Every manufacturer that has an interest in making OLED Tv's has given cost as the number one reason why they haven't done so yet. We may finally see one from Toshiba this fall, and possibly one from Samsung. Both companies have warned that the cost would be high.
I don't doubt that they would warn about high costs, but the question is why are those costs high. All I'm saying is that it has little to do with the cost to produce the screen.
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The high cost of larger OLEDs, which means everything bigger than a phone size screen is expensive.
I have to turn this around and ask you why you think the prices are high, got some numbers?
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Find for us an article talking about the low cost of larger OLED screens that are out now, and I'll sy you're right.
Again show me the opposite!
Mind you I've said previously that OLED should be cheaper to produce. That from reading trade publications.
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I did say that because of the large number of units Apple would want to sell, the price of the screen would be lower for them. But it will still be higher than an LCD of the same size and rez.
What you suspect is irrelevant. Unless you can show us that you have some knowledge of pricing, it doesn't matter, when every manufacturer speaks of their high prices.
what do you expect to hear from the manufactures that the costs and profits are low?
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It's too variable to predict what any individual user would do. With LCD screens, the only variable is the amount of time the screen is on.
Their engineers are as smart as those anywhere else. Their problem is in understanding what makes a desirable product.
Their engineers do deserve some respect but the company as a whole does seem to be adrift and unable to design products lately that meet user demand. Taken as company they have appeared to be fairly stupid of late.
In some ways I feel sad about the bright minds going to waste at Microsoft.
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That's why someone will have to make up some tests that take some known average into account. That will be tough to do. In my lab business, the Minilab manufacturers used to take an entire years worth of photos in their own labs as the average, making each season a different bias. We're talking about many thousands of rolls of film. Even so, we had to do our own specialized averaging. I don't know how some small company that comes up with tests for computer equipment and software will have the resources to do that. Eventually someone will come up with something
I'm not negative. I'm realistic. I follow the work being done in these areas. That's what I'm going by. It's not my opinion. It's from the information published, which you can find if you want to look for it.
I realize you are well informed and it totally surprises me that we come to opposite conclusions. A lot of my opinion comes from reading publications such as Photonics/Spectra and similar rags. The potential is there for OLEDs to be mass produced at a lower cost than LCDs. I believe it is possible for Apple to fianance a production line to do this.
In any event production isn't really the problem nor the hold up. Rather it is finding stable compounds for the emitters.
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You accuse me of being to pessimistic, but I think you are too optimistic. It's like LED bulbs. They're much better than they were last year, but they're still too expensive and cost too much. I but some every year to test. Another year or two will make all the difference. Why is this hard to believe?
It's not hard to believe at all. What I'm saying is that now is not the time to wait as the tech is there to produce a suitable screen. It is a certainty that the tech will be better a year from now and even in ten years. The question is do we want to wait five or ten years to get that ultimate screen.
I don't think most people would want to. This has sort of what has happened with LCDs. Todays LCD is very impressive, everyone can agree on that, but it didn't stop people from buying such screens five years ago. I even have one sitting on my desk right now about that old. It would likely suck when set next to a modern screen but was a good value for it's day.
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I agree that there will be. but screen manufacturers think that they will be able to achieve greater efficiency in another year or two. The more the better. Advances in both standard and OLEDS are rapidly improving. Just like batteries. Next year, we'll see a big improvement there as well, that may make the difference as well.
Still that is no reason to hold off today, as I've said there will always be better tech coming. The question is does OLED offer Apple an advantage over LCDs in a tablet. I'd say thinnest, potentially lower power usage and better readability are reasons to implement.
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When AMOLEDs are low power, that will b right. but this is like SSDs. People kept talking about all the power savings from their use in laptops?until they tested them, and found out that their was not only little power savings from most of them, but the faster ones actually used MORE power than standard HDDs.
There again there is more to it than just power usage which by the way is highly variable based on specific usage much as OLED power disapation will be. People still find advantage in the current crop of SSD.
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We don't know what the average power usage will be fro this generation of OLEDS. That's what we were talking earlier in the post, and in the article from ARs Technica.
Personally, I'd LOVE to get an AMOLED display. I'm all in favor of it. All we're disagreeing about is the cost and the efficiency, not the concept.
Yes I know! Cost is everything for a platform this size and frankly I wonder if it would be worthwhile if they couldn't deliver an OLED screen at reasonable cost. The problem with LCD is the viewing angle which is terrible even with the best of screens. For a large tablet you really need that viewing angle because hand orienting the device becomes a distraction. You really want to be able to read that screen while it is laying on a table and you are enjoying a morning coffe.
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But the figures that are out, and as I said, you can look them up, both are not leading edge right now.
You're making assumptions.
No more than anybody else in this thread. My assumption is that Apple can and hopefully has partnered with an OLED screen producer to implement the production technology to produce a reasonably priced OLED screen for their tablet. Frankly I believe OLED tech is a requirement for a tablet this size.
In any event a bit of a though experiment here. Everybody can agree that very nice KCD computer monitors can be had for a few hundred dollars. Why is it that the same screen when out in a box called a TV costs a thousand dollars more? Well maybe not a thousand mire but there is considerable difference. This in a day and age where the TV tuner might be one chip with a handfull of support logic. I bring this up because I don't believe the price on TVs reflect the cost of components at all and by extension doesn't the price of OLED TVs don't reflect on the cost of the screen. Thus Sonys OLED TV is expensive more because of it's rarity and Sonys pandering to the snob culture.
Do you know how many UNIX, Windows and Linux developers would kill to have only four combinations to think about?
Of course, but then, they have a dozen or more products in any one category, so they can do that. With Apple, it's different. They will only put out one item in a category, so it's got to be right.
If this were Dell, or Hp, or any of a number of large PC firms, they would have Linux devices, XP devices, Vista devices, Win 7 devices soon, etc. They would have a half dozen of each, at least, and with some, possibly a dozen, in various sizes, prices, colors, and feature sets.
Apple goes for the one hit product. If it isn't right, it's a failure. For their competitors, who don't pitch a product in the limelight the way Apple does, and with the much greater numbers, if one or more product fails to get traction, they drop it quietly, or revise it.
So for Apple, this is a MUCH bigger problem than it would be for their competitors.
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iPhone apps wouldn't have to worry about that, because the easy thing to do is to just give them an iPhone-sized window and let them do their thing. The API ingeniously includes high-level system calls so that many behaviors, such as popped dialogs and the appearance of the keyboard, are things that the app really isn't aware of. So Apple has the freedom to make an iPhone app pop a (relatively) giant keyboard on the tablet that doesn't overlap the apps' window at all, and the app will be none the wiser. It can happily believe that it's running on an iPhone.
The point is that many programs have no need at all to go full screen. The Clock program as no need for this, as an example. Neither does the Calculator in the vertical position, though the horizontal scientific version could be bigger. Thr Weather program is fine, as are many others. It would be a great advantage to get multitasking brought out to us so that we could have several of these programs on the larger screen at once.
Mail would be good full screen as would Safari. But On my 24" screen, during the time I'm here, for example, I keep a Safari window open on the left side, and a Mail window open on the right side. I would like to have overlapping windows so that I could keep them both open while seeing part of the one below.
So not all programs need to go fullscreen. That would actually be a bad thing, and waste much of the power of the larger device, assuming that Apple had a strong processing solution for it.
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Mac apps would need to adopt the iPhone APIs as relevant (easy, if they're Cocoa), and their UIs would have to be updated for the touch interface (not easy, but inevitable because of the nature of the hardware, regardless of what flavor of OS X is running).
It's not a question of whether its easy for them to adopt the phone GUI in the programming sense. It's the question of how useful they will be with that GUI. Programs that rely on the computer GUI have much more complex needs than do phone apps so far. I have some pretty complex phone apps, and they work very differently than do equivalent programs for my computer. It would require a total rethink of the GUI for them to work. A GUI is a complex thing. Otherwise good programs fail because of a poorly thought out GUI.
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In fact, I don't think that tablet OS X will be much if any different from an iPhone to an iPhone application. There's no need for new high-level APIs, and the tweaking that Apple will need to do can just as easily take place under the hood. Some apps might need little point releases for variously obscure reasons, but I think it will be in effect one platform. The great thing about preemptive multitasking is that 99.99% of applications think they have the whole machine to themselves. They don't need to know that there are actually 6 other apps running and 10 other windows open.
Multitasking is one thing, the desktop is another. Many apps can happily multitask in the background as headless apps, or act that way. It the process of using the app that can be a problem.
I'm very interested in what solution Apple will have come up with. It's very possible that this tablet, assuming that there really is one, will just be for phone apps, and no desktop app need apply. We're all just guessing, and hoping for what we would like to see the most.
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So really, I think you will have two platforms: mobile and desktop. The differences between the tiny-mobile and the midsize-mobile will be small enough for most developers to either ignore or dispatch with 5 lines of code. The difference between mobile and desktop will be greater simply because of the different needs of touchscreen and WIMP interfaces. There will be some convergence, but it will be slow.
It's too hard to tell. It all depends on where Apple is going.
Don't forget Jobs' statement when he was out of Apple, and he was asked what he would do if he were back there. He said that he would milk the Mac for all it was worth, and then get into the next big thing.
It's very possible that he thinks that the desktop wars are over as he once said, and is moving away from that platform to the next big thing with these phone-like mobile devices.
We may very well see fixed location machines becoming a professional and commercial market almost exclusively, while small portable devices will cover almost everything else.
If this thing, whatever it might be, would have a keyboard and monitor plug-in function for the home, but be taken everywhere else, with much storage in the (and I REALLY hate the name) Cloud, then large local storage may become a thing of the past. But this will take years to happen, and is totally dependent on 4G services of 100 Mb/s and faster wireless networking, and even that is mighty slow for big files.
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Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't honestly see the point of Atom. It's like they put this pretty little obstacle in front of the ARM steamroller and hoped it would... I don't know... leave a pretty corpse?
I guess the netbooks use them.
The nice thing about the platform Apple has taken pains to design is that it does not depend absolutely on the CPU. Apple has followed IBM's design strategy in the mobile space, not Intel's. With the right supporting chipset, the CPU's main tasks are delegation and crunching through any code that none of the supporting chips can crunch more effectively. It spreads the work and the heat profile around nicely and keeps the overall power consumption down.
What you are missing, is that IF, and it's an IF, Apple does decide to have their computer programs such as iLife and iWork, as well as rafts of third party OS X programs, work on this device at any speed that is usable, no matter what the GUI is, then an x86 cpu is REQUIRED.
I know very well from suing Softwindows many years ago, and then Virtual PC, that cpu emulation doesn't work unless the cpu doing the emulation is five or more times faster than the cpu being emulated. A fast GPU doesn't help that much, because almost everything uses the GPU anyway, and so it would still need to be used for that.
If apple is intending for this to ONLY be an extension of the iP/T platform, then there's no need for it. That's why I made it clear as to why it might be needed. An ARM and Atom might be needed for proper running of both platform's programs together.
Right now, no one outside of a few select people at Apple have any idea as to what's coming, so nothing we say is more than guesswork, and our reasoning will be thrown out the door once this unannounced product is announced, assuming that it ever is.
I don't doubt that they would warn about high costs, but the question is why are those costs high. All I'm saying is that it has little to do with the cost to produce the screen.
I have to turn this around and ask you why you think the prices are high, got some numbers?
It's your turn to produce a few. And if you try to, please remember that we're talking about today's costs, not those of a year or two down the road, when I've already said that they would be lower, because we're talking about a possible Apple product for release within a few months at most.
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Mind you I've said previously that OLED should be cheaper to produce. That from reading trade publications.
When you challenge someone's statements, YOU are required to produce some information, esp. when your statements are the opposite of known facts, as well as asking that person to do so. You aren't doing that. If you say that you get your information from "industry publications" then there should be no problem at all producing some articles from said publications. If you don't, then there is no reason to believe that those articles exist, at least, not with the information you claim they contain.
Since you asked ME to produce some. I did. Now, unless you can produce some to support your contention, the ones I produced must stand as accepted fact, like it or not.
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what do you expect to hear from the manufactures that the costs and profits are low?
I expect to read what I read everywhere, that production costs for OLEDs are expensive for a number of reasons, one of which is the very low yield, estimated at about 60%.
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Their engineers do deserve some respect but the company as a whole does seem to be adrift and unable to design products lately that meet user demand. Taken as company they have appeared to be fairly stupid of late.
In some ways I feel sad about the bright minds going to waste at Microsoft.
The company has been adrift for years. The last Federal case against them, while ended prematurely by the last administration, even though Bush himself had promised on the campaign trail that there would be no interference, limited their sphere of action. The leaving of Gates from the CEO spot has also softened the aggressive stance of the company as he was attributed with the methods MS had employed in the past (remember his lying on the stand).
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I realize you are well informed and it totally surprises me that we come to opposite conclusions. A lot of my opinion comes from reading publications such as Photonics/Spectra and similar rags. The potential is there for OLEDs to be mass produced at a lower cost than LCDs. I believe it is possible for Apple to fianance a production line to do this.
I'm actually kind of proud of being well informed. I read industry publications, as well as my scientific publications from the organizations of which I'm a member. My information is very different from yours, for some reason. As my information coincides with what is published in consumer publications, I have no problem relying on any of it.
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In any event production isn't really the problem nor the hold up. Rather it is finding stable compounds for the emitters.
I'm not going to get into the technology now, but the biggest problem is production yields up to the 14" size, which is the largest that can be produced right now using the best substrate technology. We aren't concerned with bigger sizes for this discussion, but costs are much higher the larger they go. Small screens aren't to difficult. A 10" screen is.
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It's not hard to believe at all. What I'm saying is that now is not the time to wait as the tech is there to produce a suitable screen. It is a certainty that the tech will be better a year from now and even in ten years. The question is do we want to wait five or ten years to get that ultimate screen.
I don't think most people would want to. This has sort of what has happened with LCDs. Todays LCD is very impressive, everyone can agree on that, but it didn't stop people from buying such screens five years ago. I even have one sitting on my desk right now about that old. It would likely suck when set next to a modern screen but was a good value for it's day.
Still that is no reason to hold off today, as I've said there will always be better tech coming. The question is does OLED offer Apple an advantage over LCDs in a tablet. I'd say thinnest, potentially lower power usage and better readability are reasons to implement.
The problem with that is not that we're talking about you and I buying an AMOLED screen. We're not. We're talking about Apple buying AMOLED screens for their product. That's very different.
I control what I buy, no matter what the cost is. If it's a new technology, and the cost is high, I may still buy it, if just to check it out and measure it. I may then put it away.
But Apple has a different model. While I've no doubt that they are given any new part they may ask a manufacturer for, as there are development kits that can be purchased, or gotten for free, that doesn't mean that Apple will use them in a product. Apple will have to decide about the power draw, and the cost first. If THEY decide it doesn't pay now, then we won't see it.
While we all pined away for an AMOLED screen for the new 3GS, Apple deigned to use it, while MS, hoping more for a publicity win, did. Who made the better choice? Apple likely thinks that they did. Can I argue that point with them? No, because I don't have the numbers.
If they come out with an AMOLED display for a tablet soon, I will be mighty surprised, but would have to figure Apple knew what they were doing, and had their reasons, hopefully not for publicity.
But if they don't, then you will have to think the same thing.
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There again there is more to it than just power usage which by the way is highly variable based on specific usage much as OLED power disapation will be. People still find advantage in the current crop of SSD.
Yes, I did link to the article that shows some power usage stats. I hope you read it.
Power usage is one of the most important aspects of a portable device as we all know. If it turns out that the current crop of AMOLED displays, which have about 50 lumens per watt output isn't enough, then Apple shouldn't use them. It's believed by those in the industry, as well as some companies that are making them that sometime in 2010, we will have AMOLED displays at about 100 lumens per watt.
I'd rather Apple waited for those much more efficient displays, wouldn't you? Can we take a vote on this here?
SSD's are an option right now for good reasons. Would you buy a laptop that costs $500 more for an SSD that 25% of the size of the HDD it would replace? Considering that it's been shown that there is no power advantage, and that most don' have a write advantage, and that reliability is no higher than HDDs and is sometimes lower, I'd say that right now, SSD's are not for everyone.
Do you want Apple to offer us the choice of an LED or an AMOLED? That would be interesting.
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Yes I know! Cost is everything for a platform this size and frankly I wonder if it would be worthwhile if they couldn't deliver an OLED screen at reasonable cost. The problem with LCD is the viewing angle which is terrible even with the best of screens. For a large tablet you really need that viewing angle because hand orienting the device becomes a distraction. You really want to be able to read that screen while it is laying on a table and you are enjoying a morning coffe.
Viewing a 10" display from 18" is no worse than viewing a 20" at 24". Even less of an angle problem.
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No more than anybody else in this thread. My assumption is that Apple can and hopefully has partnered with an OLED screen producer to implement the production technology to produce a reasonably priced OLED screen for their tablet. Frankly I believe OLED tech is a requirement for a tablet this size.
It isn't a question of how much we want one. It's still that question of whether Apple thinks it's a good idea right now.
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In any event a bit of a though experiment here. Everybody can agree that very nice KCD computer monitors can be had for a few hundred dollars. Why is it that the same screen when out in a box called a TV costs a thousand dollars more? Well maybe not a thousand mire but there is considerable difference. This in a day and age where the TV tuner might be one chip with a handfull of support logic. I bring this up because I don't believe the price on TVs reflect the cost of components at all and by extension doesn't the price of OLED TVs don't reflect on the cost of the screen. Thus Sonys OLED TV is expensive more because of it's rarity and Sonys pandering to the snob culture.
Dave
I see LCD computer monitors that cost about the same as the same size LCD Tv. No real difference in price. It depends on the quality of the monitor, and the the Tv you are comparing it to. You can't take a cheap monitor and compare it to an expensive Tv, or the other way around.
Sony's 11" OLED Tv is expensive for the reasons Sony says it it is. R&D costs were high. Yields were low, and they are producing them in the thousands per month, not the hundreds of thousands. That's always why product costs are high.
I hope you realize it took me an hour to respond to you here, so I'm not waving you off.
I just want to say, that based on what has happened in the past, I doubt the tablet would really look like this. I mean, look at what people thought the iPhone was going to look like! Here's just one example:
Now, granted a tablet could only look so many ways, Apple has never failed in surprising us with amazing features. I read in a magazine about a fabled Mac Tablet with micro-cameras between the pixels so you could look directly at the person you're talking to, instead of gazing down at them (I think it was MacLife). Such features could be real, and I doubt Apple has been as uncreative as these "reliable sources" claim.
I just want to say, that based on what has happened in the past, I doubt the tablet would really look like this. I mean, look at what people thought the iPhone was going to look like! Here's just one example:
Now, granted a tablet could only look so many ways, Apple has never failed in surprising us with amazing features. I read in a magazine about a fabled Mac Tablet with micro-cameras between the pixels so you could look directly at the person you're talking to, instead of gazing down at them (I think it was MacLife). Such features could be real, and I doubt Apple has been as uncreative as these "reliable sources" claim.
Just putting in my two cents.
+1. The iPhone has so many iPod-etsque designs and mockups before we have this beautifully crafted device in our hand, completely not what we expected. So, I guess Apple has something nice in store for us for the tablet..
The reason why this tablet won't differ from the mockups "greatly" like the iPhone did when it came it, is they are after showing us the UI, we know what the UI is going to feel like if you catch my drift. My bet is though we'll see some sort of pressure sensitivity though at the very least. Perhaps even a clicky screen. These sort of semantics are why there's no tablet from any company that has taken off yet, it's a tricky predicament really. How do you give the full Mac experience without the ability to "click or right-click" etc.? Should be interesting, including the implementation of gestures.
I like they way Apple are introducing gestures very slowing into their notebooks, it seems they are really thinking carefully about it.
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Every manufacturer that has an interest in making OLED Tv's has given cost as the number one reason why they haven't done so yet. We may finally see one from Toshiba this fall, and possibly one from Samsung. Both companies have warned that the cost would be high.
I don't doubt that they would warn about high costs, but the question is why are those costs high. All I'm saying is that it has little to do with the cost to produce the screen.
The high cost of larger OLEDs, which means everything bigger than a phone size screen is expensive.
I have to turn this around and ask you why you think the prices are high, got some numbers?
Find for us an article talking about the low cost of larger OLED screens that are out now, and I'll sy you're right.
Again show me the opposite!
Mind you I've said previously that OLED should be cheaper to produce. That from reading trade publications.
I did say that because of the large number of units Apple would want to sell, the price of the screen would be lower for them. But it will still be higher than an LCD of the same size and rez.
What you suspect is irrelevant. Unless you can show us that you have some knowledge of pricing, it doesn't matter, when every manufacturer speaks of their high prices.
what do you expect to hear from the manufactures that the costs and profits are low?
It's too variable to predict what any individual user would do. With LCD screens, the only variable is the amount of time the screen is on.
Their engineers are as smart as those anywhere else. Their problem is in understanding what makes a desirable product.
Their engineers do deserve some respect but the company as a whole does seem to be adrift and unable to design products lately that meet user demand. Taken as company they have appeared to be fairly stupid of late.
In some ways I feel sad about the bright minds going to waste at Microsoft.
That's why someone will have to make up some tests that take some known average into account. That will be tough to do. In my lab business, the Minilab manufacturers used to take an entire years worth of photos in their own labs as the average, making each season a different bias. We're talking about many thousands of rolls of film. Even so, we had to do our own specialized averaging. I don't know how some small company that comes up with tests for computer equipment and software will have the resources to do that. Eventually someone will come up with something
I'm not negative. I'm realistic. I follow the work being done in these areas. That's what I'm going by. It's not my opinion. It's from the information published, which you can find if you want to look for it.
I realize you are well informed and it totally surprises me that we come to opposite conclusions. A lot of my opinion comes from reading publications such as Photonics/Spectra and similar rags. The potential is there for OLEDs to be mass produced at a lower cost than LCDs. I believe it is possible for Apple to fianance a production line to do this.
In any event production isn't really the problem nor the hold up. Rather it is finding stable compounds for the emitters.
You accuse me of being to pessimistic, but I think you are too optimistic. It's like LED bulbs. They're much better than they were last year, but they're still too expensive and cost too much. I but some every year to test. Another year or two will make all the difference. Why is this hard to believe?
It's not hard to believe at all. What I'm saying is that now is not the time to wait as the tech is there to produce a suitable screen. It is a certainty that the tech will be better a year from now and even in ten years. The question is do we want to wait five or ten years to get that ultimate screen.
I don't think most people would want to. This has sort of what has happened with LCDs. Todays LCD is very impressive, everyone can agree on that, but it didn't stop people from buying such screens five years ago. I even have one sitting on my desk right now about that old. It would likely suck when set next to a modern screen but was a good value for it's day.
I agree that there will be. but screen manufacturers think that they will be able to achieve greater efficiency in another year or two. The more the better. Advances in both standard and OLEDS are rapidly improving. Just like batteries. Next year, we'll see a big improvement there as well, that may make the difference as well.
Still that is no reason to hold off today, as I've said there will always be better tech coming. The question is does OLED offer Apple an advantage over LCDs in a tablet. I'd say thinnest, potentially lower power usage and better readability are reasons to implement.
When AMOLEDs are low power, that will b right. but this is like SSDs. People kept talking about all the power savings from their use in laptops?until they tested them, and found out that their was not only little power savings from most of them, but the faster ones actually used MORE power than standard HDDs.
There again there is more to it than just power usage which by the way is highly variable based on specific usage much as OLED power disapation will be. People still find advantage in the current crop of SSD.
We don't know what the average power usage will be fro this generation of OLEDS. That's what we were talking earlier in the post, and in the article from ARs Technica.
Personally, I'd LOVE to get an AMOLED display. I'm all in favor of it. All we're disagreeing about is the cost and the efficiency, not the concept.
Yes I know! Cost is everything for a platform this size and frankly I wonder if it would be worthwhile if they couldn't deliver an OLED screen at reasonable cost. The problem with LCD is the viewing angle which is terrible even with the best of screens. For a large tablet you really need that viewing angle because hand orienting the device becomes a distraction. You really want to be able to read that screen while it is laying on a table and you are enjoying a morning coffe.
But the figures that are out, and as I said, you can look them up, both are not leading edge right now.
You're making assumptions.
No more than anybody else in this thread. My assumption is that Apple can and hopefully has partnered with an OLED screen producer to implement the production technology to produce a reasonably priced OLED screen for their tablet. Frankly I believe OLED tech is a requirement for a tablet this size.
In any event a bit of a though experiment here. Everybody can agree that very nice KCD computer monitors can be had for a few hundred dollars. Why is it that the same screen when out in a box called a TV costs a thousand dollars more? Well maybe not a thousand mire but there is considerable difference. This in a day and age where the TV tuner might be one chip with a handfull of support logic. I bring this up because I don't believe the price on TVs reflect the cost of components at all and by extension doesn't the price of OLED TVs don't reflect on the cost of the screen. Thus Sonys OLED TV is expensive more because of it's rarity and Sonys pandering to the snob culture.
Dave
Do you know how many UNIX, Windows and Linux developers would kill to have only four combinations to think about?
Of course, but then, they have a dozen or more products in any one category, so they can do that. With Apple, it's different. They will only put out one item in a category, so it's got to be right.
If this were Dell, or Hp, or any of a number of large PC firms, they would have Linux devices, XP devices, Vista devices, Win 7 devices soon, etc. They would have a half dozen of each, at least, and with some, possibly a dozen, in various sizes, prices, colors, and feature sets.
Apple goes for the one hit product. If it isn't right, it's a failure. For their competitors, who don't pitch a product in the limelight the way Apple does, and with the much greater numbers, if one or more product fails to get traction, they drop it quietly, or revise it.
So for Apple, this is a MUCH bigger problem than it would be for their competitors.
iPhone apps wouldn't have to worry about that, because the easy thing to do is to just give them an iPhone-sized window and let them do their thing. The API ingeniously includes high-level system calls so that many behaviors, such as popped dialogs and the appearance of the keyboard, are things that the app really isn't aware of. So Apple has the freedom to make an iPhone app pop a (relatively) giant keyboard on the tablet that doesn't overlap the apps' window at all, and the app will be none the wiser. It can happily believe that it's running on an iPhone.
The point is that many programs have no need at all to go full screen. The Clock program as no need for this, as an example. Neither does the Calculator in the vertical position, though the horizontal scientific version could be bigger. Thr Weather program is fine, as are many others. It would be a great advantage to get multitasking brought out to us so that we could have several of these programs on the larger screen at once.
Mail would be good full screen as would Safari. But On my 24" screen, during the time I'm here, for example, I keep a Safari window open on the left side, and a Mail window open on the right side. I would like to have overlapping windows so that I could keep them both open while seeing part of the one below.
So not all programs need to go fullscreen. That would actually be a bad thing, and waste much of the power of the larger device, assuming that Apple had a strong processing solution for it.
Mac apps would need to adopt the iPhone APIs as relevant (easy, if they're Cocoa), and their UIs would have to be updated for the touch interface (not easy, but inevitable because of the nature of the hardware, regardless of what flavor of OS X is running).
It's not a question of whether its easy for them to adopt the phone GUI in the programming sense. It's the question of how useful they will be with that GUI. Programs that rely on the computer GUI have much more complex needs than do phone apps so far. I have some pretty complex phone apps, and they work very differently than do equivalent programs for my computer. It would require a total rethink of the GUI for them to work. A GUI is a complex thing. Otherwise good programs fail because of a poorly thought out GUI.
In fact, I don't think that tablet OS X will be much if any different from an iPhone to an iPhone application. There's no need for new high-level APIs, and the tweaking that Apple will need to do can just as easily take place under the hood. Some apps might need little point releases for variously obscure reasons, but I think it will be in effect one platform. The great thing about preemptive multitasking is that 99.99% of applications think they have the whole machine to themselves. They don't need to know that there are actually 6 other apps running and 10 other windows open.
Multitasking is one thing, the desktop is another. Many apps can happily multitask in the background as headless apps, or act that way. It the process of using the app that can be a problem.
I'm very interested in what solution Apple will have come up with. It's very possible that this tablet, assuming that there really is one, will just be for phone apps, and no desktop app need apply. We're all just guessing, and hoping for what we would like to see the most.
So really, I think you will have two platforms: mobile and desktop. The differences between the tiny-mobile and the midsize-mobile will be small enough for most developers to either ignore or dispatch with 5 lines of code. The difference between mobile and desktop will be greater simply because of the different needs of touchscreen and WIMP interfaces. There will be some convergence, but it will be slow.
It's too hard to tell. It all depends on where Apple is going.
Don't forget Jobs' statement when he was out of Apple, and he was asked what he would do if he were back there. He said that he would milk the Mac for all it was worth, and then get into the next big thing.
It's very possible that he thinks that the desktop wars are over as he once said, and is moving away from that platform to the next big thing with these phone-like mobile devices.
We may very well see fixed location machines becoming a professional and commercial market almost exclusively, while small portable devices will cover almost everything else.
If this thing, whatever it might be, would have a keyboard and monitor plug-in function for the home, but be taken everywhere else, with much storage in the (and I REALLY hate the name) Cloud, then large local storage may become a thing of the past. But this will take years to happen, and is totally dependent on 4G services of 100 Mb/s and faster wireless networking, and even that is mighty slow for big files.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't honestly see the point of Atom. It's like they put this pretty little obstacle in front of the ARM steamroller and hoped it would... I don't know... leave a pretty corpse?
I guess the netbooks use them.
The nice thing about the platform Apple has taken pains to design is that it does not depend absolutely on the CPU. Apple has followed IBM's design strategy in the mobile space, not Intel's. With the right supporting chipset, the CPU's main tasks are delegation and crunching through any code that none of the supporting chips can crunch more effectively. It spreads the work and the heat profile around nicely and keeps the overall power consumption down.
What you are missing, is that IF, and it's an IF, Apple does decide to have their computer programs such as iLife and iWork, as well as rafts of third party OS X programs, work on this device at any speed that is usable, no matter what the GUI is, then an x86 cpu is REQUIRED.
I know very well from suing Softwindows many years ago, and then Virtual PC, that cpu emulation doesn't work unless the cpu doing the emulation is five or more times faster than the cpu being emulated. A fast GPU doesn't help that much, because almost everything uses the GPU anyway, and so it would still need to be used for that.
If apple is intending for this to ONLY be an extension of the iP/T platform, then there's no need for it. That's why I made it clear as to why it might be needed. An ARM and Atom might be needed for proper running of both platform's programs together.
Right now, no one outside of a few select people at Apple have any idea as to what's coming, so nothing we say is more than guesswork, and our reasoning will be thrown out the door once this unannounced product is announced, assuming that it ever is.
I don't doubt that they would warn about high costs, but the question is why are those costs high. All I'm saying is that it has little to do with the cost to produce the screen.
I have to turn this around and ask you why you think the prices are high, got some numbers?
http://smarthouse.com.au/TVs_And_Lar...ED_TV/S5K3G4D9
Here's from your mentioned magazine. look to the near end of the article for cost information.
http://www.photonics.com/Content/Rea...rticleID=39523
Have you any articles from them that show that the price of larger OLED displays are not much higher than the same size LCD displays?
After all, you're using them as you reference, while I had to pull an article out, which wasn't easy.
Here's one from dailytech ( a division of Anandtech).
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=15450
http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/16/ole..._0116oled.html
Check out this OLED picture frame from kodak with a 7.6" screen. notice how the article is amazed at how the price has FALLEN to $776.
http://www.oled-info.com/kodak-76-ol...9-discount-you
http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/17/l...e-in-december/
http://oled-tv.blogspot.com/2009/03/...or-future.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10163294-1.html
I can get dozens of articles.
It's your turn to produce a few. And if you try to, please remember that we're talking about today's costs, not those of a year or two down the road, when I've already said that they would be lower, because we're talking about a possible Apple product for release within a few months at most.
Mind you I've said previously that OLED should be cheaper to produce. That from reading trade publications.
When you challenge someone's statements, YOU are required to produce some information, esp. when your statements are the opposite of known facts, as well as asking that person to do so. You aren't doing that. If you say that you get your information from "industry publications" then there should be no problem at all producing some articles from said publications. If you don't, then there is no reason to believe that those articles exist, at least, not with the information you claim they contain.
Since you asked ME to produce some. I did. Now, unless you can produce some to support your contention, the ones I produced must stand as accepted fact, like it or not.
what do you expect to hear from the manufactures that the costs and profits are low?
I expect to read what I read everywhere, that production costs for OLEDs are expensive for a number of reasons, one of which is the very low yield, estimated at about 60%.
Their engineers do deserve some respect but the company as a whole does seem to be adrift and unable to design products lately that meet user demand. Taken as company they have appeared to be fairly stupid of late.
In some ways I feel sad about the bright minds going to waste at Microsoft.
The company has been adrift for years. The last Federal case against them, while ended prematurely by the last administration, even though Bush himself had promised on the campaign trail that there would be no interference, limited their sphere of action. The leaving of Gates from the CEO spot has also softened the aggressive stance of the company as he was attributed with the methods MS had employed in the past (remember his lying on the stand).
I realize you are well informed and it totally surprises me that we come to opposite conclusions. A lot of my opinion comes from reading publications such as Photonics/Spectra and similar rags. The potential is there for OLEDs to be mass produced at a lower cost than LCDs. I believe it is possible for Apple to fianance a production line to do this.
I'm actually kind of proud of being well informed. I read industry publications, as well as my scientific publications from the organizations of which I'm a member. My information is very different from yours, for some reason. As my information coincides with what is published in consumer publications, I have no problem relying on any of it.
In any event production isn't really the problem nor the hold up. Rather it is finding stable compounds for the emitters.
I'm not going to get into the technology now, but the biggest problem is production yields up to the 14" size, which is the largest that can be produced right now using the best substrate technology. We aren't concerned with bigger sizes for this discussion, but costs are much higher the larger they go. Small screens aren't to difficult. A 10" screen is.
It's not hard to believe at all. What I'm saying is that now is not the time to wait as the tech is there to produce a suitable screen. It is a certainty that the tech will be better a year from now and even in ten years. The question is do we want to wait five or ten years to get that ultimate screen.
I don't think most people would want to. This has sort of what has happened with LCDs. Todays LCD is very impressive, everyone can agree on that, but it didn't stop people from buying such screens five years ago. I even have one sitting on my desk right now about that old. It would likely suck when set next to a modern screen but was a good value for it's day.
Still that is no reason to hold off today, as I've said there will always be better tech coming. The question is does OLED offer Apple an advantage over LCDs in a tablet. I'd say thinnest, potentially lower power usage and better readability are reasons to implement.
The problem with that is not that we're talking about you and I buying an AMOLED screen. We're not. We're talking about Apple buying AMOLED screens for their product. That's very different.
I control what I buy, no matter what the cost is. If it's a new technology, and the cost is high, I may still buy it, if just to check it out and measure it. I may then put it away.
But Apple has a different model. While I've no doubt that they are given any new part they may ask a manufacturer for, as there are development kits that can be purchased, or gotten for free, that doesn't mean that Apple will use them in a product. Apple will have to decide about the power draw, and the cost first. If THEY decide it doesn't pay now, then we won't see it.
While we all pined away for an AMOLED screen for the new 3GS, Apple deigned to use it, while MS, hoping more for a publicity win, did. Who made the better choice? Apple likely thinks that they did. Can I argue that point with them? No, because I don't have the numbers.
If they come out with an AMOLED display for a tablet soon, I will be mighty surprised, but would have to figure Apple knew what they were doing, and had their reasons, hopefully not for publicity.
But if they don't, then you will have to think the same thing.
There again there is more to it than just power usage which by the way is highly variable based on specific usage much as OLED power disapation will be. People still find advantage in the current crop of SSD.
Yes, I did link to the article that shows some power usage stats. I hope you read it.
Power usage is one of the most important aspects of a portable device as we all know. If it turns out that the current crop of AMOLED displays, which have about 50 lumens per watt output isn't enough, then Apple shouldn't use them. It's believed by those in the industry, as well as some companies that are making them that sometime in 2010, we will have AMOLED displays at about 100 lumens per watt.
I'd rather Apple waited for those much more efficient displays, wouldn't you? Can we take a vote on this here?
SSD's are an option right now for good reasons. Would you buy a laptop that costs $500 more for an SSD that 25% of the size of the HDD it would replace? Considering that it's been shown that there is no power advantage, and that most don' have a write advantage, and that reliability is no higher than HDDs and is sometimes lower, I'd say that right now, SSD's are not for everyone.
Do you want Apple to offer us the choice of an LED or an AMOLED? That would be interesting.
Yes I know! Cost is everything for a platform this size and frankly I wonder if it would be worthwhile if they couldn't deliver an OLED screen at reasonable cost. The problem with LCD is the viewing angle which is terrible even with the best of screens. For a large tablet you really need that viewing angle because hand orienting the device becomes a distraction. You really want to be able to read that screen while it is laying on a table and you are enjoying a morning coffe.
Viewing a 10" display from 18" is no worse than viewing a 20" at 24". Even less of an angle problem.
No more than anybody else in this thread. My assumption is that Apple can and hopefully has partnered with an OLED screen producer to implement the production technology to produce a reasonably priced OLED screen for their tablet. Frankly I believe OLED tech is a requirement for a tablet this size.
It isn't a question of how much we want one. It's still that question of whether Apple thinks it's a good idea right now.
In any event a bit of a though experiment here. Everybody can agree that very nice KCD computer monitors can be had for a few hundred dollars. Why is it that the same screen when out in a box called a TV costs a thousand dollars more? Well maybe not a thousand mire but there is considerable difference. This in a day and age where the TV tuner might be one chip with a handfull of support logic. I bring this up because I don't believe the price on TVs reflect the cost of components at all and by extension doesn't the price of OLED TVs don't reflect on the cost of the screen. Thus Sonys OLED TV is expensive more because of it's rarity and Sonys pandering to the snob culture.
Dave
I see LCD computer monitors that cost about the same as the same size LCD Tv. No real difference in price. It depends on the quality of the monitor, and the the Tv you are comparing it to. You can't take a cheap monitor and compare it to an expensive Tv, or the other way around.
Sony's 11" OLED Tv is expensive for the reasons Sony says it it is. R&D costs were high. Yields were low, and they are producing them in the thousands per month, not the hundreds of thousands. That's always why product costs are high.
I hope you realize it took me an hour to respond to you here, so I'm not waving you off.
Now, granted a tablet could only look so many ways, Apple has never failed in surprising us with amazing features. I read in a magazine about a fabled Mac Tablet with micro-cameras between the pixels so you could look directly at the person you're talking to, instead of gazing down at them (I think it was MacLife). Such features could be real, and I doubt Apple has been as uncreative as these "reliable sources" claim.
Just putting in my two cents.
I just want to say, that based on what has happened in the past, I doubt the tablet would really look like this. I mean, look at what people thought the iPhone was going to look like! Here's just one example:
Now, granted a tablet could only look so many ways, Apple has never failed in surprising us with amazing features. I read in a magazine about a fabled Mac Tablet with micro-cameras between the pixels so you could look directly at the person you're talking to, instead of gazing down at them (I think it was MacLife). Such features could be real, and I doubt Apple has been as uncreative as these "reliable sources" claim.
Just putting in my two cents.
+1. The iPhone has so many iPod-etsque designs and mockups before we have this beautifully crafted device in our hand, completely not what we expected. So, I guess Apple has something nice in store for us for the tablet..
have oled screens compare them to similar models wihout
I think samsung has one. what battery life improvement
is there?
I like they way Apple are introducing gestures very slowing into their notebooks, it seems they are really thinking carefully about it.