→ Why quad-core iOS devices could launch within the next year

Why quad-core iOS devices could launch within the next year

Chris Foresman at ArsTechnica shows some references from within iOS for upcoming quad core devices as well as a few arguments for why they're probably coming.

9to5Mac believes that Apple may have designed the A6 to be quad-core all along, and could introduce it to the iPad 3 expected in early spring. The reasoning is that ASUS has already shipped its Transformer Prime convertible Android tablet featuring a quad-core Tegra 3 processor, and Acer and Lenovo have plans to ship Tegra 3 tablets in early 2012, so Apple won't want to appear to be behind the competition. But that doesn't necessarily mean that Apple will immediately follow suit—several dual-core Android smartphones shipped well before the iPhone 4S and Apple still managed to sell record numbers of the single-core iPhone 4 in the interim.

My take: I predict Apple will put out a quad core processor in their next iPad, but they won't do it because of what their competitors are doing. The iPhone 4 with its single core 800MHz CPU was still responsive than nearly every Android phone in existence when they were bearing dual-core 1+GHz behemoths. Apple doesn't bump the specs just for the sake of bumping specs. It bumps product specs according to how it wants its specific devices to perform with specific software. This is the advantage of its integrated in-house hardware and software.

Apple will put a quad core processor into their next iPad if it is necessary to get the device to perform as they want it to. If the "retina" quad-resolution display iPad everyone claims to be coming does come out, there's probably no escaping the necessity of a massively more powerful CPU and GPU.

Caveat to my prediction: If there's no retina display,  there's no quad core cpu in the iPad.

→ Apple's limited auto-renewal subscriptions

Apple's limited auto-renewal subscriptions

Marco Arment:

Ultimately, I had to ship Instapaper 4.0 with non-renewing subscriptions, I was able to delete all of the clunky auto-renewing server code, nobody sees that terrible dialog in my app, and I need to ship an update soon that will annoy my best customers with manual-renewal notifications.

But this is a great example, like Newsstand Kit’s background downloads, of Apple adding a capability to iOS that’s potentially useful to thousands of developers, and then restricting it so that only a handful of players (usually big companies) can actually use it.

Apple certainly doesn't cater to developers first. This is one of those cases where I assume Apple will one day get it right. Easier to gradually allow developers more power than to take it away. Still, it sure does stink until then, doesn't it?

→ Sony Pictures: Digital Movie Prices Are Too High

Sony Pictures: Digital Movie Prices Are Too High

Interview by Mark Hachman at PC World:

John Calkins, executive vice president of global digital and commercial innovation for Sony Pictures, noted that extras work for certain movies. But, he added, studios must bring down the sale price of a movie sold digitally, as well.

At least someone in the industry gets it.

→ Digital music overtakes physical in US

Digital music overtakes physical in US

It's about time.

→ Windows 8 Storage Spaces detailed

Windows 8 Storage Spaces detailed

Peter Bright at Ars Technica:

Unlike RAID systems of old, but in common with other modern storage technologies such as Solaris' ZFS and Linux's btrfs, pools can use disks of different interface technologies—USB, SATA, Serial Attached SCSI—and different, mismatched sizes. New disks can be added to a pool at any time. Pools can also include one or more hot spares: drives allocated to a pool but kept in standby until another disk in the pool fails, at which point they spring into life.

Storage in a pool is then distributed among one or more spaces. Each space can have its own redundancy policy, with three kinds of fault tolerance offered: 2-way mirroring, 3-way mirroring, and RAID 5-like parity. With the mirrored options, a space's data is stored either twice or three times within a pool. With the parity option, the system will compute additional information and store this within the pool. If any disk in the pool fails, the data can be reconstructed using this additional information.

A feature of both server and desktop Windows, this is killer.

If the feature does indeed ship in desktop Windows, it will overnight obsolete a range of SOHO-oriented storage systems; products like Drobo and ReadyNAS will find it hard to survive in a Windows 8 world.

It looks like I'm going to have to build myself a Windows 8 storage server.