I’m Marco Arment: creator of Instapaper, technology writer, and coffee enthusiast.
Sponsor: Igloo, making work a better place
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Igloo makes software for humans. Humans that need to work together. Humans
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Thanks to Igloo Software for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week and actually listening to my podcast.
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The iPad Mini and the cost of Retina
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The iPad Mini is a conflicted product.
It’s much better than the iPad 3 and 4 to handle, carry, and hold up during use. It has the best external design of any iPad to date. It runs cooler than the iPad 3 or 4, it has almost the same battery life despite its much smaller size and weight, and it matches the iPad 2 and 3 in most performance benchmarks. It charges more quickly than the iPad 3 or 4, and it’s more versatile in charging, since it’s the first iPad able to charge at full speed from an “iPhone” AC adapter. The Smart Cover even sticks to the back better when it’s flipped around.
And, of course, it’s much cheaper than the other iPads.
But the non-Retina screen is rough. If you’ve never used a Retina-screened device, you probably won’t care, but if you’ve been spoiled by Retina, you’ll notice the lack of it in the Mini almost every time you turn it on. I stop noticing after I start doing something with it, of course, but those first few seconds are a rough reminder every time.
The iPad Mini is conflictingly high-end and low-end. It’s the cheapest, “entry-level” model, but since this is Apple and this is their second-most-important product, it’s not bad, much like the 11” MacBook Air. On the contrary, the screen is the only thing about the iPad Mini that feels low-end. If they release a Retina iPad Mini next fall — and I don’t expect one earlier — no part of it is likely to feel low-end except the price, a recipe for a fantastic product.
Despite being the cheapest model, the Mini has top-notch build quality and materials. Almost every hardware spec is great: great battery life, great performance, great storage and cellular-data options. It doesn’t feel cheap at all, and no part of it feels like it was short-changed or underpowered because of price alone.
Including the screen.
A Retina screen at iPad resolution has a much higher cost than the price of the panel. I’m convinced that the other tradeoffs and costs are why the Mini doesn’t have a Retina screen.
This isn’t theoretical: we can see the cost of Retina for ourselves with the iPads 3 and 4. The iPad 3 was the first Retina iPad and showed us the initial issues, and the iPad 4 shows us the best Retina iPad that Apple could ship with the technological improvements available since the iPad 3.
We can see that a Retina iPad screen is a much bigger power hog than a non-Retina screen of the same size. That’s why the iPad 3 needed to be thicker and heavier than the iPad 2, and why it takes so long to charge: the battery is huge. The iPad 4 has roughly the same size, weight, and battery as the iPad 3, so we know that technological progress hasn’t been able to meaningfully shrink it yet.
And we can see that pushing four times the pixels needs four times the GPU power to keep performance similar to the non-Retina equivalent, especially in games. To achieve this, the iPad 3’s A5X needed to be inelegant: it was physically huge, it drew a lot of power, and it ran noticeably warm even under routine tasks like web browsing. The iPad 4 was able to improve significantly with the much faster, die-shrunk A6X, but its GPUs still need a lot of power and it still runs warm.
It’s not hard to imagine, given what we see with the iPad 3 and 4, what an iPad Mini with a Retina screen would be like with today’s technology. Its battery life, portability, or performance would suffer significantly. (Probably all three.)
Apple didn’t make an arbitrary decision to withhold Retina on the Mini to save money, upsell more buyers to the iPad 4, or “force” the first generation of iPad Mini owners to upgrade next year. They chose not to ship a Retina iPad Mini because it would be significantly worse than the previous iPads in very important factors.
Imagine the fallout if a Retina Mini shipped with only three hours of battery life, or was inelegantly thick and heavy. Or, very importantly to the iPad’s market, imagine if its GPUs were slower and it ran existing iPad games extremely poorly. And then add the component-price differences: imagine a Retina iPad Mini that was bulkier, shorter-running, or much slower (or all three) and that started at $399 instead of $329.
That’s why we don’t have a Retina iPad Mini yet. It’s not only about price: it’s because the resulting product would suck in at least two other important ways.
Until a good Retina iPad Mini can be made, it will be an unfortunately conflicted product: high-end in every way except the screen, which is a big one. But this tradeoff is anything but arbitrary.
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Windows head Steven Sinofsky fired
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Or “quit”. But it sure sounds like “fired”.
Sources have said the move came amid growing tension between Sinofsky and other top executives. Sinofsky, though seen as highly talented, was viewed at the top levels as not the kind of team player that the company was looking for. The move is likened by some to the recent ouster at Apple of iOS head Scott Forstall.
Sometimes Microsoft copies Apple a little too closely.
Seriously, though (MICROSOFT FANS: THAT WAS A JOKE), the timing of this right after a major Windows change looks pretty bad. Imagine if Forstall had been fired right after the first iPhone shipped.
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Build and Analyze: Denial Haircut
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This week’s podcast: music under podcast ads, TextMate 2 activity, the costs of pagination in Instapaper and The Magazine, scientific support of “low-acid” coffee benefits, every cure for male hair loss and baldness, and affiliate-marketing spam.
This was a good one.
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Charging an iPhone without AC power
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With the recent disastrous weather, a lot of people have lost power for many days and are looking to be more prepared for the next time. Generators can help on a large scale, but not everyone can practically use them (like most people in apartments), and the portable ones are only good until you run out of their fuel. But more importantly for this post, I don’t know anything about them, so I’ll assume you don’t have one.
If you just want to charge an iPhone,1 I can be a bit more useful. Here are your options:
Most extended-battery iPhone cases can only provide a partial iPhone charge before they’re depleted. Some of the very large external brick-like packs are worth up to two or three charges. But that’s about it. These can carry you through a power outage for a day or two if you’re lucky, but probably less, especially if you’re using your iPhone a lot because you can’t do much else.
This hand-crank charger (via Daring Fireball) sounds like a good idea but probably isn’t, and it probably isn’t worth $60. While your hand-cranking power is “renewable” and effectively unlimited, it’s probably going to take a lot of cranking for a full iPhone charge. (I can’t find any specifics on it, unfortunately.)
The PowerFilm solar AA charger uses unlimited, renewable, free solar energy. But it’s very slow: it takes many hours of strong, direct sunlight to charge a pair of NiMH AA batteries (the most common rechargeable type today), and they’re only good for about half of an iPhone charge through its USB output port. I got one of these for a group camping trip a couple of years ago as an unlimited-capacity last resort, but we didn’t use it much because it was too slow. It’s also probably not worth $70.
The standout hit of the camping trip, by far, was the Tekkeon AA-battery USB charger. It’s built cheaply and doesn’t even feel like it’s worth $20. But you can get nearly two full iPhone charges from a set of four AA batteries, if you use the right kind. The obvious disadvantage is that you’ll eventually run out of batteries, but you can get AA batteries nearly anywhere, even in bad-weather panics (since most old flashlights use C and D batteries), and you probably already have a bunch of them lying around.
The type of AAs matters a lot, since it’s a high-current device able to drain its AA batteries within an hour or two. I did some tests with different batteries before the camping trip and found that standard alkaline AAs don’t get very far at all, but NiMH rechargeables are passable, and (non-rechargeable) lithium AAs are the best by far. Lithium AAs are more expensive than alkalines, but they’re perfect for stockpiling for this sort of use: they have extremely long and stable shelf lives, they don’t care what temperature it is, and if this matters to you, they weigh almost nothing. (And if you get to the store after everyone else has already panicked and bought their supplies, they’ll be the only batteries left since they’re the most expensive.)
If I had $70 to spend on this problem, instead of a hand-crank or solar charger with a tiny capacity, I’d rather have the Tekkeon AA box and 40 lithium AAs, which could power my iPhone for about a month of frequent use. If I actually lose power for an entire month and burn through them all, presumably I will have spent part of that month finding some way to get a few extra AA batteries. And if that’s not possible, I probably have much bigger problems.
If you want to charge an iPad, none of these solutions will work very well, if at all. iPad batteries, especially on the Retina models, are almost as large as laptop batteries, and that’s just too much power for any of these to reasonably provide. Some of the biggest external lithium-ion battery packs can give a partial Retina iPad charge at most, but that’s not going to get you very far.
The Tekkeon AA pack won’t charge any full-sized iPad. It will charge an iPad Mini, but in the “Not Charging” state — the slowest mode that only charges when the screen’s off. I don’t want to burn another set of lithium AAs to find out how far they go with a Mini, but I wouldn’t expect more than about 75% of a full charge. ↩
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Gruber’s rule on linking to bullshit
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A followup to my post by John Gruber:
My rule of thumb is to ignore anything that is stupid and languishing in obscurity. But if it’s stupid and published on a high-traffic site, or it’s an expression of a widely-held misconception, it’s often worth addressing, bullshit or not.
Hilton Lipschitz had a similar rule:
But if the article is being read by a lot of people and is intentionally misinforming them, I think we should call them out and correct it. Otherwise the spin and lies will propagate.
Makes sense: high-profile misinformation deserves to be corrected by other high-profile sites.
Maybe a better rule would be: if many of my readers are likely to have read the bullshit, and it hasn’t already been well-refuted by other sites they’re also likely to read (like Daring Fireball), it might be worth refuting publicly.
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The Magazine: Issue 3, and a new hire
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Issue 3 is out today:
Powered by Guilt, by Lex Friedman
My Cup of Tea, by Dan Moren
Parenting Technology, by Stephen Hackett
The Problem with Self-Publishing, by Harry Marks
Get it on the App Store if you haven’t already.
And some great news: The Magazine has expanded.
Two weeks ago, I hired Glenn Fleishman as Executive Editor to help considerably with the editing duties. He knows the business much better than I do, and will help sort through submissions, edit, and work with authors to develop articles. To complement these roles, in addition to my required administrative and technical tasks, I’m serving as Editorial Director: deciding which pitches to accept and arranging each issue.
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Sponsor: Tapstream
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App publishers: watch website visitors turn into app users. If you have a mobile or desktop app, your website may be a neglected resource. Tapstream ties your website visits to app actions like activations, In-App Purchases or sign-ups. Watch which site pages or external sites drive app activations and which social campaigns are working best, or simply split test landing pages to find the winner. Made for iOS, Mac OS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows 8 apps.
And this week, Marco’s readers get a deal on any Tapstream tier: 50% off for a full 6 months. Try it today.
Thanks to Tapstream for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week.
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The Best
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Dustin Curtis:
If you’re an unreasonable person, trust me: the time it takes to find the best of something is completely worth it.
This is why I research and review everyday objects like light bulbs: I have no patience for poorly working, poorly designed, or low-quality products.
Dustin suggests that the goal of caring about this stuff is achieving trust in your tools to work. For me, that’s part of it, but I also consciously notice and ruthlessly eliminate tiny frustrations. As Joel wrote circa 1900:
So that’s what days were like. A bunch of tiny frustrations, and a bunch of tiny successes. But they added up. Even something which seems like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your emotions don’t seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality.
And I started to learn that the days when I was happiest were the days with lots of small successes and few small frustrations.
It really does make a difference.
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Linking to bullshit
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The industry of writing inflammatory bullshit about Apple is booming.
It’s booming partially because writing inflammatory Apple headlines gets a lot of clicks. Apple is popular and the dominant player in many industries, so anything that attacks it will attract attention.
But it’s also booming because we all keep linking to the bullshit. We, Apple-and-related writers, link to it from our blogs or Twitter accounts. We point and laugh at the most humorously wrong sentence, or we rebut its points one by one.
We think we’re taking them down, but we’re just taking the bait. And then all of our readers and followers take the bait, and we support the bullshit by sending pageviews.
I enjoy an occasional humorous takedown of one of these by the people who do it best: John Gruber and The Macalope. But even they sometimes do it more than they need to (although it’s The Macalope’s job), and we don’t all need to pile on.
If you truly dislike bullshit writing and don’t want to support it, hit the publishers where it hurts: don’t read it, and don’t link to it.
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Arq 3.0 with Amazon Glacier support
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I got hundreds of emails and tweets asking for Glacier support. Turns out it’s a good option for some scenarios (even with the slow restore time and possible extra Amazon charges). People want to use it for big stuff like iPhoto libraries, videos, etc that get too expensive in S3. They use it as a secondary backup, so they don’t expect to actually restore unless their whole house burns down, taking their primary backup with it.
This is exactly how I use online backup, and how you should: as a secondary or tertiary backup in case my primary drives, my Time Machine drive, and my SuperDuper clone all simultaneously fail or are lost. (Such a scenario could be possible if, for instance, a massive power surge blows through my UPS and fries my Mac Pro and everything connected to it while the SuperDuper clone is connected.)
I’ve read great things about Arq and wanted to use it for a long time, but my huge backup set (about 800 GB) made it poorly price-competitive with Backblaze, my current online-backup service of choice. But with support for Amazon’s new, limited, much cheaper Glacier storage, Arq is now in the ballpark.
I’m giving it a try alongside Backblaze now.
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Women and Obama’s Win
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Amy Davidson for The New Yorker:
The hour was so late because Mitt Romney had taken so long to concede that he had lost. The interval included some transfixingly odd moments on Fox News, involving Karl Rove and reports that the Romney campaign might want to contest just about everything; then they realized that there was nothing practical to contest. Romney came out onstage alone. He said that his wife would have been a wonderful First Lady, that he would pray for Obama and his family, and that he believed in America. For this, he was praised afterward in the effusive way a person often is when others are done with him. He sounded like a man who had no idea why he’d lost.
I found Romney’s concession speech painful and insincere: an unsurprising end to his campaign.
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“Don’t buy this computer.”
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From Patrick Gibson’s review of the 13” Retina MacBook Pro:
While the Retina screen contains something on the order of a trillion pixels (or so it feels like), the effective screen size is actually smaller than the 13” MacBook Air. The effective size of the 13” MacBook Air is 1440 × 900, whereas the Retina MacBook Pro is 1280 × 800. If that doesn’t sound like a lot, it isn’t, but it does make a difference.
This shouldn’t be much of a problem for most 13” Retina buyers since the 13” MacBook Pro has only ever had a (pathetic) 1280 × 800 screen (and has sold extremely well despite it), but it will definitely be noticeable for people like Patrick who are accustomed to the 13” MacBook Air’s higher-resolution screen.
The 15” Retina has a similar effective-space downgrade: its native resolution is 1440 × 900 points, while the non-Retina 15” has had a 1680 × 1050 option for years.
As Patrick says, the 13” Retina, like the 15” Retina, can scale to a simulated 1680 × 1050, but it doesn’t look nearly as good. I’ve also found that when the 15” is running one of these scaled modes, it has noticeably worse scrolling performance.
In practice, I switch my 15” Retina between native and simulated-1680 depending on what I’m doing: native for writing and internet timewasting, and simulated-1680 for programming. (The 15” also offers a simulated 1920 × 1200 option, but everything’s too small for my comfort.)
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Vote
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If you’re a U.S. citizen eligible to vote, find your polling place and vote today. Please.
I know none of the available choices are perfect. I wish we had more than two viable choices. But governments can neither satisfy everyone all the time nor impose massive changes rapidly: all they can do is try to make choices that help the most people, and make incremental changes over time to achieve significant long-term progress.
As voters, we have a similar responsibility: even when none of the options are perfect for us, or even particularly great, we must choose to make incremental progress. Choosing to do nothing by abstaining isn’t making a statement at all: it’s neglecting our society and impeding the progress you believe is necessary.
Vote.
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Apple’s design problems aren’t skeuomorphic
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Kontra:
Apple’s software problems aren’t dark linen, Corinthian leather or torn paper. In fact, Apple’s software problems aren’t much about aesthetics at all…they are mostly about experience. To paraphrase Ive’s former boss, Apple’s software problems aren’t about how they look, but how they work.
The list of Apple software and services that need to work better is getting longer as we’re arguing about how their toolbars should look.
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The Economist’s U.S.-election endorsement
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And this choice turns on two questions: how good a president has Mr Obama been, especially on the main issues of the economy and foreign policy? And can America really trust the ever-changing Mitt Romney to do a better job? On that basis, the Democrat narrowly deserves to be re-elected.
I disagree with some of the details, but they nail the big picture: Obama has left plenty to complain about, but Romney would be worse.
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Elevation Labs accepting preorders for Lightning adapter
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$15, shipping “in 1–2 weeks”. I hope they don’t have any unexpected delays like those that plagued the Elevation Dock.
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Build and Analyze: My Quotes Are Curly And My Dashes Are Solid
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This week’s podcast: settings in the Settings app, full-screen modes, text adjustment options in Instapaper and The Magazine, choosing fonts for apps, building a custom CMS versus customizing an existing one, white-labeling The Magazine, and over-roasted coffee.
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Available disk space on the Surface
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From Microsoft’s Surface FAQ:
The 32 GB version has approximately 16 GB free hard disk space.
Ah, so that’s why.
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Gigabytes
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From a Virtual Pants post refuting my experiences with the Surface:
It is expensive
The Surface is cheaper than an iPad. The base model Surface has 32GB of storage and is $499. The 32GB iPad Wi-Fi is $599. But, what about the Touch Cover? A 32GB Surface with Touch Cover is $599. A 32GB iPad with Smart Cover is $638. And that doesn’t include a keyboard.
Mr. Pants reminded me of a pricing trick I’ve wanted to point out for a while.
Flash-memory upgrades on tablets are much cheaper for the manufacturers than the $100 increments that Apple established with the original iPad pricing. The nonlinear pricing gives it away: why does the first $100 buy 16 GB more than the preceding size, while the second $100 buys another 32 GB?
Obviously, the $100 increments are arbitrary, because it’s mostly profit: the flash memory used in most iPad-like tablets costs about $1 per GB or less, not the $6.25 per GB that Apple charges us to upgrade from 16 to 32 GB. Since the other components are all identical between different-capacity models, we can surmise that a 32 GB iPad is about $84 more profitable than the 16 GB model.
Microsoft’s price of $499 for a 32 GB Surface is clever and aggressive: by adding only about $16 to its component costs, it makes people compare its price to Apple’s cash-cow $599 model, and the Surface seems like a better buy.
Why, then, isn’t there a 16 GB Surface? Presumably, it’s a combination of two factors. Windows RT needs 7–8 GB for itself, so a 16 GB model would leave relatively little room for the customer’s apps and files.