SquareTrade's long-term reliability data based on ~hundreds of thousands of warranty claims is solid. Dropping four phones a single time to see what breaks is an absurd "study" that is really nothing more than a pr stunt.
SquareTrade's one-off tests are meaningless, because there is too much variability in what can happen in a few small incidents (now, their large-scale data based on insurance claims for hundreds of thousands of phones is far more reliable). I carried my iPhone 5 around caseless and dropped it dozens of times - including many onto concrete. A year later and it has a few scratches in the metal frame, but that's it. My friend's kid had her 5 less than a week before she dropped it once in a parking lot, with a case, and the screen shattered. There are just too many variables to judge the breakability of a device using a small number of tests (did the phone fall slightly forward so gravel in the concrete could impact the corner of the glass, as it seems to have done for the 5C [see impact zone in video] or slightly backward so it would hit the corner at the metal back case, as it seems to have done for the 5S? Etc.); what SquareTrade really does with those is nothing more than advertising.
Consider this in particular: the 5S is built almost identically to the 5 - absolutely identical shape, identical weight, identical materials, nearly identical internals. The home button and second flash are the only differences iirc. Why would their scores be any different at all? (Try as I might, I couldn't find a video of the 5 in the same "slide test". Fwiw, I don't recommend using a phone as a table hockey puck.)
You say in the early 2000's you bought a Mac that was ultimately not supported by OS X 10.3. 10.3 came out in November 2003 and supported all Macs models released in 1999 and later, and some Macs (iMacs) released in 1998. 10.4, which came out April 2005, supported all Macs released in 2000 onward. Your "toe in the water" Mac must have been around 3 years old already when you got it. I won't deny Apple likes to deprecate stuff faster than most companies, but I think that's due to their desire to move forward and the number of difficult transitions they've gone through (68k->PPC Processors, Classic MacOS->OSX, PPC->Intel, 32->64 bit). All of those things have ended up as OS support dividing lines.
On the plus side, major OS releases are only $20 now.
I don't understand why scrolling up makes the toolbar reappear at all. That should just be disabled. To get the toolbar to reappear just tap the shrunk-down header (really, that should be obvious) or the footer (that should also be disabled, because it gets in the way of clicking links in that part of the screen).
But really, just use one of the nicer 3rd-party browsers. I'm partial to Atomic Web but there are a lot of other popular ones available.
to the grandparent, the animation isn't distracting at all, because it animates the shrink to coincide perfectly with the movement of the page when you scroll down. If it just popped out of existence it would be far more distracting.
Restricting folders to a 3x3 grid is by far my biggest pet peeve. It's an absurdity on a 10" tablet especially. If you have a dev account I encourage you to file a UI big against it. Maybe if they get enough complaints they'll do something about it (hahahahaha).
Android has done it properly from scratch simply riding on the shoulders of linux. Apple wanted to make sure the experience is guaranteed so it slowly introduced task switching, and now it has to hack it in.
What exactly does this mean? What is Android getting from its Linux pedigree that iOS doesn't get from its BSD UNIX pedigree?
I'm not sure if all of that is still required, but it certainly didn't seem to live up to Apple's standards for being user-friendly.
Fortunately not; you no longer need iTunes for updates and you are able to download older versions of apps that are still compatible with your older OS. And luckily none of the updates has been as terrible on older phones as iOS 4 was on the 3G, even though they do all (unsurprisingly) tend to tax the hardware more.
I used to own an iPhone 3 a few years ago, and when they forced an update onto it...
How did that happen? Updates have always been voluntary... Though of course you would be volunteering to quickly become incompatible with newer software, so I'll grant you it isn't the most convenient of choices.
I think you're forgetting how much animation there was in iOS 6 just because you got used to it, whereas the iOS 7 ones are different and are therefore noticeable. Other than the parallax effect and the translucence/blur, which I'd already mentioned, where else are there animations/eye candy where there weren't before? Folders opened with an animation (slide up rather than zoom in), the springboard loaded with an animation (swoop in from the sides rather than fall in from above), views slid from one to the next before just as they do now. And you're forgetting the subtle skeumorphic animations in certain controls that are now gone altogether, like the shine on the metallic volume slider knob that tracked the motion of the phone.
It's not that I don't think ios 7 puts more strain on the hardware - it does, especially with the translucent blur (which is why the blur is disabled on the iPhone 4). I just don't think it qualifies as "more eye candy." Mostly *different* eye candy, the worst of which is disableable if you need to improve performance.
I wouldn't say there's much more eye candy, but a lot of what there is you can at least turn off ("reduce motion" and "increase contrast" in the settings should turn off the parallax effects and translucent blurs, respectively).
That said, I notice no slowdowns on my iPhone 5 or 3rd gen iPad. Everything runs quite smoothly (though unsurprisingly it didn't during the betas).
I see. Makes sense, in its way. Are the other services you mentioned (limos and shuttles) already regulated in some way? I would expect so, so it seems like they should just expand the current definitions to apply to for-profit "ride sharing." I guess the ad-hoc nature of these arrangements requires something special.
I must be missing something about this concept. If you're getting paid (with a net profit) to drive people around, why is it called ride sharing? How is it not a taxi service?
However, I've noticed I tend to use Siri on my way out of the house - getting directions somewhere, or setting up a reminder for the day, whatever. As such, the request tends to fall during the transition from my home wifi to the cellular network. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a common thing, since this would be a very common use case.
Or you could, I don't know, add Target to your contacts? You can refer to any location in your contacts, not just your own home or work. It *would* be nice if it could seach for nearby addresses, such that if you don't have a contact for your local Target, it'll find the address anyway.
Revisionist history my ass. You didn't counter a single fact in my or the grandparent's post. Apple has always made the previous model available $100 less than the current model; that's exactly what they have done again here, except they gave it a "pretty" (and cheaper to manufacture) body. They never claimed it was supposed to be a dirt cheap phone for China; that was rumor and speculation (now, that may be a good idea or it may not, but that's an entirely separate argument). How can you simultaneously say "the rumors [that the phone was supposed to be cheap] were pretty much true" and then say they "missed this target by making it expensive"?
The point of the 5C was to break into markets where the 5S is too expensive to gain big market share. For years Apple fans were saying Apple didn't care about these markets and there was no money in cheap(er) phone, but actually they wanted in and just couldn't come up with a suitable product. It needed to be current generation (i.e. have a 5 in the name) to remain desirable but also be affordable, and it seems that most analysts think that it's too expensive.
No, that was the rumored point of the 5C - back before it was announced, when everyone assumed the C stood for "cheap," or "China." Now it is clear that wasn't it - it's the same price as the iPhone 5 would otherwise have been at this point, and internally it contains all the iPhone 5's hardware. As the poster you responded to clearly explained, the only significant change here was that it's cheaper to manufacture, allowing Apple to make a better profit off essentially the same year-old phone they would have been selling anyway.
What the hell? I have a passport, and didn't submit any fingerprints to get it. I didn't submit my fingerprints to get an identification document such a driver's license and california would expect me to submit them to get through toll roads??
I don't know about toll roads, but California definitely requires you to mash your thumb on the fingerprint scanner at the DMV every time you renew your drivers license.
Squares and square roots (along with area/volume) and basic pre-algebra are covered in 5th and 6th grade public school, at least here in California. I haven't noticed any trig though.
I concede the point... All the random, contradictory Apple product speculation on the Internet is secretly controlled by Apple. I wish I'd realized it sooner.
Interesting that Apple puts this in terms of making the Mac more like the iPhone instead.
Apple did not write the speculation in TFA. They merely said it makes maintaining a common code base easier. Nothing about making the Mac more like the iPhone.
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SquareTrade's long-term reliability data based on ~hundreds of thousands of warranty claims is solid. Dropping four phones a single time to see what breaks is an absurd "study" that is really nothing more than a pr stunt.
SquareTrade's one-off tests are meaningless, because there is too much variability in what can happen in a few small incidents (now, their large-scale data based on insurance claims for hundreds of thousands of phones is far more reliable). I carried my iPhone 5 around caseless and dropped it dozens of times - including many onto concrete. A year later and it has a few scratches in the metal frame, but that's it. My friend's kid had her 5 less than a week before she dropped it once in a parking lot, with a case, and the screen shattered. There are just too many variables to judge the breakability of a device using a small number of tests (did the phone fall slightly forward so gravel in the concrete could impact the corner of the glass, as it seems to have done for the 5C [see impact zone in video] or slightly backward so it would hit the corner at the metal back case, as it seems to have done for the 5S? Etc.); what SquareTrade really does with those is nothing more than advertising.
Consider this in particular: the 5S is built almost identically to the 5 - absolutely identical shape, identical weight, identical materials, nearly identical internals. The home button and second flash are the only differences iirc. Why would their scores be any different at all? (Try as I might, I couldn't find a video of the 5 in the same "slide test". Fwiw, I don't recommend using a phone as a table hockey puck.)
IIRC, the 5S lost to the G2 in just one of Anand's dozens of benchmarks. It was the top smartphone in all the rest.
You say in the early 2000's you bought a Mac that was ultimately not supported by OS X 10.3. 10.3 came out in November 2003 and supported all Macs models released in 1999 and later, and some Macs (iMacs) released in 1998. 10.4, which came out April 2005, supported all Macs released in 2000 onward. Your "toe in the water" Mac must have been around 3 years old already when you got it. I won't deny Apple likes to deprecate stuff faster than most companies, but I think that's due to their desire to move forward and the number of difficult transitions they've gone through (68k->PPC Processors, Classic MacOS->OSX, PPC->Intel, 32->64 bit). All of those things have ended up as OS support dividing lines.
On the plus side, major OS releases are only $20 now.
I don't understand why scrolling up makes the toolbar reappear at all. That should just be disabled. To get the toolbar to reappear just tap the shrunk-down header (really, that should be obvious) or the footer (that should also be disabled, because it gets in the way of clicking links in that part of the screen).
But really, just use one of the nicer 3rd-party browsers. I'm partial to Atomic Web but there are a lot of other popular ones available.
to the grandparent, the animation isn't distracting at all, because it animates the shrink to coincide perfectly with the movement of the page when you scroll down. If it just popped out of existence it would be far more distracting.
Restricting folders to a 3x3 grid is by far my biggest pet peeve. It's an absurdity on a 10" tablet especially. If you have a dev account I encourage you to file a UI big against it. Maybe if they get enough complaints they'll do something about it (hahahahaha).
Android has done it properly from scratch simply riding on the shoulders of linux. Apple wanted to make sure the experience is guaranteed so it slowly introduced task switching, and now it has to hack it in.
What exactly does this mean? What is Android getting from its Linux pedigree that iOS doesn't get from its BSD UNIX pedigree?
I'm not sure if all of that is still required, but it certainly didn't seem to live up to Apple's standards for being user-friendly.
Fortunately not; you no longer need iTunes for updates and you are able to download older versions of apps that are still compatible with your older OS. And luckily none of the updates has been as terrible on older phones as iOS 4 was on the 3G, even though they do all (unsurprisingly) tend to tax the hardware more.
I used to own an iPhone 3 a few years ago, and when they forced an update onto it ...
How did that happen? Updates have always been voluntary... Though of course you would be volunteering to quickly become incompatible with newer software, so I'll grant you it isn't the most convenient of choices.
I think you're forgetting how much animation there was in iOS 6 just because you got used to it, whereas the iOS 7 ones are different and are therefore noticeable. Other than the parallax effect and the translucence/blur, which I'd already mentioned, where else are there animations/eye candy where there weren't before? Folders opened with an animation (slide up rather than zoom in), the springboard loaded with an animation (swoop in from the sides rather than fall in from above), views slid from one to the next before just as they do now. And you're forgetting the subtle skeumorphic animations in certain controls that are now gone altogether, like the shine on the metallic volume slider knob that tracked the motion of the phone.
It's not that I don't think ios 7 puts more strain on the hardware - it does, especially with the translucent blur (which is why the blur is disabled on the iPhone 4). I just don't think it qualifies as "more eye candy." Mostly *different* eye candy, the worst of which is disableable if you need to improve performance.
I wouldn't say there's much more eye candy, but a lot of what there is you can at least turn off ("reduce motion" and "increase contrast" in the settings should turn off the parallax effects and translucent blurs, respectively).
That said, I notice no slowdowns on my iPhone 5 or 3rd gen iPad. Everything runs quite smoothly (though unsurprisingly it didn't during the betas).
Apple already licenses it to third-party manufacturers. There are cheaper, legit third-party lightning cables all over the place.
I see. Makes sense, in its way. Are the other services you mentioned (limos and shuttles) already regulated in some way? I would expect so, so it seems like they should just expand the current definitions to apply to for-profit "ride sharing." I guess the ad-hoc nature of these arrangements requires something special.
I must be missing something about this concept. If you're getting paid (with a net profit) to drive people around, why is it called ride sharing? How is it not a taxi service?
However, I've noticed I tend to use Siri on my way out of the house - getting directions somewhere, or setting up a reminder for the day, whatever. As such, the request tends to fall during the transition from my home wifi to the cellular network. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a common thing, since this would be a very common use case.
Or you could, I don't know, add Target to your contacts? You can refer to any location in your contacts, not just your own home or work. It *would* be nice if it could seach for nearby addresses, such that if you don't have a contact for your local Target, it'll find the address anyway.
Revisionist history my ass. You didn't counter a single fact in my or the grandparent's post. Apple has always made the previous model available $100 less than the current model; that's exactly what they have done again here, except they gave it a "pretty" (and cheaper to manufacture) body. They never claimed it was supposed to be a dirt cheap phone for China; that was rumor and speculation (now, that may be a good idea or it may not, but that's an entirely separate argument). How can you simultaneously say "the rumors [that the phone was supposed to be cheap] were pretty much true" and then say they "missed this target by making it expensive"?
The point of the 5C was to break into markets where the 5S is too expensive to gain big market share. For years Apple fans were saying Apple didn't care about these markets and there was no money in cheap(er) phone, but actually they wanted in and just couldn't come up with a suitable product. It needed to be current generation (i.e. have a 5 in the name) to remain desirable but also be affordable, and it seems that most analysts think that it's too expensive.
No, that was the rumored point of the 5C - back before it was announced, when everyone assumed the C stood for "cheap," or "China." Now it is clear that wasn't it - it's the same price as the iPhone 5 would otherwise have been at this point, and internally it contains all the iPhone 5's hardware. As the poster you responded to clearly explained, the only significant change here was that it's cheaper to manufacture, allowing Apple to make a better profit off essentially the same year-old phone they would have been selling anyway.
What the hell? I have a passport, and didn't submit any fingerprints to get it. I didn't submit my fingerprints to get an identification document such a driver's license and california would expect me to submit them to get through toll roads??
I don't know about toll roads, but California definitely requires you to mash your thumb on the fingerprint scanner at the DMV every time you renew your drivers license.
Squares and square roots (along with area/volume) and basic pre-algebra are covered in 5th and 6th grade public school, at least here in California. I haven't noticed any trig though.
I concede the point... All the random, contradictory Apple product speculation on the Internet is secretly controlled by Apple. I wish I'd realized it sooner.
Interesting that Apple puts this in terms of making the Mac more like the iPhone instead.
Apple did not write the speculation in TFA. They merely said it makes maintaining a common code base easier. Nothing about making the Mac more like the iPhone.
Trust me, after 70 years even semi-rigid is something to be proud of.
The political knowledge of those who can't vote is somewhat tangential to this discussion.
IIRC, #1 isn't an option in Australia, for better or worse. That probably inflates group #2 a bit.