Not that I find it easy to get excited by edge wrapping displays either, but it is possible to design a case that leaves the edges clear - there are plenty of cases available for Samsung's "Edge" models.
That depends on how many edges have to be left clear. A phone case held in the traditional manner must cover some portion of the front on at least two opposite edges, or else the phone will just fall forwards out of the front of the case, and even then, only if the case extends most of the way to the front of the phone (to prevent it from slipping out sideways). Otherwise, you could potentially need coverage on all four edges.
The only way to avoid partial-two-edge coverage would be to specifically design mounting features into the phone, such as grooves running down the side in which a protrusion on the case can slide, or screw holes, or pin holes, or some other indentation into the sides or ends of the phone (or screw holes in the back of the phone). With that said, a case can cover a very small portion of the sides or top and bottom. For a device that needs the left and right edges exposed, for example, a case can cover the device only at the corners (beyond the screen) or across the edge of the top and bottom, leaving the sides completely clear. Note, however, that this still precludes being bezel-less on all four sides (unless you provide screw holes, etc.).
Of course, there are also limits beyond which a case would start to not make sense—particularly when you consider gestures like swiping from the edge of the screen, which are challenging for a device in a case even under the best of circumstances. The closer you get to bezel-less, the more of a problem those gestures are likely to be.
Which means it ought to be able to be turned off, for users that are smart enough to either use a memorable passcode or write down their passcode. The problem is, by forcing users to enter their passcode once a week, it also encourages users to choose shorter, easier-to-type passcodes to avoid the nuisance. So it ends up forcing the user to remember a passcode that is so simple that the user wouldn't forget it anyway.
Instead, Apple should require a passcode before turning the device off or rebooting it. (IIRC, they already do this before installing a software update.) That way, if the user has forgotten the passcode, the user can still back up, wipe, and restore, losing nothing other than possibly passwords in their keychain marked with the "don't back up" option. Or heck, make it possible for the device to be remotely unlocked via Find-My-iPhone even after a reboot, or... there are any number of better ways to get that functionality without annoying users once a week. The irritating behavior is just the most obvious outward sign of a much deeper, more fundamental conceptual flaw in their entire authentication scheme.
If it were much smaller, you couldn't use it with a case, which most iPhone users do (87% according to one survey).
That said, I really don't get the appeal of bezel-less design on cell phones. It seems completely backwards to me. I hold a phone in my hand. The bezel provides a grip surface. Making that surface smaller is an undesirable feature. Yet if the technology is possible in a phone, it should also be possible in a laptop, which I don't hold in my hand, which therefore does not need a bezel. Why didn't the technology get used there first (or, for that matter, exclusively)?
Worse, when the menu bar is white or when watching videos, these bezel-less designs look ugly. That huge gap at the top where the camera goes means that you can't really watch videos on the entire screen, or else you lose part of the image and it looks ridiculous. So app developers will end up adding a zoom mode like they did for the 4:3 iPads so that the unusable area is avoided. And if they don't want it to look ridiculously lopsided, they'll probably trim the other end, too, and effectively we bring back the bezel, just without the convenience of an actual home button.
I just don't get it. What about this is supposed to be an improvement?
Actually, they probably got bitten by the infamous once-per-week passcode behavior that Apple's engineers keep telling us is a feature. If it has been more than one week since you last entered your passcode, the iPhone goes into a mode where you can only unlock it with a fingerprint (or, in this case, a face) for a maximum of eight hours since the last unlock. Thus, as soon as you go to sleep on the seventh day, assuming you get a normal eight hours of sleep, your phone will require a passcode.
It's a borderline useless design decision. After all, the odds of your phone just happening to get stolen after those eight hours and before you unlock it again with the passcode are approximately zero, so making this mode kick in one week after the last passcode unlock instead of one week after the last unlock (in any form) doesn't actually improve security in any meaningful way. At best, the only thing it does is force users to enter their passcode so they don't forget it and find themselves locked out after a software update when they're forced to enter it (which is, in itself, arguably a bug).
Actually, it's moving backwards in a life-critical way. You can safely unlock your iPhone while driving and then tell Siri to do stuff without looking at the screen. With this, to unlock it, you have to look at the screen. So unless Apple convinces people to let Siri always listen (creepy), this is likely to cause a lot of additional traffic accidents that otherwise would not have occurred. They really should have put a touch sensor on the back.
The second camera is a novelty toy, and unless you're shooting video, so is image stabilization on such a wide-angle lens. In the rare situations where it matters for stills, it only matters because the iPhone's sensor is way too small with way too low a max ISO. Of the DSLR lenses I own that most closely match the iPhone's focal length, one is half a stop slower and has no IS. The other has IS, but is almost two stops slower, and the IS only matters at the longer end of its zoom range, where the iPhone (including the new one they just announced ten seconds ago) does not have IS.
At best, the difference between even an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 7 might make the difference between getting 10% of the shots I could get with my DSLR and 11%. The improvement certainly doesn't hurt, but none of those improvements are enough to make me upgrade my 6s, and that's speaking as somebody who takes a *lot* of photos.
And if you do music editing in the field, watch TV shows during lunch, and various other activities, Apple has INCLUDED a short little adapter cable; so you plug in your phones just like always. And if you are worrying about losing it, additional adapters are only $9; so you can have a spare or two lying around.
And remove it every time I plug those headphones into the laptop. It isn't the adapter that's the problem. It's the fact that my laptop won't take Lightning headphones, and my phone won't take real headphones. That completely unnecessary bifurcation is by far the most un-Apple-like experience I've seen since SJ returned in the 1990s.
On this, we sort of agree. I would be very surprised if Apple doesn't switch to USB-C on the next iteration of iPhones. I believe the current devices were already in "Standards Testing" (so the hardware design had to be frozen), and gazillions of Lightning connectors were already on order, by the time that Apple even thought of changing the iPhone over to USB-C; and so this iteration just missed the boat. Happens.
Apple started rolling out USB-C on the MacBook in April of 2015, 17 months before the iPhone 7 came out. If the first time they thought about moving to USB-C was really in mid-2016, their management missed more than the boat. They missed the entire freaking ocean.
Apple is not dumb.
If it were one bad decision, I would give them the benefit of the doubt, but it isn't. It's an ever-growing string of serious product design mistakes. Since 2011, Apple has:
Removed the headphone jack
Put the power button directly opposite the volume controls (did anybody TEST these things!?!)
Made the phone so thin that it requires camera bumps, is hard to hold without a case, and if you're unlucky, gets bent in your pocket
Limited all the interesting camera features (unnecessarily) to their super-sized phablet
Pissed off half the software developer community by removing the escape key from the model they all use (except in last-year's model at the low end)
Ruined the MacBook design by providing only one USB-C port, failing to realize how many students use their laptops to charge their phones
Botched the Apple TV design by providing a USB-C port on the back that can't charge its remote
Ruined MagSafe with MagSafe 2 (doesn't stay attached nearly as well)
And on and on and on. At some point, all those seemingly small mistakes start to add up and take their toll on the Apple brand. There has always been something of a bubble of groupthink at Apple, but it seems to have gotten much, much worse over the past couple of years. Lately, the mistakes are much, much more obvious—the sorts of things that would have caused SJ to say, "We're not shipping this piece of s**t," followed by throwing the prototype across the room. These days, instead of being about hitting a quality bar like it used to be, it seems to be solely about hitting a target date. And IMO, that is why Apple's quality is slipping so badly. They really should have just skipped the iPhone 7 entirely and waited until they had something new and exciting. Instead, they shipped a meh product to hit an artificial deadline.
What should Apple do to fix their problems? Ditch the one-year release cadence. Forget about it. Figure out what you want to build, figure out how long it will take, and target that date. Try not to let it slip too much, but if it has to slip, let it slip. Better to be late than crap. Forget purchasing cycles, forget release cadences, forget all the Agile bulls**t that has been shoved down your throats since 2011, and make a promise to yourselves that you will ship a product only when it is fully baked, and no sooner. This is the one true path to quality.
Yeah, it's a mess, because of a number of factors. Basically, both parties thoroughly screwed retirees:
The Democrats:
provided funding to establish rural medical care, which extended life expectancy.
pushed for universal health insurance, which extended life expectancy.
Actively prevented increases to the retirement age to compensate.
The Republicans:
told everybody that having lots of kids was bad, thus reducing the population growth that the Ponzi scheme depended on.
created tax rules that encouraged the use of stock options and stock grants as an alternative to wage increases, thus depressing the wage of high-salary workers and preventing the wage cap from going up as quickly as it otherwise would have.
actively prevented changes to the social security rates or caps to compensate.
I guess it's going to take a news story every night about old people dying homeless and destitute because their Social Security dried up before our clown government will bother to get their act together. Either that or a million-geriatric march on Washington D.C. with pitchforks, burning torches, and nothing left to lose.
There's a smaller—but still notable—subset of people that are going to upgrade because of the camera. When I look at my iPhone 6, the biggest thing that I envy from the newest phones is the better cameras.
IMO, we're a few years past the point where camera improvements became incremental. I can't really get excited about 2/3rds of a stop in a camera that packs that much resolution onto such a tiny sensor. The only way to get a big win (in aperture or in pixel size) is to make the camera bigger, which means making the phone bigger, which Apple will never do. Almost everything else, with the notable exception of the plus-model-only stabilization, is software/firmware changes, which you can just as easily do on existing hardware.
The one hardware improvement that would make a real difference in the camera is a global electronic shutter, and even that isn't a huge win.:-)
They're a huge sidegrade. They made some things better, like the taptic engine, but they made others worse, like the headphone jack. And to users, the former is completely irrelevant.
One of the first things SJ did when he came back to Apple was remind folks that people don't buy computers based on specs. Nobody cares if the CPU in a new phone is faster unless their current phone isn't fast enough to do the job. Nobody cares if the taptic engine can make it buzz differently. And so on. These are all just spec noise.
Apple's biggest problem is that even the iPhone 5 was fast enough to be somebody's last phone, ignoring the whole lack of 64-bit app support. Now that every phone Apple sells is "good enough", I can't imagine any feature that would be so compelling that it would be worth spending a thousand bucks to upgrade an iPhone 5s, SE, 6 series, or 7 series except in response to a hardware failure. Everything that could plausibly be added to a phone at this point is either software or falls into the "nice to have" category, at most. The only possible exceptions are all niche features that target a specific subset of the market and can often be solved with external cases, such as headphone jacks, hardware keyboards, micro-SD slots, IR remote emitters, plastic touchscreens, bumpers, waterproofing, etc.
Thus, the cell phone market is a commodity market, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. If Apple wants to pull off any big wins at this point, it will likely have to do so in entirely new product categories.
Yep. That's why I skipped straight from the original iPhone to the iPhone 5. The 3G was too soon, the 3GS still didn't have a front-facing camera,
and the 4 and 4S had that stupid glass back like they were designed by somebody who flunked out of their mechanical engineering degree program....
Spending on Social Security, unemployment, and labor in 2016 was about 37%
Calling social security or unemployment part of the federal budget is disingenuous, as is calling them social programs. They are risk pools (insurance programs), and they have entirely separate funding sources, paid for by the workers and employers that take advantage of them. People pay into those pools when they work, and they expect to get money back out of them at appropriate times (upon retirement, upon disability, upon losing a job, and so on).
Neither is part of the federal budget. Money neither passes from the general budget into those programs nor vice versa. So from a federal budget perspective, spending on Social Security and Unemployment are both precisely zero, or at least within the margin of error. (Federal spending on paying back loans that they've taken out from the social security administration, on the other hand, is a large piece of the federal budget, but that's not a social program, either; it's paying the interest on government debt.)
The barometric sensor also gives you altitude. For things like HealthKit, it's how the phone counts flights of stairs. It also gives the phone a way of knowing what floor you're on for location manager. GPS gives you this in the open, but the other positioning techniques used indoors don't.
Seriously? That's kind of insane. There are many possible ways to map your position in a building that will actually work reliably, such as proximity to wireless networks, Bluetooth devices, etc. Air pressure is not one of them. Not even remotely. Heck, even outdoors, air pressure isn't a very good way to measure altitude, because the pressure can shift drastically over the course of a day and over the course of fairly short distances, so you have to have a recent reference barometer reading from fairly close to where you are or else you can be off by hundreds or even thousands of feet. For example, during Hurricane Rita, the barometric pressure at sea level was equivalent to roughly what would normally be recorded at the top of Backbone Mountain (Maryland's highest peak).
Indoors, barometric pressure is complete crap. Air pressure inside a building is so highly variable that I would expect it to be nearly useless even under the best of circumstances. The air pressure inside a building is set by the inflow and outflow rates of the air handlers, and is thus not entirely dependent on altitude. In many commercial office buildings, opening a door can easily reduce pressure by half an inch of mercury or more, which is like being suddenly catapulted upwards by about five commercial-height stories. And the hardware engineers at Apple ought to know this. After all, unless they've fixed it recently, the air handlers in the Infinite Loop buildings produce positive pressure so intense that it frequently holds the exterior doors open for minutes at a time. I'd bet they see shifts of 10+ stories there.
So again, I ask, why the h*** does a phone need a barometer? SMH.
And they look equally good at any resolution, instead of superior at one res and absolute crap at any other (minus anything with sufficiently high PPI).
I would have said equally bad, rather than equally good. CRTs are still phosphor-based just like LCDs, which is to say that they still very much have a fixed native resolution, and everything else is fuzzy. It's just analog-fuzzy (bleed) instead of digitally-resampled-fuzzy, which means it looks better than a sufficiently bad scaler algorithm.
8-bit game consoles look like rubbish on anything else
To the extent that certain games look like rubbish, I would argue that it's because they actually look like rubbish, not because the CRT is somehow better. That said, at this point, it should be possible to trivially do an adequate transformation with any moderately powerful GPU. Who wants to hack a smart TV?:-)
and games using light guns only work with CRTs.
There are hardware hacks that can make them work now, but unmodded, that's true.
So no, in answer to the question, we don't need government / corporations / etc trying to protect the American people from foreign propaganda. We need to educate the populace in a more general way to identify and filter out manipulative "fake news" and other garbage of the sort.
Heh. Good luck with that. We've been trying for over twenty years, and Fox News and MSNBC are still on the air.
Exactly. I don't know which to be more concerned about: foreign governments manipulating elections through organized propaganda or further scope creep of our intelligence services into the area of domestic surveillance.
No, wait. Yes, I do. The latter.
Russian electioneering happened once and is unlikely to happen again. There are too many people at too many companies studying what happened carefully and developing machine learning techniques and other strategies to ensure that it can't happen in the future. But once parts of the U.S. government gain additional access to various Internet services, you'll never get their fingers back out of that pie. One is a temporary manipulation of our freedom, the other is a permanent loss thereof.
Frankly, it should be an easy choice for anyone, no matter what political camp you fall into.
Sad that people on Slashdot are mired in the past.
Everything on your list, with the possible exception of the CRT, has advantages in certain situations, and thus is still manufactured in one form or another today. What you call "mired in the past", I call "having specific needs that aren't met by newer technology".
Let me guess you still think LPs sound better too?
No, but I think that record players sound better at playing your existing collection of LPs than CD players do. If you've ever tried to cut the center out of an LP and stick it in a CD player, you know what I'm talking about....
Do your computers still use vacuum tubes?
No, but my guitar amp does.
Does your main car still have a carburetor?
No, but most lawnmowers do.
I bet you're still watching a 4:3 CRT television right?
Nope. The last one I owned died a year ago. Hardware eventually does that. And given the higher power consumption, poorer image quality, dangerous voltages, audible noise, EMI, and other problems associated with CRTs and their near complete lack of redeeming qualities, out of your entire list, this is the only one for which I say, "Good riddance."
Your fridge is just an icebox with no compressor?
No, but I have a smaller ice chest with no compressor for when I want to carry food or drinks with me and keep them cold.
Like I said, different people have different requirements in different situations. Expecting a single design to be good enough for everyone is pretty much the height of naïveté.
Times the number of headphones you own. Plus some sort of adapter keeper so that when you use the headphones with your Mac, you don't lose the adapter.
Could somebody please tell me why the h*** a phone needs a barometer? Are people really going to be trying to tell the weather on the phone? Downloading the latest barometric pressure data for the nearest airport so they can crudely approximate their altitude?
It seems like a useless novelty toy in search of a reason for existing, and in exchange for that useless novelty, they removed something that a decent percentage of users use every day.
I just got an Android phone as my work phone, and I've started using it. I don't like it as much as I like my iPhone, but I can plug headphones into it. For people who do music editing in the field, watch TV shows during lunch, and various other activities, being able to have one set of headphones that seamlessly connects to multiple devices matters. A lot.
And if and when the Android vendors eventually follow Apple's lead and remove the headphone jack, I will have long since upgraded my MacBook Pro to a USB-C version, and I'll still be able to use a single pair of headphones with my Mac and an Android phone, whereas that will still not be true for my Mac and my iPhone.
For a company that supposedly designs their ecosystem to be highly interconnected, IMO, Apple screwed this up massively. They need to either ditch the stupid Lightning connector in favor of USB-C or they need to put a Lightning connector on Macs, and you can probably tell which one I think is a better idea from the way I worded that....
You can already use $900 earphones that only have a Jack for input on an iPhone 7 using Apple's dongle that Apple bundles with the iPhone.
Chances are you also need an adapter because $900 earphones don't come with a.25" connector, not a 3.5 mm.
Actually, that changed some time around the mid-1990s. These days, even recording-grade headphones use an 1/8" plug, not a 1/4". They come with an adapter to plug into all the equipment that uses 1/4". The reason for that change is robustness. As someone who has used adapters in both directions over the years, I would never touch any headphones that come with a 1/4" plug these days.
An 1/8" jack to 1/4" plug adapter puts a weak connector into a strong connector, and because it is easy to make a weak jack, you can make the adapter fragile so that if anything is going to break, it's the adapter. They bravely sacrifice themselves en masse to protect the equipment, and everybody just keeps a drawer full of spare adapters.
A 1/4" jack to 1/8" plug adapter is almost impossible to make fragile. The 1/4" plug can't fit inside the 1/8" plug, so the body of the adapter acts like a giant lever. And it's hard to make the plug part weak enough to not damage the jack when there's a giant lever attached like that. With those adapters, if anything is going to break, it's the 1/8" jack inside the device.
Worse, even if you did somehow manage to make a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter fragile enough to not destroy the gear, the weakest point would still be the 1/8" part of it, which means the tip would break off inside the device and would often be hard to remove. I quickly concluded that adapters in that direction, unless in the form of a cable, are more trouble than they're worth (and even cable-based adapters only help if the 1/4" plugs aren't L-shaped).
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Not that I find it easy to get excited by edge wrapping displays either, but it is possible to design a case that leaves the edges clear - there are plenty of cases available for Samsung's "Edge" models.
That depends on how many edges have to be left clear. A phone case held in the traditional manner must cover some portion of the front on at least two opposite edges, or else the phone will just fall forwards out of the front of the case, and even then, only if the case extends most of the way to the front of the phone (to prevent it from slipping out sideways). Otherwise, you could potentially need coverage on all four edges.
The only way to avoid partial-two-edge coverage would be to specifically design mounting features into the phone, such as grooves running down the side in which a protrusion on the case can slide, or screw holes, or pin holes, or some other indentation into the sides or ends of the phone (or screw holes in the back of the phone). With that said, a case can cover a very small portion of the sides or top and bottom. For a device that needs the left and right edges exposed, for example, a case can cover the device only at the corners (beyond the screen) or across the edge of the top and bottom, leaving the sides completely clear. Note, however, that this still precludes being bezel-less on all four sides (unless you provide screw holes, etc.).
Of course, there are also limits beyond which a case would start to not make sense—particularly when you consider gestures like swiping from the edge of the screen, which are challenging for a device in a case even under the best of circumstances. The closer you get to bezel-less, the more of a problem those gestures are likely to be.
From the comment you're replying to:
Like I said.
Who said anything about texting? "Hey, Siri, this song sucks. Play the next one."
Which means it ought to be able to be turned off, for users that are smart enough to either use a memorable passcode or write down their passcode. The problem is, by forcing users to enter their passcode once a week, it also encourages users to choose shorter, easier-to-type passcodes to avoid the nuisance. So it ends up forcing the user to remember a passcode that is so simple that the user wouldn't forget it anyway.
Instead, Apple should require a passcode before turning the device off or rebooting it. (IIRC, they already do this before installing a software update.) That way, if the user has forgotten the passcode, the user can still back up, wipe, and restore, losing nothing other than possibly passwords in their keychain marked with the "don't back up" option. Or heck, make it possible for the device to be remotely unlocked via Find-My-iPhone even after a reboot, or... there are any number of better ways to get that functionality without annoying users once a week. The irritating behavior is just the most obvious outward sign of a much deeper, more fundamental conceptual flaw in their entire authentication scheme.
But the edges were in play when they played video during the demo.
If it were much smaller, you couldn't use it with a case, which most iPhone users do (87% according to one survey).
That said, I really don't get the appeal of bezel-less design on cell phones. It seems completely backwards to me. I hold a phone in my hand. The bezel provides a grip surface. Making that surface smaller is an undesirable feature. Yet if the technology is possible in a phone, it should also be possible in a laptop, which I don't hold in my hand, which therefore does not need a bezel. Why didn't the technology get used there first (or, for that matter, exclusively)?
Worse, when the menu bar is white or when watching videos, these bezel-less designs look ugly. That huge gap at the top where the camera goes means that you can't really watch videos on the entire screen, or else you lose part of the image and it looks ridiculous. So app developers will end up adding a zoom mode like they did for the 4:3 iPads so that the unusable area is avoided. And if they don't want it to look ridiculously lopsided, they'll probably trim the other end, too, and effectively we bring back the bezel, just without the convenience of an actual home button.
I just don't get it. What about this is supposed to be an improvement?
Actually, they probably got bitten by the infamous once-per-week passcode behavior that Apple's engineers keep telling us is a feature. If it has been more than one week since you last entered your passcode, the iPhone goes into a mode where you can only unlock it with a fingerprint (or, in this case, a face) for a maximum of eight hours since the last unlock. Thus, as soon as you go to sleep on the seventh day, assuming you get a normal eight hours of sleep, your phone will require a passcode.
It's a borderline useless design decision. After all, the odds of your phone just happening to get stolen after those eight hours and before you unlock it again with the passcode are approximately zero, so making this mode kick in one week after the last passcode unlock instead of one week after the last unlock (in any form) doesn't actually improve security in any meaningful way. At best, the only thing it does is force users to enter their passcode so they don't forget it and find themselves locked out after a software update when they're forced to enter it (which is, in itself, arguably a bug).
Actually, it's moving backwards in a life-critical way. You can safely unlock your iPhone while driving and then tell Siri to do stuff without looking at the screen. With this, to unlock it, you have to look at the screen. So unless Apple convinces people to let Siri always listen (creepy), this is likely to cause a lot of additional traffic accidents that otherwise would not have occurred. They really should have put a touch sensor on the back.
SNL predicted this in 2005.
The second camera is a novelty toy, and unless you're shooting video, so is image stabilization on such a wide-angle lens. In the rare situations where it matters for stills, it only matters because the iPhone's sensor is way too small with way too low a max ISO. Of the DSLR lenses I own that most closely match the iPhone's focal length, one is half a stop slower and has no IS. The other has IS, but is almost two stops slower, and the IS only matters at the longer end of its zoom range, where the iPhone (including the new one they just announced ten seconds ago) does not have IS.
At best, the difference between even an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 7 might make the difference between getting 10% of the shots I could get with my DSLR and 11%. The improvement certainly doesn't hurt, but none of those improvements are enough to make me upgrade my 6s, and that's speaking as somebody who takes a *lot* of photos.
And remove it every time I plug those headphones into the laptop. It isn't the adapter that's the problem. It's the fact that my laptop won't take Lightning headphones, and my phone won't take real headphones. That completely unnecessary bifurcation is by far the most un-Apple-like experience I've seen since SJ returned in the 1990s.
Apple started rolling out USB-C on the MacBook in April of 2015, 17 months before the iPhone 7 came out. If the first time they thought about moving to USB-C was really in mid-2016, their management missed more than the boat. They missed the entire freaking ocean.
If it were one bad decision, I would give them the benefit of the doubt, but it isn't. It's an ever-growing string of serious product design mistakes. Since 2011, Apple has:
And on and on and on. At some point, all those seemingly small mistakes start to add up and take their toll on the Apple brand. There has always been something of a bubble of groupthink at Apple, but it seems to have gotten much, much worse over the past couple of years. Lately, the mistakes are much, much more obvious—the sorts of things that would have caused SJ to say, "We're not shipping this piece of s**t," followed by throwing the prototype across the room. These days, instead of being about hitting a quality bar like it used to be, it seems to be solely about hitting a target date. And IMO, that is why Apple's quality is slipping so badly. They really should have just skipped the iPhone 7 entirely and waited until they had something new and exciting. Instead, they shipped a meh product to hit an artificial deadline.
What should Apple do to fix their problems? Ditch the one-year release cadence. Forget about it. Figure out what you want to build, figure out how long it will take, and target that date. Try not to let it slip too much, but if it has to slip, let it slip. Better to be late than crap. Forget purchasing cycles, forget release cadences, forget all the Agile bulls**t that has been shoved down your throats since 2011, and make a promise to yourselves that you will ship a product only when it is fully baked, and no sooner. This is the one true path to quality.
Yeah, it's a mess, because of a number of factors. Basically, both parties thoroughly screwed retirees:
The Democrats:
The Republicans:
I guess it's going to take a news story every night about old people dying homeless and destitute because their Social Security dried up before our clown government will bother to get their act together. Either that or a million-geriatric march on Washington D.C. with pitchforks, burning torches, and nothing left to lose.
IMO, we're a few years past the point where camera improvements became incremental. I can't really get excited about 2/3rds of a stop in a camera that packs that much resolution onto such a tiny sensor. The only way to get a big win (in aperture or in pixel size) is to make the camera bigger, which means making the phone bigger, which Apple will never do. Almost everything else, with the notable exception of the plus-model-only stabilization, is software/firmware changes, which you can just as easily do on existing hardware.
The one hardware improvement that would make a real difference in the camera is a global electronic shutter, and even that isn't a huge win. :-)
Because it's thinner.
They're a huge sidegrade. They made some things better, like the taptic engine, but they made others worse, like the headphone jack. And to users, the former is completely irrelevant.
One of the first things SJ did when he came back to Apple was remind folks that people don't buy computers based on specs. Nobody cares if the CPU in a new phone is faster unless their current phone isn't fast enough to do the job. Nobody cares if the taptic engine can make it buzz differently. And so on. These are all just spec noise.
Apple's biggest problem is that even the iPhone 5 was fast enough to be somebody's last phone, ignoring the whole lack of 64-bit app support. Now that every phone Apple sells is "good enough", I can't imagine any feature that would be so compelling that it would be worth spending a thousand bucks to upgrade an iPhone 5s, SE, 6 series, or 7 series except in response to a hardware failure. Everything that could plausibly be added to a phone at this point is either software or falls into the "nice to have" category, at most. The only possible exceptions are all niche features that target a specific subset of the market and can often be solved with external cases, such as headphone jacks, hardware keyboards, micro-SD slots, IR remote emitters, plastic touchscreens, bumpers, waterproofing, etc.
Thus, the cell phone market is a commodity market, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. If Apple wants to pull off any big wins at this point, it will likely have to do so in entirely new product categories.
Yep. That's why I skipped straight from the original iPhone to the iPhone 5. The 3G was too soon, the 3GS still didn't have a front-facing camera, and the 4 and 4S had that stupid glass back like they were designed by somebody who flunked out of their mechanical engineering degree program....
Calling social security or unemployment part of the federal budget is disingenuous, as is calling them social programs. They are risk pools (insurance programs), and they have entirely separate funding sources, paid for by the workers and employers that take advantage of them. People pay into those pools when they work, and they expect to get money back out of them at appropriate times (upon retirement, upon disability, upon losing a job, and so on).
Neither is part of the federal budget. Money neither passes from the general budget into those programs nor vice versa. So from a federal budget perspective, spending on Social Security and Unemployment are both precisely zero, or at least within the margin of error. (Federal spending on paying back loans that they've taken out from the social security administration, on the other hand, is a large piece of the federal budget, but that's not a social program, either; it's paying the interest on government debt.)
Seriously? That's kind of insane. There are many possible ways to map your position in a building that will actually work reliably, such as proximity to wireless networks, Bluetooth devices, etc. Air pressure is not one of them. Not even remotely. Heck, even outdoors, air pressure isn't a very good way to measure altitude, because the pressure can shift drastically over the course of a day and over the course of fairly short distances, so you have to have a recent reference barometer reading from fairly close to where you are or else you can be off by hundreds or even thousands of feet. For example, during Hurricane Rita, the barometric pressure at sea level was equivalent to roughly what would normally be recorded at the top of Backbone Mountain (Maryland's highest peak).
Indoors, barometric pressure is complete crap. Air pressure inside a building is so highly variable that I would expect it to be nearly useless even under the best of circumstances. The air pressure inside a building is set by the inflow and outflow rates of the air handlers, and is thus not entirely dependent on altitude. In many commercial office buildings, opening a door can easily reduce pressure by half an inch of mercury or more, which is like being suddenly catapulted upwards by about five commercial-height stories. And the hardware engineers at Apple ought to know this. After all, unless they've fixed it recently, the air handlers in the Infinite Loop buildings produce positive pressure so intense that it frequently holds the exterior doors open for minutes at a time. I'd bet they see shifts of 10+ stories there.
So again, I ask, why the h*** does a phone need a barometer? SMH.
I would have said equally bad, rather than equally good. CRTs are still phosphor-based just like LCDs, which is to say that they still very much have a fixed native resolution, and everything else is fuzzy. It's just analog-fuzzy (bleed) instead of digitally-resampled-fuzzy, which means it looks better than a sufficiently bad scaler algorithm.
To the extent that certain games look like rubbish, I would argue that it's because they actually look like rubbish, not because the CRT is somehow better. That said, at this point, it should be possible to trivially do an adequate transformation with any moderately powerful GPU. Who wants to hack a smart TV? :-)
There are hardware hacks that can make them work now, but unmodded, that's true.
Heh. Good luck with that. We've been trying for over twenty years, and Fox News and MSNBC are still on the air.
Exactly. I don't know which to be more concerned about: foreign governments manipulating elections through organized propaganda or further scope creep of our intelligence services into the area of domestic surveillance.
No, wait. Yes, I do. The latter.
Russian electioneering happened once and is unlikely to happen again. There are too many people at too many companies studying what happened carefully and developing machine learning techniques and other strategies to ensure that it can't happen in the future. But once parts of the U.S. government gain additional access to various Internet services, you'll never get their fingers back out of that pie. One is a temporary manipulation of our freedom, the other is a permanent loss thereof.
Frankly, it should be an easy choice for anyone, no matter what political camp you fall into.
Everything on your list, with the possible exception of the CRT, has advantages in certain situations, and thus is still manufactured in one form or another today. What you call "mired in the past", I call "having specific needs that aren't met by newer technology".
No, but I think that record players sound better at playing your existing collection of LPs than CD players do. If you've ever tried to cut the center out of an LP and stick it in a CD player, you know what I'm talking about....
No, but my guitar amp does.
No, but most lawnmowers do.
Nope. The last one I owned died a year ago. Hardware eventually does that. And given the higher power consumption, poorer image quality, dangerous voltages, audible noise, EMI, and other problems associated with CRTs and their near complete lack of redeeming qualities, out of your entire list, this is the only one for which I say, "Good riddance."
No, but I have a smaller ice chest with no compressor for when I want to carry food or drinks with me and keep them cold.
Like I said, different people have different requirements in different situations. Expecting a single design to be good enough for everyone is pretty much the height of naïveté.
Times the number of headphones you own. Plus some sort of adapter keeper so that when you use the headphones with your Mac, you don't lose the adapter.
Could somebody please tell me why the h*** a phone needs a barometer? Are people really going to be trying to tell the weather on the phone? Downloading the latest barometric pressure data for the nearest airport so they can crudely approximate their altitude?
It seems like a useless novelty toy in search of a reason for existing, and in exchange for that useless novelty, they removed something that a decent percentage of users use every day.
I just got an Android phone as my work phone, and I've started using it. I don't like it as much as I like my iPhone, but I can plug headphones into it. For people who do music editing in the field, watch TV shows during lunch, and various other activities, being able to have one set of headphones that seamlessly connects to multiple devices matters. A lot.
And if and when the Android vendors eventually follow Apple's lead and remove the headphone jack, I will have long since upgraded my MacBook Pro to a USB-C version, and I'll still be able to use a single pair of headphones with my Mac and an Android phone, whereas that will still not be true for my Mac and my iPhone.
For a company that supposedly designs their ecosystem to be highly interconnected, IMO, Apple screwed this up massively. They need to either ditch the stupid Lightning connector in favor of USB-C or they need to put a Lightning connector on Macs, and you can probably tell which one I think is a better idea from the way I worded that....
You can already use $900 earphones that only have a Jack for input on an iPhone 7 using Apple's dongle that Apple bundles with the iPhone.
Chances are you also need an adapter because $900 earphones don't come with a .25" connector, not a 3.5 mm.
Actually, that changed some time around the mid-1990s. These days, even recording-grade headphones use an 1/8" plug, not a 1/4". They come with an adapter to plug into all the equipment that uses 1/4". The reason for that change is robustness. As someone who has used adapters in both directions over the years, I would never touch any headphones that come with a 1/4" plug these days.
An 1/8" jack to 1/4" plug adapter puts a weak connector into a strong connector, and because it is easy to make a weak jack, you can make the adapter fragile so that if anything is going to break, it's the adapter. They bravely sacrifice themselves en masse to protect the equipment, and everybody just keeps a drawer full of spare adapters.
A 1/4" jack to 1/8" plug adapter is almost impossible to make fragile. The 1/4" plug can't fit inside the 1/8" plug, so the body of the adapter acts like a giant lever. And it's hard to make the plug part weak enough to not damage the jack when there's a giant lever attached like that. With those adapters, if anything is going to break, it's the 1/8" jack inside the device.
Worse, even if you did somehow manage to make a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter fragile enough to not destroy the gear, the weakest point would still be the 1/8" part of it, which means the tip would break off inside the device and would often be hard to remove. I quickly concluded that adapters in that direction, unless in the form of a cable, are more trouble than they're worth (and even cable-based adapters only help if the 1/4" plugs aren't L-shaped).