Electrical engineers could rejoice for this iPad gizmo

The iScilloscope: An iPhone App Late Career Bela Lugosi Could Be Proud Of
[Via Cult of Mac]

For years, the oscilloscope was my favorite gadget for being such a ubiquitous instrument in the basement laboratories of 50s B-Movie scientists. As a kid, I didn’t know what an oscilloscope did, but it was clearly important somehow in the business of creating atomic supermen, or taking over the world with giant octopodes, or operating a Billion Bubble Machine.

In all things, there must be an end to innocence, though, and eventually, I found out that an oscilloscope is just a pretty bog standard machine allowing you to measure oscillations in voltage or current, and has nothing to do with playing God or conquering this world of man. I abandoned it as a favorite gadget, and moved on to playing with my iPod.

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According to the company, it is the smallest mixed signal oscilloscope in the world. They have a free software demo on iTunes.

It would be really cool if it had appropriate sound effects for the display. Something science-fictiony.

How will an Apple TV monitor really fit?

Evidence points toward Apple releasing HDTV this year – report
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple could launch an Internet-connected high-definition television set by the end of 2011, entering the lucrative $100 billion LCD TV market, a new report claims.

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The TV business is really cutthroat with pretty thin margins. They are commodities with little customer loyalty. Price usually determines the sale.

What would this provide that a monitor and a $99 Apple TV box doesn’t? $2000 for this new thing. Really? How big a market is there for something like this? Netflix is hot but it only has 20 million subscribers. How many of those would put up $2000 for anApple product, even if it is a unique product? 10% would be high, I think. Would the total market be much bigger than 2-3 million?

Why would Apple enter a marketplace with low profits and a constrained audience? I’m not an expert here but it doesn’t seem like a very smart thing for them to do.

And the big problem I see here is the data packages from ISPs. All of them have data limits or will shortly. 250 GB of download sounds great until you realize that an hour of HD content from Netflix can be up to 2.7 GB. Several TVs and you could reach that limit.

Because of data limits in Canada, Netflix is providing lower versions of its movies that use 2/3rd less data, at some cost to quality. I’d expect to see the same sorts of things here.

Would Apple want to have the real control of its TV in the hands of ISPs and what they charge? Heck, if people start doing this, I’d expect the ISPs to lower the data limits and try and make more money off of those doing HD streaming. There is nothing to really prevent them. They can start comparing those streaming with data hogs using up all the available bandwidth.

As a rumor, this seems unlikely without a lot more idea of how Apple would be different.