All benchmarks are a proxy. They're not fake, they're just not fully representative. The A-series chips are faster than last year's A-series chips, and they're faster than Qualcomm's chips. Qualcomm's chips from this year are faster than they were last year. These things aren't fake.
Without the snark of other comments, I'm wondering what problems you'd like to see solved.
I also have a 6 right now, and while the 6s, 7, 8 and X don't solve a lot of problems between generations, I think as a combination they're a reasonable upgrade. I mean, we don't ask for that sort of problem solving out of many other devices in our lives. (For the record, I kept my iPhone 4 until I got my 6; a 4-year cycle is what I've deemed to be most appropriate.)
For the upgrade you get - a much better camera - a faster CPU - a more efficient CPU - a device with a bigger screen without a bigger form factor (X only, obviously) - a device with a more efficient screen (X only)
Those aren't insignificant upgrades. I'd argue that on the hardware side, smartphones are in general remarkably well made devices with very few problems, and most of the problems have to do with being too slow or running out of battery too soon.
But I'm honestly interested in your list: what would you like to see fixed that would be considered a major upgrade?
Ultimately, this isn't really the fault of any particular Android handset maker—they have to work with what's available, and Qualcomm is effectively the only game in town. Samsung makes its own line of chips, of course, but they're not substantially better, as near as I can tell. They're better, but they're not A-series better.
What Android needs now is some other company to pick up the ARM spec and make a better chip, but there's really no margin in it. Everyone is trying to get parts as cheap as possible, so nobody's going to want to pay more for a different one. Even the 'flagship' Android phones are facing something of a race to the bottom, and it's constraining certain aspects of their performance. Samsung is really the only one with a chance here, and it doesn't surprise me that they're the only handset maker in the Android space that makes any money.
For the next release, Apple fans wonâ(TM)t need to do that anymoreâ"the A11 will still be faster than next yearâ(TM)s Qualcomm release. Itâ(TM)s already partly true right now; the iPhone 7 does those âoereal worldâ speed loop tests than the most modern android phones already.
Now is any of this meaningful? Probably not. But itâ(TM)s a metric of comparison that Apple owns.
1) This isn't something Google can do, because obviously Google's bread and butter is ads (though, let's be real—I bet Google could do better, less disruptive advertising if they wanted to) 2) Apple's users are disproportionately represented in online purchasing. When you see stats for online Black Friday sales, most mobile sales are on iOS devices. This makes Apple's decision hit twice as hard despite having less market share.
I'm sure it won't be long before ad agencies come up with some other irksome method of ruining my online browsing experience, but I'm so happy someone is trying *something* to mess with these guys.
Right: Apple relies on these other manufacturers to do the dirty work and be 'good enough' in the Android space to make components like the screen great rather than mediocre, and that's when they switch over.
The OLED screens that Samsung made weren't always amazing. The colour reproduction was criticised, and when the pixels were bigger, people complained about how the screens looked fuzzy. Now the screens are great; why wouldn't Apple use them?
I don't really see why this is a criticism of Apple or it's model. They wait for the best parts and put them together in arguably the best package. I get the best tech breakthroughs every 4 years (I'm on a 4 year replacement cycle) and I never feel that far behind, even in the 4th year of my phone's life. That's not really an exorbitant price to pay.
OLED also had trouble with tiling and accurate colour reproduction. Until Apple could get one that met their standards, they didn't want to do it. Ironically, only Samsung can make the panels that meet their standards right now, which is apparently part of the reason why the iPhone X is rumoured to be supply constrained.
This would present completely different issues, and presumably wouldn't even work in some cases (phone has crashed) and would be meaningless if the phone's battery died.
My passcode is over 15 characters long. I love biometric sign-in specifically because it lets me have a long passcode that doesn't get in my way constantly.
The passcode lock turns on after 24 hours of not signing in—or this week-long thing—primarily to make sure that whoever has the phone is really the person that should have the phone. The week-long version is a bit weird, but I don't think it's a huge burden.
One other thing: I live in Quebec, and a word like 'partner' is actually pretty useful here. People here aren't super in to marriage (historical beef with the church; same reason why all the swear words are repurposed religious/church terms) so 'partner' is perfectly descriptive. I actually meet people with kids that describe themselves as 'boyfriend' and 'girlfriend' when they speak in English, which sort of underplays the extent of their relationship.
She's my wife, technically, but neither of us really like that word—it comes with a lot of baggage. 'Partner' is more descriptive in the sense that we try to do things together, as equally and equitably as possible.
And, to be honest, there's something that we like about the ambiguity. You can't tell if I'm male or female or straight or queer. The word worked when we were just dating, and it still works now that we have a piece of paper from the government that tells people that our life decisions are legally binding. It's a good word for us.:)
You only think this because humans deal in visual information, and that's actually pretty useless to good facial recognition. This is why I assume this works with faces that aren't white and caucasian unlike most other facial recognition systems based on facial image data for years, and presumably also why it isn't fooled by flat photographs. (It isn't even fooled by masks, which is astounding.) The contour data is much more useful than an 'image' in the human-visual-system sense.
My partner got an iPhone SE when her iPhone 6 died. It was cheaper and she likes the smaller form factor better. Not everyone cares to be cutting edge with absolutely everything.
Face recognition didn't fail, they didn't unlock the phone when it woke up, just like with Touch ID. You have to provide a passcode after the phone has been turned off and on.
Facial recognition doesn't take any photos, just like Touch ID didn't take an imprint of your finger. It converts it to a mathematical representation and does a comparison inside the Secure Enclave. The analysis it does is non-transferable.
There are two big features that I think people would jump ship for: the camera and the size of the screen. (Setting aside that I actually think the form factor of the 5/SE is the best one in hand.)
And indeed, Apple saw massive uptake of the original iPhone 6 because of the bigger screen, and the iPhone 7+ was more popular than expected. So if we're talking specifically about the 5/5s, we can definitely see a reason to upgrade there.
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. It's the one feature that you can see the difference in, if not every year, definitely once every 2 years. (I bought one of the new 9.7" iPads this June, and I'm in the weird position of preferring that camera and software because it can do live photos, which are fantastic if you have fast moving things in your house, like children or cats. Of course, it's an enormous hassle to move an object that big into position as a camera for some shots.)
Now, these arguments aside, I'll agree with you about the 'sidegrade'—the 7 is uniformly better than the 6s, but it's still in the same order of magnitude, if you'll allow me to abuse that term a bit.
I think Apple has some room to move—particularly with ARKit coming—so I wouldn't say Apple is out of possibilities for big wins in the smartphone space. And hey, you never know what's going to be big and amazing until after it happens. But by and large, I think you're right, and the iPhone will become the device that you have that anchors the rest of your amazing and magical Apple products, just as the Mac used to be.
I don't think that second reason is particularly relevant. Apple is still taking away 90% of the industry's profits (or have they dropped to the high 80% range?), and often end up supply constrained at the beginning of the cycle. Apple understands the market really well, and they're selling about as many phones of that price as the market can bear.
Your design comment is probably the strongest—even though the design was a bit different, it wasn't enough. The internals of the 7 are a huge upgrade, but people want it to look different and be noticeably better at everything. Apple and most other high-end phone manufacturers are running into the issue of their phones just legitimately being so powerful it's hard to say that the additional power they're throwing in has *too* much of an affect on day-to-day use. Sure, you and I can talk about geekbench scores and their multi-core design, but if it isn't making the phone visibly better, it's hard for an average consumer to decide to get the new phone if their current one isn't broken—which is effectively your first point. I can bet there are some people that did defer the upgrade for this year's phone, just as the 6 pulled upgrades forward by a year, but it's hard to believe it's the dominating factor.
(I heard recently—on Gruber's show—about a survey that asked people when they upgrade their phones. The most common answer was apparently 'when my old one breaks'.)
Tim Cook does virtually none of the presenting—most of what he does is the feel-good stuff, financials and introducing other people, so I'm not sure what you're complaining about. He's taking on the stuff that nobody could make particularly interesting anyway.
So I use Feedly (and Newsify on iOS), and it's pretty good. I went looking around recently, and most of the free options are legitimately terrible. They don't support OPML, or they're restricted in a way that's really obnoxious. I'm okay with good services trying to monetize, though, so it's not that big a deal. But if you're looking for something that's free, your options are thin on the ground.
Then when you get to clients, it's surprising how many fail on basic interface things, even when you're paying, particularly in the smartphone app space. I was considering Unread, a rather pretty iOS client. It looks like the reading experience is good and it can handle multiple different services...but you can't add a new source. So if you're on your phone or tablet, you have to go to your feed in a different app and add it there. That seems ridiculous.
Other apps just have terrible interfaces, or bizarrely seem set up so that reading is a bit of a chore. I've sifted through a lot of apps, and for free, the best you're going to get is 'pretty good' (Newsify). In the paid space, well, I haven't pulled the trigger on anything because $6-10 is a lot for an app that might make my life worse than it currently is now.
Hang it on the wall as a reminder that if you donâ(TM)t change with the world, it will leave you behind, and no amount of pretentious posturing or loud-spoken denials about the state of the world will save you.
iOS 11 will automatically delete old apps that havenâ(TM)t been used in a long time if you ask it to. Itâ(TM)ll keep the data around, and you can just restore it from the App Store if you want it again
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All benchmarks are a proxy. They're not fake, they're just not fully representative. The A-series chips are faster than last year's A-series chips, and they're faster than Qualcomm's chips. Qualcomm's chips from this year are faster than they were last year. These things aren't fake.
Without the snark of other comments, I'm wondering what problems you'd like to see solved.
I also have a 6 right now, and while the 6s, 7, 8 and X don't solve a lot of problems between generations, I think as a combination they're a reasonable upgrade. I mean, we don't ask for that sort of problem solving out of many other devices in our lives. (For the record, I kept my iPhone 4 until I got my 6; a 4-year cycle is what I've deemed to be most appropriate.)
For the upgrade you get
- a much better camera
- a faster CPU
- a more efficient CPU
- a device with a bigger screen without a bigger form factor (X only, obviously)
- a device with a more efficient screen (X only)
Those aren't insignificant upgrades. I'd argue that on the hardware side, smartphones are in general remarkably well made devices with very few problems, and most of the problems have to do with being too slow or running out of battery too soon.
But I'm honestly interested in your list: what would you like to see fixed that would be considered a major upgrade?
Like, 11 months.
Ultimately, this isn't really the fault of any particular Android handset maker—they have to work with what's available, and Qualcomm is effectively the only game in town. Samsung makes its own line of chips, of course, but they're not substantially better, as near as I can tell. They're better, but they're not A-series better.
What Android needs now is some other company to pick up the ARM spec and make a better chip, but there's really no margin in it. Everyone is trying to get parts as cheap as possible, so nobody's going to want to pay more for a different one. Even the 'flagship' Android phones are facing something of a race to the bottom, and it's constraining certain aspects of their performance. Samsung is really the only one with a chance here, and it doesn't surprise me that they're the only handset maker in the Android space that makes any money.
For the next release, Apple fans wonâ(TM)t need to do that anymoreâ"the A11 will still be faster than next yearâ(TM)s Qualcomm release. Itâ(TM)s already partly true right now; the iPhone 7 does those âoereal worldâ speed loop tests than the most modern android phones already.
Now is any of this meaningful? Probably not. But itâ(TM)s a metric of comparison that Apple owns.
This is really significant in a few ways:
1) This isn't something Google can do, because obviously Google's bread and butter is ads (though, let's be real—I bet Google could do better, less disruptive advertising if they wanted to)
2) Apple's users are disproportionately represented in online purchasing. When you see stats for online Black Friday sales, most mobile sales are on iOS devices. This makes Apple's decision hit twice as hard despite having less market share.
I'm sure it won't be long before ad agencies come up with some other irksome method of ruining my online browsing experience, but I'm so happy someone is trying *something* to mess with these guys.
Right: Apple relies on these other manufacturers to do the dirty work and be 'good enough' in the Android space to make components like the screen great rather than mediocre, and that's when they switch over.
The OLED screens that Samsung made weren't always amazing. The colour reproduction was criticised, and when the pixels were bigger, people complained about how the screens looked fuzzy. Now the screens are great; why wouldn't Apple use them?
I don't really see why this is a criticism of Apple or it's model. They wait for the best parts and put them together in arguably the best package. I get the best tech breakthroughs every 4 years (I'm on a 4 year replacement cycle) and I never feel that far behind, even in the 4th year of my phone's life. That's not really an exorbitant price to pay.
OLED also had trouble with tiling and accurate colour reproduction. Until Apple could get one that met their standards, they didn't want to do it. Ironically, only Samsung can make the panels that meet their standards right now, which is apparently part of the reason why the iPhone X is rumoured to be supply constrained.
This would present completely different issues, and presumably wouldn't even work in some cases (phone has crashed) and would be meaningless if the phone's battery died.
My passcode is over 15 characters long. I love biometric sign-in specifically because it lets me have a long passcode that doesn't get in my way constantly.
The passcode lock turns on after 24 hours of not signing in—or this week-long thing—primarily to make sure that whoever has the phone is really the person that should have the phone. The week-long version is a bit weird, but I don't think it's a huge burden.
One other thing: I live in Quebec, and a word like 'partner' is actually pretty useful here. People here aren't super in to marriage (historical beef with the church; same reason why all the swear words are repurposed religious/church terms) so 'partner' is perfectly descriptive. I actually meet people with kids that describe themselves as 'boyfriend' and 'girlfriend' when they speak in English, which sort of underplays the extent of their relationship.
I would (and did!) use 'partner' in this circumstance. The nice thing about the word is that it transcends your formal relationship status.
She's my wife, technically, but neither of us really like that word—it comes with a lot of baggage. 'Partner' is more descriptive in the sense that we try to do things together, as equally and equitably as possible.
And, to be honest, there's something that we like about the ambiguity. You can't tell if I'm male or female or straight or queer. The word worked when we were just dating, and it still works now that we have a piece of paper from the government that tells people that our life decisions are legally binding. It's a good word for us. :)
You only think this because humans deal in visual information, and that's actually pretty useless to good facial recognition. This is why I assume this works with faces that aren't white and caucasian unlike most other facial recognition systems based on facial image data for years, and presumably also why it isn't fooled by flat photographs. (It isn't even fooled by masks, which is astounding.) The contour data is much more useful than an 'image' in the human-visual-system sense.
It has 3 buttons.
My partner got an iPhone SE when her iPhone 6 died. It was cheaper and she likes the smaller form factor better. Not everyone cares to be cutting edge with absolutely everything.
I didn't even know you could pre-detect like that. I've been double tapping the home button and authenticating BEFORE approaching the reader.
Face recognition didn't fail, they didn't unlock the phone when it woke up, just like with Touch ID. You have to provide a passcode after the phone has been turned off and on.
Facial recognition doesn't take any photos, just like Touch ID didn't take an imprint of your finger. It converts it to a mathematical representation and does a comparison inside the Secure Enclave. The analysis it does is non-transferable.
You have to be actively paying attention, apparently—CFed demoed that. You also have to have your eyes open.
There are two big features that I think people would jump ship for: the camera and the size of the screen. (Setting aside that I actually think the form factor of the 5/SE is the best one in hand.)
And indeed, Apple saw massive uptake of the original iPhone 6 because of the bigger screen, and the iPhone 7+ was more popular than expected. So if we're talking specifically about the 5/5s, we can definitely see a reason to upgrade there.
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. It's the one feature that you can see the difference in, if not every year, definitely once every 2 years. (I bought one of the new 9.7" iPads this June, and I'm in the weird position of preferring that camera and software because it can do live photos, which are fantastic if you have fast moving things in your house, like children or cats. Of course, it's an enormous hassle to move an object that big into position as a camera for some shots.)
Now, these arguments aside, I'll agree with you about the 'sidegrade'—the 7 is uniformly better than the 6s, but it's still in the same order of magnitude, if you'll allow me to abuse that term a bit.
I think Apple has some room to move—particularly with ARKit coming—so I wouldn't say Apple is out of possibilities for big wins in the smartphone space. And hey, you never know what's going to be big and amazing until after it happens. But by and large, I think you're right, and the iPhone will become the device that you have that anchors the rest of your amazing and magical Apple products, just as the Mac used to be.
I don't think that second reason is particularly relevant. Apple is still taking away 90% of the industry's profits (or have they dropped to the high 80% range?), and often end up supply constrained at the beginning of the cycle. Apple understands the market really well, and they're selling about as many phones of that price as the market can bear.
Your design comment is probably the strongest—even though the design was a bit different, it wasn't enough. The internals of the 7 are a huge upgrade, but people want it to look different and be noticeably better at everything. Apple and most other high-end phone manufacturers are running into the issue of their phones just legitimately being so powerful it's hard to say that the additional power they're throwing in has *too* much of an affect on day-to-day use. Sure, you and I can talk about geekbench scores and their multi-core design, but if it isn't making the phone visibly better, it's hard for an average consumer to decide to get the new phone if their current one isn't broken—which is effectively your first point. I can bet there are some people that did defer the upgrade for this year's phone, just as the 6 pulled upgrades forward by a year, but it's hard to believe it's the dominating factor.
(I heard recently—on Gruber's show—about a survey that asked people when they upgrade their phones. The most common answer was apparently 'when my old one breaks'.)
Tim Cook does virtually none of the presenting—most of what he does is the feel-good stuff, financials and introducing other people, so I'm not sure what you're complaining about. He's taking on the stuff that nobody could make particularly interesting anyway.
So I use Feedly (and Newsify on iOS), and it's pretty good. I went looking around recently, and most of the free options are legitimately terrible. They don't support OPML, or they're restricted in a way that's really obnoxious. I'm okay with good services trying to monetize, though, so it's not that big a deal. But if you're looking for something that's free, your options are thin on the ground.
Then when you get to clients, it's surprising how many fail on basic interface things, even when you're paying, particularly in the smartphone app space. I was considering Unread, a rather pretty iOS client. It looks like the reading experience is good and it can handle multiple different services...but you can't add a new source. So if you're on your phone or tablet, you have to go to your feed in a different app and add it there. That seems ridiculous.
Other apps just have terrible interfaces, or bizarrely seem set up so that reading is a bit of a chore. I've sifted through a lot of apps, and for free, the best you're going to get is 'pretty good' (Newsify). In the paid space, well, I haven't pulled the trigger on anything because $6-10 is a lot for an app that might make my life worse than it currently is now.
Hang it on the wall as a reminder that if you donâ(TM)t change with the world, it will leave you behind, and no amount of pretentious posturing or loud-spoken denials about the state of the world will save you.
âoeFishâ is a perfectly acceptable plural. Itâ(TM)s even in the dictionary.
iOS 11 will automatically delete old apps that havenâ(TM)t been used in a long time if you ask it to. Itâ(TM)ll keep the data around, and you can just restore it from the App Store if you want it again