Thomas: Ever since the iPad announcement I’ve been eagerly awaiting further details of the tiny powerhouse that drives is, the Apple A4 CPU. I’ve just finished reading an article on its guts, or at least the general consensus of what will form its guts. The article guesses that it’s not based on the latest ARM A9 architecture, but is actually stripped down A8 based SoC (System n a Chip) with any unnecessary hardware removed and disabled in favour of increased battery life. So why do Apple need to be so secretive? Surely if they’d managed to design and build the Jesus Chip they would be shouting it form the rooftops, and declaring their brilliance with a range of excellent graphs and charts? But instead all we’ve got is silence. What gives?
Martin: Look over there, that giant ‘Who Cares’ that is coming marching over the hill with gay abandon is heading straight for this conversation. It doesn’t matter what chip the iPad has. As we said before the iPad is about a new type of computing that is aimed at the non geeks. You buy the iPad, you go on the App Store and buy apps for it and you run them. They work because the hardware is constant. The choice of chip is purely down to Apple finding the right balance of cost, performance and power usage. Its a model that has worked really well in games consoles and iPods for years and now finally Apple are applying to more general computing. I genuinely hope for the day when all computers are sold on the only things that actually matter – price and storage space. Imagine when choosing a new computer is as simple as choosing an iPod.
I’m sure that you’re about to tell me why I should care.
Thomas: Regardless of the fact that I’ve spent the last 27 years of my life taking things apart to see how they work (I sometimes put them back together too!), here is my reasoning for needing more details about the internals. It’s OK that Apple wants to keep it a secret, and it’s OK that you personally don’t want to know. The problem arises when version two is released with a faster CPU, more memory and built in GPS. It doesn’t take long for the app developers to get their heads round the new hardware and take advantage of the increased capabilities, building apps which require the new hardware platform to function. The app store has no way of dealing with this complexity, there is nothing stopping me buying a GPS app and trying to load it on my first gen iPhone. It won’t work of course, and I doubt the app store would give me my money back without a fight!
I like to know the numbers and specs behind every device I own, but I guess the venn diagram I’m imaging would have me in one circle, and you, Steve Jobs and most of the worlds population in the other circle, with very little overlap. I’ll be interested to see how Apple overcome the problem I outlined above, though…
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