Sapphire glass wouldn't have solved the issue - by the time it was thick enough to make an appreciable difference to the phone's mechanical performance, the screen would look pretty dim. Steel would've helped (there's a reason the iPhone 4 is made out of it) but would've increased the weight markedly (there's a reason the iPhone 6 isn't made out of it). It's a difficult engineering trade-off when you're selling what amounts to a thin aluminium sheet with a cover glass on it, and I'm honestly surprised it took so long for people to notice.
I'm going to sit here smugly with my steel-bodied phone crammed into my jeans, safe in the knowledge that while it might make sushi of my legs if I sit wrong, it's not going to deform on me.
I'm saying that they're newer and don't scale up as conveniently as biomass, geothermal, and hydro, which are the three big success stores. That's not to say that they're uncompetitive - and they're getting more and more competitive all the time - but the nations which have huge renewable penetration right now have a big head start. You have to read South Australia's seemingly-small achievement in that context.
Most of Germany's renewable energy comes from biomass and hydro, sources that Australia can't tap. The same is true of most countries with high renewable usage: they're profiting from advantageous geology or ecology. If you're going to peg your renewable hopes on solar or wind, you're going to have a bad time.
Your idea is not without precident; the iPad Mini essentially exists because Apple was losing marketshare to the smaller tablets everyone liked, regardless of Jobs' protestations that 10-inch was the perfect size. If there's new product that obviates yours, it might as well be you selling it. There was an argument going around the tech blogs maybe six months ago that tablets may be positioned as PC killers, but that they don't have much of a future; "kids these days", so to speak, aren't using PCs in the first place, so won't transition onto them. They're all cellular.
Yeah, that's the point I was going for; it's whatever particular set of characteristics the person using the word doesn't like and don't fit into another readily available pejorative. Fetishisation of old technology? Hipster. Fetishisation of new technology? Hipster. Disinterest in technology? Hipster. Shaggy clothes and beard? Hipster. Well-groomed and stylish? Hipster. Completely normal looking? Hipster.
Isn't voice recognition done server-side just now? Having enough power to have Siri running locally, and therefore not dependent upon a good network connection, would be nice.
I wrote this. I think it's hilarious that I got 5: Interesting as a logged-in user expressing these, and Score 0: Troll for elaborating on them further.
Unless you read the same journalists' quotes about the Galaxy Note II, which pretty much say the same things that they allegedly would never say about a non-Apple phablet. Because it was about six months later and they were actually used to it.
I'm not sure what sort of case you're trying to make here except "some tech writers don't like large-screened phones and are just about capable of tolerating Apple's one".
UK. My last place was pretty quick ADSL and it topped out at about 12 down, 2 up. My iPhone 4 on regular old HSDPA was hitting nearly 20 down, 2 up very easily. Might depend on where you live; I imagine the bigger cities have better broadband and worse cellular connections. Regardless, that poor mobile infrastructure is something that's not going to be fixed by improving the phone's radio which is my point.
I don't think this was timed optimally; Apple themselves were concerned last year that most of the market growth in premium handsets was in larger sizes, an area they didn't cover. The optimal time to launch a larger model would've been then, not a full year later.
They missed the boat. Pleasantly, for people like me who like small handsets, but they missed it.
Wait, I thought hipsters were the guys who liked the new things? Like if you had an iPad and an iPhone you were a hipster, but if you had an old Android and a Lenovo laptop you were a legitimate human being.
Except if you actually go back and read what the press said, there was a little bump of "wow, that's a big phone" for the Galaxy Note and S3 - which were large phones for the time - and then stopped mentioning it. In fact, the general concensus over the past two years is that the iPhones are too small now. If you look up the iPhone 5/S reviews by each of those sites, you'll see the same sorts of remarks. The Nexus 4 really set the benchmark at about 5 inches as far as the press were concerned.
The premise put forward by the article is, to put it bluntly, unsupported by the facts.
These aren't reviews from "before... the iPhone 6", they're exclusively reviews of the Galaxy Note and S3 - the first "phablets". Writers' tastes haven't changed because they're duplicitous hacks trying to find a way to hate Android; they've changed because of experience.
I actually sat down and thought about this, and I think software obsolescence is a big factor. Apple supports phones with new OS releases for four years. (Which is nice by phone standards but kind of shameful by any other measure. Something that a pleateau in specs might fix, but I digress.) You might get a year or so of reasonable compatibility beyond that but we're already seeing apps that start at iOS 8.
If you're spending £600 on the latest iPhone at 64GB, that's £150 per supported year If you're spending £500 on last year's 5S at 32GB, that's £166 per supported year If you're spending £400 on a 5C at 32GB, if you can still find one, that's £200 per supported year.
Viewed as "renting the device" for a certain number of years of faithful service, you really are better off going with the newest model. I'm not sure about the Android or Windows Phone situation though.
(As you can guess I've been doing this calculation to figure out which phone I should buy. I would probably be on an iPhone 5C already if I wasn't worried about it running out of support before I pay it off.)
Well to be fair, there are backhaul issues, but if the guys on the billing side of the office put some more of the money back into improving infrastructure, that would solve the "technological" side of it.
There will always be applications for which more computing power is desirable, but the issue is most applications, for most users. I can use all the CPU time you give me to generate data, but I use a 7-year-old, then-£400 laptop to write up the results into a paper.
HSDPA - much less LTE - is already faster than most people's home broadband connections, which is certainly fast enough for most applications. If we're going to see improvements on mobile data it's going to have to happen on the carrier side.
Taking the article-s premise as correct for the moment - it's certainly plausible - that might imply that we're entering a phase where the technological improvements in smartphones aren't used to cram more silicon in there at higher clock speeds, but to keep us on an even keel and improve battery life. There were whiffs of this at Apple's last event - the focus on the 20nm process and improved APIs over raw performance - and there would be precident. Remember about five years ago when laptops were suddenly "fast enough" and typical battery life ballooned from one or two hours to six or eight?
Slashdot Mirror
Sapphire glass wouldn't have solved the issue - by the time it was thick enough to make an appreciable difference to the phone's mechanical performance, the screen would look pretty dim. Steel would've helped (there's a reason the iPhone 4 is made out of it) but would've increased the weight markedly (there's a reason the iPhone 6 isn't made out of it). It's a difficult engineering trade-off when you're selling what amounts to a thin aluminium sheet with a cover glass on it, and I'm honestly surprised it took so long for people to notice.
I'm going to sit here smugly with my steel-bodied phone crammed into my jeans, safe in the knowledge that while it might make sushi of my legs if I sit wrong, it's not going to deform on me.
"You need looser pants."
http://daringfireball.net/link...
I'm saying that they're newer and don't scale up as conveniently as biomass, geothermal, and hydro, which are the three big success stores. That's not to say that they're uncompetitive - and they're getting more and more competitive all the time - but the nations which have huge renewable penetration right now have a big head start. You have to read South Australia's seemingly-small achievement in that context.
I read the other reviews that the article did not cherry pick.
Most of Germany's renewable energy comes from biomass and hydro, sources that Australia can't tap. The same is true of most countries with high renewable usage: they're profiting from advantageous geology or ecology. If you're going to peg your renewable hopes on solar or wind, you're going to have a bad time.
Your idea is not without precident; the iPad Mini essentially exists because Apple was losing marketshare to the smaller tablets everyone liked, regardless of Jobs' protestations that 10-inch was the perfect size. If there's new product that obviates yours, it might as well be you selling it. There was an argument going around the tech blogs maybe six months ago that tablets may be positioned as PC killers, but that they don't have much of a future; "kids these days", so to speak, aren't using PCs in the first place, so won't transition onto them. They're all cellular.
Yeah, that's the point I was going for; it's whatever particular set of characteristics the person using the word doesn't like and don't fit into another readily available pejorative. Fetishisation of old technology? Hipster. Fetishisation of new technology? Hipster. Disinterest in technology? Hipster. Shaggy clothes and beard? Hipster. Well-groomed and stylish? Hipster. Completely normal looking? Hipster.
Isn't voice recognition done server-side just now? Having enough power to have Siri running locally, and therefore not dependent upon a good network connection, would be nice.
I wrote this. I think it's hilarious that I got 5: Interesting as a logged-in user expressing these, and Score 0: Troll for elaborating on them further.
I think we can all agree that ten million sales last year is better than ten million sales today.
Unless you read the same journalists' quotes about the Galaxy Note II, which pretty much say the same things that they allegedly would never say about a non-Apple phablet. Because it was about six months later and they were actually used to it.
I'm not sure what sort of case you're trying to make here except "some tech writers don't like large-screened phones and are just about capable of tolerating Apple's one".
UK. My last place was pretty quick ADSL and it topped out at about 12 down, 2 up. My iPhone 4 on regular old HSDPA was hitting nearly 20 down, 2 up very easily. Might depend on where you live; I imagine the bigger cities have better broadband and worse cellular connections. Regardless, that poor mobile infrastructure is something that's not going to be fixed by improving the phone's radio which is my point.
I don't think this was timed optimally; Apple themselves were concerned last year that most of the market growth in premium handsets was in larger sizes, an area they didn't cover. The optimal time to launch a larger model would've been then, not a full year later.
They missed the boat. Pleasantly, for people like me who like small handsets, but they missed it.
Wait, I thought hipsters were the guys who liked the new things? Like if you had an iPad and an iPhone you were a hipster, but if you had an old Android and a Lenovo laptop you were a legitimate human being.
If by "suddenly" you mean "two years and dozens of four-to-six-inch-phones later", yes.
That's less time than it took for the original iPhone to go from ridiculously oversized* to perfectly normal.
*Ars Technica's review compares it unfavourably to the Razr.
Except if you actually go back and read what the press said, there was a little bump of "wow, that's a big phone" for the Galaxy Note and S3 - which were large phones for the time - and then stopped mentioning it. In fact, the general concensus over the past two years is that the iPhones are too small now. If you look up the iPhone 5/S reviews by each of those sites, you'll see the same sorts of remarks. The Nexus 4 really set the benchmark at about 5 inches as far as the press were concerned.
The premise put forward by the article is, to put it bluntly, unsupported by the facts.
These aren't reviews from "before ... the iPhone 6", they're exclusively reviews of the Galaxy Note and S3 - the first "phablets". Writers' tastes haven't changed because they're duplicitous hacks trying to find a way to hate Android; they've changed because of experience.
Those aren't issues that will be fixed by improved handset technology though; it's all carrier-side.
I actually sat down and thought about this, and I think software obsolescence is a big factor. Apple supports phones with new OS releases for four years. (Which is nice by phone standards but kind of shameful by any other measure. Something that a pleateau in specs might fix, but I digress.) You might get a year or so of reasonable compatibility beyond that but we're already seeing apps that start at iOS 8.
If you're spending £600 on the latest iPhone at 64GB, that's £150 per supported year
If you're spending £500 on last year's 5S at 32GB, that's £166 per supported year
If you're spending £400 on a 5C at 32GB, if you can still find one, that's £200 per supported year.
Viewed as "renting the device" for a certain number of years of faithful service, you really are better off going with the newest model. I'm not sure about the Android or Windows Phone situation though.
(As you can guess I've been doing this calculation to figure out which phone I should buy. I would probably be on an iPhone 5C already if I wasn't worried about it running out of support before I pay it off.)
Well to be fair, there are backhaul issues, but if the guys on the billing side of the office put some more of the money back into improving infrastructure, that would solve the "technological" side of it.
To quote myself: If we're going to see improvements on mobile data it's going to have to happen on the carrier side.
There will always be applications for which more computing power is desirable, but the issue is most applications, for most users. I can use all the CPU time you give me to generate data, but I use a 7-year-old, then-£400 laptop to write up the results into a paper.
HSDPA - much less LTE - is already faster than most people's home broadband connections, which is certainly fast enough for most applications. If we're going to see improvements on mobile data it's going to have to happen on the carrier side.
Taking the article-s premise as correct for the moment - it's certainly plausible - that might imply that we're entering a phase where the technological improvements in smartphones aren't used to cram more silicon in there at higher clock speeds, but to keep us on an even keel and improve battery life. There were whiffs of this at Apple's last event - the focus on the 20nm process and improved APIs over raw performance - and there would be precident. Remember about five years ago when laptops were suddenly "fast enough" and typical battery life ballooned from one or two hours to six or eight?