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iPhone 3.0 Software Announced
Apple unveiled the iPhone 3.0 software just now in Cupertino. Here's MacWorld's live-action blow-by-blow coverage. The announcement included new features for developers and users. For developers, the big items were in-app purchasing (for example for game upgrades, map content, and subscriptions) for paid apps only; peer-to-peer connectivity via Bluetooth; giving apps access to hardware via the dock connector or Bluetooth; maps embeddable in apps; and push notifications. For users, there's finally cut-copy-paste available in all apps; search across everything in the iPhone; landscape keyboard; MMS messaging; and voice memos. Developer beta starts today and 3.0 will be available in the summer — free for all 3G phones, $10 for iPod Touch.
10:08 PT - DM: Scott looking very hip in a black zip-up. I wonder who does his hair. 3.0 is a major update to the iPhone OS. Comes with "incredible features" for developers and customers. Here's what's on tap for developers.
He's so dreamy! I hope the new iPhone OS has lots of his pictures pre-loaded!
And the new iPhone works with any service provider, right?
I, for one, am not looking forward to being spammed in my apps to pay "Only $.99 for this new widget! Click Now!". I expect everything from EA to be even worse on this platform than it has been to date.
Did you see that FPS demo where the guy had to pay extra to get the rocket launcher? That does **not** make me want to play that game.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
*EVERY* time Apple announce something new for the touch/iphone, it costs an extra $10 on the touch.
*EVERY* time someone moans about that.
*EVERY* time someone else points out that Apple account for iphone sales over a period of time, thus allowing them to maneuver around the ridiculous Sarbonnes-Oxley requirements. They bill the touch as a one-off, so can't add new functionality without there being a representative charge.
Whether you agree with them or not, that's their position (presumably that of their highly-paid lawyers, too). Get over it, *every* time you add onto the touch, you're going to pay extra.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The short answer is that our financial regulatory environment forces them to do so, kinda.
If Apple books profits for iPod Touches at the time of purchase, but then books expenses for iPod Touch development later, they are vulnerable to the accusation that they were hiding expenses on their balance sheet, which is illegal.
After getting burnt by this once in the past (Airport basestations, I think), they started charging for feature updates. When they book expenses for the development of iPod Touch 3.0, they can account for it like a new product for sale, and either make a profit or loss on those sales.
The other solution to this issue is that they book profits for iPhones on a "two year subscription basis". That means they only record 1/8th of the sale profit of an iPhone as profit in the quarter it was purchased. They can then charge further development costs against this same income, and they don't have to account for it like a separate product for sale.
Whether they should account for *everything* on a subscription basis is totally open for debate. It has been suggested that this subscription accounting is one of many factors that could be depressing Apple's share price. When they have a killer quarter for iPhone sales, that profit gets smeared across 8 quarters of earnings statements.
IMHO, it could be argued that this is a good thing, and forces shareholders to consider longer term value. So maybe they really should account for everything this way. The question is how profitable are these $9.95 iPhone OS updates & $100 Mac OS updates. Iduno.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
This only came up in the Q&A afterwards, but tethering is a new feature supported by OS 3.0, but Apple are not making a big thing of it yet because it's going to need to be negotiated with the phone carriers before it can be rolled out.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
* Removable Battery
* Video
* Speech to Text
* Waterproof
* Fireproof
* Shatterproof
* Self-cleaning screen
* Wriststraps
* Juice dispenser
* Cash dispenser
* Stock predictor
* Mechanical actuators of any kind
* Biometric monitoring
* Jury tampering
* AI
* Introspection
* ESP
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
If there's is something you don't like about the iPhone, you have choices like the Android but if you are patient, Apple might address your issue sometime in the future. It's not a matter of life and death that Apple didn't release the feature you wanted:
2001:
.
Apple: Introducting the iPod: 1000 songs in your pocket.
Naysayers:"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Seriously who's going to buy this? It is Mac only, uses Firewire, and costs $400!!
2002:
Apple: iPod 2.0: Touch sensitive scroll wheel. Now compatible with Windows. Up to 20GB
Naysayers: Okay, more space than a Nomad, but no wireless. Firewire only. Still expensive. Easily scratched
2003:
Apple: iPod 3.0: UI Redesign. Now USB compatible. Up to 40GB
Naysayers:Still waiting for wireless. Still expensive. No video or photo capability. Really I need something smaller, maybe flash based. Easily scratched. Still expensive
2004:
Apple: iPod mini: Smaller version of iPod. 4 or 6 GB disk based. iPod 4.0. UI Redesign. Clickwheel. Up to 40GB. iPod 4.1: now with color and photo capability. Up to 60GB
Naysayers:Still no wireless. Still expensive. No video. Maybe a phone/iPod combination would work. Easily scratched. Still expensive
2005:
Apple:iPod Shuffle: Ultra-portable iPod. Up to 1GB. iPod mini v2: New colors. iPod nano: Flash based. Color. Replacing mini. Up to 4GB. iPod 5.0: Now with video. Up to 80GB
Naysayers:No screen on the shuffle. Small video screen on the iPod. And it's not a touch screen. Replace the profitable mini, are they insane? The nano scraches too easily! Still no wireless. When is Apple going to make an iPhone? Still expensive
2006:
Apple:iPod Shuffle: Even smaller. Metallic shell. Up to 2GB. iPod nano: New scratch-resistant metallic shell. More battery life. Up to 8GB.
Naysayers:I can't use the new shuffle as a USB stick! Still no wireless or widescreen or touchscreen. No iPhone. Easily scratched. Still expensive
January 2007:
Apple:iPhone: multi-touch, widescreen iPod + mobile phone + internet browser + wireless
Naysayers:I wanted the phone part to be separate. It's only on AT&T. It's not 3G. I can't buy music wirelessly. It's frickin' expensive.
September 2007:
Apple:iPod Touch: iPhone without the phone. iTunes Music Store built in. iPod nano: New form factor. Video. Up to 8GB. iPod Classic: Metallic shell. Up to 160GB
Naysayers:iPhone is still only AT&T and not 3G. iPod touch is only 8GB and 16GB. And it's frickin' expensive.
February 2008:
Apple:iPod nano: new colors: iPod shuffle: new colors. iPouch Touch: 32GB available
Naysayers:iPhone is still only AT&T and not 3G. iPod Touch and iPhone are still expensive
June 2008:
Apple:iPhone 2.0: 3G. Slimmer, faster, more apps, cheaper. 8GB $199. 16GB $299
Naysayers:iPhone is still only AT&T. No cut and paste. The camera is 1.3MP and not video. Not cheaper: AT&T 3G plan costs me more than 2.5G plan. I blame Apple for this.
March 2009:
Apple:iPhone 3.0 software: Cut and paste. Bluetooth peer-to-peer connectivity. Complete iPhone search. landscape keyboard. MMS messaging. and voice memos.
Naysayers:Where's my total Exchange interoperability? No printing. No email filtering. No video recording.
Fast forward to the future . .
2020:
Apple:iPod femto: Size of a business card, but thinner. Direct neural interface. No charging, uranium battery last 5,000 years. Up to 500TB. iPhone X: Instantaneous, realtime language translation. Up to 20PB
Naysayers:Still no ogg. Should be 1PB. Neural interface is only in HD and not Extreme-HD. Should have used plutonium batteries that last 10,000 years. iPho
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's because they can.
There is absolutely no legal or accounting reason they have to charge for anything. Anything any Apple employee says to the contrary is a bald-faced lie.
Plenty of other companies give out free support, upgrades, and content for hardware and software.
The issue is Apple doesn't want to report the costs for the development and support of updates in their reports, so they act as if they'll never happen.
When demand reaches a point (WHERE THE FUCK IS MMS OR COPY AND PASTE?!) they can no longer ignore, they crank out the update and offset the cost by selling it. This pleases investors (and thereby keeps regulators off their backs), who would otherwise say "But you said costs were $X, and we launched last year! What the fuck is this new cost for?"
As to why iPhone users get it free and Touch users have to pay, I suspect that carriers are eating the cost (at a much-reduced rate).
Apple could easily report costs as $X, with an estimated $Y per year for continued support and development, for Z years.
Apple does not like to do things this way because they prefer to hide the cost (and then recoup them by selling the update). Apple also likes to be secretive. If you saw a report stating that the iPhone support costs are $Y per year for Z years, you could figure out that Z-1 years from now we'll be seeing the next iPhone hardware. And as we all know, Apple likes to keep new products under wraps for as long as possible, so people keep buying the old one up until very the day of the conference, when they all run out and buy the new one.
That sir, is your answer.
Record video from the camera
Seriously. If a couple amateurs can get it to work at some level despite every restriction they had in their way, there's just no excuse. Even if it sucked, it'd be better than nothing.
They market the phone to replace a number of gadgets people might carry around, and they sort of do it (mostly). That's the most frustrating thing of all. If Apple's iPhone division was running a marathon, it'd be like this: they'd start an hour and a half late, but regardless, they'd relentlessly catch up with the rest of the competitors. Then, they'd blaze ahead of the competition for the rest of the race--but they'd stop 20 feet before the finish line and just sit down right there, completely unexhausted, but protesting the idea of moving another inch.
Get off your asses and finish the job, you jerks!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
The really interesting thing in the announcement I thought was a hint that there might possibly be some low level of bacground apps. They were not clear on what they meant but this is a big deal.
People have complained there is no flash. At first I assumed, like most folks, this was because apple was stiffing adobe. Then after I started programming for iphone I got a glimpse of why I think there is no flash.
Basically there can only be one app runnning and resident at a time. When you switch between apps and then come back to say safari, it comes back to where you left it so from your point of view it looks like safari was resident and running while your attention was elsewhere. But this is not the case.
It's a clever illusion. Apps have to manage their own persistence. So to make it seem like that safari or any app has to save and restore it's complete state. And the apple iphone rules require this all has to happen in under 5 seconds or you get a kill -9 applied to your slow ass.
Now imagine safari is also running flash under the hood. It does not have the flash internal sate that it can save and restore so how can safari persist a flash system across sessions? It could try a desperation move and try sweeping out the memory as an image. But that won't work since it won't have permission from the OS to do that. Even if it did have permission, then what if flash is storing things on disk, how is safari supposed to keep all the file handles open across sessions?
You could probably come up with some workaround kludges but it would not be pretty.
And then there's that 5 second problem. If safari has to load and resotre it's state almost instantly, you don't want it having to speculatively reload flash every session start just because at some point in your browsing history you opened a flash web site. You'd have a really annoying end result of delaying the application swap for everyone by a second or two every time.
So you can see it's not as simple as it sounds due to the one-app resident at a time rule.
since the iphone has no Virtual memory, you can't just let it be resident and not running either.
thus you can see allowing background apps is not something to do lightly or get yourself locked into (like for example, windows CE) and have to have a task and memory management the user must control.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
* Blender-Proof
mod me funny
So, what you mean is, you've never owned a smartphone. My corded landline doesn't have cut and paste either, but every smartphone I've had has had cut and paste.
Lucky you. I have a fairly recent Nokia "business phone" with Symbian S60 as the operating system (Nokia E61i). It does support cut and paste, BUT you can only cut and paste (or copy for that matter) in edit mode. What this means is that you can't copy from a webpage, and to copy from an email you have to select "forward" or "reply". I guess you could call that smart if you stretch things?
...and while you present an interesting technical argument for lack of flash on the iPhone, it's much much simpler.
Flash games and applications bypass the app store.
If you bypass the app store, AT&T and Apple don't get to extract [more] money out of you or out of the end user. Apple and AT&T are more interested in money than in truly unifying the mobile and fixed web browsing experiences. End of story.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.