Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Apple uses LED displays... what's missing now?

Yesterday Apple upgraded the macbook pro series. The upgrade concerns the amount of memory, the processors and the display.

In my opinion the display is the most interesting upgrade.

The amount of memory is not interesting at all: it's just marketing and common upgrading; there's no innovation in adding some memory.

The processor is the new Santa Rosa by Intel. Nice, but not a revolution as it was the Centrino technology.

The new display is very nice. A new technology that has lots of advantages: it saves power, it is more eco-compatible, it is brighter, faster and more uniform illumination. I really think that LED is the next-generation for displays.

So, nice work, but what's still missing?
  • Flash-memory based hard disks. Hard disks are the weakest link of the chain. They are slow, it's easy to break them if you are moving, they use lot of power. If we replace common hard disks with flash-memories, we can overcome all this problems and I suspect that suspend/resume and hibernation would be even more powerful
  • Loooonnnngggeeer battery-life. Laptops are fine as they are. They are enough powerful, but the battery doesn't last enough. I know it's a very hard problem to solve, but in order to have a very nomadic computing we need to improve the battery life dramatically. We may also think to implement some energy scavenging ideas into our device.
  • Connections. We need to be as connected as possible. Using any medium. Like wired networks, wi-fi networks, mobile phones, wi-max, whatever. And everything should work seamlessly with the highest transparency for the user. Ideally the user should not be aware that the network medium changes and it should continue to work. All the dirty work must be delegated to the system.
  • Be eco-compatible. Use recycled and recyclable materials.
  • Open standards. For anything. For example, the docking station should be standard, so that one can plug any laptop in any docking station.

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