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Tech Breakthroughs Take a Backseat in Upcoming Apple iPhone Launch (reuters.com)
Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters: The new iPhone is expected to include new features such as high-resolution displays, wireless charging and 3-D sensors. Rather than representing major breakthroughs, however, most of the innovations have been available in competing phones for several years. Apple's relatively slow adoption of new features both reflects and reinforces the fact smartphone customers are holding onto their phones longer. Timothy Arcuri, an analyst at Cowen & Co, believes upwards of 40 percent of iPhones on the market are more than two years old, a historical high. That is a big reason why investors have driven Apple shares to an all-time high. There is pent-up demand for a new iPhone, even if it does not offer breakthrough technologies. It is not clear whether Apple deliberately held off on packing some of the new features into the current iPhone 7, which has been criticized for a lack of differentiation from its predecessor. Still, the development and roll-out of the anniversary iPhone suggest Apple's product strategy is driven less by technological innovation than by consumer upgrade cycles and Apple's own business and marketing needs.
When will it be here? I MUST have it!
Get rid of that awful fucking iTunes software and let me access the phone like any normal USB device.
"Still, the development and roll-out of the anniversary iPhone suggest Apple's product strategy is driven less by technological innovation than by consumer upgrade cycles and Apple's own business and marketing needs."
Doing it for the money, who woulda thought?
It's true though, every time they come out with a new feature it's like they invented it.
They just mean not low anymore.
There is pent-up demand for a new iPhone, even if it does not offer breakthrough technologies
No, not really. As long as it gets security updates and still works, why bother upgrading? I just replaced the battery in my iPhone and expect to get at least a couple more years out of it.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Do people fall for that kind of bullshit?
a headphone jack.
Get all the perks of the latest phone with all the bug ironed out. Still riding out a 6s until the 8s rolls through. 2-3 years for a phone is about right for me. No need to upgrade immediately as apple rarely does anything earth shattering in their phones any more.
Why should I be someone's guinea pig for new features when this phone meets 99% of my needs.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Get rid of that awful fucking iTunes software and let me access the phone like any normal USB device.
I honestly cannot remember the last time I opened iTunes on a desktop computer or synced my iPhone with it. That hasn't been a requirement for years.
As for using it as a USB device, I feel you but doubt it is going to happen any time soon.
This is just a justification for Apple's relatively recent incompetence when it comes to innovation. The times of Jobs and Wozniak are gone, this is what the article basically says. Instead of spending on building a new campus, Apple should sit down and figure out "where the future lies".
The biggest change for me coming from Android is the lack of a filesystem.
This word, breakthroughs, I do not think it means what you think it means.
How can features be "innovations" if they're already present in other phones?
They may have been innovative features when first released - but they're already out in the market now.
#DeleteChrome
"There is pent-up demand for a new iPhone, even if it does not offer breakthrough technologies"
Why is there demand for a very modest upgrade? It seems like people are holding onto their old phones because the upgrades are insignificant..
Twinstiq, game news
iPhone batteries are supposed to die between 2-3 years to force you to upgrade.
people are holding on to phones longer so that means there is pent up demand for upgrade? I would imagine holding on to it means they do not want to upgrade. Or that the upgrade option wasn't an upgrade but just a new phone....which would mean some new killer feature or features are needed to lure them into an upgrade. This reasoning doesn't add up.
I have my phone. Let Apple play catch up. Fuck Apple.
I love reading the articles where you just know the author is cradling his Android phone and looking for reasons to bash Apple while having to make it obvious he knows full well Apple is a great investment and is probably already in his 401k.
I feel like this is consistent with PC upgrade cycles. Sure, there are tech breakthroughs, but as someone who upgraded their PC every year or two for over a decade, my last one went for 11 years and was really still perfectly usable and acceptably played what I threw at it. I only upgraded because it was starting to not like POSTing on a regular basis.
I feel like for most users, they're not pushing their iDevice or Android anywhere close to it's potential and will be able to continue using it far longer than the traditional 2 year upgrade cycle. We're comparing 'Really Fast', to 'Really Really Fast', when people only need 'Fast' to do what they care about.
Wireless charging has been around for at least a decade, and the electric toothbrush battery is still going strong
I have an iPhone 7, it's a nice phone but really it doesn't seem better or worse than say a Samsung 7. Homestly since the inclusion of the fingerptint scanner there hasn't been a real new must have feature I can think of in any phone. I just can't think of really any features I feel I am missing to be honest. I feel wireless charging is somewhat of a joke and seems like a good way to waste electricity, so what are iPhones missing?
As for the lack of a headphone jack it was annoying until I picked up some airpods, they are truely amazing, but loookimg at the features on the Samsung 8 or the iphone 8 well none of them seems like I would be that much of a must have.
"Apple's relatively slow adoption of new features both reflects and reinforces the fact smartphone customers are holding onto their phones longer."
Instead, I posit that overpriced hardware with little innovation (*glares in frustration at new MacBook Pros*) results in customers holding on to their phones longer. Without some amazing leap or new feature, there's little to temp me into upgrading more than every few generations of iPhone.
It's amazing that a news company can divine a company's whole business strategy from un-proven rumors about a single product. Just awesome.
As someone who moved on from Android, I don't care for stupid things like wifi charging. First of all wifi charging causes a ton of stress on the battery and causes premature failure. Also, I don't use most of the other touted features. Apple should be working to improve its calendar and mail apps. It also should add an IR to the phone as that is the only missed feature to my Samsung. This all being said we have finally reached the stage that smartphones are good enough to pretty much do everything we want them to do. When we reached that stage with soundcards the market stagnated and the same with desktop PC's, a 5-year-old computer can still do most functions the user wants to do. There are going to be the groundbreaking phones that try to replace a PC, but the problem with that is for a user like me, there is no way in hell a little RISC processor is going to handle my PC workload. The sound quality also out of my IP7 is amazing when used with an external DAC, much better and I saw the axe to the headphone jack as the way we're going to go for a long time. Most of the features of IP7 were performance related. The fact that the memory now is as fast as an SSD and that they upgraded lightning to work with USB-C for USB 3.1 type speed transfers. The biggest feature also that gets ignored unless you've been an Android user is the fact that Apple supports their devices. I am not a fanboy, I bought a phone for every Android release up to Nougat as I liked the customization options. I just got to the point though that I was tired of waiting almost 9 months for the carriers/manufacturers to release the next android version for my phone. I was tired of buying a new device just to get a new OS feature. Android has move towards locked boot-loaders and no root access, so there isn't much argument in the way to keep Android over the iPhone and I can say that the performance of my IPhone when trying to overload it has been very enlightening, especially when gaming.
You iPhone users are in for a treat!
Wireless charging is awesome! I've used it every day since the technology came out about 4 years ago!
iPhones are rebranded Samsung phones.
My wife's two-year-old iPhone 6 started glitching, so she just replaced it with - An iPhone 6.
She likes the iPhone technology stack (I'm an Android guy), but refuses to buy a phone without a headphone jack. For times when she does want to go wireless, bluetooth works fine for her.
Did they go back to a sane Mac Pro case design yet? No? Still forging ahead with form over function? Yes?
Okay, going back to sleep now.
I want a new Mac Pro Tower, not another box using throttled laptop parts. Oh, and I'm not storing video projects in the cloud so I need to have a box that has a lot of room for hard drives. And two ethernet ports.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
That's exactly right. And because these devices are designed down to the level of the ignorant, rather than uplifting them, they don't have to learn. And those of us who could use these devices to a much greater extent remain reined in by this pandering to market. Subfolders are too complicated, the apologists tell us. There's no saving people too stupid to learn what a subfolder is/does. But those who are simply ignorant can learn in seconds. The insistence that this is "too much" is utterly pitiful to hear.
In the end, dumbing everything down is the surest way to the market consisting of the broadest portion of the Gaussian, and therefore, their money. That's why this is happening.
Time to watch the intro to Idiocracy again to remind ourselves why pandering to the lowest common denominator is a really, really bad idea.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This speaks to the /. crowd not really understanding what "technology" is.
Do you think Thomas Edison really "invented" the light bulb out of thin air?
New technology is pretty much always a slight improvement from some previous tech. Marketable consumer technology makes its improvements in things that consumers care about (i.e., getting rid of those bugs and kinks--and this isn't easy, btw, try it someday). Apple wins in the market because they are (a) trying to solve the technology problems that matter most to consumers, and (b) they're better at solving those tech problems than their competitors.
If it was easy (or just a matter of "marketing") then every other company would do it.
Interesting way to twist the narrative from Apple being a leader in innovation to Apple purposedly delaying tech breakthroughs to their advantage... I guess it's the fanboy distortion field operating once again.
If they remove features to sell more dongles it's for having courage to take the next step, if they don't adopt a tech that is plenty mature it's because they have something in development that is better, if they close down the system it's either for security or privacy, if they make accessories proprietary and expensive to license it's for quality control, if there's a hardware defect either you are holding it wrong or it affects too few devices to count...
This is one key difference I've noticed between Android and iOS fans... iOS fans are far more forgiving.
Oh well.
No, I really have not.
I just want bloody subfolders and the ability to get at the filesystem. I don't care if I have to turn it on specially. I don't care if your snowflake pilots can't see it. I just want it to really work without having to root the bloody phone.
Good grief, no. I'm arguing for pre-1990 levels, almost prehistoric levels by computing standards, of organizing capacity. There's nothing wrong with most user's intellects -- other than the intellects behind the reasoning that says "one level is all you get", now those intellects are simply downright crippled.
Yeah, my use case incorporates the concept of organization far beyond what these crippled devices allow, and yes, I readily admit this is beyond most phone-only users comprehension at the moment (although not if they have ever used a desktop or laptop computer), but just as you said, they (you mentioned pilots, I'd add four-year-olds) could cope with it if it was there. I don't even think they they should have to; I just think I should be able to.
The idea that everyone must suffer because pilots - or whomever - want simple is nothing less than anathema to me. I despise it, and I despise its proponents, and I find their reasoning (which is being far too generous) to be unworthy of serious consideration.
Filesystems promote organization. Single level folders went out of use in the 1980's, and the reason they did is because they are insufficient to organize any amount of data beyond a cupful. And no, "search" is not a valid replacement, before anyone tries to jump into that moldy old corner. The very fact that my home screen overflows onto additional pages and I am unable to properly, reasonably, organize my apps and data is a huge red flag that the system itself is deficient. Multiple cores, GHz+ clock speeds, gigs of ram and storage... and I can't have bleeding subfolders? Jesus. Hosiphat. Christ.
And the Long-Dong-Silver sized irony here is that if you DO dig into the actual systems underneath the sadly flattened icons to see how the phone actually works, what will you find? YOU. WILL. FIND. SUBFOLDERS.
There's simply no adequate justification for the intentional, irreversible crippling that's been done to end-user level of these devices. None.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.