This is not news

Don't you get tired of the constant speculation of new products and the constant stream of news story that contain no news? I certainly do and it is very irritating. I have come across a couple of stories in the last day or two that illustrate this and one was a news item that reported that Microsoft is already working on the next version of Windows. There was even a leaked screen shot of Windows 9, which actually showed nothing important.

This is not news. It takes a long time to develop an operating system because of its large size and complexity and as soon as one is out of the door you start work on the next one. It is not news to say that Microsoft is working on Windows 9. Nor does it say anything about the popularity or not of Windows 8. It is just a fact of software development. Apple works on the next version of OS X and Ubuntu developers work on the next Ubuntu release as soon as the current one is done.

Actually, it is best to have multiple teams working on an OS and some people are retained to work on bug fixes, service packs and minor tweaks for the current release, while other people are put to work on the next version. There may even be teams of people dreaming up features for the version after that. I'll bet that there are people at Microsoft planning Windows 10, never mind Windows 9.

Another news story I read, today actually, was that Apple is planning to release a new iPhone this year, probably called the iPhone 5S. This is not a news story. Can you think of a year when Apple didn't release an iPhone? If Apple was not going to release an iPhone this year, then that would be news.

There is also the tiresome speculation of what new features will be in upcoming products. This is mostly about Apple products because the company is so secretive and so little is known. I often wonder whether people just make up these rumours or whether Apple puts them out to muddy the waters and make it difficult to know what the company is really up to. Put out a lot of fake rumours and no-one will know which the right ones are. But perhaps thats just the conspiracy theorist side of me.

The latest rumours are that there will be a new iPad in April. I find it hard to believe that Apple would release three iPads in the space of 12 months. The iPad 3 last spring, iPad 4 in the autumn and iPad 5 this spring? Surely not.

If there is to a refresh, then surely it would be the iPad Mini. The hardware spec of this is barely better than an iPad 2 and it has the same processor, same screen resolution, same memory and so on. Only the camera is better.

I would like an iPad Mini, but the spec of the current model puts me off. I can see this being out of date very quickly and being unable to use new features in upcoming versions of iOS to be released this year and next. The iPad 4's processor is twice as fast and has twice the graphics power as the iPad Mini's and it should last several years whereas the iPad Mini might get left behind. There are already things than my iPad 2 can't do.