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For This Year's iPhone, Apple Is Ditching Lightning Connector and Home Button, But Embracing USB Type-C and Curved Display (wsj.com)
Apple has decided to adopt a flexible display for at least one model of the new iPhone, reports WSJ. From the report: People with direct knowledge of Apple's production plans said the Cupertino, Calif., company has decided to go ahead with the technology, and it will release a phone model using the OLED screens this year (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source). The technology allows manufacturers to bend screens in ways they couldn't previously -- such as by introducing a curve at the edge of the phone as in some Samsung models. However, once the phone is manufactured, the OLED screen can't be bent or folded by the user, at least with current technology. Using OLED displays would allow Apple to introduce a phone with a new look to fuel sales. They said Apple would introduce other updates including a USB-C port for the power cord and other peripheral devices instead of the company's original Lightning connector. The models would also do away with a physical home button, they said. Those updates would give the iPhone features already available on other smartphones.
So they are making an s7 edge without a home button.
new year new connector new headphones again!
Has hell frozen over?
Apple embrace USB-C? Why not go all in and say they will embrace a memory slot and stop overcharging hundreds of dollars for substandard memory space.
If this is true (it seems to be just a rumour) then it will be two years in a row that Apple made users' existing headphones obsolete. That would be brave/arrogant/foolish even by Apple's standards.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
It's abuot time they had the courage to use an existing standard on iPhones.
Still no headphone jack though - and yes, I'm still bitter.
Can we just do away with the physical phone and be done with it?
Sounds like with the addition of wireless charging, lack of headphone jack, and removing the home button - they are on track to make a phone that is a totally sealed slab. Once the last remaining physical connector goes away, it would be trivial to make a waterproof, dust-proof device.
Side benefit for Apple - even harder to replace the battery.
You forgot a dedicated memory slot so they stop overcharging hundreds of dollars for substandard memory space. Their flagship model is nerfed to 10x less than cheaper competitors.
I'll stand up to that challenge. You lend me your smartphone :-)
I'm not sure I'm a fan of the 'software' driven UI home button; I certainly don't care for it on any of my Android breed devices. I like the idea and design of a physical hardware button, but I won't if ditching this gives Apple more courage to mess with this rounded-screen design --- last time I checked, buttons are flat.
If anything it's going to take me a really long time to get used to not having that little indentation to blindly hover-touch my thumb on to do anything.
Yeah we had to buy $500 of new dongles once again, but they had curved screens. Curved. Screens.
"Using OLED displays would allow Apple to introduce a phone with a new look to fuel sales"
Note it's not to improve anything substantial in terms of usability or quality or crazy stuff like that. It's just to improve their bottom line.
I think it's rather honest of them to embrace and admit that, is "iCandor" trademarked yet?
Of course, *I* won't buy one and the legions of iZealots won't care.
-Styopa
Several of those items would make me stop buying them.
For all of their hype about courage, design, etc, I've always subscribed somewhat to the idea that Apple like proprietary because it drives more marginal revenue for them via licensing and (at least initially) single-source supplier status on some aspects of their hardware.
Which makes it seem strange that they would abandon Lightning for an industry standard connector. Dropping 30 pin connectors made sense from a practical perspective, and IIRC, they have some kind of proprietary chip in them which enables Apple to get a licensing cut (or guarantee quality standards, depending on how you like your kool-aid).
A standard connector would end their relative monopoly on cabling.
The rest of it -- virtual home button, etc, I'm totally willing to believe. The home button would actually be in keeping with their stated goals of removing bulky fixtures and connectors.
They've had the ability to have multiple apps open at once, and to copy & paste between them for some time now.
The change to 'push home button to unlock' is relatively recent, and the switch to a lack of button had been done 5+ years ago on the Pre3. (might have been on the Pre2 as well, I only had the Pre & Pre3). And they finally get wireless charging, which was an upgrade for the Pre (released in 2009).
The UI became more WebOS-like, switching to cards that you can sort through rather than the strip of icons at the bottom of the screen. (although it's still one card per app, not one stack of cards per app, with related windows stacked together, even if it's the MS Word reader and the web browser stacked w/ mail, as that's how you opened those windows).
Now they just need to make the notifications less crappy. An alarm that you can shut off by grabbing for you phone while half asleep? Who's stupid idea was that? .... and I'm wishing I had held out for the blackberry. Finally made the cutover to iPhone this weekend, after trying to get used to it for a few months while the Pre3 was my main phone.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
*Taps mic*
*Clears throat*
I have a lot of money to spend on a device, since I only do so every 4 or 5 years.
Could some "brave" soul please take a break from curving displays, gluing batteries, and adding bling to their phones, and address my market segment?
I really want to give someone my money.
For it, you will need to build a device that:
- Has a user-swappable battery, preferably with an ultracap allowing hot replacement. It's not really a hard to do. - Is too thick. I want pundits to reel. I want trash talk. "What kind of fashionista would buy this?" - Lasts 48 hours on a charge most days, and cannot self-discharge within 16 hours with all radios active and CPU bouncing off the thermal governor - Speaks all radio protocols fluently, with dual sim support - Is IP67 - Has a barometer, thermometer, hygrometer, full IMU with a razor sharp compass, GPS and GLONASS - Has both USB-C and MicroUSB on the bottom - Has great speakers - Has 4gb or 6gb RAM, and the best CPU currently available - No onboard storage.. just two raid1 MicroSD card slots with a battery-backed memory buffer Name your price. Since I don't let carriers leach my money away on phone contracts, nor do I toss out my phone every year, I (and a sizable market of people like me) have a lot of money to spend on a truly flagship device.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
3 - Dual SIM capability
iPhones now come with eSIM (branded as Apple SIM), which alleviates a lot of the need for this: you can have an arbitrary number of software-defined SIMs installed and switch between them at will.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Who really needs a $1000 phone, other than as a show of great eclat (word from a crossword puzzle yesterday)? It's basically just a status symbol, often owned by those who have no status to begin with.
Waiting until they switch from iOS to Android too...
Can you send a JPG to the iPhone via bluetooth? Because right now, each time I want to copy images to iCrap, I have to run a file-server (HFS) on my Windows machine and browse it from the iPoop Safari browser... Hoping it won't crash because this is all its poorly implemented Java cuck apps seem to do on iOS - crash and recover.
Does the iPhone 7 have this? Like my iPhone 7 w/ Verizon - could I just add another carrier when I travel outside the US?
Lasts 48 hours on a charge most days, and cannot self-discharge within 16 hours with all radios active and CPU bouncing off the thermal governor
I think the closest you get is the Japan-exclusive LG V34, or the US version LG V20 Dual-sim option, Plus find yourself some kind of IP67 case to seal it up in.
Gotta disqualify the Samsungs, Because when you use the Dual-Sim feature, you lose ability to use the Micro-SD storage slot,
since they make both of them use the same tray.... Like you would ONLY want Either Dual-Sim OR External storage, but not fscking both?!.
You're gonna have to make some compromises anyways, that's a physical fact.... The battery that could do what you would like to see would literally weigh 10+ pounds. Have enough RAM and CPU power, and it will Seriously drain some major mAh, and the battery density to get what you want has not been invented yet.
Nobody wants to be lugging around 20 pounds of cellphone. Why wouldn't people just grab a laptop or put a 30000mAh power bank in your pocket with a USB cord plugged into your phone (protected by a rugged cover/shield), in that case?
Welcome to this week's exciting game of "Connector du jour", where you try to guess what kind of wire, cord, or connector you'll need to charge your iPhone!
The First Place Winner gets a free dongle of their choice from Apple, while the Second Place Winner gets a night with the bride!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I think you overestimate the size of the market of people like you. Buuuut I digress. Have you looked at any of the OnePlus phones? The 3+ doesn't have everything you're looking for, but it's probably the closest you'll get.
He wants Apple to cater to the non-douche market.
You're not his target audience.
It'll be called the iPhone 7S and 7S+. It'll have the same design as the iPhone 7/7S, same connectors, slightly faster processor, slightly better camera, slightly better battery life, slightly better video performance, slightly better network support and iOS 11.
You know, like they've been doing since about 2011 when they first introduced the 4S.
At which point, we'll see that people who have "knowledge of the matter" really don't have any at all.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Well I'd go for that phone he wants. So there's at least 2 of us. :)
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
I wonder how that home button will be after a couple years of forced software "upgrades" have rendered the phone laggy and unresponsive? At least with a physical button you had tactile feedback to know you pressed it, be patient. If there is any delay between press and taptic feedback, people are going to start pressing harder, perhaps until something breaks.
...to see a story title on slashdot that reads "Apple is ditching Tim Cook".
It 's a 3-piece adapter that goes from 3.5 mm to USB to Lightninng to USB-C. All in the sake of modern technology.
Why does the skeptic side of me say that while they may be embracing USB-C, how much do you want to bet that the voltage spec will be incompatible w/ existing Android chargers. And knowing Apple, hey will find some way to make direct plug peripherals that work w/ Android incompatible w/ the iPhones. :(
"Come on fan boys, buy out crap (like speaker docks) for a THIRD time!" lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I hope they continue selling the iPhone 6S since when I break this one, I'd prefer to get a new one of these.
Tried the 7, sold it and I think I'll still with the 6 as long as I can. To be honest, I'd rather see them focus on software than hardware.
Well I'd go for that phone he wants. So there's at least 2 of us. :)
I suspect many people on this site would. But Slashdot is its own little niche.
No onboard storage.. just two raid1 MicroSD card slots with a battery-backed memory buffer
So not only do you want something that is only a fraction of the speed of modern smartphone NAND storage, but also 1/1,000,000th as reliable? I'm just glad that you're not designing modern smartphones.
These phones become useless after a short amount of time! Every phone I had after around 2 years required a battery change. My scuba diving computer, my old school watch are good at least to 300ft and both have replaceable batteries - so stop this BS. I will be just fine with 0.01mm difference in size as long as I can remove a couple screws. I will totally forgo 6in screen size in my used to be portable phone. Since these companies can't adjust we need to regulate them else we are going to create a ton of unnecessary eWaste.
Apple has consistently shown itself to be a) completely out of touch with customer needs and b) woefully behind the times with respect to technology.
USB-C has been a thing on cell phones for a couple of years now and they are JUST NOW getting around to it, after a completely flawed and failed experiment with an approach that was clunky, expensive, inconvenient for consumers, and technologically inferior in every single way imaginable to USB-C.
I would genuinely like to know why people keep buying their stuff.
...are a hideous example of function following form. The curve makes it difficult to protect the phone, and do not improve functionality in any way. It's something that needs to go away.
Thermometer isn't very useful on a phone since it generates a lot of heat and is often in your pocket.
USB-C supports analogue audio with a passive adaptor, so if Apple supports this mode then iPhone users would be able to use old headphones with a generic (cheap) adaptor.
Why would you need another adaptor when Apple would just ship one in the box like they did for the iPhone 7?
It doesn't matter if the adaptors are cheap.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's like asking real estate developers to build affordable housing, instead of affordable housing with a "luxury" tag that triples the price.
So I got an adapter for your adapter that replaces your adapter. Just take my money Dawg.
So everything they said before about the USB-C not being viable in their devices was total bullshit?
Actually, the V20 does come very close. It tempted me, and I'm really just waiting for ZeroLemon to release a ~10Ah battery/case, and for xposed to drop on N.
As for the battery weighing 10lbs for such battery life, though ... not true. My Note 3 with its (zerolemon) 10Ah cell lasts about 3 days idle, or 12 hours with the CPUs pegged, all radios on (though not necessarily tramitting at full bandwidth). With all the power efficiency gains on modern CPUs in the last few years, I'm sure 16 hours would be acheivable.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
You're probably right. Sigh.
The OnePlus 3+ looks good, but fails in the most fundamental way: they glued the battery in. :(
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Memory-backed microSD storage is significantly faster than NAND storage in all but edge-case scenarios.
RAID-1 array of microSD cards is significantly more reliable than NAND storage.
Seriously dude or dudette, what are you smoking?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Not true at all.
First, differential thermometers can be used to compensate for internal device heat, to some extent. Simply thermally isolate one thermometer, and not the other (ie. one on the screen, and one fused to the chassis). The difference is proportional to the amount of internally generated heat/temperature of the device. Even use of the current sensor over time can be used to roughly compensate.
Second, a thermometer in your pocket is working perfectly. It's telling you the temperature of your pocket. :)
If you want to know the temperature of the inside of your tent, room, or outdoors, you need to leave the device exposed to those conditions until it stabilizes. This is true for all non-infrared thermometers.
The trick is in careful thermal isolation, compensation, and use.
I use the thermometer on my Note 3 all the time.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Hit submit too quickly.
Just for reference, I have 3 thermal sensors on the table right now, and they read the following:
- Suunto Alu watch: 24C
- Standard mercury weather thermometer: ~24C
- Note 3: 23.8C
Good enough for me.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
You need to take some of his requirements with a grain of salt, and assume he's exaggerating. The battery-life requirement is one of those. I think it's entirely possible to get a significantly longer lifetime than current phones, with normal usage (not CPU bouncing off the thermal limiter...); all they need to do is double the battery size. Considering how everyone and his brother has some kind of case on his phone, a little extra thickness shouldn't be a big problem.
We don't need 20 pound cellphones, and it's true that such a thing would not sell very well. But there is room to expand the battery some and add many of these features back in, which used to be common: user-replaceable batteries, headphone jack, SDcard slot, etc., while not ending up with an overly-large phone.
You forgot "Sane display resolution for a portable device." I don't want or need a 4K HDR screen sucking down my battery.
The reason you (I mean people in general, not just you) are not getting more is because of what you have installed on your phone. In your case, the fact that you say the CPU is loaded should be a clue something isn't right. You should be able to get a full day with anything even remotely modern unless you're a pretty heavy user, in which case an extended battery should work. If you have a phone capable, I don't buy phones without sd or internal batteries, stop buying into trends.
So what's doing it?
Social media is one of the single biggest battery killers, widgets that constantly update (news and weather) are the second largest, with apps in general falling into third. Want to truly kill your battery, use a free ad based widget that handles your social media. It's bad enough you're using social media, which uses lots of data, but as a widget it's constantly updating and often using alarms and such to tell you it has updates, and if it's a widget, it also has to format the data for the widget every time it updates. If it's ad driven, its constantly updating advertisements, and worse still, the ads access the GPS every time too. Some will even turn on the wifi radio for data, location and data gathering (spying), which, while saving you data, uses a FAR less efficient radio. The same applies to weather and news widgets. Keep in mind, they don't share the radios when on, one will wake it, update, power down, then the next can kick them right back on and update. too many things, as is the case here, and the phone rarely gets a chance to idle down long enough to hold a charge.
So what can you do?
Get rid of the social media widgets, period. You can keep the social media, but lose the widgets. If you use a weather widget, use one without ads if possible, and instead of having it use GPS, lock it to either your work location or home, this way it's not pinging the GPS, which uses a lot of power and adjust it, if possible to only update every 30 minutes, or if you turn on the device. You may have to try a few weather widgets to find one that is efficient, some are insanely wasteful. Get rid of anything that puts an ad anywhere except inside itself and runs at boot, yes you may actually have to pay for something. Keep in mind, even some pay apps are tracking you for no good reason, I've called out developers on this in the past. Also, take a look and see what running at startup, in Androids you can see all running apps and in some cases shut them down, but some do it for no reason, uninstall them if they misbehave.
If you are using a "battery tuner" or "trainer", especially a free one, you are doing more harm than good. Yes, they can work, but in my experience they cannot beat what I posted above. Why? Because you are relying on yet another app to do what you should be doing. Why would you use an ad driven battery sucking app, to try to control the other ad driven battery sucking apps. Android has a way took and see what's using the battery ram and cpu cycles which you can use to help diagnose which apps are being battery vampires. Another to be careful of, on at least one phone I had, the "battery saver" or "efficiency mode" actually ate more battery, I'm not sure if this was because of a bad profile or because it idled down below a threshold that was too low for something the background or what, but for some reason it ended up costing me 20% of my battery runtime when I used it.
Lastly, if you are rooted (I can't stand to use one without root), remove factory boat and run an adblocker and/or firewall, you may even want to consider installing a rom, which deletes the factory bloat, adds efficiency, an removes some spying abilities of the manufacturer. There is also some apps which will let you strip or block apps from using GPS or even networking, while they can be helpful, be careful, they can break apps (uninstall the app and simply re-install will fix it).
So does it work?
Well, I can get 1-2 days on a Galaxy S3, about 2 days on a Galaxy S4, and 3 on an S5 (this
what? those haters from wsj spouting nonsense again?
ruurd
A waterproof phone is more resilient, and therefore would be a bug in the apple ecosystem. The phone will most certainly, and deliberately, not be waterproof so that you have to buy a new phone if it gets wet.
My Note 3 with its (zerolemon) 10Ah cell lasts about 3 days idle, or 12 hours with the CPUs pegged
3 days idle should be a cinch for the manufacturer.
The trouble is when you suggest top of the line CPU completely pegged out.
I believe top-of-the-line would be considered an ARMv8-A chip, of a model such as the Qualcomm SnapDragon 835 8-core processor.
Fully pegged out to maximum usage, Assuming the chip is perfectly cooled, so there's no throttling going on: the CPU's Going to wind up dissipating on the order of 16 Watts with a full load on the proc and no load on Gpu.
The minimum voltage required by the CPU is 3.7volts.
This means you'll be drawing 16/4 = ~4 Amps with a 4V battery.
Needing to choose a battery that provides no less than 3.7 volts fully discharged, this therefore means, You
need 4 A-h = 4000 mAh for a single theoretical Hour of runtime.
However, Lithium ION batteries have some finnicky chemistry requirements regarding their discharge cycle, So you must actually design the phone so that you shut the power down when there is less than 50% remaining, to avoid permanent damage to the battery, So from the user's point of view only 50% to 75% of the charge is accessible --- thus you actually need:
4800 x 16 = 76,800 mAh for 16 hours of runtime.
Since a 1100mAh cell is 25 grams; You can estimate that 70 of these cells in a battery pack in balanced parallel configuration will be 1750 grams Or ~3.8 pounds. This is a LOT to try and stuff in your pocket.
To put this in perspective.... just the battery capacity would weigh a Pound more than a Macbook air, Or
approximately the weight of two iPads.
and none of your new shit has it... so im no longer an apple fan boy
they glued the battery in. :(
Ah. That is a shame. And that one I don't really understand, because I feel like replaceable battery is a feature that has cache beyond the realms of Slashdot.
For sure. But I said right in my post "bouncing off the thermal governor." :)
I highly doubt your average sized passively cooled phone could continuously dissipate more than 2-3W staying below the core temperature limit.
2-3W for 16 hours.. plus radios.. ok, that's still an enormous battery. But 12,000mAh would get close, I suspect.
And, lithium ion polymer is one of the least finnicky chemistries on the market! The discharge curve is well documented and incredibly linear. Discharging 80% reduces the cycle life by little more than what you'd expect, scaling linearly, and the internal resistance doesn't significantly rise until 90% DoD. Permanent damage doesn't occur until discharge below 3V, which would never happen under even 1/4C load @ 90% DoD.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Also, the battery voltage is irrelevant. All electronic devices use charge pumps, boost or buck converters, and other techniques to regulate the voltage sent to the SoC and other components.
The 835 likely needs less than a volt, though I haven't looked over the datasheet.
There's absolutely no reason you couldn't use a standard 3.7V lithium ion polymer battery to 80% of its stated capacity, every day, for years on end, to run these loads. That's what most users, in fact, do.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
And one more while I'm nit-picking.. haha.
There's no need to balance cells that are in parallel.. only those in serial. Cells in parallel are, by definition, voltage-balanced.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
You need to take some of his requirements with a grain of salt, and assume he's exaggerating.
OP here. I want a pony, too. :p
I think the right answer is for manufacturers to start offering multiple battery sizes to suit the user. Everyone wins. It's not exactly difficult to offer a different phone back / battery to a high fit and finish, and they could charge an arm and a leg to people like me.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Agreed. 1080P is absolutely adequate for a 5-6" screen.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I haven't used wired headphones in years -- been happily on the Bluetooth bandwagon since BT 3.0 was the latest spec -- and I already have plenty of USB-C cables, including C to C and C to A.
Also, to the extent that *some of* Apple's hardware is "So Last Year" compared to the Android flagships, some of it is genuinely ahead of Android by 6 to 12 months. For instance, A10 Fusion is still today the fastest production system on chip that you can buy in a fully-functional, consumer-oriented device being produced at high volume. Both its CPU and GPU are quite a bit faster than the nearest competitor from Qualcomm and the like. Samsung's Exynos is even further behind, because their serial performance sucks; they seem to be stuck in the same "MOAR CORES" rut as AMD was for a number of years while they were irrelevant and a non-competitor to Intel. Single thread perf is king for consumer workloads (which is most HTML rendering, JavaScript execution and game engines), period, end of story.
Sure, Qualcomm will soon eclipse the A10 Fusion with something faster, but by the time an Android manufacturer puts it to market, Apple's next gen SoC (A11?) will be out in an iPhone you can go buy at your corner Best Buy or AT&T store. And it'll be the fastest again.
On the RAM front, iPhones also lag behind by about 2 years (the 7 Plus has the same RAM as the Note 4 from Q4 2014). But this brings me to my next point: Software.
I used Android phones from three different manufacturers (HTC, Samsung and Motorola) from the Android 2.0 era up til KitKat. And I swear that with every single phone, with every single stock firmware, I encountered the following, reliably: horrible, annoying bugs in my daily use case paths; awful, choppy Bluetooth with anemic range; very poor battery endurance (never more than 2 years); and some degree of bloatware that was impossible to remove/disable that had very significant storage and/or RAM footprint. I also spent most of my time with Android running a device with a widely publicly-known root exploit vulnerability (several of them exploitable remotely over the network or through apps I used), usually with some open-source exploit toolkit out there that could exploit the vulnerabilities my phone had. This is because as soon as an OTA came out fixing an exploit, another one would surface, rinse and repeat.
Lastly, despite all Google's efforts, Android devices are still extremely laggy even at the ultra high-end and perennially have performance problems, even with custom ROMs. There are so many little lags and hitches here and there that it just feels like it's running interpreted VBScript.
In my two years of using iPhones, I've never encountered a single bug of any sort. Yes, the software is not perfect and has bugs, but they're so minor or such edge cases that I've never encountered them in my daily workflow.
The performance is consistently, almost perfectly fluid, with exceedingly rare performance problems and hitches. For every single noticeable lag I've observed on an iPhone, I would've observed about a thousand of them on my Android device by using it for the same duration with similar use cases.
And Apple actually fixes their security problems quite expediently. Many OTAs have been rolled out whose entire content is just security vulnerability fixes. And often those vulnerabilities had been disclosed within the past week, or less. So the exposure time once a bug goes public is usually quite narrow or nonexistent.
Also, Apple is assertive enough to give the giant middle finger to parasites like Verizon and AT&T when they ask about the prospects of installing bloatware onto iPhones. They simply say "No". You might say that they build this into the device purchase price, but I can always purchase an unlocked iPhone and Verizon won't make a penny off of that, so there really is no financial incentive available to a carrier selling iPhones, except that *users want them* and want to use them on their favorite carrier's network.
I'm frighteningly