If you don't understand Tradeoffs, You can't understand Apple!

Its about deciding between having higher mega pixel lens with a smaller pixel size or a lower mega pixel with a larger pixel size that lets more light inside giving you better low light performance.

Its about deciding between having many cores with meagre performance or having lesser cores with greater single core performance. (Though you have 8 cores, if there is a process with only 2 threads, other 6 cores are useless!)

Its about deciding between having an L3 cache or sacrificing it for higher performance bandwidth.

Its about deciding between screen having more pixels per inch or having just enough number of pixels with true colour representation and wider viewing angles.

Its about deciding between having an open source operating system and dealing with all sorts of viruses and inconsistencies or to go with a curated appstore approach.

Its about deciding to have a higher processor clock speed or a lower clock speed with optimised performance and sustained throughput. (Phones with higher clock speeds slows down once the phone gets heated to compensate the temperature)

Its about deciding between going with a bigger storage options of conventional hard drive or to go with costlier flash storage that has a greater overall performance.

Its about deciding between having a more powerful RAM or to have just enough RAM and optimising the performance conserving the battery life.

There are mobile cameras that give you better low light performance than iPhone, better quality in sunlight than iPhone and better color representation than iPhone but there is not a single mobile camera that beats iPhone in overall performance.

There are mobiles with better screens than iPhone, better viewing angles than iPhone, better saturation than iPhone. But there is not a single mobile screen that is better than iPhone’s mobile screen in overall quality.

There are mobiles having processors with higher clock speeds, higher no of cores and higher bytes of RAM but there is no single phone that is better than iPhone in real world performance.

While many companies are “Why not?” companies, Apple is the ultimate “Why?” company. Every new feature faces a harsh spotlight of inquiry. No feature in iPhone is done because it can be done. It is done because it really adds up to what iPhone is. That’s the reason, “New is easy, right is hard!”

The only thing Apple hates to make trade off with is Cost and that’s the only reason you have to pay a higher price for an Apple’s product!

Down below is a great video that explains what Apple is all about.

There are thousand "No"s to a single "YES!"

Happy birthday Windows!

Last Friday marks 30 years of existence for Microsoft Windows. Microsoft is the first software company. Bill Gates envisioned long ago how a software company should be like before anyone knew what software actually is. Microsoft has been the face of computing for many long years and it still is in a very tangible way. There are many ups and downs for a huge company as Microsoft where the former clearly dominated the latter, it wasn’t always a cakewalk for Microsoft to protect its identity. Software is funny. You clearly dominate the industry, become myopic and then you are irrelevant. We have seen recently this week on how Rdio filed for bankruptcy after being a super hit just 4 years ago. Similarly we have seen many instances in the past where companies faltered not knowing where their next bet should be and going bankrupt.

This was Microsoft's first logo

Microsoft was started in 1974 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975. When Paul saw the future in Altair 8800 (A Micro processor) he persuaded Bill Gates that the time was ripe and they have to jump into the world of programming. Then Bill Gates and Paul Allen somehow convinced Altair manufacturers and started to write programming immediately. After spending many sleepless nights, they finally were succeeded in delivering the program. 

1980s

These were the days of IBM Personal computers which took public by storm. Microsoft wrote the program of MS DOS for IBM. The biggest mistake IBM did was allowing Microsoft retain the licensing rights on MS DOS. When Bill Gates and his team at Microsoft were developing MS DOS for IBM, they were not at all confident of getting the licensing rights as IBM being market leader was ruthless. But the management of IBM thought that nobody in the industry could replicate their success in hardware manufacturing and thought that they will remain market leaders in the foreseeable future. Bill Gates from the inception is a software guy. He when came to know that the management of IBM is not at all interested in retaining the licensing of MS DOS, he was shocked and said to his close friends how big this mistake is and also added that IBM is going to repent on this Historical mistake. He was right. Many manufacturers came around figuring how to do hardware and started to approach Microsoft for the software. Microsoft suddenly replaced IBM as face of computing.

Microsoft also licensed their ‘Basic’ programming for Macintosh and wrote office software for Mac. Bill Gates worked closely with Steve Jobs in creating Macintosh’s software. Bill Gates was a little apprehensive on Mac’s success as he thought the Macintosh that was launched in 1984 was way ahead of its times and may not succeed. Turns out, he was right and Macintosh’s failure lead Steve Jobs step out of the company. But people started to look at Macintosh’s GUI as a game changer. 

Then the whole industry started to believe that Graphical User Interface is the future of the computing and the huge debate of Text based interface vs Graphics based interface soon turned into a intuitive common sense. It is clear - GUI is the future.

1990s

Windows came up with Windows 95 and it was the first windows operating system that supported GUI and it became an instant hit. Apple immediately filed a lawsuit that Microsoft copied their Macintosh’s interface and the competition became intense. Microsoft finally relented and agreed to purchase $350 million worth Apple shares in ‘out of court’ settlement when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. While Apple pursued an integrated approach from the start where Hardware, Software and Services are provided by a single company, Bill Gates’ vision was different. He thought consumer should be given a choice of different hardware manufacturers and he pursued an open approach where different components are designed by different companies. In hindsight, we have to say that the industry immensely benefitted from Microsoft’s open systems approach. Competition intensified among the manufacturers which turned into a Zero sum game which triggered price wars. In the end, consumer benefitted. 

Microsofts push to Enterprise is also a commendable effort suited to its open approach. Microsoft allowed OS customisation and tweaking according to the needs of the enterprises and they came up with a server operating system that was and still is immensely popular. Even food chains like KFC use Microsoft’s enterprise Operating system. Here instead of whole Operating system a lite version of Windows is deployed on a low cost hardware that saved lot of costs and was easier to use. 

2000s

Many say that this decade is a ‘lost decade’ for Microsoft. Steve Ballmer when took over Microsoft, it is a giant. Microsoft lost focus and ventured into many irrelevant spaces in the fear of being Myopic. They ventured into robotics, phones without a vision and did many irrelevant innovations that didn’t help its desktop operating system in any sort. In 2004 they debuted a Windows based tablet which is a complete failure. Windows Vista’s failure didn’t help Microsoft. On the other hand Apple and Google are driving ahead leaving Microsoft behind. In a desperate attempt to attract attention, Microsoft even ventured in to search space through Bing. The abbreviation of Bing is ‘Bing is not Google.’ If you name your product after your competitor, it says how terrified and desperate you are. After losing ground to Apple and Google on mobile front and Amazon on server front, Microsoft really need a restructuring. 

Present

Steve Ballmer was sacked as CEO by the board and Satya Nadella who overlooked Enterprise Mobility division and cloud platform Azure was made the CEO. Satya Nadella when made the CEO stressed the importance of Mobile first approach and started conscious efforts to bring back Microsoft as an enterprise leader. 

Its too early to judge Satya Nadella as a CEO but innovations of Microsoft recently on Surface tablets, Surface books, Windows Mobile, Azure, Microsoft Band, Xbox, Holo lens, and Windows 10 looks promising. Satya has a clear head unlike the chaotic personality that represents Steve Ballmer. Below is a video explaining his vision for Microsoft after a recent product launch.

Microsoft indeed brought us a long way. Let’s hope Microsoft takes us to even more heights we could never have imagined. Happy 30th Anniversary Windows!

Google Services - A faustian Bargain?

Faust is the protagonist of classic German legend. He is a scholar who is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life. This leads him to make a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Now the reason I brought this up is that while all the Users are Faust s in their souls, the question that whether users are always in a bargain with Google always ponders me.

Google has always been the go to company for many services we use today. Some might be surprised on how much google knows about us. Google has got the upper hand over Apple in the services it is in because Google was able to read more of your data and provide you many contextual services. Google now, for example is a service which provides contextual cards. When there is a reservation made, be it flight, movie, or a bus, Google automatically reads your mail, looks for the details in the ticket and serves you the contextual cards telling you the time to start based on your current location and traffic conditions to your destination. Now for this to happen, Google has to read your mails, strip the vital information of your location, destination, time and date of the travel. Only then will it be able to serve the cards. For an user, it doesn’t matter what information Google is gathering as long as these services thrill you.

But the inevitable question that arises is what else Google is doing with this data. If you think that Google collects data just to provide contextual services, you are terribly wrong. After Google does this, it sells that data to advertisers. Advertisers in turn use this data to serve you contextual ads. Google is doing this through its service called adsense suite. Google assigns a random ID to all the data and uses that data to serve you contextual ads. While the identity of the person can’t be known, the service reading your mails and analysing your location data sounds a little creepy. Android users can open this link and can see their location history. Open this link and you can get all the searches you made at Google. Google not just tracks you, it even sells this data to companies. 

Many Apple users face the heat from their friends who are Android users on how cool Google services are but they  never realise that Google steals gobs of data from them. Apple recently through its software update iOS 9 brought the capability of converting mails into calendar events. While Google fanboys proclaim the feature to be available for them for two years, the thing they never understand is that, while Google’s approach makes the server read your mail and create calendar event for you, Apple’s approach makes the iPhone do that for you without a byte of data moving out of your phone. A rational person would understand how different the two approaches are and why Apple takes so much time to bring out these features and execute them just right.

Down below is a screenshot of famous game 'subway surfers.' Now as you can see, it collects the information like, Device & app history (Allows the app to view one or more of: information about activity on the device, which apps are running, browsing history and bookmarks), Device ID and call information, etc.. Now here’s a trivial game that can read the apps that are present in your phone, apps which are running in the phone, browsing history on your phone and bookmarks present in your phone. Now what do you think the developer of the app does collecting the information? They sell it to third party, makes money and doesn’t care what the third party does making you vulnerable. 

Now, Apple never allows this to happen. That is the reason you find many apps in iPhone less functional than their Android counterparts for a simple reason that Apple never gives such sensitive information away. This is one of the two reasons why you find many Android apps being free while Apple charging premium for the fact that Android developers can collect your data, sell it and make revenues. The other reason being many pirated versions available and the ability to side load them in Android. But in Apple, you can download the apps only from the Appstore unless the device is jailbroken. 

For Apple, customer is the king while for Google, customer's data is the king. I know that this post started from being a critique of Google services has ended being a comparison between the approaches of Android and Apple, but the point I was trying to make is that choice is subjective. People who are very sensitive and critical about where their data is going might want to depend on Apple and people who don’t care where their data is ending up as far as they are enticed with the contextual services of Google might want to stay with Google. 

So while entering into Google services, beware that you are entering into a faustian bargain. Only time will tell whether Google is a devil or it isn’t!

Steve Jobs - Life Lessons

Steve Jobs as a person needs no introduction. People know him as the founder of Apple and as an amazing leader. But there are lot of intricacies involved in his personality worth knowing to truly understand why he got the success he got.

                               

Steve Jobs thorough his career had revolutionised many industries. He single-handedly transformed computer industry with Macintosh, Animation industry with Pixar, Music industry with iPod and iTunes, Mobile Phone industry with iPhone and Tablet industry with iPad. His genius lies not in the result but in the process and the way he did it. Everybody knows how and why he created these industries. But let us look at some situations where he exhibited a flash of brilliance that was needed for the day.

1. Fonts in Macintosh

Computers back in 1984 were majorly used in the field of research and publishing. When Steve and his team were brainstorming for the breakthrough features that needed to be put in Macintosh, Steve came up with this idea of having different typefaces (fonts) in word processing software. When they executed this idea and released the product, this feature became the talking point and a huge success as publishers instantly fell in love with the feature. Only later in 2004 when Steve gave his commencement address at Stanford, did he mention that the idea of different fonts came only because he had dropped out of his college and dropped in calligraphy classes. It is hard to believe but the truth is if Steve Jobs hadn’t taken calligraphy classes we wouldn’t have had this feature of fonts.

So he said to all the young graduates that attended the ceremony not to ask the question of why when you are learning. In his own words, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”

2. iPod and the Aquarium

Steve Jobs was a micro manager and he used to handpick the design himself looking at the prototypes. When a designer showed him a prototype of an iPod, Steve was not satisfied with the size as it didn’t fulfill his his vision of “1000 songs in your pocket.” Steve asked the engineer to make it smaller for which he got a reply that minimizing it further is impossible. He stood up took that iPod and threw it in the aquarium in his office and showed him the water bubbles emerging from it. Then he said to the engineer with his ever passionate tone. “Tell that you can’t do it. Don’t call it impossible. Go back and rework.”

3. Being a Control Freak

Steve approved a Prototype of iPod and the manufacturing facility was about to start the trial production of iPod when Steve halted it saying the socket into which the headphones went was “defective.” Engineers were called to Steve Jobs’ office and Steve started to complain that the socket was not “clicky” enough. Engineers didn’t understand the problem and Steve started telling that click is the only feedback a user gets when he inserts the headphone into the socket. When he hears it, he feels content that he inserted it properly. So I want sockets to be reengineered. 

Here’s a CEO complaining about sound that came when you inserted your earphones into the socket.

4. Stepping into the Shoes of a User

Steve being a CEO of Apple had used products of different competitors so that Apple as a company was never behind the competitors’ offerings. Whenever he opened any box of an electronic product, the user manual used to say “charge for 8-16 hours before switching it on.” Steve as a user was irritated on seeing this. Steve then called the lead of iPod project Tony Fadell and said to him “I don’t want to see this in my product. User should start using iPod from the instant he sees it.” Tony Fadell presented him the problems from manufacturing perspective on how difficult and lengthy manufacturing process will now become as they needed an extra hour to charge the batteries. Steve then asked the product’s hard disk to be tested for an extra hour versus 10 minutes they did till then so that the quality assurance is higher and batteries would charge.

From then, every electronic product started coming with at least 50% charge so that users need not wait impatiently for the product to charge.

5. AM/ PM in an iPod

Interface engineers in iPod's team were having a heated debate on which font to use for the new clock face they were designing. They tried different fonts but it was affecting the aesthetics of the clock design. When Steve Jobs walked in to the lab, engineers explained him the problem. Steve Jobs as usual within a second came up with an amazing as well as aesthetically pleasing solution - He said "Use a white face if it is day and use a black one if it is night." 

Now talk about spontaneity. Anyone?

6. Success through Cannibalization 

Sony had been the king of consumer electronics in the 20th Century. Experts believe that Sony had necessary technology to make iPod before Apple but they chose not to because they are worried if the sales of the CDs would drop as the consumption pattern changes. Nonetheless Apple did it and as a result Sony’s sales dropped. Steve learned this lesson fast. In 2005, when iPod has been the primary revenue generator for Apple, Steve Jobs asked his strategic team to name a product that can kill iPod. Everybody said mobile phone with music capabilities has the ability to kill an iPod. Steve said “Let’s do a phone.”

And the rest was history.

7. Attention to Detail

This is what Steve Jobs said to Vic Gundotra, a google executive on the phone on Sunday Morning. "So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away. I've already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow" said Steve. "I've been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I'm not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn't have the right yellow gradient. It's just wrong and I'm going to have a team member of mine fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?" 

But in the end, when we think about leadership, passion and attention to detail, just think about this call a top level executive of google received from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning in January. It was a lesson we all as future leaders should never forget. CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday. 

This is the reason why Steve Jobs was such a person whose personality is worth emulating, whose actions are worth imitating and whose words are worth inscribing. 

He is not a coder, he didn’t know how to program, he didn’t learn design academically. But this is how he described himself:

“Musicians play their instruments.

 I play the orchestra” 

Uber and Ola- The new revolutions in transport.

On a sunny (I'd rather say hot) Wednesday afternoon, I was waiting for a bus to get a ride to a friend’s place nearby. As always the frustration to wait for public transport, the convenience of having AC in a cab and laziness to walk last few metres after getting down a bus influenced me to open apps that are present under “travel” category in my phone. So I opened Uber. Requesting for a ride, the driver arriving there and me getting in to the car hardly took 5 minutes from the tap of a button. The conversation I had with the driver influenced me to write this column. 

After I got in, the first thing he did was to confirm my Identity and started to write my name in a book with the odometer reading beside it. I asked him the reason for doing it. He said in elegant English, “Sir, I have been getting wrong readings in Uber dashboard while I have been riding longer distances than what is being showed. So I wanted to confirm whether it is any technical error and wanted to report it.” I was offended when he said he found fault with technology. Geek in me came out brashly and explained him how navigation works and said that mighty Google powers Uber’s backend of navigation. He listened patiently and said to me, “Sir I have been getting cancelled rides and some non payment issues because of combination of wallet and cash. I just want to make sure that there is no foul play. Nothing against Google or Uber.” There’s a shiny Asus phone plugged and set in a stand on the car. I asked him whether he purchased it. He said that Uber gave it to him. “I was offered Samsung and Asus. I hate bloatware in Samsung and touchwiz is laggy. So, I have selected Asus.”

Then our conversation moved from technology to revenue models. I asked him, “How do you make profits from Uber? We pay a mere Rs. 7/Km and is it even viable for you?” He smiled and said, “Sir, apart from whatever you give us, we get an incentive of Rs. 100 or Rs. 125 based on the type of car whether it is a Sedan or a Hatchback. In addition to that for each hour we login, we get Rs. 200 irrespective of whether we get rides or not. I asked him whether those incentives remain forever. He said that starting from 1st Nov, prices of Uber are going to be increased with all the incentives for drivers cancelled and the new price is going to be Rs. 16/Km and are going to serve sub-urban as well. I was surprised and agitated at the same time and said, “How could they do that? Do they even realise that people are going to desert them if the prices hike outrageously high?” Then he said to me, “Sir, you can’t desert us. You know that, we know that, Uber knows that. Will you now after enjoying the private rides go back to footboard rides on a bus? Uber went as far as to rent Audi s and Benz s for Rs. 25000 a day from top celebrities only to attract people to Uber. They are even showing losses in the profitable counterparts only to provide free rides and promos and push this concept aggressively in India.* Bitter truths are hard to digest and I countered him to back his claim. He replied wryly, “Surge pricing. Surge pricing is a strategy to test your spending capabilities. There are 20 lakh cars in Hyderabad which are registered to Uber and let’s say, 25% of them are offline. There would still be 15 lakh cars on roads and rarely will there be a deficiency. Even at the time of surge where the prices would go 3 X or 3.5 X, people are not stopping. And recently when Uber started charging Rs. 18/Km after 16 Km, it didn’t deter people from taking a ride.” Now I didn’t have anything to speak. 

My destination arrived and while he was pressing “End trip” on his console, I asked him, “How much do you make?” He replied “Rs. 65000 - 80000 a month.” As I readied myself to pick my bag I have promised it to be the last question and asked him “What is your qualification?” “M.Com.” Understanding the bafflement on my face, he continued speaking “I didn’t want to work under anyone. I love driving and wanted to be my own boss and thankfully technology is allowing me to do it.” 

If technology is allowing a man in his 30s to follow his passion, giving him financial freedom, and is encouraging public to lead a better way of life, I’ll indeed call it Revolutionary in bold and italics :)

*I was unable to confirm the claim.

Ad-Blockers and the Business Reality.

By now as I write this article, many publishers would have already started creating technologies that bypass adblockers for running their businesses. Recent move by Apple to move out of its values (or what they have spoken till now) to provide content blockers on its mobile browser is really catastrophic for the publishers. The move could take ad-blocking on the mobile web mainstream, with serious implications for any business with a stake in online ads. I liked adblockers. In fact, I absolutely loved them until I really thought of it deeply by putting myself in the shoes of publishers. The reason I used the word catastrophic is because it really is if Apple does that in such scale. It is estimated that 60% of web traffic today comes from Mobile devices out of which many (not majority) are iOS devices. Now that Apple is giving an option for its users to download adblockers and use them in Safari, Apple is not just killing Google and Facebook which primarily rely on Ad business, they are giving a death call to publishers.

Where did it all start?

Google is the first word that comes to anybody's mind if one thinks of the word free or ad. Google is not giving everything free for philanthropy. It is creating a business model around a service where the primary service is given free to the users (at least on disguise) but charges users in the form of their data. Tim Cook recently said, "if somebody are making money mainly by collecting gobs of personal data, I think you have a right to be worried. As far as we, Apple are concerned, you are not our product." Apple tried and tried hard to convince people to move away from free services like Google to protect their privacy. But at the end, every user votes for themselves on the tradeoffs on whether or not he wants contextual services (Google Now) by sacrificing privacy, whether or not he is ready to trust all his personal collection of photos to one company for free (Google photos) or paying for it. It eventually boils down to the user on tradeoffs he's going to make. The problem now to Apple is that they are unable to turn enough of the users away from Google. 

We read many blogs online everyday. It is estimated that more than half of the publishers rely on Google's AdSense for the ads to be served. Whether they use Google's services or anybody else's, Apple allowing content blockers on their web browsers implies, revenues for many blogs is going to plummet. It has been just a day that iOS 9 is released which support adblockers and all the apps that are adblockers are already topping the charts on the App Store. Users are surely annoyed about the ads and my personal experience says that content blocking allows you to load your webpages as quick as twice as fast depending on the density of media these ads deploy but blocking them altogether is harsh. 

Apple may come out and say, we care about user experience more and all the other things less but on the way to their vision they have to look back and reflect upon casualties of their decisions because they are no more a startup. Their decisions do not create ripples. Their weight now disposes water from the ocean to the bank. Some even say that the debut of both Apple news app and content blockers is not a coincidence but a conspiracy. I'm not going that far to suggest the same but can say with some certainty that Apple is having a cruel laugh as they are now successfully blocking revenue sources of Google.

What should publishers do now?

Big companies that rely majorly on ad revenue like Google, Amazon, Facebook are purportedly paying millions of dollars to major adblocker players like ABP to whitelist their ads. Now that Apple is personally involved in this they seem to have upped the ante. It is rumoured that Adblocker plus creator is now working alongside Google to block the adblockers. (what an irony!) Google has already updated Youtube's code and is penalising users that use adblockers by forcing them to see the whole ad taking away the option to skip the ad. 

All these futile attempts aside, if we speak of current ads, they are cluttered, passé and an overhaul is long due. Now all the publishers should seriously consider revamping the ads and should think of  ways to deal with adblockers. One way is to politely ask users to switch off adblockers. (A publisher can know whether or not a user is using an adblocker by running a simple html script) Second way is to deceive adblockers by serving inline ads. Curated ads is another way to deal with the problem. Rather than serving up random ads that come directly out of Google's servers which are often deceptive, publishers can always serve users with better, contextually relevant ads which serves the purpose of one, better user experience and two, the probability for the ad to be clicked. 

Its now on the publishers come up with a business model around the new developments of adblocking and strive to serve it's readers.

iPhone, iPad Pro and Apple TV - The Critique.

Tim Cook started the keynote by saying "We are really firing on all cylinders and we are about to make some monster announcements across several of our product lines." Boy they indeed delivered on what they have promised. Its been almost 4 years since Steve Jobs passed away and the flow of ideas is still consistent from Apple. Whether you like Apple or not, these keynotes are phenomena in themselves. Nobody seems able to replicate the scale and energy. Apple Keynotes are the least acknowledged among the best products of Steve Jobs! Now let's look at what's changed.

iPad Pro

This is BIG — both in size and scale! The new iPad Pro is a monster with 12.9" screen 78% larger than the standard 9.7" iPad. iPad has been a huge success initially but gradually the sales are slowing down - a concern for Apple. Nothing is really wrong in recent iterations but its just that people are upgrading their iPads less often. Apple is not shying away from doing whatever necessary to increase its sales. Deal with IBM to develop enterprise applications is an example on how far Apple is willing to go to revive the growth of iPad. Not stopping there, Apple even gave its keynote space to Microsoft to debut its Office suite on iPad. There was a stunned silence from the audience when Apple put Microsoft's name on the screen but thats the distance Apple is willing to go if they see an opportunity.

There is a lot of discussion on the internet that Apple is doing things Steve Jobs hated - the stylus. But the fact is when Steve said about stylus, he was referring to mediocre styluses on resistive touch screens. Not the kind of stylus Apple debuted through "Apple Pencil." If History was any evidence, Steve Jobs always did things he said he would not. He said iPod with video would fail and the next year, first iPod with video capabilities came out. He said he would never do a phone. iPhone was a history. Steve Jobs was an amazing in flipping and flipping is an art. Things do change and you have to change accordingly. Be rigid and you are preparing your route to oblivion. Moreover Steve Jobs' parting advice to Tim Cook is to "Do what's right. Never think what I would have done. Just do what's right."

iPad Pro could have many implications and many use cases that we never would have imagined. Through iPad Pro, Apple is clearly targeting photo-editing professionals and enterprise employees who run multiple apps side by side. New Photoshop app from Adobe and might of iPad to support multiple apps with 4 GB RAM is the evidence. This potentially could have a huge impact on the industry and its up to the developers now to decide on the places and use cases they take it to.

Apple TV

Apple has always been the company that started with a less - capable but user friendly operating system and add features to it over time based on the advancements of the hardware. They did the same with iPad where they took mobile operating system iOS to a bigger canvas when the competitors are trying to port stripped down versions of Windows on to the tablet hardware. There lies the brilliance of Apple. They are doing something similar with the Apple TV. While the competitors are out with game consoles that can do a bit of entertainment, Apple started with entertainment and overtime started giving gaming capabilities to this device. This is a completely different animal when compared to X box or PS both in price and positioning. Apple has a large advantage in the form of developers and the community is ripe with innovations. They are making unique value proposition with developers, thanks to Apple users who buy more when compared to the users of it's competitors. Siri integration into Apple TV is great and with the same pace we are nearing a day in the future where we would finally cut the cord!

iPhone 6s and 6s plus

Now we come to a product that is earning 56% of the total revenues for Apple. Whether Apple admits it or not, iPhone is the most important product for Apple. Smartphones are maturing and innovation in this sector is drying up. Making things work is where Apple really relies on.... Until now. With force touch, Apple is taking advantage of its unique strength - hardware-software integration. It might take some time for competitors to come up with similar UI as hardware and software manufacturers are different. While Apple's force touch user is neatly implemented, it takes time getting used to as there is some learning curve involved. In the end, this gesture adds another UI interaction and as Apple is opening up the API of force touch, its time for developers to start fiddling with it and come up with new features. The only downside of force touch is that Apple can not be free from fragmentation of Apps now . Now that the new iPhones require different apps written to make use of force touch, there would be some fragmentation involved.

The updated optics and the live photo feature are the other talking points of iPhone. The live photo feature might shake the industry and may give Apple a first mover advantage as facebook and instagram have already announced that they would start supporting this new format. Though similar feature already exists in some phones of htc, Apple nails in implementation yet again. Making use of screen as a flash for selfies is one another nice implementation. For this Apple included a chip in the iPhone that drives the brightness of the screen 3 times more to its normal brightness. This great additions make this iPhone a compelling purchase!

All said the iPhone is on route to reign the title of "best smartphone in the industry" yet again and Apple, as always is going to remain the market leader. 

Here's the full keynote.