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.

Comments

Time limitation for projects

[mikael]

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.

Re:Time limitation for projects

[sexconker]

As far as I understand it, they DID port it.

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.

The feature is baked in and ready to go on the 7 Plus, but only the X will write the requisite metadata in the header to trigger it.
Copying that metadata over from a photo - any photo - taken on the X and pasting it over the metadata on a photo from the 7 Plus results in the 7 Plus activating the feature.

As far as I understand it, anyway. I don't have an iThing so all I can do is trust the summary.

Oh please

[Opportunist]

How would this have sold more iPhone Xs?

Re:Oh please

[DontBeAMoran]

It would have sold more future iPhones by showing current iPhone 7 users that buying an iPhone is a good value for the money.

With this news, it instead shows them that Apple kept a feature from their current iPhone in order to make them buy a new phone, thus showing them they can't trust Apple and should pick a different company for their next phone.

Probably a case of testing

[mlw4428]

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.

Re:Pretty obscure

[dstyle5]

Perhaps they are hoping for rage click/comments from the 1/100000 /. readers who are actually surprised that something like this is possible and that a benevolent corporate monolith such as Apple would withhold such a feature from their iPhone 7?

Um...Thank you?

[ArhcAngel]

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.

That title is so clickbait-y

[rbpOne]

Please don't go down that road, Slashdot.

Err

[thegarbz]

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.

Not an artificial restriction

[d3vi1]

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.

The difference between the 7 Plus and 8/X

[Dixie_Flatline]

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.