visible difference at all in the real world. Does the blogger have golden eyes that perceive even tiny pixel density changes? As a practical matter, I have compared the significantly higher advertised density of the Samsung Galaxy S4 with an iPhone 5, and there’s no comparison. Text on the iPhone looks sharper, and you cannot see the individual pixels. That’s not the case with the Galaxy S4. Worse, the Galaxy S4 does not strike me as noticeably sharper than the Galaxy S3, which has a pixel density very close to the iPhone’s.

What’s the good of advertising a spec if regular people can’t see the results, or can see it only if they strain real hard?

You’ll notice that screen real estate between the Tab 3 8.0 and the iPad mini is not mentioned. The mini has standard definition, whereas the Samsung is widescreen. What this means is that there are more square inches on the iPad, which comes into its own when you are using it in the landscape mode and want to visit a Web site as opposed to just streaming a widescreen movie.

And what about the overall user experience? How fast does the iPad feel in regular use compared to the Tab 3 8.0? How well do each handle apps? What about the App Store collection of tablet-optimized software compared to what’s available at Google Play? Here’s where the rubber meets the road, because App Store developers have, by and large, actually given thought to making their apps take good advantage of a larger display. Android apps are usually just scaled up to make them tablet compatible. That “cheap out” approach clearly offers a subpar user experience.

Now a real comparison might include an Android tablet with an HD display, such as the newest Nexus 7. Unfortunately, the Nexus 7 has been afflicted with a number of serious bugs, including touch display issues that, according to CR, causes it to go “crazy,” and a defective GPS. CR, which usually adores an Android tablet, is warning people not to buy one until Google fixes the most serious problems.

Indeed, Google has already pushed an update to the Nexus 7, but time will tell whether the software fixer-upper does the trick or whether more work needs to be done. In passing, the original Nexus 7, released in 2012, is notorious for early failures of one sort or another. You can bet that if Apple dared release an iPad or an iPhone in that condition, they’d never hear the end of it.

Aside from a handful of stories, Google seems to have gotten a pass, and this will all soon be forgotten. Pretty much the same thing happened a few years back when Microsoft sold millions of Xbox gaming consoles susceptible to early and serious hardware failures. Yes, they fixed them all, but consider the inconvenience to the customers.

It’s certainly true that outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had plenty of confidence. Sometimes too much confidence, they say, as he could be somewhat overbearing; well, maybe not somewhat. But he certainly hung around Redmond for a long time, having joined the company run by his pal Bill Gates in 1980 in a sales capacity.

In 2000, he replaced Gates as CEO, while Gates remained as Chairman. Since then, Ballmer’s tenure has been mixed, and in recent years it’s become clear he’s been looking in the wrong direction to remake the company.

It’s telling that Wall Street quickly betrayed its lack of confidence in Ballmer. Within minutes after his impending departure was announced, the stock went up at a much faster rate than usual. That doesn’t say a lot about Ballmer’s ability to handle the job, though it’s also true that the stock price increase, if it holds up, ended up increasing his personal fortune by over a billion dollars. So there’s no reason to feel said that he’s going to soon be out of a job.

Continue Reading…