iPhone5?

9 Mar 2012

Weekend post – let’s give some thought about where Apple is heading. The biggest company in the world, a company that invented computers with Apple II and then reinvented them with MacIntosh’s graphic interface; a company that reinvented the music industry with the iPod, (animation with Pixar, if we identify Steve with Apple), mobile phones with the iPhone, software with AppStore and that invented a new industry – the industry of tablets, with iPad. What will the next industry be? My bet would be on the industry of cameras.

First of all, I would try to figure out if all of this was Steve’s way of thinking or Apple’s. Will Apple be able to go on inventing and remodeling industries or will it try to suck everything from the existing legacy and slowly drop down to normality? Either way, in the meantime I think the big guy left enough road-maps, so I expect to see a couple of surprises in the near future. The question remains valid.

Meanwhile, we are still living on Steve’s roadmap and we can try to think like him. OK, we have changed 6-7 industries; we have a significant market share in all of them; what do we do to continue growing? a) we increase our market share in these industries (business as usual) and b) we attack another industry (innovation). What industry shall it be? We specialize in consumer goods; the mobile phone is already at the gates of photography, but it lacks something. Let’s bring that special something to iPhone that could turn it into a spectacular camera.
OK, this means that the next iPhone will be the natural replacement of cameras and that people will not just take photos with their phone because they don’t have the camera at hand, but because the phone will be a really good camera by itself. I strongly believe that Apple will work hard to gain a significant market share on the camera market. Just like with iPhone – there were smartphones before it, but iPhone made the difference. They will probably do the same with the cameras installed in the phones. And I promise not to buy another camera until Apple launches iPhone 5.

And what is not working with phones at the moment? Why aren’t the cameras in them any good? They have x MPs, don’t they… Yes, but the number of MPs doesn’t matter as long as the quality of the image is very low. A bad picture can be broken in any number of MPs, it will still be bad. This is because of the technology that is a hundred years old: we are still talking about lenses, about the camera obscura through which light sensitizes a sensor. The quality of the photo inevitably depends on the depth of the camera obscura. No matter how small the activated pixel is, if the camera obscura is small – the quality will be poor. Professional photographers will be able to tell you why. So we probably have to move on to a new technology in order to have very good cameras that are small enough to fit in a phone. These technologies already exist and probably the best is “Array Camera” – a set of 16 or 25 sensors, each impressed in a different way by the environment; the final picture will then be created using software as a combination of the information provided by the 25 sensors. The advantages are (among other things) a very narrow camera (25 sensors), multifocus (parallax), 3D (parallax), very good quality, including at night without flash (you can have 2 of the 25 sensors read night-vision, then interpolate the images) and many others.

There are many companies that are already doing this experimentally; I know two (in one of them, the most important engineers are Romanian!) and I am convinced Apple will be the company that will manage to break patterns and change the market once again.

On the other hand, I would so much like to see in Romania people who have the guts to work for a tech paradigm shift! A few years ago, I met a Romanian that seemed to have invented a CD with very high storage capacity. But he had no idea how to make a business out of it and he didn’t want to share the benefits with someone that could help him. It went all the way down the drain…

Going back: Will iPhone 5 attack the camera industry by completely changing the technology and the business model? My bet is that “Yes”.

Later Edit: info from Daniel Nicolescu/PayU – iWallet – will Apple enter the credit card industry? Yes, iPhone5 will probably have NFC and iWallet.