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Apple's Risky Balancing Act With the Next iPhone (macworld.com)
Long time columnist Jason Snell: As there always are at this time of year, there are lots of rumors out there about what the next iPhone will be. This year we're hearing that Apple is going to release a high-priced, next-generation phone in addition to the expected iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus models. [...] By most accounts, Apple's next-generation iPhone will offer a similar design. But also, by many accounts, Apple is struggling to create that product -- and when it arrives, it may be expensive, late to ship, and supply constrained. This is one of those areas where Apple may be the victim of its own success. The iPhone is so popular a product that Apple can't include any technology or source any part if it can't be made more than 200 million times a year. If the supplier of a cutting-edge part Apple wants can only provide the company with 50 million per year, it simply can't be used in the iPhone. Apple sells too many, too fast. Contrast that to Apple's competition. On the smaller end, former Android chief Andy Rubin announced the Essential phone, but even Rubin admitted that he'd only be able to sell in thousands, not millions. Same for the RED Hydrogen One -- groundbreaking phone, hardly likely to sell in any volume. The Google Pixel looks like it's in the one million range. Apple's biggest competitor, Samsung, has to deal with a scale more similar to Apple's -- but it's still only expected to sell 50 or 60 million units of the flagship Galaxy S8.
lmao I own an iphone 6 plus and I'm doing everything humanly possible to PREVENT updates. Because Apple really really wants you to upgrade your OS to the latest version, the phone will automatically download a 2 GB update, by itself, with no warning. And there's nothing you can do to prevent this, no amount of fiddling in settings will prevent this auto-update. Only thing that can stop it is jailbreaking, but currently there is no jailbreak for iOS 9 (which my phone is on).
Since there is no way to prevent it from the phone itself, you have to stop it on the network level. Which I did, by blocking the Apple update server on my Linksys router (it has a rudimentary firewall function). Here are the URLs you need to block if you don't want your phone auto-updating:
appldnld.apple.com
mesu.apple.com
Why would I want to prevent auto updating, you ask? Because after a certain point (usually 2 number versions later) your old(der) phone will choke on the bloated new OS and run like complete shit. I've had iphones and ipads that came with iOS 4 from the factory. Ran beautifully, very smooth and snappy. A year later iOS 5 comes out and you upgrade to it. You get some new features but you notice some jittery-ness and slower response and longer loading times for the browser and so on. Still usable, but definitely slower than before.
Then another year later (it's been 2 years now since you bought the phone) you upgrade to iOS 6. Now is when shit hits the fan, your phone runs like complete utter garbage to the point where you don't wanna use it for anything except taking phone calls.
It seems like iOS 6 was a particularly bad version. Apparently Safari got a major upgrade with a new rendering engine or something, so older hardware really struggled with it. There were lots of complaints, people asking how to revert to the older iOS version 5 (you can't). So Apple said they addressed the issue a year later when iOS 7 came out. I upgraded, hoping it would be better. Turned out iOS 7 was slightly better in app loading times, but still just as bad in terms of response and navigating (slow slow slow). At this point I just said fuck it, you win Apple, I'll sell my old iphone and ipad on Ebay for pennies on the dollar and pony up for new shiny Apple shit. And I bent over and spread wide.
Anyways my current iphone 6 came with iOS 8 from the factory. I upgraded to 9, and as expected noticed some slowing but still quite usable. But now I know better than to upgrade to 10 or 11 or whatever the fuck they're on. So my phone will stay on 9 until the day it dies.
Yes, yes, I know. Everything Apple does is one big Conspiracy.
The double tap on the home button to turn on the device and then go to the PIN entry adds exactly what functionality? None! At least let me swipe to get to the lock screen instead of wearing out a mechanical button on the device. And since the home button is the #1 thing to fail on an iPhone (besides cracked glass), how can you not claim it to be malicious on Apple's part? One of the first mods ever added by the jailbreak community was a soft home button so that you could use a device without replacing the button. That's how common of a problem it is and Apple did something that makes the problem worse.
You're kidding, right? The swipe left vs. right went completely unnoticed by me. I don't use that feature often enough to remember which way to swpie anyway!
I sometimes write software for Apple devices and have hardware that cannot be upgraded to the latest iOS. So some of my devices scroll through apps one way, and some of them scroll through the other. It's incredibly irritating when you switch devices. Sure, if you've only got one device you get used to it pretty quickly but again it was an arbitrary change for no real reason.
But if that's the best you can come up with, that's pretty minor stuff in the overall scheme of things for an OS.
I can think of dozens of changes that Apple makes to the UI every single time they roll out a new version of iOS. But you made the claim that everything they did was deliberate and well studied and I just don't think that's the case. Jon Ive does whatever the hell he wants now that Jobs is gone, and most of it is just because he decides it looks better this week than it did last week.