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Apple Could Have Brought a Big iPhone X Feature To Older iPhone But Didn't, Developer Says (twitter.com)
Steven Troughton-Smith, a prominent iOS developer best known for combing new software codes for references for upcoming features, over the weekend indicated that portrait mode lighting effects, a major feature in the current iPhone generation -- iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X, could technically be added to iPhone 7 Plus from last year. The feature works like this: you take a picture, go to the photos app on your new iPhone and play with the "Lighting" effects. He writes: So yeah you just need to hexedit the metadata in the HEIC. Not quite sure where, I copied a whole section from an iPhone X Portrait Mode photo and it worked. Original photo taken on 7 Plus on iOS 11. Someone could automate this. Just to add insult to injury, if you AirDrop that photo back to the iPhone 7 Plus now it shows the Portrait Lighting UI, and lets you change mode. So Portrait Lighting is 100% an artificial software limitation. 7 Plus photos can have it, 7 Plus can do it.
I know that this is news for nerds, but still, this is completely unimportant. So, you can duplicate one functionality of a new smartphone by manipulating images in software? OK, but why do I care, exactly?
It's just a computer, it can do anything software can do.
It's like, apple wants you to buy a new one every year!
Maybe they were in a hurry to get those features added for the new generation of smartphone and didn't want the time penalty of retro-porting and testing. No different from device driver support for old versions of Linux. Though eventually someone does get around to do retro-ports.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
How would this have sold more iPhone Xs?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My guess is that a "cornerstone" feature like this isn't so much artificially restricted as it is just disabled because Apple isn't testing iPhone 7s. That's not to say they won't backport, but their hands are probably pretty full just fixing iOS 11's messes.
How will people upgrade?
Good software deserves to be compensated. People hate to pay for software, but you want features, pay for them. It's just another reason to appreciate the hard work that developers go through.
Nothing stops people from stealing the feature, but those people wold probably steal the phone anyway.
Same with iOS 10 and the New iPad (sometimes called the iPad 3) - it is basically identical to the iPad with Retina display (sometimes called the iPad 4) except for two differences: it has the old-style iPod connector instead of a Lightning connector and it has a slower CPU. It has the same RAM, it has the same display, etc.
But Apple decided the New iPad was not new enough and so the iPad with Retina Display got iOS 10 (even though the New iPad has a retina display too) and the New iPad did not. Forced obsolescence.
I have seen numerous companies that had a tiered line where the lower end model is identical to the higher end just feature locked. Part of the fun of getting the lower end model was hacking it to unlock the higher end features. a good percentage of the automotive head units are this way. In fact the Ford I have now has a head unit that supports a backup camera but my model doesn't support the option so if I want to add a camera I have to flash a different model firmware.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I'm pretty sure we ALL knew that applying a little post processing to an image wasn't tied to hardware. Not unless it made use of some added instructions for better performance and even them the lock would only be on that implementation.
Please don't go down that road, Slashdot.
That literally describes most software from most vendors that gets released on Smartphones. The camera app especially changes with each new model and doesn't get back ported to previous phones. Software versions are arbitrarily locked, and even features are locked between devices, e.g. Samsung Health on Galaxy S4 doesn't work with Garmin's bike cadence sensor. It does on the Galaxy S5 for no reason what so ever.
Apple can basically get away with anything it does because its user base a) knows next to nothing about how hardware or software works under the hood, b) has no idea how cheaply Apple manufactures its products and c) hangs on to the irrational idea that "if you buy Apple, you get the best in the world". I bought the latest greatest iPad as a gift for a relative who only uses Apple products. I checked it out before I gave it to her. I saw nothing that even remotely impressed me either software or hardware wise.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Of course it's software limitation.
A negative Apple story posted by msmash? It must one of those days of the week that ends with 'day'.
From what I understand, portrait lighting depends on a depth camera. Once you take the photo, if you also have the depth information, you can indeed change the "portrait" settings on any iOS 11 device, but you can't take it since the iPhone 7 doesn't actually have the depth camera.Actually the 'developer' confuses portrait mode with portrait lighting.
Portrait mode which works on the iPhone 7 Plus, 8 Plus and X is accomplished by using the two cameras simulate the depth of field effect of a large diaphragm.
Portrait lighting uses the depth camera on the iPhone X to also get a depth map. It is used in turn to figure out which is the face/head and what is the background in the picture. It applies the light effects on the head and darkens the background. If you capture the picture on an iOS device that supports depth mapping, you can indeed edit it on another device since all the needed information is present in the photo.
Apple has a history of almost artificially restricting features like it did with FaceTime on non-front camera phones (iPhone 3GS). It made sense if you think about it, you can't see and be seen at the same time. At the time, jailbreaks allowed the activation of FaceTime on non-front camera devices, but it was almost pointless.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever ones.
This is the Apple modus operandi.Nothing new.
You buy Apple, You be Dumb. Simple as, folks!
No one concentrates on good photography and techniques anymore -- just runs their selfies through a bunch of filters to post on the latest soshul meedjuh fad app.
Honestly, camera phones do have their advantages (for recording abuse by police, etc), but I wish everyone wasn't snapping (touching?) pictures every few minutes. It distracts from real-life enjoyment of an event or place. Form a picture in your head, take pictures like you have 24 exposures before you need a new roll.
I think the cheap/ubiquitous smartphone camera is one of the worst things to happen to social lives in the past decade.
No, that's not how it works. When you are about to take the photo, it shows you the effect in real-time. You also have the opportunity to change the effect later on, but that's not the whole feature, nor is it the main point of it. And guess what? The iPhone 7 doesn't have the horsepower to show you the effect in real-time. So all Apple would be able to do would be to deliver a feature where you take a photo not knowing how it will look, and then edit it to look right afterwards. Apple chose not to deliver a half-assed feature. How terrible of them!
Portrait mode lighting effects are done in real time on the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, and Apple makes the claim that it it's sufficiently processor intensive that it requires the A11 chip. The fact that the iPhone 7 Plus can do it to a photo after the fact isn't terribly special; so could an iPhone SE, it would just take longer.
If someone else wonders what it means, HEIC is image file format, encoded using HEVC. Only latest iOS and MacOS X seem capable of opening that.
Can someone write an app that fiddles with the picture header to activate it?
So, a tech company puts a software feature into a high-end model but doesn't enable it in the low-end model even though the low-end is technically capable of it.
Isn't that the way software has worked since, like, forever? They were doing this back in the mainframe days. How and why is this a surprise to anyone?
Next up: Ford could have put leather seats into the base-model Mustang but didn't. They mysteriously only show up in the "performance" trim, even though they have nothing to do with performance! Why they did it will shock you!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.