At Vox, Matt Yglesisas posits that Apple is losing the innovation race to Google: Google wants to reinvent transportation, Apple wants to sell you fancy headphones

There were two striking pieces of business news this week from America’s leading technology brands. On the one hand, Google unveiled a prototype of an autonomous car that, if it can be made to work at scale, promises to end mass automobile ownership while drastically reducing car wreck fatalities and auto-related pollution. Meanwhile, Apple bought a company that makes high-end headphones.…

But that’s exactly why it’s so disappointing to see Apple focused overwhelmingly on small-ball extensions of its existing franchise while Google goes for big plays.

Yglesias posits that one of the reasons that Google can make this big plays and Apple is playing small ball is because Google’s complete control by Brin and Page  (or their lack of lack of accountability to shareholders) allows them the freedom to experiment with big ideas. Apple is beholden to activist traditional shareholders who want the company to release its huge cash reserves to shareholders. 

However, there is no way to actually know if Apple is in fact working on big ideas or just making iPhones in new colors. Apple doesn’t announce new product concepts or share their work in development. Apple creates products, Apple announces products, and Apple ships products. Since Jobs returned to Apple after the NeXT acquisition, it focused on creating and shipping products. See e.g. John Gruber  in 2011 The Type of Companies That Publish Future Concept Videos and Kontra in 2008 Why Apple doesn’t do “Concept Products”. I’m sure that Apple is irking on all kinds of product variations and new product ideas in house. But without signing Apple’s restrictive NDA, we’re not going to know about those new ideas. 

Apple has a culture of obsessive secrecy and Apple employees do not leak information. Last year, at the D10 conference, Tim Cook announced Apple’s plans to “double down on secrecy.” By all indications, this has been successful.  

Tomorrow, Tim Cook and Apple’s senior executives will step on stage at WWDC, their annual developer conference, to announce OS X 10.10, iOS 8, likely introduce Jimmy Iovine and the Beats team. But aside from a “flatter design” or Healthbook app, we have no leaks on what Apple plans to introduce. This could be because either Apple is not coming up with any major innovations, or because Apple doesn’t leak them. The Apple rumors community hasn’t seen screenshots from either operating system. Apple watching is like Kremlinology. Apple doesn’t announce what their plans will be, but analysts have to infer those plans from third party sources of information. This is mostly through the supply chain and potential partners. Under Jobs, Apple was not afraid to be vindictive if partners leaked details about Apple products before Apple announced them. 

The majority of releases about Apple hardware come from sources within its manufacturing partners in Asia, whose employees and contractors are not as strongly incented to protect Apple’s proprietary and confidential information as Apple’s own employees. (This is unfortunately, why I am not optimistic about a new Retina Thunderbolt display or Retina iMac release tomorrow. I really do want a full-sized Retina monitor, but more importantly, a 12” or 13” laptop that can drive a 4K panel.)

From the roundup of rumors reported by Macrumors likely to be announced at WWDC tomorrow, all involve the types of applications and APIs that will rely on integration with third party hardware and/or software: Healthbook (integrating with fitness tracking), song identification (partnering with Shazam), mobile payments (partnering with retailers), smart home integration (partnering with hardware and software). Where rumors seem unlikely (major new hardware announcements) it’s because of the lack of smoke from the hardware supply chain.  Apple’s own innovations do not leak. 

This doesn’t preclude Apple announcing a wholly new product type that is not yet ramped for production. But if Apple only announces products, why would it announce something that it’s not ready to ship? Because, regulatory approval.

The single biggest product announcement that Steve Jobs made was the 2007 introduction of the original iPhone at Macworld. (Back when Apple presented a keynote at Macworld.) Part of what made the keynote so surprising was the audacity of the product. Apple watchers had been expecting an iPhone for a number of years, expected to be some kind of hybrid iPod and mobile phone, maybe with a click wheel or hardware keyboard. Most people were floored by the device, which Jobs announced as three things: a “widescreen iPod with touch controls,” “a revolution mobile phone,” and a “breakthrough internet communications device,” which, by the way, were not three different devices, but just one. 

Even though Apple announced the iPhone in January 2007, the first iPhones didn’t ship until June 27. Apple’s hand was forced to announce before release because the FCC requires manufacturers of wireless devices to obtain regulatory approval of devices that will transmit over the public airwaves. If Apple submitted the iPhone for approval before announcing it, rumors sites and the tech press would have uncovered all of the product details before Apple itself announced. If nothing else, Apple wants to control its message. New categories that require regulatory approval won’t be ramped for production and so we won’t see leaks.

But regulatory approval is also the reason that we are hearing so much about Google’s self-driving cars and Amazon’s drones. These are not only products that would require regulatory approval, but that would require significant changes to rules or legislation in order to be legal to use or sell. Any commercial aircraft, including autonomous aircraft, requires FAA approval. NHTSA is evaluating guidance and regulations on self-driving cars. In addition, each state will have different regulations governing the use of roads and driving standards, multiplying the lobbying burden for obtaining regulatory approval. 

Between attempting to catalogue all the world’s knowledge, create self-driving cars, and by acquiring Boston Dynamics, the creator of various military robots, do we as a society need to worry that Google is building Skynet? 

This past weekend, I spent time with family in the beautiful Catskill mountains. On the rainy day, we all became quickly frustrated with the speed of our pokey DSL internet connection.

Speed testing revealed actual speeds of 1.5 Mbps downloads and 0.4 Mbps uploads.¹

In the FCC’s sixth broadband deployment report from 2010, the Commission redefined broadband as a minimum of 4 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. A report today indicates that the Commission is considering upping the threshold of broadband to 10 Mbps down or higher.

Being far from the central office, Verizon indicated that we are lucky to have DSL at all and can not offer more speed, due to the noise in the length of the copper run.

While cable service is available in the denser Village of Hunter, the local Time Warner franchised monopoly will not run cable to the more widely spread out houses in the Town of Hunter.

So, what options are available?

AT&T has 4G LTE service from a tower on Hunter Mountain. This provides solid speeds, at over 20 Mbps. However, it only offers that speed for a fraction of a month. All of AT&T’s LTE plans have bandwidth caps. 10 GB of data per month at 20 Mb/second is approximately 4000 seconds of peak bandwidth, or just over one hour per month.²

Satellite internet access from HughesNet offers 10 Mbps downloads and 1 Mbps uploads for $60 per month. But it is also capped, at 20 GB per month. At half the speed and twice the cap, HughesNet offers peak bandwidth for nearly four and a half hours per month.³

Of course, even streaming video and downloading files is unlikely to use the full bandwidth available in a connection, so the lowest tier data cap is usefully for more than that. But metered broadband limits the use of the internet, just like metered dial-up AOL access in the mid-90’s.

When you think about the cost of streaming a movie, you’re less likely to stream a movie if there is a marginal bandwidth cost. In the context of entertainment, it’s no big deal. But what about the student trying to access online research and learning resources? Doesn’t it disadvantage students who can not access unmetered broadband, since the more they use internet resources, the more money it costs?

I’m sure there are research studies from the mid-90’s talking about how the transition from hourly dialup AOL to unlimited dialup internet access made the early commercial internet thrive.

In the twentieth century, the federal government undertook the efforts to connect every house in America to the electrical grid and the telephone network. The local phone company is required to provide every house with a dial tone. The local power company is required to provide every house with a connection to the power grid. If we don’t create universal uncapped service for broadband, we will quickly strand rural America back in the twentieth century.

For now, unlimited service throttled to 10 Mbps on a reliable LTE connection is far more useful and productive than 30 Mbps LTE capped at 10 GB of traffic per month. Will the wireless providers have enough spectrum and backhaul to provide that? What about the next generation internet? When will wireless be able to deliver 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps to the home? This is why we need a national initiative — subsidized by federal government — to bring common carrier fiber to every home in America. Allow broadband providers to compete for customers on the network, but require that every home has access to a 100 Mbps connection within the next 5 years. It may not be universal health care or universal end to hunger, but it is what America needs to do to stay competitive and connected.

¹I forgot to screen capture the speed test results. This post would have been more impressive with screen caps!)

²Some rough back of the envelope math: 10 GB/month = 80 Gb/month = approximately 80,000 Mb/month. At 20 Mb/second, that is approximately 4,000 seconds of peak bandwidth, or 66.67 minutes.

³Some rough back of the envelope math: 10 GB/month = 80 Gb/month = approximately 80,000 Mb/month. At 20 Mb/second, that is approximately 4,000 seconds of peak bandwidth, or 66.67 minutes.

After more than 10 years running my blog on an increasingly outdated install of Movable Type, I’ve migrated over to use WordPress. Exciting, right?

Hopefully, it will spur my creativity to write more, because the words might look fresher, or at least bigger.