Thunderbolt. Sounds like Thor’s sidekick. Remember Light Peak? (read Apple + Light Peak = Early 2011) An official-looking spec sheet for the new low-end 13.3-inch MacBook Pro has been leaked by fscklog. I’m not sure if this is entirely legit because the LCD is stuck with a lowly 1280×800 pixel format. The 13.3-inch MacBook Air was bumped up to 1440×900. I mean this baby has the Pro moniker tattooed on it. Anyway, there’s probably higher-end models that do have 1440×900. But back to Thunderbolt: if the leak is true, Thunderbolt is identical to a Mini DisplayPort connection. And that’s very interesting.
DisplayPort was developed to replace all external display connectivity options like VGA, DVI, HDMI and LVDS, an internal interconnect. Will Thunderbolt replace Mini DisplayPort as the standard external display connection? Or for that matter all external connections? That would adhere quite well to Apple’s design ethos: simplification. If you look at the side of your MacBook Pro all those ports with different heights and widths look messy. A row of three or four Thunderbolt ports would look much nicer. The only problem is that the leaked image shows all the other ports intact.
Since Steve Jobs’ return to Apple, when the company decides to go to next-generation technology it doesn’t keep old tech around. A prime example would be the original iMac. Jobs & Co decided that 3.5-inch floppy drives were toast and went 100% CD-ROM. Since then there have been zero systems with 3.5-inch floppy drives. Same thing with the ADB connections for keyboards, mice, and other things. Apple decided USB was it and ADB became extinct. Apple has done a similar thing with external display connections. First it was VGA, then DVI, and now DisplayPort, the Mini version. And now comes Thunderbolt that is identical in physical looks to Mini DisplayPort.
I think Apple’s grand plan is to slowly do away with all the other ports, starting with DisplayPort, moving toward other high-speed connections like FireWire 800/400, and eventually completely annihilating all other connections. In the long run and from a design perspective this sounds simple, minimal, elegant. And for anyone tangled up with cables of different sizes, shapes, and formats Thunderbolt sounds oh so good. Maybe Thunderbolt will replace the 30-pin connector on iOS devices, too.
Update: Anand Lai Shimpi, AnandTech:
Intel is the sole owner of the Thunderbolt spec. Building Thunderbolt devices requires a license to use the spec but no royalties need to be paid to Intel. Intel is also the only supplier of Thunderbolt controllers. Without Intel’s permission, no other company can make a Thunderbolt controller.
This last point is extremely important. The chances of Intel building a Thunderbolt controller for an ARM platform are very slim. Intel could eventually allow Apple and other companies to make their own Thunderbolt controllers, but that decision is Intel’s alone to make.
If Intel does not allow Apple to make its own Thunderbolt controller for iOS and if Apple eventually abandons Thunderbolt altogether then it’s effective dead.
Trade-in your Kindle at Microcosm Publishing in Portland for $139-$189 worth of real books. I think this is a terrific idea! The paper, the printed text, the feel and sound when I turn the page. I enjoy all of it when reading a real book. I prefer quality hardbacks and coincidentally just picked up The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman at a local library. I’ve read many books about Apple and Steve Jobs but this book, 65 pages in, tells a story of Jobs more as a person than a business icon. The fact that it is a real book makes the reading experience more enjoyable for me.
I’m not so fond of this trend toward e-book readers. I was just at a Barnes & Noble on the corner of Stevens Creek and San Tomas Expressway in San Jose. As I walked in I saw a huge section carved out just for Nooks. There was no way to ignore them so I took hold of a Nook Color and started flipping the pages. The page flip was near instant, unnaturally instant. The feeling was too… digital. The IPS LCD was good enough and worked quite well in the brightly-lit B&N store, but the reading experience was too… gadgety. I’m fidgeting for words because the difference is between the physically real experiencing of touching and reading a book made of paper and an electronic one made with digital pixels. You can’t really flip the pages, instead the digital pages are just a reorientation of the liquid crystals that have been manipulated by sending electrons through a grid of semiconductors.
It was only the second time I was fiddling with a Nook so I didn’t know what I was doing, but I did get a magazine to load. The entire page filled up the screen but the text was unreadably small. I double-tapped on the text, a habit from using iDevices, expecting the paragraph of text to zoom out and fill the screen. The Nook responded by doing absolutely nothing. Hmm. I reoriented the Nook in landscape mode but that only made it worse: now two pages filled the screen! Anyway, I walked away from the huge Nook island unimpressed. The E Ink version with dual displays beckoned but was ignored. I sat down with my cup of coffee, pulled out my iPhone 4, and started reading RSS feeds on Reeder, which I think is absolutely the best RSS reader for the iPhone. This too was digital but RSS feeds started life as digital so there is not an analog equivalent to compare it to. Reading RSS feeds on the iPhone is completely natural though 100% digital. The next generation of kids that start reading books on e-readers and tablets will have vastly different expectations of what it means to read a book. For me, I love the analog experience of reading a real book and probably won’t change.
My recommendation to Microcosm Publishing: allow Kindle users to ship their Kindles to you. And you can ship them a whole bunch of books they pick online.
Antoine De Saint-Exupéry:
Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.
The only connection I have to Saint-Exupéry is his novella The Little Prince, which I was introduced to by Filippa Edberg, who I bumped into on a return flight to San Jose from a consulting gig in New York. I must say I enjoyed the book quite a bit, the English translated version. If you haven’t read the book you should.
Now, where was I? Yes, perfection. Saint-Exupéry’s definition of perfection resonated with what I was thinking of in terms my goals for DisplayBlog. I’ve been wishy-washy regarding the overall look and feel of this blog, but I think I’m getting closer to what I really want. The overarching goal for DisplayBlog is for it to be readable.
I don’t want you to be distracted. And that’s why I opted for a single column design. I think stuff on the left and right just get in the way. There are many excellent writings about which font is most readable. Some say that Verdana is easiest, but some others say fonts that are easy to read don’t stick around in your head for that long. At times I’ve used Verdana for the body text but I’ve decided on Georgia. Why? I think Instapaper, Readability, and Apple have done a lot of research trying to answer the question of, “What is the most readable font?” already. I won’t pretend to know better. It is interesting that all three use a serif font, in particular Georgia. There are now more font options for Instapaper, but when it first got started the default and only font was Georgia. Same thing for Readability. Apple’s Reader option (shift-command-r) on Safari also uses Georgia. I might be wrong about the exact font, if I am please let me know. So standing on the shoulders of these three giants, I chose Georgia.
But the font itself doesn’t make it easy to read. It can’t be too small. There are many many sites where the font is simply too small to read. So I chose a rather large font size. The default font size of the three tools mentioned above tends to be large, too. The large size goes well with the 600 pixel width of the single column. I’ve read that the optimal number of words in a given row of sentence should be around 15 or so. The logic goes like this: if there are too many words it becomes visually difficult to stay on that row of words. I also wanted a visual cue as to the textual boundaries. I didn’t want vertical lines so I chose to justify the text. Of course, simply justifying the text can leave a whole bunch of unwanted space. So I use a hyphenation plugin called wp-Typography. It isn’t perfect but it works quite well.
No more to take away. I started with the byline. I asked myself, “What information is absolutely necessary in the byline?” A while back I had Name, Categories, and Date. Before I had a couple of posts by other friends but decided that I’d like DisplayBlog to be my voice and my voice only. So there was no reason why my name should appear on every post. It’s obvious: all posts would be, “by Jin,” so I took my name off. Then there was Categories. It is convenient to click on say tablet and get all related posts, but was it really necessary? I don’t read other blogs based on categories nor do I google based on categories. I read based on the exact gadget name or the exact technology and google them that way, too. So Categories was gone. Left is just Date, and I think this is necessary. Although I would love to be able to write posts that are timeless, for now I think the date gives the reader, you, a context of time that is important. The byline I think is close to Saint-Exupéry’s definition of perfection: there is no more to take away.
Next was the menu. The menu was beneath the logo and there were three items: Home, About, and Resource. Resource was also known for quite some time as Database. I wondered if it was possible to get rid of the entire menu. The Home menu item was there because I couldn’t for the life of me get the header image to be clickable. This is still a big mystery using the Thesis theme that DisplayBlog is based on. I solved this problem by getting rid of the header image and instead using text, which is the Silkscreen font from TypeKit. The About item is now linked to my name in the footer. I shrunk down the footer from “Copyright 2010-2011 Jin Kim” to just “© Jin Kim”. I’m quite proud of being so textually frugal. Then I decided Resource wasn’t what I want DisplayBlog to be about. The Resource menu item had only one thing: IPS LCD Monitors. I’m sure it was useful to some but I realized I didn’t want to spend time updating the list anymore. If anyone wants to be in charge of updating the list get in touch with me. Now there is no more menu and no more to take away.
On the very bottom are three elements: search, a list of links, and a Google AdSense ad. I think everyone would agree that search is absolutely necessary. Then there are the list of links that are important to me. The first one is to my Amazon affiliate link . I don’t make a whole lot of money but I am deeply thankful to the few of you who have used the link to purchase items that you would ordinarily buy on Amazon. Thank you so much! The next three are links to excellent display resources. First is DisplayMate by Dr. Raymond Soneira. DisplayMate is an excellent source of detailed display test results and the company’s award-winning set of software tools. Second is Jutta Rasp’s FPExperts, a global display consultancy. If, for instance, you are setting up a LCD fabrication plant in India, Jutta can help. Third, Veritas et Visus by Mark Fihn. The newsletters thoroughly cover the flat panel display industry. Actually, thoroughly isn’t a thorough enough word. Finally, there is a 300×250 Google AdSense ad. The good folks at Google contacted me and informed me that this particularly sized ad is the most popular and lucky for me the size fits, not perfectly, but quite well. My hope is to one day be recommended to The DECK, which would replace the ad from Google. I could take away all of these at the end to get closer to perfection, but I hope you’ll understand that I do need to make a bit of money. And since these are located after you’re done reading the post, I hope they aren’t a distraction.
Update: In the quest toward a more content-focused DISPLAYBLOG, I’ve decided to remove all links. And Amazon Associates was terminated by Amazon. End of update.
Do these changes on DisplayBlog help you to focus on reading? I hope so. In the future, I am contemplating using less images and videos. The act of framing an object, taking a picture, and sharing it with you brings a lot of joy. I really enjoy the process, but I also know that some photographs are unnecessary. They also take up bandwidth, which is limited for some of you, and lengthen the time it takes to load this blog. But there are also times when no amount of words, not even a thousand, can explain what a single photo can. Same goes for videos. On the other hand as we move toward displays with higher densities, like the Retina Display used in the iPhone 4, only text and vector graphics will be able to take full advantage of them, another reason to focus more on text. So we’ll see. One thing’s for sure: I’ll be thinking of ways to get closer to having no more to take away. Feel free to send me your feedback.
PS: DisplayBlog looks best when viewed with WebKit-based browsers like Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari.
Mitsubishi (Japanese) via Tech-On!: Mitsubishi Electric showcased its LCD-46MDR1, a 46-inch LCD TV with a unique backlight composed of a red laser diode and a cyan LED. The cyan LED is used to generate both green and blue while the red laser generates a deep 638-nm wavelength red. Several tens of red laser diodes and several hundred cyan LEDs are used in an edge-lit design.
While all other specifications like brightness, contrast ratio, power consumption, etc. are similar to other white LED backlit Mitsubishi LCD TVs, color gamut is improved to 126% NTSC with a marked enhancement in red vividness.
iFixit took the Motorola Atrix 4G and tore it down. And what did the good folks at iFixit find? Naturally, I’m mostly interested in the display. Once iFixit got to the LCD it was easy to take out. The 4-inch TFT LCD was not optically bonded to the cover glass. Which could mean you’ll eventually be dealing with dust that get in between the LCD and the cover glass. The LCD and cover glass are easier to replace, but it might not really be: few have access to a clean room.
Also, I just found out yesterday, thanks to Joel Pollack, Executive VP at Nouvoyance Inc., that the TFT LCD in the Atrix 4G makes use of the company’s PenTile RGBW sub-pixel technology. PenTile RGBW is unique in that the Red, Green, Blue, and White sub-pixels are structured in a 2×2 matrix.
There are many benefits to a RGBW sub-pixel structure. In 3M + Acer = All Day Computing And Then Some I detailed how scarce light is: only 3% of the light from the backlight comes out of the front of the display. There are many culprits that absorb light. One is the RGB color filter that absorbs 70% of light that passes through it. The PenTile RGBW structure adds a white sub-pixel that is clear and with no color filter material. This improves light transmittance, about twice that of a typical RGB LCD, leading to a brighter display. I would assume it could also lead to significant power savings, an important consideration when it comes to power-hungry smartphones like the Motorola Atrix 4G.
There are other differences, too. A typical LCD uses a RGB stripe sub-pixel structure and counts the trio as a pixel. On the PenTile RGBW, each pixel is composed of two sub-pixels. According to Nouvoyance:
Images on a PenTile RGBW panel are subpixel rendered, meaning they are drawn at the subpixel level (the individual points of light), rather than to the whole pixels of an RGB stripe display. In fact “pixels” in the traditional sense have been eliminated in PenTile RGBW displays; individual subpixels are not restricted to use in one pixel group, but instead participate in multiple “logical” pixels in their surrounding vicinity.
The Motorola Atrix 4G is stated as having a pixel format of 960×540 based on the definition of a single pixel having two sub-pixels. Now there is definitely some magic going on in the background that probably makes the PenTile RGBW LCD in the Motorola Atrix 4G look as good as a RGB stripe-based LCD with 960×540. A 4-inch RGB LCD with a 960×540 pixel format doesn’t exist, so an apples-to-apples comparison is not possible, but my gut feeling is that if there was a 4-inch RGB LCD with 960×540 pixels that it would be a bit sharper. In Motorola Atrix 4G Review I mention that the 4-inch LCD has a resolution of 275PPI, but now I need to add that the calculation is based on Nouvoyance’s definition of a pixel for the PenTile RGBW.
Just as a mental exercise, if we define a pixel as having three sub-pixels then the 4-inch PenTile RGBW Motorola Atrix 4G would result in a pixel format of just 640×360. The resolution, based on this definition of pixel and the new pixel format, would also be a bit less at about 184PPI. Still very high, but far from 275PPI.
It’s not easy to do a 1:1 pixel comparison since the very definition of pixel is different. The typical method of using RGB sub-pixels is being challenged: Nouvoyance is pioneering a vastly different way to show texts and images on displays with many benefits. An accurate comparison between normal and new might not be possible and it may not even be meaningful. What will be meaningful is how users respond to the 4-inch PenTile RGBW LCD used in the Motorola Atrix 4G, especially when they compare it to its arch-competitor: the 3.5-inch Retina Display with 960×640 RGB pixels in the iPhone 4.