Two big things happened in the tech world today - one from Apple (of course), and the other, from Microsoft. I blog about Apple all the time, so it should be no surprise that I think that Apple's announcement today that they have purchased P.A. Semiconductor to be an important one. I can't remember the last time that Apple has developed a CPU. Apple has always had chip-design capabilities on staff, but the amount of chip engineering talent that Apple is going to get with this acquisition will surely dwarf anything that they already had.
Now, it isn't entirely clear what Apple is going to do with a semiconductor design arm. The knee-jerk reaction of the blogosphere is that P.A. Semiconductor's IP would be used to power future iPhones and iPods. Later rumormongering casts some doubt on this assertion. I think that this acquisition is all about power. In the electrical sense. One of the most amazing things (in a series of amazing things) about the iPhone is how little power the phone consumes while displaying all of its impressive tricks. I'm sure that Apple has a lot of goals for future iPhones - a lot of graphical effects that they would like to add, accessories (3G, GPS, etc), HD video playback, etc. And all of those things are going to require some serious CPU horsepower. So, my guess is that Apple sees that if they can come up with a CPU that is extremely efficient, then it will give them a competitive advantage. Plus, Apple has been obsessed with "thin" lately - so if they have a CPU design capability, they might be able to integrate some of the support chips into their custom CPU, thus saving space (and making for thinner designs).
So, I see this as being a bold, albeit interesting, acquisition for Apple. And I will be really curious to read about the CPU in the 3rd generation iPhone. ;)
Now, onto the other exciting thing that happened today - Microsoft announced a new product, called "Mesh". I have been thinking about this sort of thing for a little while now, and while I had hoped that Apple would do this first, what Microsoft has done here looks pretty good. Whenever I upgrade my operating system, I always ponder what sorts of goodies that I will have in the next version of my OS. It has been clear for awhile that some sort of integration is needed between my OS and the Internet -- beyond what is provided by the browser. I mean, why do I need to worry about if the file that I want to use is on my desktop, my work laptop, or my iPhone? Why can't all of my devices have access to all of my files, all of the time?
I think that this is clearly where the traditional OS is headed - it is going to be the comprehensive way in which I access "the cloud". I haven't had too much time to dig into Microsoft's solution yet, but from what I have seen it appears as if Microsoft has taken a leadership position here - one that I expect Apple (and possibly the OSS community) will be catching up to for a long time. This is what .Mac always should have been - why would I want to bother with controlling my home Mac via the new "back to my Mac" feature? What I want is access to my data, on whatever device that I happen to be using. If Mac OS X 10.6 doesn't ship with some sort of universal Mac OS X / iPhone / Apple TV / etc. integration with a next-genration .Mac, then I will be sorely disappointed.
-Andy.
Man, "blogosphere" is like the worst made up word in the past decade.
I think that MSFT is behind the curve with this mesh idea. As the headline says, it's only for Windows so that's not exactly breaking too much with their lockin mindset toward users.
That and Google has been doing this for years. Now I'm a Google fan like you're an Apple fan so feel free to take this with a grain of salt. Most of my important docs are in google docs or spreadsheets or notepads. The rest is in gmail. I've got all my bookmarks and feeds on igoogle.
The only reason I'm dependent on any individual machine is for installed programs like games or media players and for data like pics, music and movies. Now that flickr hosts videos I've got all my pics and short videos of Lily there so my local copies are just another backup. Google's got a competitor for pics too but I just don't use it. My dozens of gigs of music and terabytes of movies are still stuck on my hard drive and disks for now but it's just a matter of time before bandwidth in the US comes up to snuff and google finally offers the gdrive and I'll be free of having any data aside from backups.
So like Silverlight, I don't think Mesh is anything more than a years-late proof of concept to demonstrate that they are capable of at least implementing something that someone's already thought of.