neomac

Why 960 × 640?

marco:

What’s the average-person selling point for the high-density display that will overcome the downsides? 

It is perfectly understandable that the creator of Instapaper would see this change in terms of reading.  But the iPhone HD is going to have a 960x640 display for showing super high quality video from it’s internal camera.

Cellphone video has always pretty much sucked.  This is a great area where Apple has an opportunity to not only deliver something great— but to deliver something competitors can’t match.

Apple has an HD Format that they quietly introduced last year called iFrame.  The format of this video? 960x640.  This perfectly matches a pixel doubled iPhone display, and this is not a coincidence.

Over the last several years, we’ve seen two major trends— the replacement of point-and-shoot cameras with cellphones, and the addition of hd video on cameras of all types.  We’ve also seen the rise of inexpensive HD cameras of low quality, such as the flip and kodak zi6. 

The downside of most cameras that shoot video is that their manufacturers made poor codec choices.  AVCHD is designed to work with optical disks and TVS, and with no concern for what will happen with the video.  Thus despite Apple shipping iMovie for almost a decade, most consumers have no convenient way to edit their movies.  iFrame is a codec that is easily editable without a transcoding / importation step.  Just copy the files onto your computer and iMovie works with them natively.  This is huge for anyone who shoots a lot of video.

In one release, for $199 (with 2 year contract) Apple is going to release a video camera that delivers much higher image quality, in a much more usable codec, in a package with a gorgeous display to show off this gorgeous video.  And make consumer video vastly more relevant than it has been since the initial boom in days of DV.

This is also a product which shows how Apple’s vertical integration pays off— they make the CPU in the phone which shoots the video, the computer to edit it which comes with a built in editing suite.   Both the phone and the computer help sell each other as part of a total solution. 

But the clear selling proposition for consumers— what Marco actually asked for— is that for $199 you can get a high quality video camera, that shoots stills, and you get the phone, and the iPod, etc. for free.