If Apple really wanted to silence critics, they have a place to do so. I’ve now seen it with my own eyes.

Inside Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA, there are a collection of rooms that house 17 giant anechoic chambers. Basically, they’re rooms where no waves (sound or electromagnetic) can reflect off of anything, so there is absolutely no interference when it comes to wireless testing. Apple places their devices from iPhones to iPads in these chambers to ensure the performance is up to their standards.

Yesterday after their press event, Apple gave myself and a handful of other journalists the chance to take a tour of these facilities. It was the first time anyone outside of Apple has ever seen them. In fact, most people who work at Apple have never seen them, we were told. The tour was led by Ruben Caballero, Apple’s senior antenna expert (and, incidentally, the man in the news recently thanks to a BusinessWeek story — a story which Apple says is a “crock” and “total bullshit”). Also there to answer questions were Apple executives Phil Schiller, Bob Mansfield, and Greg Joswiak.

Right off the bat, it was made very clear to us that we were not allowed to take pictures or record video inside of these rooms. (The pictures in this post are the ones Apple provided.) It’s pretty clear why. While the chambers themselves are custom-made for Apple by various third party industrial manufacturers, the areas these chambers are in also contain a ton of other testing equipment. And yes, there were several things hidden under black cloaks on tables in these rooms.

“This lab used to be secret. Most people don’t know it exists,” Caballero told us. Dubbed the “Black Labs,” when I asked about the black cloaks, Caballero said that “we have a lot of other projects going on.”

At one point we were told that the iPad had been in testing in this facility “for years.” Even more interesting may be that the iPhone 4 specifically had been in testing in these chambers for 2 years. You know that that means. Not only was the iPhone 5 likely in the same room that we were in. But the iPhone 6 may have been around as well.

Sadly, we weren’t allowed to lift up the cloaks.

The point of our visit to these labs was clear: Apple wants it to be known just how much testing goes into devices such as the iPhone. More specifically, Apple wants to the world to know just how much testing the iPhone 4 went through before they deemed it ready to go. Again, it was in these various chambers for 2 years. This is obviously a direct response to allegations made recently that perhaps Apple didn’t test the device enough before they shipped it.

So how do they test it? There are four stages. The first is a passive test to study the form factor of the device they want to create. The second stage is what Caballero calls the “junk in the trunk” stage. Apple puts the wireless components inside of the form factor and puts them in these chambers. The third part involves studying the device in one of these chambers but with human or dummy subjects. And the fourth part is a field test, done in vans that drive around various cities monitoring the device’s signal the entire time (both with real people and with dummies).

We were shown three different anechoic chambers, each used for slightly different purposes. Some where used to test the devices by themselves, some where meant for testing with humans and the devices.

The most interesting of these rooms was one that Caballero called “Stargate.” Why? Because well, it looks like it belongs in the movie/TV series Stargate. Inside this room, there’s a giant ring that a human sits on a raised chair in the center of. This chair slowly rotates around as signals are passed around the entire outer circle. This creates a 360 degree test area. I was told this room is completely safe for humans. And people typically spend 40 minutes in there at a time for testing. By comparison, devices can stay in the other anechoic chambers for up to 24 hours at a time.

Speaking of movies, one chamber we didn’t get to see was a giant one that looks exactly like Cerebo from the X-Men films. I mean, just look at the picture Apple provided (bottom). It’s the same thing. Of course, in Apple’s Cerebo, I assume the subject standing in the center can’t read every human beings’ mind. But I can only assume that as we didn’t get to see this room.

Each of these chambers is also a bit frightening because each is covered from floor to ceiling with giant blue spikes. Sure, these spikes are made of foam and simply used to absorb and dampen any waves, but still, these chambers look like they belong in a nightmare. Again, if Apple needs a place to silence critics, they have the rooms.

These chambers vary in cost, but each of the ones we saw cost over $1 million. All told, Apple said it has spent over $100 million on these testing facilities.

We then went into a room that contained fake heads. Obviously, these are used to test the various devices without having to use real humans. And Apple goes so far as to fill these heads with liquid mixtures of sugar, water, salt, and other components to replicate the make-up of the human brain. There were also replicas of the human hands and feet (that latter for Nike+ testing). If the tour started out as a bunch of people going to see the inside of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory for the first time, I was starting to grow concerned that it was turning into that scene where they enter the strange psychedelic tunnel.

But that feeling quickly subsided as we headed outside to see the vans Apple uses to test their devices in the real world. These are giant white vans with antennas on the top of them to pull in both cellular and GPS signals. The back of these vans contain various computer equipment to collect all the data and send it back to the labs at the headquarters.

Mansfield closed the tour by noting that they had hoped it was now a bit more clear the amount of time and energy Apple puts into testing these wireless products. “We hope to give you a sense of the real engineering going on here,” Mansfield said. It’s not just testing, it’s re-testing — and this goes on for months, he said.

No matter what your take is on the iPhone 4 antenna — my take is here: it’s real, but not a big deal — there is no question that Apple spends a huge amount of time and money testing these devices. And the fact that the thing people will care most about in this whole 1,200-word post is the passing mention that the iPhone 5 and iPhone 6 may have been in one of these rooms, says just about all you need to say about the state of the iPhone.

For those interesting in learning more, Apple has also posted the following page (and video) about the antenna labs.

Inside Apple’s Actual Distortion Field: Giant Chambers, Fake Heads, And Black Cloaks

IPS Resources – Something New coming to GMM Skin Themes

A day after Amazon made it abundantly clear it’s gunning for world domination in the e-reading space by lowering the price of the Kindle from $259 to $189 – following competitor Barnes & Noble’s decision to slash the price of its Nook e-reader down to $199 – chief executive Jeff Bezos sat down with Fortune’s JP Mangalindan for a fairly interesting interview.

One of the things Bezos talked about was the iPad, Apple’s tablet computer that is selling like hotcakes and unequivocally poses a genuine threat to Amazon’s burgeoning ebooks and ereader business (and, as some claim, to reading in general).

According to Apple, it’s already taken about 22% of the U.S. ebooks market, with iPad owners having downloaded some 5 million books in the first 65 days of the iBooks store alone.

But Bezos does not seem terribly impressed.

Here’s the key part of the interview (which you should read in its entirety):

Fortune: Obviously, the Kindle’s price drop was in response to Barnes & Noble’s price cut on the Nook. Did the iPad and its overnight success play a role, too?

Bezos: No. The iPad… I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category. The Kindle is for readers.

Fortune: So far you’ve been capturing consumers. Amazon accounted for about 80% of all electronic book sales last year. How has it grown so fast, and can you keep it up?

Bezos: It’s hard even for us to remember internally that we only launched Kindle a little over 30 months ago.

Our strategy with the ebookstore is ‘buy once, read everywhere.’ If you want to read on your iPhone, if you want to read on your BlackBerry. We want people to be able to read their books anywhere they want to read them. That’s the PC, that’s the Macintosh. It’s the iPad, it’s the iPhone. It’s the Kindle.

His words ring true, because this strategy is visible in the field too.

We now have a Kindle reader app for Android phones, a Kindle app that includes fresh support for video and audio for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch and versions for BlackBerry devices, PC and Mac computers via a desktop client and of course the company’s own Kindle, which Bezos says has been purchased by “millions”.

Furthermore, Amazon boasts more than 620,000 ebooks in its catalog, significantly more than Apple, despite the latter’s agreements with 5 of the 6 top publishers in the United States.

Finally, I think Bezos is right about the fact that there will be many tablet devices making their way to the market in the coming months and years (according to Forrester Research, there will be 59 million tablets in use by 2015) and that Amazon should be focusing on being able to shift ebooks on as many platforms as possible.

But does all that mean Bezos should be dismissing the iPad for being a different product?

Cross-platform ebook selling strategy aside, with the Kindle Amazon has stepped into the hardware arena, and the reality is price doesn’t always make the difference. The iPad can simply do a lot more than the most recent model of the Kindle can, and the next-gen iPad is undoubtedly already in the works.

ZDnet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes put it best when he wrote:

The problem with the Kindle (and Nook) is that it’s a one-trick pony. One-trick ponies are cool in an ecosystem where there are no other ponies doing tricks. Add more ponies doing more tricks, and the one-trick pony gets long in the tooth real fast.

Maybe Amazon’s problem is that the iPad really is a different product category?

(Image via TechCN)

Jeff Bezos On The iPad: “It’s Really A Different Product Category”

This is a very high contrast Invision Power Board skin hosted at invisionize.com

It’s dark grey, black, and bright blue. It’s compatable with IPB versions 2.2 and 2.3
BlueXM Skin, another release by http://www.ipbshock.com
Much the same as the RedXM version only with a nice pale blue and dark greys in color with a black background, a nice color combination in my opinion!
What you will get in the download file is:

- 2 Skin files (xml)
- Readme.txt – please read this, its called read me for a reason

- Banner(logo4) .psd so you can change the text in the banner.
- Font(s) – Fonts there were used in the skin

]]> http://invisionskins.net/blue-xm-skin-for-ipb-versions-22x-23x/feed/ 0 http://invisionskins.net/plausable-pixels-dark-color-skin-for-ipb-22-23/ http://invisionskins.net/plausable-pixels-dark-color-skin-for-ipb-22-23/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 03:02:16 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/?p=41

“Plausable Pixels” is a nice dark skin made by plausiblepixels.com

The skin is black, grey, with white text. You could definetly use this for a gaming skin or perhaps some sort of urban/music/rap type skin. Below I have copy and pasted exactly what he said on his post.

The 4th and final version of my first skin. This is a Dark skin with some orange and Yellow formatting.
All images are custom, thats over 60 icons/buttons.
Only 2 skin edits, so this is a great skin for installing mods.
Includes PSD for logo, and the font I used to buttons and logo.
Comes with Fixed and Stretched versions for Import. On this skin I took a totally different approach for the boarder. So this means the global header and footer is very clean, even with the board around the skin you wont be able to see that html directly. The only other edited skin template was “render_row”, its very sexy now. Please note that the demo skin/site is very modified.
Screenshot:
http://www.xghozt.com/site/skins/images/ghoztcraft.png
=========================================
[Copyright Notice]
YOU ARE ALLOWED TO USE THIS SKIN FREE OF CHARGE.
YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO USE ANY CUSTOM IMAGES USED IN THIS SKIN ON
ANY OTHER SKIN OR EDIT THEM IN ANY WAY.
YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SELL THE SKIN OR MAKE ANY PROFIT DIRECTLY FROM THE SKIN.
YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO REMOVE THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT
THE FOOTER OF THE PAGE OR EDIT IT IN ANY WAY.
YOU DO HAVE THE RIGHT TO EDIT ANY LOGO FILES AND PROFILE IMAGES.
Please respect my wishes by simply keeping the copyright intact and I will continue to release my skins. Anyone one that wants to remove the copyright or change images, I have all the psd’s so please request permissions from me to modify any graphics I created.
Thank you and Enjoy,
~ XGhozt
~ Me[at]XGhozt.com

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