There was an inherent flaw in Apple's version of skeumorphism, which is that it took up a lot of space on screens that were already cramped for space. It's one thing to have leather stitching all over in OS X where you've got screen space to burn, but even on an iPad, it feels like those extra pixels could be used better.
Skeumorphism itself is not fundamentally evil; arguably, you can't get away from it at all, since it's really just another way of describing a way to use metaphor to indicate how something works. The calendar app still represents a calendar--it doesn't try to do away with the convention by throwing away our concept of months or something.
I'm actually a big fan of the zoom animations, but I'm not sure if that animation is covering load time that we'd be subject to anyway or not--I'd like to know if control passes to the application as soon as the icon has been pressed or if the animation is blocking.
I don't entirely agree with your comments on the functionality of the system, particularly as someone that uses it (happily) every day. I think we're rapidly getting to an era of religious debate a la emacs vs. vi, though. We've got two systems that have different philosophies and both have camps of happy users. We may be at a point where we should just leave well enough alone and just use what we want without spending too much time preaching.
Not at all. Useless things tacked on are STILL USELESS THINGS.
They still have an actual impact on the usage of the phone. You want me to come up with software things? Fine: why doesn't my phone come with an emulator for a Cray Y-MP? What about apps specifically for reminding me to water my plants and a widget that does nothing but emit a high pitched whine? Or a dog whistle app?
It's all garbage. The agumentum ad absurdum is just as relevant for physical features as software ones (you can't think of any superfluous physical features of any phones?) and they all fall into the same category: useless things on my phone that I don't want and shouldn't be burdened with when I take it out of the box.
Actually, Apple's concern is rarely to be first, they just like to be best.
But in this case, being first forced Samsung into an awkward position, which Apple wouldn't be able to pass up. The very next day, Samsung either had to say that they had 64-bit chips coming for their next phones. Obviously, that means months of lead time to architect something like that, but it looked like they were just mimicking what Apple did, to the general public.
It was a marketing masterstroke for a technical advance that is necessary for a long-term strategy, but is otherwise only moderately interesting. There are benefits to 64-bits that don't involve 4GB of RAM, but most people that BUY the phones aren't going to care about them. They just need to know the A7 is fast, not how wide the integers are.
I think this is pretty simple: Next year, the only phone that Apple sells that's 32-bit will be the A6 5C. The 6C and 6S will run A7 and A7x/A8 chips respectively.
The year after THAT, the 5C will be EOL. The 5S or equivalent will be sold as the bottom-end phone. This means that in less than 3 years, Apple can have a line-up of phones that are still receiving full OS updates but only have one OS code line.
The 5C will probably be officially cut from updates for iOS X. The 5S will still get them. At that point, they can do whatever they want. The devices of that year or the next will probably be using 4GB of RAM. It'll be both cheap and small enough to fit into a mobile device, and it'll have OS support.
I really think that's all that is really behind it. The fact that they get to make Samsung look like an also-ran is just icing on the cake; forcing your main competitor to look like the copycat that you've been trying to convince everyone that they are is a fantastic side benefit to a long-term technical strategy.
For me, this also says that if you're looking to keep your phone that you buy THIS year for 3+ years, you're better off with the 5S because the 5C will be locked out all too soon.
I think even more to the point is that this data is irrelevant.
Let's pretend that Apple is lying through its teeth. Does that actually change anything? Not really.
If the NSA wants your data, they'll get it. Your fingerprint is only meaningful as a method to get that data. They can crack your phone themselves, or ask Apple to do it for them. The fingerprint is a humongous waste of time.
Your fingerprint isn't sufficiently unique that they care about a fingerprint database anyway. We KNOW there's overlap in fingerprints. The fact that the phone is yours and tied to your bank account and that you're paying for it is FAR more information than they need if you're in court. Your fingerprint is on the OUTSIDE OF THE PHONE.
They don't need your digitised fingerprint for anything. This is to keep your friends from taking your phone at parties and photographing their junk and sending it to your Mom. It's so that if you drop your phone and someone else picks it up, they don't have immediate access to all your stuff. It's a faster authentication method, and that's it.
That episode was from 2006. I can see how you might think absolutely zero progress has been made in the intervening period, but I have a hypothesis that modern implementations are better.
Listen, if the government wants your fingerprints, right now, they'll just find some reason to arrest you and fingerprint you. It's not actually a thing that they have to worry about. The phones are already trackable.
Your fingerprint is at best a password, and has no inherent value beyond letting you into your data. The NSA can already crack the data, or demand that Apple decrypts it, and that's WAY faster than mucking around with a fingerprint.
Also, as has probably been pointed out before, fingerprints are only unique-ish. This isn't a DNA sample. Fingerprints don't count as evidence on their own anymore, they're sort of add-in evidence that helps firm up a case.
Once the iPhone starts asking for DNA samples, maybe I'll find a reason to be worried.
Your phone wasn't hardened against NSA intrusion yesterday, and it won't be tomorrow. The fingerprint is a convenience that should prevent CASUAL access, like at a party. It may slow someone down for just long enough to get your phone back. You think the 4 digit PIN that it (partially) replaces was a lot stronger? Really?
That ridiculous. Do you have scissors built into your phone? A laser pointer, dog whistle, tissue dispenser or espresso maker? Why not? Isn't it better to have the feature available?
Even if we don't consider the realm of the obviously bad ideas, elegance is not about having as much stuff in one box as possible, it's about having as little as possible to get the job done properly. If my phone is stuffed with software that I never use and will never use, it's just a waste of my time and storage. The whole point of having app stores is so that you buy the stuff that you want to augment the functionality of your phone.
Wouldn't it be better if your phone came with the 20% of stuff that you use and left the other 80% out?
So the other response correctly points out that the 4 didn't get Siri because the mics and the special on-board noise reduction chip weren't in it.
If you'd like to test out what kind of difference this makes, load up Google's voice search, and see how often it gets the search right compared to the 4s. I've basically never gotten a single correct search out of Google when trying to use the voice feature, but I've had friends with newer devices tell me that it all worked just fine.
I don't think you can really think of this as the first iteration of the technology anymore. The design is unlikely to change much, even if there's a bit of an issue.
I still have my iPhone 4, bought a few months after release. I never had the problems with the antenna that other people apparently had, and that was the supposed major, fundamental design flaw of the phone. They fixed it in the 4s, and presumably the 5. But I haven't heard of anything fundamentally wrong with the 4s or the 5, and the new stuff being introduced this year doesn't sound like it's necessarily going to be ripe for failure.
Oh. Would you care to point me to the hoards of level headed climate activists who say this about Hurricane Katrina or Sandy? I seem to have missed them.
Most of the climate scientists that I've heard interviewed say, very strongly, that we can't attribute any single event to our understanding of the current climate situation. That is, we don't know if Katrina or Sandy happened because of climate change or if they would have happened anyway. Instead, they rely on statistical models to understand what the probability of such events is, and how likely it would be that something like that would happen in the absence of the climate change that we believe is happening.
Actually, I would challenge you to find a quote from an actual climate scientist--and not a re-written or misattributed quote, since the media is incredibly bad at reporting ALL science. How many times have you seen a headline that says something like, "X and Y PROVE Z is occurring, say scientists." 99% of the time after reading the article, the researcher in question says something like, "we believe that factors X and Y increase the chances of Z by n%, and thus may be among the possible causes of Z over the long term." This happens in medicine, physics, climate, whatever. Science reporting (particularly in newspapers) is far more hyperbolic than the papers that inspire them.
Again, I've yet to hear even a single scientist make as strong a statement as you claim. Every single one I've heard hedges by saying certain things are likely, or are of increased likelihood. A lot of 'maybes', 'could bes' and 'possiblys' are thrown around. Never trust a scientist that's absolutely sure about anything (unless it's a mathematician with a proof in hand).
The iPhone 5 connector is becoming easier and easier to find. A lot of those phones have been sold. I've seen them at the airport, and if I stood up and shouted for one here on the floor at work, I bet I could find at least one. But more to the point, there's nothing special about the 'electrical' interface on an iPhone cable. It has one end that's USB and another end that is proprietary. But if I can find a cable, I can plug it into the USB port on the plane, or in any computer. If I don't have a cable, I'm SOL, but I'm SOL with any phone. You still need a cable.
I have never, at any point, synced my iPad to my computer. Not once, not for anything. It works fine. I have all the media on it that I want (and that I own). It syncs with the cloud without any issue. I've never even plugged my iPad into my computer to charge it. Don't tell me I have to use iTunes or my computer to manage my devices. I transfer my documents wirelessly through an application that I picked up on the store. And that's what apps are there for--to augment the functionality of the device if I decide that I need it. In fact, I rarely use the application because the data I want on my phone and tablet are generally completely unrelated to the files on my computer.
'Nobody you know' isn't a valid sample space. Maybe you just have bad friends. Who's to say? Apparently lots of people are fine with it. I won't argue that iTunes on Windows is a great piece of software--it's not. I can understand if people don't like it and don't like syncing with it. That said, it's still true that it seems to work well enough for the majority of people.
I haven't come across a time where I wanted something on my phone and I wasn't allowed to put something on it. I can put anything I want on my phone that's being sold in the store. This is similar to owning an XBox--if something doesn't exist in the store, I can't put it on the XBox. That's a tautology, I admit, but it's no different from the iPhone. If you're a developer and want to put your own stuff on the phone, you can do that too. I wouldn't call that kind of control 'excessive'.
You're right that I don't have those widgets. I jailbroke my iPhone for a while so I could get those widgets. I got tired of them and all the space they took up when I didn't need the information contained therein. Again, I'm not going to be a valid sample space, but I think we've seen that the market is okay with the limited setup of the screens on the iPhone so far. I've checked out the Android phones and they largely don't interest me; if I had one, it would be set up just like my iPhone.
From an HCI perspective, it's not always better to give users more choices. You can give someone an interface that leaves them feeling subjectively better or more productive but objectively less productive. This paradox is so prevalent, someone even wrote a book about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less
Oh, and the last point that you didn't address, which is obviously a lie: DRM.
I'm not convinced of your premise. In fact, given the recent churn in so-called 'smart-watches', I'd argue that Apple doesn't have to enter a market to disrupt it at all--its reputation precedes it.
The Pebble, I believe, pre-dates any talk about a wearable Apple device, but we didn't start hearing from Samsung and Sony and Microsoft that they all had watch divisions until several months after rumours about Apple started.
Moreover, once Apple enters that market (if they ever do, of course) I expect that the market will shift hugely again.
Oh, or we can just look at the iPad. That was something that I think most of us were predicting, and at it didn't really matter. Apple is now the leader of that segment, and other manufacturers were helpless to stop it.
We definitely agree on one thing, though: blessings be upon the CSIRO.:)
No, I'm just more realistic about my product requirements. Plus they're the only company still making a small flagship phone. I actually wish they'd stuck with the iPhone 4 size format.
But anyway, the point of being over 320-ish PPI is that at normal distances, for most human eyes, you stop being able to distinguish between individual pixels. While 441 is definitely a bigger number than 326, it is almost 100% irrelevant to humans with normal eyesight that hold the phone somewhere away from their face. An iron atom is much more massive than a hydrogen atom, but it doesn't matter--I can't see EITHER of them. I can't see the pixels on my iPhone without a really intensive search.
2GB of memory takes up more space and power than 1GB of memory and that's just sort of the end of the story. The reason why Apple custom designs its chips is to reduce the power requirement as much as possible. Again, you shouldn't notice any difference at all on the user-side; more memory is meaningless to you until it starts to limit the applications that developers can make. I haven't seen or heard of any evidence of that yet. We've all seen the incredibly high-res games that the iPad can play, and it only has 1GB of RAM.
Everything that I've read still points to on-board NAND being faster than even Class 10 devices, but I admit, I'm not well versed on the details.
Anyway, I think most of the stuff that Samsung is pushing out the door is crap, but I think that a lot of the stuff done by HTC (best industrial design), Sony (the XPeria Z is waterproof and has ANT+) and Motorola (the Moto X is probably the single most cutting-edge phone on the market--it benchmarks really competitively against other phones with bigger screens and more cores). But as I said in another comment, Apple's big innovations rarely come once they're entrenched in a market. They'll move on to something else.
But again, bigger screens aren't innovation, they're just bigger. Across the board, the bigger phones have worse battery life than the iPhone (except the Note series, I believe, but they're SO big that they have a lot of room for a battery).
Incidentally, here's a tip: using the word 'fanboi' is both illiterate and generally the sign of a person that's run out of actual things to say. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here. It's not that I find your complaints without merit, I really just think that if you look at the market in general and the use case for most people that can afford a high-end phone, the iPhone is really no worse off than any other maker. You've got a different use case, and while you're dissatisfied with the phone, in the context of this story and Apple's relative ability to innovate (or not), I still don't see that Apple is in any particular trouble.
Truth be told, Samsung (and other Android makers) are winning the global marketshare race on the basis of their cheaper phones, not their better phones. That *definitely* doesn't have anything to do with innovation.
Apple doesn't need to do anything special to stay in this horse race, the same as it's always been with them. They'll start looking around for a different industry to be 'innovative' in; this one is basically about incremental upgrades for the next several years.
I don't know why you consider these things innovation. A bigger screen means less battery life. 2GB of RAM is nice to have, but takes up space, and isn't actually all that necessary given Apple's multitasking model. SD/MicroSD is slow and cumbersome and takes up space that Apple would rather put to a bigger battery. But in any case, none of THOSE things are innovative, either. That's just more stuff.
NFC is effectively dead in the water; nobody's putting it in their phones, and because of that, nobody's actually using it in devices. It turns out the new BlueTooth spec is getting more traction for close-range communications. An IR blaster is a thing that literally nobody that I know uses, even if they have one. I haven't found a friend that went looking for one in their next phone. Many have switched to Android devices and zero of them even brought it up.
I don't really know what you're talking about with low resolution--are you talking about the number of pixels? And you're calling the pixels huge? At this point it's hard to believe you ever owned an Apple products at all. The pixels are hard for me to pick out on my iPhone 4 even with my nose practically up against the screen (my vision is sufficiently good that I don't require glasses).
The things you want are things that *I* don't, and that most people don't remotely care about. I want more battery life. I want a phone that's fast and durable and will last me another 3 years. An upgraded camera will be nice...and that's it. I guess I'm easy to please in this regard.
You're not Apple's market anymore. It's good that you enjoy your Samsung, because you'll probably never come back to Apple.
I've got a lot of different kinds of proprietary cables from a lot of companies, including Sony. I'm pretty sure Samsung had their own for a long time, too. But Apple charge cables are easy to find; they're only slightly less ubiquitous than USB cables. Don't make this out to be a bigger issue than it is; I've never had a problem charging my Apple stuff, even if I've forgotten a cable.
Where are you getting Oggs and FLACs from? Are you doing it yourself, or buying it from a store? Oh, you're doing it yourself because everyone sells MP3s? If that's what you're doing, you could just as easily have made AACs or ALAC files, and you've had to connect to a desktop computer SOMEHOW. This is a complete non-issue. (It's worth noting that iTunes actually lets you manually manage your phone by dragging and dropping files onto it in the finder. Most people don't use this functionality because iTunes playlists and music management is very powerful if you know what you're doing, or very simple if you don't. With the upcoming phones this fall, transferring files without connecting to a desktop computer should be easier than before.)
My iPhone syncs with Google calendars just fine. It does so through a variety of different apps, even.
The 'freedom' argument is made now and then, but nobody's ever shown me an app that every Apple user wants that only exists on Android. Maybe this will change one day, and maybe this won't, but the fact of the matter is that there are more Apple exclusive apps than Android exclusives that are popular. Plants vs. Zombies, anyone? (I know this is coming for Android, but I've already played it enough that I'm almost done with it.)
There are trade-offs for using any phone. How many Android devices are up-to-date with the latest OS release 3 years after their release (or even a few MONTHS after their release? Precious few. (In fact, probably only one.)
Where do you go if you break your phone to get it repaired? Is there a convenient shop, or do you have to talk to your carrier (which I think most of us will agree is the worst possible option). How much carrier-ware do you have installed on your phone if you buy it subsidised? With Apple, there's none, ever.
Then you get into weird edge cases where you've got a phone like the HTC One, which seems pretty great. But people don't like HTC's modifications to Android. Well, now you can buy it without HTC's mods! Oh, but that removes the actually useful camera software built-in. You can't get everything as just stock Android with the upgraded camera software. Maybe someday someone will come up with a modded ROM, but surely we can all see the problems inherent in that for the average consumer.
Trade-offs are just a thing we have to live with. For the price of having a different cable and a slightly more restricted ecosystem (which for practical purposes is more than sufficiently robust), I get a phone that I can keep for 3 years and get new OS features every year (I'm still on my iPhone 4; I'll be getting a new phone this fall). I deal directly with Apple, and if there's a problem with the hardware, I know who to go to. The OS works well with the hardware and in fact can be well optimised because of the total integration of the product. These are tradeoffs I'm willing to work with, despite the fact that I think the HTC One is the most beautiful phone on the market, the fact that the XPeria Z is waterproof and has ANT+ built in (which would be super cool to me as a cyclist), and the Moto X has a really appealing set of cutting edge features.
This whole post is wrong. Literally everything you said isn't true or at best is subject to interpretation. (The exception is the UI point, but only because that's wholly subjective. Mostly, though, it's just lies.)
Congratulations,/. you've come full circle. Once defender against FUD and trash, now an active promoter of it.
Okay, listen. I know it's popular to bang the 'Apple is failing to Innovate' drum, but it's STILL NOT TRUE.
The problem is that people are compressing the last decade of work into a much smaller space than it deserves. Apple doesn't release huge, blockbuster game-changing products every year. Not even every couple of years. It's MANY years between cycles. The time between the iPod and the iPhone was a long time. The iTunes music store was its own special story. Yeah, the iPhone has sort of settled into a pattern, but it's still a very good phone.
People are looking to Apple to change the PHONE industry again, and they probably won't. They changed the music player industry ONCE, and iterated on that until it wasn't relevant anymore. Apple will continue to make a good phone--even a GREAT phone--but they probably won't ever really be the industry leader again.
Apple will find a new market to disrupt. It's easier than trying to disrupt the market you're entrenched in. Is the next thing a watch? Maybe iWatch refers to a TV (that would be a big surprise, wouldn't it--it's the sort of misdirection that I would expect from them). In all likelihood, it's something that people won't be able to predict, just like the iPhone was.
Stop asking Apple to a) really, truly innovate faster than they have before; and b) ask them to innovate in a space that they're already making money in. That's not the way they've ever worked.
I think what you're forgetting is that the content of the message is really only useful (from a big brother standpoint) if you can definitively pin the message on someone.
Sure, if a message appears on my phone, I can write it down and SAY it's from you, but without that transaction log, it's just your word against mine. There's no paper trail except a message you claim I sent you. A picture of the message or anything else that doesn't include that signature is meaningless.
So the REAL question is whether or not this is sufficient to sever the link between sender and message when the message is 'burnt'.
The thing to understand about Ryanair is that it's less an airline and more of a bus with wings. They don't care about you in the same way that the bus service in your city doesn't care about you. They'd like to cram as many people on as can pay the fare, get you to your destination on-time-ish and hustle you off.
It's not a bad system, but luggage and stuff works exactly as badly as it usually does on the bus. The costs for a bag for an airline are way higher, though, so you can't expect sympathy.
If you expect nothing out of Ryanair except a cheap ticket and just enough seating so that you can pass the time only moderately uncomfortable--just like a bus or a subway--you'll be fine.
1) America has a significant tradition and history of immigration and open borders. The country was founded on the basis of immigration. 2) It's wildly hypocritical to have an administration (not just the current one, but in general) that espouses freedom all over the world, and make claims to freedom inside its borders, but then turns around and effectively strips all your freedoms the moment you set foot into an airport.
If you go to China, you probably know what you're getting into. You know that they're extremely controlling and don't like people stirring the pot too much. If you try to travel into a war zone, you know that's also going to be bad news. When someone travels to the USA, they expect a certain amount of welcome and freedom because that's been the refrain for so many years. Maybe they shouldn't expect or demand that courtesy, but I'm not sure if it says more about them or the country that that's the case.
Nobody knows what they do yet. To me this seems like a way to get a drop on Apple and say that they had a watch out before. If and when an Apple device hits is when we'll see motion in the market, whether that device is good or bad.
Not having the first product on the market has never bothered Apple before, so I'm not sure what Samsung is trying to get out of this other than bragging rights. Or, who knows, maybe everyone will want one!
As it stands, I can't think of many things that sound more useless than a 'smart' watch. The only good suggestion I've seen so far has the phone in the pocket while direction prompts from your GPS pop up on the watch face. But if that's the best that we're going to get, I'll pass.
Approximately 8% of the human genome is actually leftover virus material. Organisms that have genes from other, unrelated organisms aren't really anything new. In fact, I would wager that some of the things that we're doing to foods happen occasionally and randomly by mutation, but are either not viable in a normal environment or are eaten and destroyed before they can spread.
There's no good reason to believe GMO is necessarily safe or dangerous based on what a company tells you, I agree. But I don't think that the widespread fear of the whole field of study is warranted, either.
There's room for the science, but at usual, what we really need is a strong scientific regulatory framework administered by governments acting in our best interests. A pipe dream, I know...
A lot of stuff actually appears in racing cars first, and trickles down to high-end cars, then down to every day cars. DSG-type transmissions (the so-called 'flappy-paddle gearbox') were an F1 technology first, I believe.
My 6-year-old VW Jetta is more technologically advanced than a Merc from the 90s, but it's BECAUSE someone paid for a Merc in the 90s that I can have a VW that's such a good vehicle.
Good for Tesla. This is how you change an industry.
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There was an inherent flaw in Apple's version of skeumorphism, which is that it took up a lot of space on screens that were already cramped for space. It's one thing to have leather stitching all over in OS X where you've got screen space to burn, but even on an iPad, it feels like those extra pixels could be used better.
Skeumorphism itself is not fundamentally evil; arguably, you can't get away from it at all, since it's really just another way of describing a way to use metaphor to indicate how something works. The calendar app still represents a calendar--it doesn't try to do away with the convention by throwing away our concept of months or something.
I'm actually a big fan of the zoom animations, but I'm not sure if that animation is covering load time that we'd be subject to anyway or not--I'd like to know if control passes to the application as soon as the icon has been pressed or if the animation is blocking.
I don't entirely agree with your comments on the functionality of the system, particularly as someone that uses it (happily) every day. I think we're rapidly getting to an era of religious debate a la emacs vs. vi, though. We've got two systems that have different philosophies and both have camps of happy users. We may be at a point where we should just leave well enough alone and just use what we want without spending too much time preaching.
Not at all. Useless things tacked on are STILL USELESS THINGS.
They still have an actual impact on the usage of the phone. You want me to come up with software things? Fine: why doesn't my phone come with an emulator for a Cray Y-MP? What about apps specifically for reminding me to water my plants and a widget that does nothing but emit a high pitched whine? Or a dog whistle app?
It's all garbage. The agumentum ad absurdum is just as relevant for physical features as software ones (you can't think of any superfluous physical features of any phones?) and they all fall into the same category: useless things on my phone that I don't want and shouldn't be burdened with when I take it out of the box.
Actually, Apple's concern is rarely to be first, they just like to be best.
But in this case, being first forced Samsung into an awkward position, which Apple wouldn't be able to pass up. The very next day, Samsung either had to say that they had 64-bit chips coming for their next phones. Obviously, that means months of lead time to architect something like that, but it looked like they were just mimicking what Apple did, to the general public.
It was a marketing masterstroke for a technical advance that is necessary for a long-term strategy, but is otherwise only moderately interesting. There are benefits to 64-bits that don't involve 4GB of RAM, but most people that BUY the phones aren't going to care about them. They just need to know the A7 is fast, not how wide the integers are.
I think this is pretty simple: Next year, the only phone that Apple sells that's 32-bit will be the A6 5C.
The 6C and 6S will run A7 and A7x/A8 chips respectively.
The year after THAT, the 5C will be EOL. The 5S or equivalent will be sold as the bottom-end phone. This means that in less than 3 years, Apple can have a line-up of phones that are still receiving full OS updates but only have one OS code line.
The 5C will probably be officially cut from updates for iOS X. The 5S will still get them. At that point, they can do whatever they want. The devices of that year or the next will probably be using 4GB of RAM. It'll be both cheap and small enough to fit into a mobile device, and it'll have OS support.
I really think that's all that is really behind it. The fact that they get to make Samsung look like an also-ran is just icing on the cake; forcing your main competitor to look like the copycat that you've been trying to convince everyone that they are is a fantastic side benefit to a long-term technical strategy.
For me, this also says that if you're looking to keep your phone that you buy THIS year for 3+ years, you're better off with the 5S because the 5C will be locked out all too soon.
I think even more to the point is that this data is irrelevant.
Let's pretend that Apple is lying through its teeth. Does that actually change anything? Not really.
If the NSA wants your data, they'll get it. Your fingerprint is only meaningful as a method to get that data. They can crack your phone themselves, or ask Apple to do it for them. The fingerprint is a humongous waste of time.
Your fingerprint isn't sufficiently unique that they care about a fingerprint database anyway. We KNOW there's overlap in fingerprints. The fact that the phone is yours and tied to your bank account and that you're paying for it is FAR more information than they need if you're in court. Your fingerprint is on the OUTSIDE OF THE PHONE.
They don't need your digitised fingerprint for anything. This is to keep your friends from taking your phone at parties and photographing their junk and sending it to your Mom. It's so that if you drop your phone and someone else picks it up, they don't have immediate access to all your stuff. It's a faster authentication method, and that's it.
That episode was from 2006. I can see how you might think absolutely zero progress has been made in the intervening period, but I have a hypothesis that modern implementations are better.
Listen, if the government wants your fingerprints, right now, they'll just find some reason to arrest you and fingerprint you. It's not actually a thing that they have to worry about. The phones are already trackable.
Your fingerprint is at best a password, and has no inherent value beyond letting you into your data. The NSA can already crack the data, or demand that Apple decrypts it, and that's WAY faster than mucking around with a fingerprint.
Also, as has probably been pointed out before, fingerprints are only unique-ish. This isn't a DNA sample. Fingerprints don't count as evidence on their own anymore, they're sort of add-in evidence that helps firm up a case.
Once the iPhone starts asking for DNA samples, maybe I'll find a reason to be worried.
Your phone wasn't hardened against NSA intrusion yesterday, and it won't be tomorrow. The fingerprint is a convenience that should prevent CASUAL access, like at a party. It may slow someone down for just long enough to get your phone back. You think the 4 digit PIN that it (partially) replaces was a lot stronger? Really?
That ridiculous. Do you have scissors built into your phone? A laser pointer, dog whistle, tissue dispenser or espresso maker? Why not? Isn't it better to have the feature available?
Even if we don't consider the realm of the obviously bad ideas, elegance is not about having as much stuff in one box as possible, it's about having as little as possible to get the job done properly. If my phone is stuffed with software that I never use and will never use, it's just a waste of my time and storage. The whole point of having app stores is so that you buy the stuff that you want to augment the functionality of your phone.
Wouldn't it be better if your phone came with the 20% of stuff that you use and left the other 80% out?
So the other response correctly points out that the 4 didn't get Siri because the mics and the special on-board noise reduction chip weren't in it.
If you'd like to test out what kind of difference this makes, load up Google's voice search, and see how often it gets the search right compared to the 4s. I've basically never gotten a single correct search out of Google when trying to use the voice feature, but I've had friends with newer devices tell me that it all worked just fine.
I don't think you can really think of this as the first iteration of the technology anymore. The design is unlikely to change much, even if there's a bit of an issue.
I still have my iPhone 4, bought a few months after release. I never had the problems with the antenna that other people apparently had, and that was the supposed major, fundamental design flaw of the phone. They fixed it in the 4s, and presumably the 5. But I haven't heard of anything fundamentally wrong with the 4s or the 5, and the new stuff being introduced this year doesn't sound like it's necessarily going to be ripe for failure.
Oh. Would you care to point me to the hoards of level headed climate activists who say this about Hurricane Katrina or Sandy? I seem to have missed them.
Most of the climate scientists that I've heard interviewed say, very strongly, that we can't attribute any single event to our understanding of the current climate situation. That is, we don't know if Katrina or Sandy happened because of climate change or if they would have happened anyway. Instead, they rely on statistical models to understand what the probability of such events is, and how likely it would be that something like that would happen in the absence of the climate change that we believe is happening.
Actually, I would challenge you to find a quote from an actual climate scientist--and not a re-written or misattributed quote, since the media is incredibly bad at reporting ALL science. How many times have you seen a headline that says something like, "X and Y PROVE Z is occurring, say scientists." 99% of the time after reading the article, the researcher in question says something like, "we believe that factors X and Y increase the chances of Z by n%, and thus may be among the possible causes of Z over the long term." This happens in medicine, physics, climate, whatever. Science reporting (particularly in newspapers) is far more hyperbolic than the papers that inspire them.
Again, I've yet to hear even a single scientist make as strong a statement as you claim. Every single one I've heard hedges by saying certain things are likely, or are of increased likelihood. A lot of 'maybes', 'could bes' and 'possiblys' are thrown around. Never trust a scientist that's absolutely sure about anything (unless it's a mathematician with a proof in hand).
The iPhone 5 connector is becoming easier and easier to find. A lot of those phones have been sold. I've seen them at the airport, and if I stood up and shouted for one here on the floor at work, I bet I could find at least one. But more to the point, there's nothing special about the 'electrical' interface on an iPhone cable. It has one end that's USB and another end that is proprietary. But if I can find a cable, I can plug it into the USB port on the plane, or in any computer. If I don't have a cable, I'm SOL, but I'm SOL with any phone. You still need a cable.
I have never, at any point, synced my iPad to my computer. Not once, not for anything. It works fine. I have all the media on it that I want (and that I own). It syncs with the cloud without any issue. I've never even plugged my iPad into my computer to charge it. Don't tell me I have to use iTunes or my computer to manage my devices. I transfer my documents wirelessly through an application that I picked up on the store. And that's what apps are there for--to augment the functionality of the device if I decide that I need it. In fact, I rarely use the application because the data I want on my phone and tablet are generally completely unrelated to the files on my computer.
'Nobody you know' isn't a valid sample space. Maybe you just have bad friends. Who's to say? Apparently lots of people are fine with it.
I won't argue that iTunes on Windows is a great piece of software--it's not. I can understand if people don't like it and don't like syncing with it. That said, it's still true that it seems to work well enough for the majority of people.
I haven't come across a time where I wanted something on my phone and I wasn't allowed to put something on it. I can put anything I want on my phone that's being sold in the store. This is similar to owning an XBox--if something doesn't exist in the store, I can't put it on the XBox. That's a tautology, I admit, but it's no different from the iPhone. If you're a developer and want to put your own stuff on the phone, you can do that too. I wouldn't call that kind of control 'excessive'.
You're right that I don't have those widgets. I jailbroke my iPhone for a while so I could get those widgets. I got tired of them and all the space they took up when I didn't need the information contained therein. Again, I'm not going to be a valid sample space, but I think we've seen that the market is okay with the limited setup of the screens on the iPhone so far. I've checked out the Android phones and they largely don't interest me; if I had one, it would be set up just like my iPhone.
From an HCI perspective, it's not always better to give users more choices. You can give someone an interface that leaves them feeling subjectively better or more productive but objectively less productive. This paradox is so prevalent, someone even wrote a book about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less
Oh, and the last point that you didn't address, which is obviously a lie: DRM.
I'm not convinced of your premise. In fact, given the recent churn in so-called 'smart-watches', I'd argue that Apple doesn't have to enter a market to disrupt it at all--its reputation precedes it.
The Pebble, I believe, pre-dates any talk about a wearable Apple device, but we didn't start hearing from Samsung and Sony and Microsoft that they all had watch divisions until several months after rumours about Apple started.
Moreover, once Apple enters that market (if they ever do, of course) I expect that the market will shift hugely again.
Oh, or we can just look at the iPad. That was something that I think most of us were predicting, and at it didn't really matter. Apple is now the leader of that segment, and other manufacturers were helpless to stop it.
We definitely agree on one thing, though: blessings be upon the CSIRO. :)
No, I'm just more realistic about my product requirements. Plus they're the only company still making a small flagship phone. I actually wish they'd stuck with the iPhone 4 size format.
But anyway, the point of being over 320-ish PPI is that at normal distances, for most human eyes, you stop being able to distinguish between individual pixels. While 441 is definitely a bigger number than 326, it is almost 100% irrelevant to humans with normal eyesight that hold the phone somewhere away from their face. An iron atom is much more massive than a hydrogen atom, but it doesn't matter--I can't see EITHER of them. I can't see the pixels on my iPhone without a really intensive search.
2GB of memory takes up more space and power than 1GB of memory and that's just sort of the end of the story. The reason why Apple custom designs its chips is to reduce the power requirement as much as possible. Again, you shouldn't notice any difference at all on the user-side; more memory is meaningless to you until it starts to limit the applications that developers can make. I haven't seen or heard of any evidence of that yet. We've all seen the incredibly high-res games that the iPad can play, and it only has 1GB of RAM.
Everything that I've read still points to on-board NAND being faster than even Class 10 devices, but I admit, I'm not well versed on the details.
Anyway, I think most of the stuff that Samsung is pushing out the door is crap, but I think that a lot of the stuff done by HTC (best industrial design), Sony (the XPeria Z is waterproof and has ANT+) and Motorola (the Moto X is probably the single most cutting-edge phone on the market--it benchmarks really competitively against other phones with bigger screens and more cores). But as I said in another comment, Apple's big innovations rarely come once they're entrenched in a market. They'll move on to something else.
But again, bigger screens aren't innovation, they're just bigger. Across the board, the bigger phones have worse battery life than the iPhone (except the Note series, I believe, but they're SO big that they have a lot of room for a battery).
Incidentally, here's a tip: using the word 'fanboi' is both illiterate and generally the sign of a person that's run out of actual things to say. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here. It's not that I find your complaints without merit, I really just think that if you look at the market in general and the use case for most people that can afford a high-end phone, the iPhone is really no worse off than any other maker. You've got a different use case, and while you're dissatisfied with the phone, in the context of this story and Apple's relative ability to innovate (or not), I still don't see that Apple is in any particular trouble.
Truth be told, Samsung (and other Android makers) are winning the global marketshare race on the basis of their cheaper phones, not their better phones. That *definitely* doesn't have anything to do with innovation.
Apple doesn't need to do anything special to stay in this horse race, the same as it's always been with them. They'll start looking around for a different industry to be 'innovative' in; this one is basically about incremental upgrades for the next several years.
I don't know why you consider these things innovation. A bigger screen means less battery life. 2GB of RAM is nice to have, but takes up space, and isn't actually all that necessary given Apple's multitasking model. SD/MicroSD is slow and cumbersome and takes up space that Apple would rather put to a bigger battery. But in any case, none of THOSE things are innovative, either. That's just more stuff.
NFC is effectively dead in the water; nobody's putting it in their phones, and because of that, nobody's actually using it in devices. It turns out the new BlueTooth spec is getting more traction for close-range communications. An IR blaster is a thing that literally nobody that I know uses, even if they have one. I haven't found a friend that went looking for one in their next phone. Many have switched to Android devices and zero of them even brought it up.
I don't really know what you're talking about with low resolution--are you talking about the number of pixels? And you're calling the pixels huge? At this point it's hard to believe you ever owned an Apple products at all. The pixels are hard for me to pick out on my iPhone 4 even with my nose practically up against the screen (my vision is sufficiently good that I don't require glasses).
The things you want are things that *I* don't, and that most people don't remotely care about. I want more battery life. I want a phone that's fast and durable and will last me another 3 years. An upgraded camera will be nice...and that's it. I guess I'm easy to please in this regard.
You're not Apple's market anymore. It's good that you enjoy your Samsung, because you'll probably never come back to Apple.
I've got a lot of different kinds of proprietary cables from a lot of companies, including Sony. I'm pretty sure Samsung had their own for a long time, too. But Apple charge cables are easy to find; they're only slightly less ubiquitous than USB cables. Don't make this out to be a bigger issue than it is; I've never had a problem charging my Apple stuff, even if I've forgotten a cable.
Where are you getting Oggs and FLACs from? Are you doing it yourself, or buying it from a store? Oh, you're doing it yourself because everyone sells MP3s? If that's what you're doing, you could just as easily have made AACs or ALAC files, and you've had to connect to a desktop computer SOMEHOW. This is a complete non-issue. (It's worth noting that iTunes actually lets you manually manage your phone by dragging and dropping files onto it in the finder. Most people don't use this functionality because iTunes playlists and music management is very powerful if you know what you're doing, or very simple if you don't. With the upcoming phones this fall, transferring files without connecting to a desktop computer should be easier than before.)
My iPhone syncs with Google calendars just fine. It does so through a variety of different apps, even.
The 'freedom' argument is made now and then, but nobody's ever shown me an app that every Apple user wants that only exists on Android. Maybe this will change one day, and maybe this won't, but the fact of the matter is that there are more Apple exclusive apps than Android exclusives that are popular. Plants vs. Zombies, anyone? (I know this is coming for Android, but I've already played it enough that I'm almost done with it.)
There are trade-offs for using any phone. How many Android devices are up-to-date with the latest OS release 3 years after their release (or even a few MONTHS after their release? Precious few. (In fact, probably only one.)
Where do you go if you break your phone to get it repaired? Is there a convenient shop, or do you have to talk to your carrier (which I think most of us will agree is the worst possible option). How much carrier-ware do you have installed on your phone if you buy it subsidised? With Apple, there's none, ever.
Then you get into weird edge cases where you've got a phone like the HTC One, which seems pretty great. But people don't like HTC's modifications to Android. Well, now you can buy it without HTC's mods! Oh, but that removes the actually useful camera software built-in. You can't get everything as just stock Android with the upgraded camera software. Maybe someday someone will come up with a modded ROM, but surely we can all see the problems inherent in that for the average consumer.
Trade-offs are just a thing we have to live with. For the price of having a different cable and a slightly more restricted ecosystem (which for practical purposes is more than sufficiently robust), I get a phone that I can keep for 3 years and get new OS features every year (I'm still on my iPhone 4; I'll be getting a new phone this fall). I deal directly with Apple, and if there's a problem with the hardware, I know who to go to. The OS works well with the hardware and in fact can be well optimised because of the total integration of the product. These are tradeoffs I'm willing to work with, despite the fact that I think the HTC One is the most beautiful phone on the market, the fact that the XPeria Z is waterproof and has ANT+ built in (which would be super cool to me as a cyclist), and the Moto X has a really appealing set of cutting edge features.
This whole post is wrong. Literally everything you said isn't true or at best is subject to interpretation. (The exception is the UI point, but only because that's wholly subjective. Mostly, though, it's just lies.)
Congratulations, /. you've come full circle. Once defender against FUD and trash, now an active promoter of it.
Okay, listen. I know it's popular to bang the 'Apple is failing to Innovate' drum, but it's STILL NOT TRUE.
The problem is that people are compressing the last decade of work into a much smaller space than it deserves. Apple doesn't release huge, blockbuster game-changing products every year. Not even every couple of years. It's MANY years between cycles. The time between the iPod and the iPhone was a long time. The iTunes music store was its own special story. Yeah, the iPhone has sort of settled into a pattern, but it's still a very good phone.
People are looking to Apple to change the PHONE industry again, and they probably won't. They changed the music player industry ONCE, and iterated on that until it wasn't relevant anymore. Apple will continue to make a good phone--even a GREAT phone--but they probably won't ever really be the industry leader again.
Apple will find a new market to disrupt. It's easier than trying to disrupt the market you're entrenched in. Is the next thing a watch? Maybe iWatch refers to a TV (that would be a big surprise, wouldn't it--it's the sort of misdirection that I would expect from them). In all likelihood, it's something that people won't be able to predict, just like the iPhone was.
Stop asking Apple to a) really, truly innovate faster than they have before; and b) ask them to innovate in a space that they're already making money in. That's not the way they've ever worked.
I think what you're forgetting is that the content of the message is really only useful (from a big brother standpoint) if you can definitively pin the message on someone.
Sure, if a message appears on my phone, I can write it down and SAY it's from you, but without that transaction log, it's just your word against mine. There's no paper trail except a message you claim I sent you. A picture of the message or anything else that doesn't include that signature is meaningless.
So the REAL question is whether or not this is sufficient to sever the link between sender and message when the message is 'burnt'.
The thing to understand about Ryanair is that it's less an airline and more of a bus with wings. They don't care about you in the same way that the bus service in your city doesn't care about you. They'd like to cram as many people on as can pay the fare, get you to your destination on-time-ish and hustle you off.
It's not a bad system, but luggage and stuff works exactly as badly as it usually does on the bus. The costs for a bag for an airline are way higher, though, so you can't expect sympathy.
If you expect nothing out of Ryanair except a cheap ticket and just enough seating so that you can pass the time only moderately uncomfortable--just like a bus or a subway--you'll be fine.
Two things, I think:
1) America has a significant tradition and history of immigration and open borders. The country was founded on the basis of immigration.
2) It's wildly hypocritical to have an administration (not just the current one, but in general) that espouses freedom all over the world, and make claims to freedom inside its borders, but then turns around and effectively strips all your freedoms the moment you set foot into an airport.
If you go to China, you probably know what you're getting into. You know that they're extremely controlling and don't like people stirring the pot too much. If you try to travel into a war zone, you know that's also going to be bad news. When someone travels to the USA, they expect a certain amount of welcome and freedom because that's been the refrain for so many years. Maybe they shouldn't expect or demand that courtesy, but I'm not sure if it says more about them or the country that that's the case.
Nobody knows what they do yet. To me this seems like a way to get a drop on Apple and say that they had a watch out before. If and when an Apple device hits is when we'll see motion in the market, whether that device is good or bad.
Not having the first product on the market has never bothered Apple before, so I'm not sure what Samsung is trying to get out of this other than bragging rights. Or, who knows, maybe everyone will want one!
As it stands, I can't think of many things that sound more useless than a 'smart' watch. The only good suggestion I've seen so far has the phone in the pocket while direction prompts from your GPS pop up on the watch face. But if that's the best that we're going to get, I'll pass.
Approximately 8% of the human genome is actually leftover virus material. Organisms that have genes from other, unrelated organisms aren't really anything new. In fact, I would wager that some of the things that we're doing to foods happen occasionally and randomly by mutation, but are either not viable in a normal environment or are eaten and destroyed before they can spread.
There's no good reason to believe GMO is necessarily safe or dangerous based on what a company tells you, I agree. But I don't think that the widespread fear of the whole field of study is warranted, either.
There's room for the science, but at usual, what we really need is a strong scientific regulatory framework administered by governments acting in our best interests. A pipe dream, I know...
Not fundamental particles. Or photos. Or the mathematics of wonton-burrito meals.
A lot of stuff actually appears in racing cars first, and trickles down to high-end cars, then down to every day cars. DSG-type transmissions (the so-called 'flappy-paddle gearbox') were an F1 technology first, I believe.
My 6-year-old VW Jetta is more technologically advanced than a Merc from the 90s, but it's BECAUSE someone paid for a Merc in the 90s that I can have a VW that's such a good vehicle.
Good for Tesla. This is how you change an industry.