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.

Comments

Well there's a surprise

[ddtmm]

"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.

Re:Well there's a surprise

[bigdady92]

Apple's Marketing is awesome like that.

One thing I will give Apple is that they will take technology that is mostly mature, fix lots of bugs and kinks, then roll it out and proclaim it "New! Exciting! So Pleased to show you!"

Yes Premium Android Smartphones have had everything that the Iphone8 will have for years. Apple will bring that capability to the masses and then the fleet of android handset manufacturers will push those features out till every single phone has it.

Re:Well there's a surprise

[whoever57]

"if you want to know what is coming in the next iPhone, just look at what was new on Android two years ago"

Re:Well there's a surprise

[Guspaz]

Sometimes they did invent it, or do it first. Sometimes they took something pre-existing and polished it enough to be practical. Sometimes it was done better by other companies first. But this sort of describes every major smartphone vendor.

My point is that while there's certainly some of it, Apple isn't entirely "me too". They've had some firsts, like beating everybody else to market with 64-bit ARM by something like a year, and they've generally been something like 3-6 months ahead of the curve in terms of SoC performance in general. They weren't the first to do fingerprint readers, but they were the first to do them well enough for mass-market use. And if the rumours hold and the next iPhone is able to read your fingerprints through the screen, that'd be a big first too.

Re:Well there's a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the marketing, it's the consumer. The vast majority of consumers want mature technology. They don't find bugs and quirky behavior a selling point nor do they want that on them even if it means some kind of bragging rights. Apple does it right by consumer demand. It's not cutting edge but it works and I'm more than happy with that. I can't recall the last time Apple put something out there that I really felt that they should have done sooner. I remember far too many rushed-to-production "features" on Android that finally got me to give Apple a try. It's a trade off but it's well worth it at the end of the day.

Re:Well there's a surprise

[fred6666]

Turn by turn GPS navigation, WiFi hotspot, contact cloud synchronization, large displays, water resistance all worked just fine on Android before being copied by Apple. I don't mind if it is called "beta" by Google as long as it works.

Re:Well there's a surprise

[InvalidsYnc]

That must be why seven Android phones are sold for each iPhone.

That might be due to the fact that you can get an Android phone for free, or a couple of bucks most of the time. Now if you want an S7, sure you'll pay as much as an iPhone, but Android on the other hand, on the whole is much cheaper (you can choose what that means to you).

Re:Well there's a surprise

[fred6666]

So? When is it the last time Apple released something that matters for Android? And no, that "move to iOS" app doesn't count.
Android had this important feature first. Just like the others I mentioned and many more.

Re:Drop iTunes requirement

[MightyYar]

It's all clouds and dewdrops now. That's last decade's battle.

Re:Drop iTunes requirement

[pecosdave]

Even Android has basically done away with this over the years, then Google fought a war on SD Cards and semi-lost, but had a victory in the way they encrypt them. I believe in Androids case it's to arm-twist people into using and paying for Google Music.

I have found KDE Connect to be a reasonable and useful replacement for using the phone as a USB device. I can do more than 90% of what I used to do while using it as a USB device, and the fact I'm using a Google phone makes the other 10% not matter, now that I no longer have carrier/manufacturer bloat to forcibly remove.

As for the iPhone - not being able to do this sort of thing is a lot of why I abandoned the platform when my 3G gave out.

The market is saturated

[dugancent]

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.

Re:The market is saturated

[Nidi62]

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.

My wife finally replaced her iPhone 4 last year. With one of my parents' old iPhone 5 that they had laying around since they both now have work provided phones. Even phones that are 2 generations old are still plenty good enough these days. I was using my S5 until last week when it got smashed in my car door to the point the display was shot. It's the only reason I now have an S7, but I was planning to hold on to my S5 for at least another couple years.

Re:The market is saturated

[avandesande]

Been an apple hater for a while but think I might go for SE... I like small bricky phones and everything else out there looks like junk. At 200$ it is even reasonably priced.

Re:The market is saturated

[trawg]

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.

Anecdata: with every new iPhone release, a little less than half of my friends upgrade. The next release, the other almost half upgrade.

Most people I know are on a every-second-phone cycle that seems to suit them pretty well. There's a very small percentage (maybe 2-3 people) who always upgrade to have the latest one, and a slightly bigger group who stick with their phone until it dies.

Re:The market is saturated

[thoughtlover]

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.

Exactly my thoughts/experience... there is no reason for me to upgrade my iPhone 4. It does everything I need it to do, and if it doesn't, I'll jailbreak it. The phone is still using the original battery; I fully cycled the battery anytime I got the chance to (which was pretty much every charge) and it still goes for days. Amazing, really.

Re:The market is saturated

[antdude]

Which model do you have? I am debating to keep using this 4S with its crappy original battery life or upgrade/replace it since it is slow and no more updated iOS.

I know a tech innovation they should include...

[dbialac]

a headphone jack.

Always wait for the S version

[bigdady92]

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.

Re:Always wait for the S version

[Nidi62]

Why should I be someone's guinea pig for new features when this phone meets 99% of my needs.

Out of curiosity, assuming you are doing a payment plan and not paying for the phone outright, if the phone meets 99% of your needs why are you upgrading every 2-3 years as soon as you get your old device paid off? With the 2 year upgrade cycle people are locking themselves into perpetual device payments.

Re:Always wait for the S version

[swb]

IIRC, the AT&T Next program or whatever they called it made my last iPhone (6 Plus, so it's been a while) basically an 18 month interest free loan.

If you're upgrading on two year cycles, then that's at least 6 months with no payments. 3 years would make it 18 on and 18 off with payments.

In some cases, even "perpetual" payments may not be as bad as they seem. Until the 6 Plus, I upgraded every year but my wife got my year old handset and her handset got pushed down to be our "home" phone. So each phone technically had a 3 year (probably slightly longer) use cycle, at which point it was close to software obsolete or nearly unusable with the most recent software update.

My 6 Plus is the first iPhone I've had where there wasn't a noticeable degradation in performance when switching to the "new" OS released with a new phone model. Between that and the lack of compelling new technology, I've been content at this point to hold on to my 6 Plus. It really is all I need.

Re:Always wait for the S version

[ranton]

Out of curiosity, why are you doing a payment plan? My take is that if you can't afford to pay for a give phone outright, don't buy it. Same as buying shoes, why would anyone buy them on a payment plan?

Any time I get the opportunity to pay installments with 0% interest, I generally take that option. I could easily buy an $800 smartphone up front, but as long as Verizon is willing to give me an interest free loan why would I pass that up?

Re:Always wait for the S version

[Just Some Guy]

We switched away from buying our phones through Verizon, to the Apple Upgrade Program. It's a zero-interest loan over 24 months, but you can upgrade every 12 months by extending the loan so that you have another 24 months remaining.

On this plan, the most logical behaviors are to 1) pay off your phone and hold onto it as long as possible, or 2) upgrade the moment you can so that you're not continuing to make payments on last year's model. The worst option is to upgrade every two years, because your monthly payment is exactly the same as if you upgrade every year but you have an old phone half the time.

Re:Always wait for the S version

[NatasRevol]

Yes, the opportunity cost on $700 is huge!

Why, in fact, I have this really cheap stock that you should buy $0.05 right now, guaranteed to go to $0.35! get 7x your money back.

blah blah blah

Re:Always wait for the S version

[ranton]

Because you're still on the hook for a $700 or $800 phone or whatever. The interest rate isn't the only factor to take into account.

The interest rate is the only factor when deciding whether to pay up front or with a payment plan (or nearly the only factor), which is they only question posed by the GP. Deciding whether a phone is worth $800 is another matter.

Re:Always wait for the S version

[bigdady92]

I paid for the phone outright. Not on some payment plan locked to a vendor who will charge me an arm and a leg for service. It was cheaper in the long run to do this vs go with ATT/VZ/SPrint

I can choose to upgrade or I can stay with the current phone. 2-3 years is the length the phone batteries last, screen gets scratched to shit, device gets wonky. A hardware refresh keeps me uptodate and I got my money's worth out of the device.

Re:Always wait for the S version

[OffaMyLawn]

The way Verizon currently handles the iPhone and the Galaxy S line is on a yearly upgrade cycle now exactly as you described. I pre-ordered the 7 Plus to replace my strangely behaving Note Edge, and I'll be able to get the new iPhone when it is released, without having to go straight to Apple.

Re:Always wait for the S version

[hipp5]

Because you're still on the hook for a $700 or $800 phone or whatever. The interest rate isn't the only factor to take into account.

Well if you have any other debt at all, you're better off being on the hook for $800 at 0% interest and applying that $800 to your other debt. Most mortgages will permit extra payments. You've basically taken a 0% loan from your cell provider and used it to reduce the balance of your 3.5% loan.

Even if you have no debt, if you're half financially competent you should still take the 0% phone loan and put that $800 into an investment.

Where you burn yourself is if you take the 0% phone loan, and then use the $800 to buy yourself another shiny trinket.

Re:Always wait for the S version

[ThosLives]

Funny thing with this rationale is that it fails to quantify the benefit of not having a monthly payment obligation.

Also - if you have $800 in your pocket now and you want to take out a 0%/24-month loan and "invest" the cash instead of buying outright, that means you have to have an investment where you can withdraw $33 a month to make the payment on the 0% loan. You can't just pay that $800, say, into your mortgage because that money is not really liquid and you can't use it to make the payments on that 0% loan.

Re:Always wait for the S version

[Just Some Guy]

We ran the numbers and Apple's plan came out better for us. One big advantage is that Verizon is just our carrier now, so if T-Mobile makes a better offer we're not contractually bound to anything.

iTunes hasn't been a requirement for years

[sjbe]

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.

Re:iTunes hasn't been a requirement for years

[pecosdave]

Even though I no longer user i-Devices as someone in I.T. I works with lots of users who use them religiously.

I still recommend users of iDevices open iTunes occasionally and sync if for nothing more than backup purposes. I know most of it syncs to iCloud or whatever now, but the solid backup on your own system still seems to be the best way to restore user data when an iPhone falls into an iCrapper full of iPeed and must be replaced.

Re:Nothing says demand like not buying new phones

[molarmass192]

That's nothing, you should see the pent-up demand for buggy whips!!! That market has about 100 years of "delayed" sales, it's gonna be yuuuuuuuuuge!!! Hell, joking aside I'm going to use a variant of that in my slide decks: "This isn't a drop in sales, it's pent up demand!"

filesystem

[OffTheLip]

The biggest change for me coming from Android is the lack of a filesystem.

Re:Drop iTunes requirement

[alvinrod]

I've got an iPad and haven't used iTunes for anything in a long time and I don't think I've even hooked it up to a PC at all since I got the Air 2 several years ago. I suppose they have the "iTunes" app on the device itself, but you don't need to sync it with a Mac/PC at all. However, the only thing you can access when plugging it in like a USB device would be the photos as it doesn't expose the file system. There are some applications that you can put on your computer that will do that if you really want.

I think that most people who really want or need that functionality are using Android or a Windows tablet already though. They really should fix the unholy abomination that has become iTunes though. It was pretty decent back in the day, but bloat and feature creep made it an unwieldy mess. I kind of understand why they don't want to make anything better in order to product their digital media sales business, but there are a phone apps for all of that now so there's little point in having iTunes be anything more than just music management software at this point.

Re:Drop iTunes requirement

[MightyYar]

That's what I meant by clouds and it being last decade's battle.

this word, "breakthroughs"

[Anonymous Coward]

This word, breakthroughs, I do not think it means what you think it means.

"Most of the innovations..."

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Upgrade for the sake of upgrade?

[HalAtWork]

"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..

Re:Upgrade for the sake of upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

That and the iPhone 7 is a rather significant downgrade in two respects: the obvious loss of the headphone jack and the less obvious loss of the physical home button.

Slashdot has reported on this some, but the home button in the iPhone 7 is no longer a physical button. It's now a pressure-sensitive "soft" button. This means you can't use it if you're wearing gloves (not even the ones that "work with touchscreens") and that it can just randomly stop working when the software crashes. It no longer feels like a button since it shakes the entire phone to "simulate" a button click.

Beyond that, all the upgrades are rather bland. Same camera, slightly faster processor, slightly faster I/O but same storage space. Nothing interesting. So it's not surprising that the iPhone 7 is a dud and that people are sticking with older iPhones: they still work, they're still being updated, and Apple has really added nothing interesting since they added TouchID.

Re:Pls cut the crap

[supremebob]

Apple tends to let others release new "innovations" first, and then released improved versions of those innovations that are more stable and easier to use.

People seem to forget that Apple didn't invent the smartphone, or even the first smartphone with a touch screen. Microsoft had "Windows Mobile" products years before Apple, but they were unstable and difficult to use. They basically were a mess because they tried to cram a Windows XP style UI onto a 3.5" screen.

Same deal with the tablet. There were plenty of touch screen tablets before the iPad came out, but most of them had a crummy UI and lousy battery life. Apple fixed most of those issues.

Re:Drop iTunes requirement

[pecosdave]

Oh, I've done it. I did it on my M8. Every time I had wanted to use USB I would have to go into developer options and enable USB for data access. If I unplugged my M8 even momentarily I would have to re-enable USB access in the developer options regardless of what software I had installed. I'm sure I could have gotten some other firmware for it where this was no longer the case, but running the Google Play Edition ROM kept me from wanting to do that.

BTW - as you can see from the fact I called out KDE connect I do use Linux.

I found using KDE connect to be more reliable than USB since the underlying OS fought using USB so viciously even when it was enabled I would have file transfers stall out and need to be resumed later whereas I could do a file transfers of 16 GB - my music collection - in one go with KDE Connect.

Yes, sometimes I do miss the simplicity of putting my original EVO with WiMax on my system as a straight up USB drive, or the ability I had with my EVO 4G LTE to boot up into Clockwork Mod or whichever one I was running at the time and make my entire phone a big USB device out-of-OS, but being able to load it up as a reliable network share on my desktop that's just about as reliable as the SFTP connections I have to other systems on my network make the USB cable almost a trivial concern.

Re: Drop iTunes requirement

[known_coward_69]

i like the no file system access and having apps use their own dedicated storage which can be locked down

means i can lock down apps and the data in them so my kids can't access them while playing with my phone

Same as PC-land

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Amazing

[MikeMo]

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.

We have reached the stage of good enough

[Guitargeek86]

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.

Re: Drop iTunes requirement

[phayes]

Once again an AC troll who claims that "you gotta use android to do that" is wrong...

VLC on the iPhone is free and allows you to transfer videos to an iphone without even using iTunes:
http://ioshacker.com/how-to/tr...

Headphones

[CohibaVancouver]

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.

Tech breakthroughs can go into a new tower

[sandbagger]

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.

Idiocracy

[fyngyrz]

the vast majority of the tablet/phone purchasing world has no clue what you mean by that statement. They. Don't. Care.

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.

Re:Idiocracy

[shilly]

You've really missed the point. You are after complexity of the OS so that you can do complicated things with the OS. But most device users are after simple yet powerful solutions for the complex problems they face. Like airline pilots who use IBM's Plan Flight app to calculate fuel loads. I'm pretty sure pilots could cope with a sub-folder, but they really don't *want* to, nor do they *need* to -- they'd rather have big-data-driven decision support for optimising fuel loads presented in an intuitive, fast-to-use format.

http://www.ibm.com/mobilefirst...

You think you're arguing for sophistication and intellect, but really you're arguing about the line between "as simple as possible" and "no simpler". Your use cases differ wildly from most of the billions of the users of iOS devices in where you feel the need for complexity.

All technology is a refinement of previous tech

[Brannon]

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.

Heh...

[XSportSeeker]

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.

Re:Drop iTunes requirement

[Applehu Akbar]

If the device management and synchronization functions in iTunes were split into a separate application, the iTunes interface for music and video could be made more usable again for that specific purpose. There's nothing like having to keep relogging into iTunes Store when I just want to send a set of slideshow photos up to my iPad. And for s real exercise in frustration, just try exporting a set of albums from your iTunes library as MP3s on an SD card for playing in your car.

Idiocracy doubles down

[fyngyrz]

You've really missed the point.

No, I really have not.

You are after complexity of the OS so that you can do complicated things with the OS.

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.

You think you're arguing for sophistication and intellect

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.

Your use cases differ wildly from most of the billions of the users of iOS devices in where you feel the need for complexity.

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.

Re:Idiocracy doubles down

[Karlt1]

Why do you want access to *the* filesystem? If you just want the ability to access "a common place to store files that work across apps", you've been able to do that since IOS 8 over two years ago. If you don't like iCloud Drive, you can use Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and a few others. I believe all of the rest of them give you the ability to use folders.

Once any of these apps on your phone, any app that supports Apple's document picker, including Apple's own apps like Safari and Mail will let you load or save a file to any of them. It's up to you to decide which documents will be stored locally on the device.

Re:Idiocracy doubles down

[fyngyrz]

Why do you want access to *the* filesystem?

So I can control and organize my data.

If you don't like iCloud Drive, you can use Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and a few others. I believe all of the rest of them give you the ability to use folders.

I don't want to give my data to a third party. I want to be able to control my own data. I have plenty of local storage, and no need or desire whatsoever to place my information in someone else's hands. If you want to do so, of course, by all means. For myself, I'd just as soon not enter into the lottery of "which cloud service will suffer a security breach next", or the lottery of "which cloud service is sharing data with government / corporations / hackers / employees", or the lottery of "geee, the Intertubes are down, I guess I can't get at my data", or the "you must look at ads or pay a fee to get at your data lottery", or the "I'm on a plane and so I can't get at my data lottery", etc., etc., etc.

It's up to you to decide which documents will be stored locally on the device.

Indeed it is. And the answer is "all of them", except where I have also stored them on some other device I own and wholly control.

Re:Idiocracy doubles down

[Karlt1]

Luckily, if you care about folders and not having your documents on a third party server, you can do that. With just a quick perusal of the App Store I found two programs - Transmit and Documents. They both work with any app that supports document providers and they include share sheet extensions.

Re:Idiocracy doubles down

[fyngyrz]

This is a partial solution. It still doesn't let me organize my applications.

Re:Idiocracy doubles down

[Karlt1]

First you said you couldn't get access to the file system and that iCloud didn't do folders.....

I posted four or five different apps that you could use instead of iCloud.

Then you said you didn't want to Store your documents in the cloud because you have plenty of local storage options.

I posted two apps that you could use that met your requirements.

Now you can't organize your applications??? Do you really have so many apps that you need sub folders.

Re: Drop iTunes requirement

[pecosdave]

There was a short period where they really wanted all the manufacturers to drop SD support and recommended it. There was a bit of a revolt and Google quietly backed off. I was against this recommendation.

Now that they're actually putting enough storage in a phone - I have a 128 GB Pixel. I'm okay with not having an SD card because my music will fit directly on the phone with enough room to still have the rest of the phone. There was no reason bigger storage couldn't have happened earlier, the chips were there well before the phones were.