Over at The Guardian, Jemima Kiss thinks Apple at its iPad event yesterday wheeled out Steve Jobs to distract from the fact that the iPad 2 (thinner, lighter, two cameras, twice as fast, nine times better graphics, new creative apps) was a load of rubbish:

It’s not hard to read Steve Jobs’ surprise appearance at Wednesday’s iPad 2 unveiling as a mark of desperation. Is Apple so in need of a boost to its share price that it needed to haul Jobs out of medical leave?

Clearly, she’s right. After all, it’s pretty rare for Jobs to front an Apple event. NO, WAIT! And, yeah, mark of desperation—for anyone not expecting digital unicorns, the iPad 2 ticked all of the boxes. But Kiss wanted her horny horses.

But was his appearance designed to distract us from an underwhelming launch? His introduction seemed to try even harder than usual to build up Apple and to knock its rivals – from ebook and app download numbers to dismissing the competition’s attempts at tablets.

Because, gosh, Apple’s rivals haven’t been doing similar, and it’s not like the tech press would EVER report on bullshit spewed out from Apple’s competition regarding tablets. Quick tip: sometimes you have to fight back. Sometimes you can’t rise above. Apple was merely stating some pretty blunt facts about the current state of the market.

Anyway, UNICORNS!

What were we left with after that? A faster processor, a dual-core A5 chip, that will mean it can operate twice as fast and render graphics up to nine times faster.

Yeah, you tell them. No Retina! No USB! NO DAMN UNICORNS! Unremarkable, really, unless you care about performance and graphics, like anyone using creative apps such as the new iMovie and GarageBand for iPad that Apple revealed, and which Kiss seemed to not see, presumably because she was by that point smashing her keyboard with fury, yelling I WANTED A UNICORN, DAMMIT!

A less logical rear-facing camera – who’s going to use the iPad to shoot anything?

Man, if only Apple had demoed some kind of movie-editing software for iPad, like iMovie, and said it would be released on to the App Store alongside the iPad 2. Then that camera would have somehow made sense! What idiots those Apple guys are!

Those improvements could all have been made to the original iPad, though you can’t count a black and white version as an improvement. Lighter, thinner, maybe. Is there really much incentive to buy an iPad 2?

If you’re one of the people with an iPad, maybe not (although, on a rough count, about half the people I know who have an iPad want to upgrade to the iPad 2); but, Ms. Kiss, it might have escaped your attention that while Apple did quite well in selling iPads over the past nine months, it didn’t quite sell 6.7 billion of them. Therefore, there might just be a market that Apple can target with its new device. And thinner/newer/better is a stronger marketing tactic than ‘a year old’.

Steve Jobs’ appearance undermined Apple’s obligation to cultivate a new public face of Apple, apparently for the short-term benefit of a stock-price boost. Long term, that’s succeeded in keeping the succession the main story.

This is true, because at recent Apple events, Jobs has been furiously protective of his space, never showing that Apple’s a company that has many people working hard to make it a success. Stupidly, he never lets anyone else share the stage. Well, apart from Tim Cook. And Scott Forstall. Oh, and Phil Schiller. And Randy Ubillos. And Xander Soren. And Jon Ive. And Craig Federighi. And Bob Mansfield.

Apart from those guys, it’s always all about Steve ‘quick, distract everyone from the substandard updates’ Jobs, the sneaky territorial bastard.

Oh, David Goldman of CNN Money, haven’t you been listening? The iPad is actually doing quite well, grabbing 93 per cent of the market. While it’d be nice if the iPad 2 was unicorn-powered, all Apple really needs to do today is provide a nice upgrade that shoves in a bit of extra clout and some cameras. That alone will see the iPad 2 fly off the shelves, right?

GOLDMAN SAYS NO. In fact, Goldman says some very odd things:

The good and the bad news for Apple is that the year-old iPad still rates highly among even its newest rivals.

That’s good news, because Apple should again have the best-in-its-class tablet if the iPad 2 is as improved as the rumors say it will be.

But that’s also bad news: How much thinner, lighter, faster, better — and perhaps most importantly, cheaper — can the iPad get? Did Apple shoot itself in the foot by making its first generation tablet too good?

Yes, because the one thing people thought when they got an iPad was “man, if only this product was worse”. And iPad-owners thinking about an iPad 2 today are all complaining: “I would have upgraded, if only Apple had made the original iPad complete shit”.

The only people wishing Apple had made the original iPad worse are important figures working for Apple’s rivals.

But, luckily, there’s one way Apple can win this game, thinks Goldman:

Tim Cook, Phil Schiller or whichever Apple executive introduces the iPad 2 will need to offer some impressive specs, lest Apple fans walk away disappointed.

After all, it’s not like the competition tries to differentiate itself by wanking itself into a frenzy over spec lists, rather than, say, what you can actually do with your device. here’s hoping Goldman realises that, eh?

Rival tablets have front- and rear-facing cameras,

Phew!

[…] dual-core processors, four times as much RAM as the iPad, HDMI output and Adobe Flash support.

Oh.

And:

If that’s all Apple does, its fans will probably be unimpressed. Apple may need to have something “magical” up its sleeve, as Jobs likes to say, to wow its potential customers.

NO UNICORN? I’M LEAVING!

To be fair to Goldman (it’s sunny, so I’m in a good mood), he’s right on that last thing. Apple ‘fans’ typically have insane expectations, driven by the rumour mill. However, Apple doesn’t need a checklist of specs that somehow ‘better’ its rivals on paper—it simply needs to stay ahead where things really matter: usability, apps, quality.

Following on from reports that Microsoft has delivered its ‘other’ tablet operating system (ZDNet), the snappily named Windows Embedded Compact 7, which is meant to be for consumption devices, rather than consumption and creation devices, the rumour mill is hot with news of a further exciting Microsoft announcement later today, sure to scupper Apple’s iPad 2 launch.

According to ‘sources’, Microsoft will unveil Windows Inserted Not Quite Teeny Weeny But Nonetheless Somewhat Small 7, which has been designed specifically for devices that are “mostly consumption devices, but occasionally used for creation, like when the owner’s without a laptop and really needs to creatively create an Excel spreadsheet in a creative manner”.

When asked about how Microsoft’s staggeringly bonkers mobile fragmentation strategy hopes to compete with Apple’s single flavour of iOS across all devices, a spokesperson said: “Look, just fuck off, will you?” before feverishly smashing up an iPhone 4 with a hammer.

The BBC is generally well regarded outside of the UK, and some of its shows—including Doctor Who and Top Gear—are torrented like crazy. When Apple TV rentals yomped on in, it appeared the BBC was one of the very few non-stupid corporations in the field, since it joined Fox and Disney in offering content for Apple’s device, rather than whining about how Apple was somehow ‘devaluing’ their content. (Hello, Warner Bros.! I’d still love to know how 99 cents per episode is worse than eight bucks per month for everything through Netflix!)

Now, director general Mark Thompson says things are going to be taken a step further. An international version of iPlayer will “definitely” launch in 2011 and will cost “a small number of dollars a month—less than 10” (source: Journalism.co.uk and others).

It remains to be seen how many holes end up in the schedule, but it’s likely the BBC’s own content at least will be made available through the player. It’ll be interesting to see whether the organisation making it affordable and readily available will encourage non-Brits to fund the service, or whether they’ll still consider “less than 10” dollars too much outlay and continue to torrent.

Articulate argument from Tim Anderson on why 24-bit will not fix computer audio and why 16-bit is fine:

[What] are the limitations of 16/44 audio? We can be precise about this. Nyquist’s Theorem says that the 44,100 Hz sampling rate is enough to perfectly recapture a band-limited audio signal where the highest frequency is 22,500 Hz. Human hearing may extends [sic] to 20,000 Hz in ideal conditions, but few can hear much above 18,000 Hz and this diminishes with age.

In fact, despite the claims of audiophiles, most people cannot tell the difference between studio-quality output and an MP3 file, especially given that output is usually sub-optimal (car stereos, crappy headphones, TV speakers, and so on). And given that music is distorted beyond belief in all commercial recordings these days (to make everything sound ‘loud’, audio is compressed and peaks are clipped, wrecking dynamic range), upping the audio from 16- to 24-bits won’t make the slightest bit of difference in the vast majority of cases, even if you have high-end kit.

To my mind, as long as sources are offering ‘high enough’ quality lossy files (256–320 kbps AAC or MP3), that’s enough. Any move to 24-bit will just be corporate PR wankery—a pissing match that aims to snare users who think higher numbers are better. And I bet you’d get charged more for the privilege.