If I were Steve Jobs...

I love Apple but there are some things I would really like to see improved so I thought I would create a list:

iPhone

I believe the following are all GLARING OMMISIONS from the iphone and I find their absence to be highly unacceptable. C'mon Apple!!!:

• Stereo Bluetooth headphones for the iPhone. I can't believe Apple has kept this feature turned off. I think they do this because they want everybody to look like fashion victims wandering around with their trademark white apple headphones dangling. When I work out the white cable is always in the way.

• Cut and Paste.

• Syncing your to-do and notes.

• Adobe Flash support.

• Setup the external speaker sound on the iPhone to play in stereo. I would achieve this by utilizing the phone receiver speaker located a the top of the iPhone as the left Stereo speaker. This way, the left channel sound would come out the top speaker and the right channel sound would come out the bottom speaker. This would make the iPhone sound great when using the external speakers for music or video playback. Adding this feature would also make it twice as loud.

• Replace the super lame 2 MegaPixel camera!!! C'mon Steve, why do you make me carry around a point and shoot just to get decent shots. The unimproved camera in the iPhone takes lousy shots. It needs to be at least 3.2 Mega Pixels, needs much better low light performance and should also shoot video. Also, what is up with the super-slow shutter lag??? Samsung currently offers an 8 Mega Pixel camera on their phone, so we know it is possible. (By the way, I would be happy to pay an extra $100 for a better camera.)

• Voice Recorder: I would also add a voice recorder application to the iPhone.

• Add Volume Stops: The external volume switch on the left side of the iPhone does not have enough volume stops when adjusting the volume when playing music. In other words, when I am using my iPhone as an iPod, often times a song is too low and if I hit the volume up button just one time, it is too loud. If there are 10 stops right now there should be 20.

• Spotlight Search: I would add a universal Spotlight search to the iphone. The Palm Treo has had this feature forever!!! 

• Address Book Search: I would also add a feature to the find feature in the contacts application on the iPhone so that when you type your search query it does a live search exactly the way it works in the Apple Address Book application on the desktop. I would also add this feature to the Mobile Me version of the address book.

Let me be specific. In the Apple Address Book application for the desktop, if I put the word "bagel" in the notes field for your contact and then I type in "bagel" in the search field in the upper right hand corner of the application, it will isolate your contact. If I do this on an iPhone or on Mobile Me it won't find it. Laaaaame!!!!!!!

• Book Reader. This is a killer missing application. I think Apple should purchase the Stanza book and PDF reader or build there own.

• Safari search. You should be able to search in Safari the same way you do on the Mac.

• Dictionary

How apple can make such an amazing phone and leave out these basic features is beyond me!!!

New Macs

• 30 inch iMac, just like the 20 and 24 inch iMacs but with the 2560 x 1600 native resolution.

• Create a 40 inch LCD with the same pixels per inch as the 30 inch.

• Apple LCD TV sets. In other words, I would make a 42, 50, and 65 inch Apple LCD TV with OS 10.5 Leopard built into it. I would make the native resolution at least 1920 x 1080 on all of these.

• Get rid of the white keys on the desktop keyboard and replace them with black keys. White is the worse color keys could be and they always look dirty–just like a white cat.

Apple's Upcoming Mac Operating System 10.6 Known as Snow Leopard.

Eleven years ago, after Steve Jobs came back to run Apple, he proclaimed it was time to completely dismantle Apple's then System 9 Operating System and rebuild and redesign from scratch. Apple successfully did so and Apple's Operating System 10 was released and strategically rebranded as OS X. "X" being the Roman numeral for 10.

Upon introducing OS X, Apple decided they would try to come out with a new and improved version every year and a half or so, and to make things even cooler they would name each version after a big cool cat, and thus they decided to name their first version 10.0 as Cheetah. Next was 10.1 as Puma; 10.2 as Jaguar; 10.3 as Panther; 10.4 as Tiger and 10.5 as Leopard, which is the name of the current Apple Macintosh Operating System.

At the Apple World Wide Developers conference in June of 2008, Steve Jobs said Apple's next operating system, 10.6 would be named Snow Leopard. Nice name, but what shocked all the Apple developers, including myself, was he said they would be adding no new features and instead they would essentially be taking OS X apart and putting it back together again.

In my opinion as a developer and designer, this is the most amazingly radical, and intelligent thing Apple could do–but what exactly does this mean?

When Apple originally built OS X, it only ran on the Motorola Power PC platform, which was fairly limited. A few years ago, Apple announced that for the first time in their history, they were switching their entire architecture to run on Intel chips.

Doing so was very challenging, and because Apple did not want to upset customers, they devised a strategy, whereby any new Apple software written would run successfully on both microprocessors, but this came at a cost–a rather high cost. In making the software so it could run on both systems, know as a "Universal Binary" Apple had to make compromises. Apple created a technology they dubbed "Rosetta" that allowed Motorola code to run in emulation mode, and this tended to slow things down.

As Apple moved forward with Intel something came along to skew  Moore's Law. Moore's Law argued microchips would double their speed every year or so and the challenge Intel was running into was the chips were running way too hot and cost too much to produce, but they came up with a brilliant idea, and that was to create what is known as dual and quad core microprocessors.

The formal name of Intel's new chips that parallel process are, Intel Core 2 Duo and they have very quickly become ubiquitous and relatively inexpensive.

Essentially you double or quadruple the speed by adding more microprocessors which is called parallel processing. The challenge with parallel processing is that OS X was originally architected around a single core architecture. All Apple computers sold today have at least 2 cores, and the Mac Pro comes standard with 8 cores.

The greatest challenge is the current operating system can't take very good advantage of the multiple cores, so Apple has decided once again to go back the drawing board, and completely dismantle OSX, and put it back together from scratch. Before I go into detail, I want to commend Apple for taking this ultra-profound and incredibly intelligent approach.

In rebuilding OSX, another technology came along beside multi-core Central Processing Units (CPU) which is known as multiple GPU, which stands for Graphics Processing Unit, which is as revolutionary as multiple core technology. 

In the old days, the microprocessor would complete the computations for the video, then computers started getting cards dedicated just to graphics known as graphics cards.

Today graphics cards, are incorporating multiple processor GPUs which are also starting to take advantage of multiple processor technology.

This new architecture that optimizes GPU computing and parallel processing is know as Open CL, which provides significant tools for developers to write and optimize code that can take complete advantage of the next generation multi-core graphics cards as well as multiple core processors, on the main microprocessor.

Essentially, Apple is optimizing their architecture to take complete advantage of parallel processing, and the net results of this will be absolutely astounding!!!

We will see a radical increase in speed and stability while seeing a decrease in heat output and energy consumption. As a matter of fact, Apple will be shrinking the footprint of their Operating System by 2/3. That is not a typo. They will be decreasing the size by close to 70% and one of the ways to do this is to throw out all the legacy code for Power PC Architecture, meaning that Snow Leopard 10.6 will likely not run on older legacy Power PC machines.

At WWDC, Apples annual World Wide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs announced there would be no more features added to 10.6, but as the OS is trimmed by up to 70%, so will all of the Apple applications, including Mail, Address book, Safari browser, iPhoto, Finder–virtually no application or process will be untouched by this overhaul.

By making everything so efficient, this will significantly increase battery life on portables, while significantly decreasing power usage on desktop machines. Also, laptops should run much, much cooler.

Another huge benefactor are the new state of the art solid-state hard drives that are starting to slowly creep into laptops. Solid state hard drives show so much potential because there are no moving parts, but they are very expensive and small. 

Apple realizes that prices will creep down, and size will grow, but they figure it is smart to optimize in both directions, which in my estimation is brilliant engineering. Future desktops will also likely benefit from solid state drives. It is likely at some point in the not so distant future all hard drives will be replaced with solid-state drives.

Microsoft strangely has only ever done the exact opposite of Apple, which is called writing "Bloat code."  

Bill Gates once reasoned that since the processors double in computing power every year to year and a half, that Microsoft did not have to worry about optimizing their code. Gates reasoned the extra computing power would just eat through the code faster, thus Microsoft ended up with the worlds largest piece of Swiss Cheese.

This ultra-lazy and inelegant solution put forth by Gates has resulted in a nightmare for Microsoft. As a matter of fact, Microsoft's number one strategic partner, Intel recently announced they would not upgrade ANY of their own computers to Microsoft's over a year old and latest operating system known as Vista.

No wonder Bill Gates recently retired. Essentially Bill Gates parachuted out with a Ton of cash. Microsoft has not been innovating for a long, long time and has been resting on their laurels for an equally long time. 

Microsoft is a giant and has been quietly imploding in slow motion. So slow in fact that most people don't notice the implosion–but I always have.

The future is looking very bright for Apple and I take my hat off to them. Apple is continuing to take the road less traveled, while Microsoft continues to take the path of least resistatnce, which gets you just that–the least.

Apples shrewd and adroit long-term strategy is paying off in spades!!! Snow Leopards are beautiful creatures and it looks like Apple's Snow Leopard will be as well.

Update: Snow Leopard will be 64Bit. To read a fascinating article that shares all the details click here.

The Two Steves...The Other Apple Steve

Turns out I was not the only one who noticed how gaunt Steve Jobs looked at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference last week.  Fortune has a great write up on what is likely the case.

I hope that Steve is o.k. and wish him the best.

You can read the Fortune article by clicking here.

On the left Steve Jobs looks more like Steve Wozniak or Santa Claus.

Steve Wozniak Teaches Kathy Griffin How To Ride A Segway...

This is so funny!!! Woz and Kathy are like Laurel & Hardy.  The Bravo channels new show stars Kathy Griffin and is named "My Life On The D List."

In this segment, The Woz teaches Kathy how to ride a Segway.

You can watch the video by clicking here.

This scene is so funny when Kathy's dog bites Steve Wozniak!!! You have got to love Steve!!!

Radically Simple...

CEO of ATT Wireless talks to The Wall Street Journal about the power of simplicity and Long Term Thinking & The iPhone.