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Apple Obscures Future Device Hints in iOS 5.1 Beta 2 with Fake References

orfeas0 said:
Come on, don't tell me this
Image
isn't humorous!
I mean it lists an iPad 11.1!!!
It's like a treasure hunt, find the correct next product!
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Actually, if you take every third line, add the total number of listed products, multiply by the addition of every second numbers of each product, you'll get a number. Take that number, turn every digit into its appropriated letters and you'll find the name of the new device...
 
I figured that the iFPGA entry might be for a product that's still in the very early stages of development...early enough that it doesn't have its own chip or board yet, and they're prototyping it on an FPGA.

Or it could be an in-joke. Who knows...
 
Stella said:
Seriously...

On the one hand its quite funny the length apple will go.. but on the other.. its quite sad... paranoid like.
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And instead of making it easier for less than, uhm, 'thinking' analysts to go wild with the next Apple iPhone prediction whatever from some piece of garbage they gleaned from some site analyzing lists, this should make it more difficult. Though I'm not a shareholder seems the 'disappointing' 4S release (since it didn't live up to the clues from lists) sank their stock for a while even though sales were the best ever. So maybe they actually do know how to run a company. If that means being paranoid, ok, they're paranoid. Just watching their back (as my cousin in Iraq used to say).
 
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If I were the CEO of Apple, I would spend the first thirty minutes of the next product launch to introduce a fake product named iFPGA, just for fun.
 
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Yvan256 said:
Since a FPGA can be programmed to be almost anything, you can read the joke as Apple listing "iAnything" instead of "iFPGA".

I.E. you can keep looking at that list all you want, you'll never guess.
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xsmasher said:
It's the geeky version of an "iToaster" or "iPotholder" or "iCar" joke.

The very-funny part is some sites taking the reference and running with it, as though it were a real product.
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Oh i see! Hahaha, thanks. Quite sneaky of Apple. They're probably tired of all the speculation altering people's expectations or something.
 

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There is going to be a 10th generation iPhone!

I'm not upgrading till it is out! :D
 
The iFPGA reference is not a joke. That's been in there before. Apple likely prototypes hardware on FPGAs just like any other major consumer electronics manufacturer. Also, before iPad became iPad it was listed as "iProd" in itunes betas.
 
MacRumors said:
The change is likely to make it more difficult to detect new additions, as the new entries will serve as placeholders until Apple quietly begins using the software on its latest devices under development.
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You really aren't getting it, are you? The whole point is to AVOID new additions - the new products will just use one of the previously "fake" i.d.'s. Why in the world would Apple go to the trouble of seeding a bunch of fake product i.d.'s only to then add "real" ones as necessary? Use some common sense.
 
For some reason I just found this histarical.

I wish they would have added things in like:
iCar
iStarship
iJedi

Would have made things even more fun.
 
Small White Car said:
Ok, SOMEBODY cares, I guess.

My point is that a CDMA iPhone is nowhere near as interesting as an entirely new product.


I suspect that that's why they changed this. Otherwise, why change it now after years of people reporting on these? The timing isn't random, I don't think.
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Someone at Apple HQ sneezes and all the fanbois want all the gossip.
People care about this stuff. But these people are only the hard core fanbois. The rest of us just read the credible rumours or just watch the keynotes.

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fishmoose said:
Submit that to Cult Of Mac. They'd run it as an EXCLUSIVE.
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I'm surprised MacRumors has not also run it as an exclusive as well.
 
chrmjenkins said:
The iFPGA reference is not a joke. That's been in there before. Apple likely prototypes hardware on FPGAs just like any other major consumer electronics manufacturer. Also, before iPad became iPad it was listed as "iProd" in itunes betas.
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Its presence is not purely a joke, no, but giving it that name is most certainly a sort of in-joke from an Apple engineer. They could have used any number of other, more generic placeholder names for early device prototyping, but they didn't, because "iFPGA" is a pretty funny notion:

An FPGA is like a Swiss Army knife meant exclusively for electrical engineers with the knowledge and equipment to give it purpose. And that's fine: if a tool is only useful to a specialist, it's reasonable to design it with the expectation that only a specialist with use it.

Meanwhile, if you think about what Apple's iSomething branding represents (and has always represented) -- consumer devices that bring technology to the masses using simple, elegant designs that anyone can just pick up and use -- then, well, an FPGA is just about the opposite of that.

And yet, an FPGA chip and an iPad are similar, through a shared sense of versatility: just as an iPad 'becomes' whatever app you're currently running, an FPGA 'becomes' whatever chip design is currently programmed into it.

So the humour of iFPGA (and yes, I did laugh out loud upon seeing that) comes from the juxtaposition of these ideas. It's almost entirely inconceivable as a commercial product, but with a tiny shred of plausibility that makes you pause for just a moment and wonder.
 
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