I find Apple so incredibly impressive. They target a few key features with every release, absolutely nail those features, and sell the new products perfectly. Their product line-ups and messages are constantly evolving, but slowly, determinedly. And so they achieve things no other company seems capable of - like an unlocking mechanism that is going to be market-defining. Why? Because when the other companies become jealous and try and come up with their own versions, they'll rush and release something half-baked, and out of the confusion only Apple's solution will speak to consumers. Apple is so far ahead of the competition it's ridiculous - maybe Google can compete in the medium-term, I'm not sure. Apple's confidence and poise is awe-inspiring.
Its their discipline that impresses me: How much they are willing to play the long game, and take short term hits to do it.
While getting hammered by Wall Street and the press for not innovating, they stick to their guns and keep evolving in incremental steps, and laying the ground for the innovation they want to do in the future.
For example, current iPhone battery life isn't the greatest compared to some of the larger phones out there that are packing much more battery.
But they keep making small efficiency improvements, over and over, so that if (when?) release a device with a larger battery, it will be like the MacBook Air situation, where the MBA gets staggering battery life on the next hardware iteration compared to competitors that have just adequate battery life, basically being carried by the hardware.
I imagine the larger display is a similar situation, they're not happy with some compromise they'd have to make to produce a display of the larger size, whereas competitors are happy to pump something out that is better by some metric (PPI, size), but has adverse effects (battery life, color oversaturation, artifacting).
I think Google has the ability to continue competing with them if they remain focused.
I have my doubts about any of the other Android manufacturers, though Xiaomi could be interesting in the future, due to their focus on services.
> I imagine the larger display is a similar situation, they're not happy with some compromise they'd have to make to produce a display of the larger size, whereas competitors are happy to pump something out that is better by some metric (PPI, size), but has adverse effects (battery life, color oversaturation, artifacting).
The iPad 3 is a counter-example; retina display almost for the sake of it, and the hardware suffered. The fact that Apple pushed out the iPad 4 so quickly thereafter can, IMO, be chalked up to the fact that the iPad 3 was either a stopgap device or immediately regretted internally and caused the schedule of the iPad 4 to be bumped up.
How is iPad a counter-example?
I have been using it since it came out: Retina display is awesome; the battery life is longer than my iPad 2's battery life; 3G support is super; iPad 3 works with no problems!
And did I mention that I don't have to use new charging cables? My family uses MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPod, iPad2, and iPad3 and I am happy I have to use the same cables for each.
I'll take iPad3 over iPad4 any day (at least for the next few years)
No. I'm sure you didn't use iPad 3 and got that impression from reading tech media always chasing spec sheets. I own iPad 3 and there's nothing wrong with it.
I personally own an iPad 3 and have used it next to an iPad 2 and iPad 4 running the same applications. If you use a non-trivial application it's pretty clear that the iPad 3 is visibly slower than an iPad 2.
On it's own, it's certainly fine. However it's clear that there were trade-offs when moving from the iPad 2 to the iPad 3.
I use iPad 3 to watch videos, surf and read books and PDFs in iBooks and never had the impression that I have to wait on the CPU for something. What are your "non-trivial applications"? If they are games, I admit I haven't even tried any.
The one I've personally benchmarked is an unreleased application by a group of people I know, however it's very far along and (IMO) could be released today. The iPad 3 performs more poorly compared to the other platforms across several metrics.
Do say if the app is sloppy programmed or really needs the faster CPU to do the work. We're programmers here, well, most of us. Anyway note that up to recently you needed two graphic cards and in the desktop and the two monitor cables just to be able to connect the screen with the resolution of the iPad 3. http://youtu.be/KpUNA2nutbk
I bought my iPad 3 for reading, coding, and drawing (Procreate and Paper). It's perfect for it and I am yet to see how the hardware has suffered for the retina display.
For graphically intensive 3D games it may have suffered compared to the iPad2 but it is still a great piece of hardware and worthy update from the iPad2.
Yes, discipline is a great word for it. Against a sea of nay-sayers and critics they keep their composure and stay focused on the long-term. The result is that their competitors blow their opportunities by rushing, and squander any stature. Apple remains in total control of the industry.
This is a nice phone, but I'm sorry - if you think Apple "remains in total control of the industry" with sub 20% marketshare and shrinking you are delusional.
Whatever you may think of the theorerical advantages that Apple has, its not working for them outside of the US.
Do you measure BMW, Rolex and Gucci, by market share? Or profit share? There are more meaningful measures than market share and picking a measure the company isn't particularly interested or aiming for in is a strange choice.
If Apple has 20% market share but 50+% profit share, then what does that mean?
BMW is definitely in control of the luxury car industry, which is quite huge worldwide in terms of revenue and more importantly, profit. It depends on how narrowly you define "industry."
You Apple fanboys are constantly moving the goalposts. First it was who sells more devices, then it was who had more revenue. Now you've lost the "who has more profits" argument as well. What's it going to be next? Who uses more aluminum in their devices?
I never understood why people are so proud of a company having significantly higher margins than their competitors. Unless I owned _stock_ in a company (and then refused to buy their products), I'd rather buy my stuff with as razor-thin of a margin as possible.
But thanks for the link, I'll be using these statistics in future debates against the iCult.
Margins are an indication of how good the product is. Either you compete on quality, or you compete on price, basically. Also, value != price alone, or even the margin the company is making on the product (they could just be more efficient and better at execution than their competitors).
Margins are an indication of how much you're getting screwed by your supplier.
Now don't get me wrong, a number of Apple-users are rational beings. They actually argue to me that they get huge value from iDevices, and I'm fine with that. If its your cup of tea, yes, go on and get it. (And I won't call these guys part of the iCult. Rational Apple-users are indeed... rational).
However, people like you argue that high margins are a good thing. NO THEY'RE NOT. Margins are:
* Cost of the device MINUS cost that Apple spent to create the device
The larger the margin, the more Apple is screwing you out of your money. Period. No rational consumer should EVER be happy about being conned out of tons and tons of money.
And to see these idiotic members of the iCult, so proud... so happy to waste money, and BRAG about the margins that Apple is stealing from them... it really is enough to make me lose faith in the free market.
I'm not so infatuated with Apple products as I'm disgusted with the quality of the competition. When Android phones and tablets actually become usable and won't break after a few months, I might consider saving money on them.
The iCult doesn't exist, you are just trying to justify your own buying decisions. But go ahead and keep thinking otherwise, I really don't care.
Oh look, an actual _argument_. As I stated before, if you actually don't like Android or any of the other competition, I'm perfectly fine with that.
But as long as you "brag" about Apple's profits, you are masochistically accepting punishment from a company that you hold dear. You are bragging about how much Apple manages to take your money away from you...
And that just isn't right.
So IMO, keep the arguments against Android, argue about why other systems are bad. But whatever you do, do NOT pretend like Apple's huge profits are a good thing for you as a consumer.
BMW's higher profit margins than Hyundai is not good or bad for consumers; are BMW owners getting the same car for the money they pay? Can Hyundai compete with BMW in the lux market? I don't think BMW owners feel f*cked over by BMW because BMW makes more money per car than Hyundai does.
As long as we aren't forced to buy Apple products, i.e. we have a free market, Apple's huge profits don't matter to consumers. Perhaps Apple has a monopoly on smartphones that don't suck balls, but until the DOJ sees it necessary to break them up for it, I reserve judgement.
BTW, I happily use a Nokia 920, not an iPhone, but I'm tired of these Apple cultists economics-ignorant conspiracy theories. The cult argument is usually used by people who just can't understand free markets.
You know what? Maybe I'll start shopping at HSN instead of Amazon, because as we all know, HSN's higher margins obviously means that they're a superior store than Amazon's crappy margins. </sarcasm>
Red herring. If HSN and Amazon are selling the same crap, prices correlate more directly to value. Otherwise, if an apple costs 50 cents and an orange costs 25 cents, which one do you want?
In case you don't know, Strategy Analytics are the ones who define "units sold" as "units shipped". I'd imagine they are capable of taking similar shortcuts with profit share estimates.
I doubt that the scanner will be on the front, because it will take valuable screen space (there are no hardware buttons on android)
I also doubt the apart from a bunch of phones there will be many using this technology. It didn't catch with the motorola phone because the sensor was prone to errors.
iphone battery size isn't much compared to android phones, but they are constantly on top of the web browsing battery life tests in spite of this. disappointing that the 5s was a small step backward here.
Not responding to the fawning per se, but specifically the "unlocking mechanism that is going to be market-defining": face unlock seems undeniably cooler still, works reasonably well, has been shipping on all Android phones for nearly two years now, yet certainly hasn't "defined" any markets.
How exactly is putting a little scanner inside a button going to be meaningfully better? Like face unlock, it's at best a cute trick. Apple's past genius has been about finding new fundamental ways to use technology. Slightly easier protection against spousal snooping doesn't qualify, sorry.
Having used face unlock, it's really gimmicky. I turned that off right away. It could be a good idea in the future but, like with Samsung's hands-free gestures, right now I'd have to spend too much time aligning my face and waiting and hoping that it was going to work.
Touch ID takes what you would have done anyways (thumb on home button to wake and then type in PIN) and makes it even faster. Now you still put your thumb on and eliminate the typing pin part.
I haven't used Touch ID yet but I wake my phone a lot during the day, so this seems like a nice (but not absolutely necessary) feature for me. Something small that makes the experience that much better.
I use face unlock on my Nexus 7. Not gimmicky at all for a device I pick up maybe 3 times a week, in good light.
For a phone, it's a poor fit. Variance in light levels is too high.
Fingerprint login is something I've had on my laptop for what seems like a decade. It's a gimmick there. But I anticipate that fingerprint unlock could be about as good as face unlock. It has the advantage of working in the dark.
I have face unlock turned on, and so apparently, no, the natural way of picking it up doesn't perfectly center my mug.
Net effect is having waited however long to try to center and recognize my face, I end up having to realize it didn't work, so an exception case action is needed, and type in a pin and enter.
It's all about execution. When Android manufacturers make these "innovations," by and large they're sloppily implemented and poorly communicated. They're generally part of dozens of features that companies like Samsung try to boast about - so the net result is that consumers don't know what to pay attention to, they aren't inspired to feel lust for the product or any of its particular features, and so the product becomes just one more indistinct phone on the scrapheap.
Whereas Apple focuses on a few core features to improve on and communicate with each phone, and they're overwhelmingly cautious - like only integrating Touch ID with a few spots of the phone at first. But they nail the initial execution, and the communication. So their phones are still the absolute centre of the market. And no other company can inspire product lust to the degree they can.
I never used an iPhone 5s but I would agree with the importance of execution. Lenovo has been shipping ThinkPads with fingerprint scanners for like what? Almost a decade? (ThinkPad T43 had fingerprint scanner, it was released in 2005) Those scanners never defined anything. I thought it'd be handy to save all the passwords at one place and then just scan your way through all the websites. Turns out it didn't work. Successful scan rate was too low, having to swipe one's finger again and again made me feel like an idiot. Then there's software. That bulky ugly software that reeks of corporate. Although I kept buying ThinkPads, I stuck to my vanilla Windows Vista/7 and never installed those "utility tools".
I think your observation aligns with startup culture in general - an idea (fingerprint scanner) can be valuable, but the execution is what matters. Execution means in this case, identifying the probable use cases, picking one or two flagship ones, really refining those (i.e., ensuring the hardware & software are good enough to make it all work as smoothly as possible).
I think Apple is in a unique place because they are beholden to no upstream provider (either hardware or software), retailer (they own their own stores) or component manufacturer (in the case of x64 chips, they flirt with AMD enough to keep Intel in check - for ARM solutions they run the show). They have volumes that can command suppliers' compliance.
Lenovo is hobbled by Windows, and the margins in that space are small enough that it's honestly not worth their time to simply "make it work right" w/r/t their drivers, which is why my Thinkpad fingerprint scanner never got used after about day 3.
I think this is slightly apologetic thinking. Apple didn't start off with a complete ecosystem of obeisant suppliers, in-house hardware, software, and retail stores - they built up their empire piece by piece, starting I suppose from the late-90s. And we still don't know their master-plan. The space has been open for any other company to decide to compete on that level. Lenovo could have decided to do that. Any other company could have decided to rise up and play the long road too. It was not impossible to think like this in 2005.
Instead Apple's competition has fallen over themselves to try and chase every short-term opportunity, leading to constant reinvention, total lack of focus, and squandered potential. Frankly, it's embarrassing - you would think that enough people outside of Apple recognise the scale of the challenge Apple poses and decide to respond. Instead these companies come off looking like cheap idiots.
I don't disagree with your facts. I am merely saying there is a structural reason for this - Windows and Android manufacturers will never command the same power as Apple (who as you say, got it the hard way by taking over ground before it became valuable - i.e., skating to where the puck will be). They will never have it because Intel, Microsoft and Google will fight tooth and nail to prevent it.
Lenovo bought IBM's business because IBM (who essentially made Microsoft who they were) decided it's a loser's game to depend on Microsoft. They are structurally incapable of meeting Apple's capabilities. If they do something novel, it will be reverse-engineered by Dell or HP and become commoditized (I would support that clandestine type of sharing if I were Microsoft).
About the only exception might be Samsung because of their dominant position supplying memory/disk/processors for Apple and other smartphone manufacturers. Apple is worried about Samsung, but Google should be as well.
Do you work for Apple, or are you an iOS only developer, or something? Throughout this thread, your gushing praise of everything Apple and disparaging remarks about literally everything every other company does is so over the top, even by HN standards, its hard to figure out where you are coming from.
By "Apple's competition", I assume he is referring to Android. Considering that Android has 80+% of the market, and Samsung is the worlds largest seller of smart phones, its difficult to justify saying that they have "squandered their potential".
He has been spouting rubbish like this all over the thread.
If he was just saying that Apple make great hardware, I dont think anyone would be disagreeing with him.
Everything you said is true but it was such a different era and market, sensitive security features for special needs. ThinkPads were designed for entreprise(+military) where everything is bulky and complex, in that regard having to install IBM battalion of tools was just the norm (and mandatory most of the time, they did provide value). The target crowd was also different, users would be trained at work, so it wasn't 'required' to be intuitive and invisible, a mainstream defining constraint, like a home button swipe. Here you have a few billion people probably using it every two days for every little id/money related task that don't wanna think about it (otherwise they'll toss it out).
"Target crowd" is a bit misleading. True, as long as fingerprint sensors were a bit difficult to use, only the ones with a specific need for them took the time and effort to use them. But the same was also the case with previous smartphones, and lots of other technology.
If some company hade made a really good and well integrated fingerprint sensor, it might well have seen more widespread use.
I kinda agree, but still, back then much fewer people needed security compared to nowadays where you have your life in your pocket. It's plausible Packard Bell did provide a very subtle Touch ID button on a cheap laptop and it flopped because nobody cared.
Well, people have their entire lives in their computers as well. You also see the same with touchpads. It's only after Apple pushed multitouch that touchpads have gradually started improving on PCs (many early gestures actually made PC touchpads _worse_ to the point where I had to turn them off).
OT: I have a HP laptop with fingerprint reader, and it works perfectly with Lastpass and Windows login. I almost never type my passwords now. HP had shipped some software, but I honestly never used it. It works just fine with in-built Windows 7 support.
You mean like how they executed with Siri. Siri was also supposed to define a market and take over the world. In the new iPhone there is no mention of Siri at all.
Siri hasn't gone anywhere and it's still being improved.
There's no mention of it anywhere? So what, there's many other previous headline features they're not highlighting.
I'm not implying that Apple can't make mistakes - it's clear they can with Maps and Siri - but a) it would be extremely uncharitable to judge them on version 1.0 of Maps and Siri, both ridiculously complex features, and most importantly b) their overall product strategy is still the best in the business. Doesn't matter how much people kick and scream about the newest Apple mistake - does anyone even remember Antennagate? Tech people cling to these memories, but normal people forgive and forget.
You have a good and reasonable argument, but I'd like to offer a couple of counterpoints.
1. In other contexts, the sheer perfection of their 1.0 products are exactly what Apple is judged so successful by. As with the commentary on the fingerprint scanner: the praise is that while other manufacturers deliver buggy, incomplete features, Apple gets things right on the first try.
2. While it's true that everyone makes mistakes, Siri and Maps were arguably the highest profile features on the 4S and the 5, respectively.
I don't think Siri falied, but disapointed. Apple hyped it up so much you would believe it could do anything, and work flawlessly. Instead it works halfway reasonably in a few soecific situations.
I can't recall the last time I used Siri on my iPhone, or anyone else I know, for that matter; however, I've used Google Now on an almost daily basis on my Nexus 7. Execution is key.
I think when parent(s) were remarking on execution mattering they were implying: 'Execution is key ... to the success of the feature (and consequently) the brand'. My experience is very few people know what Google Now is. Your preference of it does not demonstrate an example of that sort of success-due-to-execution that other posters are suggesting Apple's products exemplify.
Have there been recent instances of Apple cutting features from a device on a new release?
I hope touch id proves to be successful, but I'm really interested to see what happens if it's not. How do you save face and stop investing in a technology, while also weaving a story that convinces customers they don't need it anymore?
> But they nail the initial execution, and the communication. So their phones are still the absolute centre of the market. And no other company can inspire product lust to the degree they can.
While they may have implemented Touch ID really well, it's still just yet another way of unlocking the device. Strategically it has little benefit to Apple.
How much would you pay for Touch ID? It offers little security benefit, only allowing you to log in a tiny bit faster. I can log in with my passcode fairly quickly and often without even looking at the screen. Maybe $5? $10 at a stretch. Definitely not worth getting locked into Apple's platform for another generation.
Edit: It will be extremely telling of the politics of touch ID internally within apple when we see the uptake of this stuff on non-iPhone hardware. Does the entire company believe in this technology? Will we see it on the iPad, iPad Mini? On Macbooks? Once we see deeper integration of touch ID across the rest of Apple's hardware devices and software services would a moat start being formed, but it would require a stern guiding hand within Apple to make it happen.
> While they may have implemented Touch ID really well, it's still just yet another way of unlocking the device. Strategically it has little benefit to Apple.
Uh, how many times a day do you perform some type of authentication of your identity? I have a feeling this will be one of those foot-in-mouth statements.
Haha, I certainly hope so - that's what I meant by my edit above. If Apple pushes this technology across the entire company then only at that time does it become a compelling part of the Apple ecology. If too many services/devices "chicken out" and avoid integrating with Touch ID then Apple will continue to be forced to carry legacy authentication mechanisms, lowest-common-denominator style.
If this tech remains an iPhone (or even just iDevice) only tech, it's a (albeit impressive) party trick. Nothing provided by touch ID can't be eventually replicated by a competitor, patents notwithstanding.
No other OEM is positioned like Apple is to pull this off, but it won't be easy to elevate touch id to how we today perceive something like retina.
It seems that the technology is intrinsically linked to the A7 processor. I hate linking to a Quora article, but this one actually highlights why the A7 is such a leap.
Apple bought a company that made fingerprint scanners (like the one in the Motorola Atrix HD) and put the secure info in the secure area of the ARM chip, which ARM designed for putting secure info in.
Except make that sound like the moon landing, SpaceX, Tesla and the Oceans 11 heist all rolled into one.
Are we still allowed to call Apple a cult? Or are they a full blown religion now?
In other words, you think it's fun to make up a sentence, out of whole cloth, about how Apple is supposedly "making something sound like the moon landing", etc., and then post a troll attack based on what you made up. In addition, all your facts, every single fact in your post, is wrong:
-No, the Touch ID scanner is not like the one in the Motorola Atrix, at all. Totally different and superior technology. The Motorola uses the standard, inferior, straight-line fingerprint sensor that you have to swipe your finger across. These are easily fooled by many methods, including a lifted print or a mold of the user's finger.
-No, it's not an ARM chip; Apple designed the chip. Not ARM. Apple also designed the secure area of the chip; not ARM. It does use ARM CPU cores, yes. Which is different.
Are we allowed to call you a troll yet? Or just content-free and annoying?
Apple hasn't "made it sound" like anything except a fingerprint sensor with good convenience and very good security. Which is what it apparently is. So pipe down, mister.
I was referring to the 1744 word Quora answer that was linked in the post I replied to. Not to Apple's official PR, just one member of their volunteer PR army.
That link also claims that Apple uses a "version of TrustZone" from ARM, which seems highly likely. We'll not hear about it from Apple just like Nuance aren't allowed to talk about the fact that they make the voice for Siri, and just like Samsung screen prints little Apple logos on the chips it makes for them.
But since you're so sure it's not, what's your source?
That I like reading about technology and business, not feel-good fairy stories that people make up about technology and business and (un-?) intentionally obscure the usually more interesting truth?
>While they may have implemented Touch ID really well, it's still just yet another way of unlocking the device. Strategically it has little benefit to Apple.
No, it's not.
It has two properties that are very important:
1) It's very secure (not like Face unlock, which could be fooled by a photograph or fail to work depening on poor lighting etc).
2) It's very natural (you already press the home button to open the phone anyway, you don't need good light, you don't need to hold it so that the camera centers your face etc). So people will use it, unlike Face unlock which is usually discarded.
Why are both of those things important? Because it means it can be used a authentication mechanism for buying stuff. In fact, Apple has already integrated it with iTunes IIRC.
BOOM, you don't even have to add your Apple ID password anymore!
Add Bluetooth 4, Passbook, camera for scanning codes and stuff, and half a billion iTunes accounts, and you have an "mobile payments" winner.
Strategically it has a huge benefit to Apple. Touch ID provides a secure way to authenticate your iTunes account, which millions have linked to their credit cards.
If Apple ever starts offering payment services through iTunes (using NFC or some other technology), authenticated payments can be done in an instant instead of "just wait a bit while I enter my password".
By strategically I mean that while it may offer great benefits to both customers and apple, the technology in and of itself offers only a small barrier to moving to another platform. That barrier will rise with the adoption of touch id across Apple devices and services.
If you're an iPhone user and I took away your iPhone and replaced it with an Android phone, would the first thing you complain about be touch id?
Build quality, accessories, apps (maybe?) are all things that Apple has going for it with the iPhone that at the moment are more strategically important than touch id.
It's like free samples at Costco. They're awesome, you miss them when you shop at a different grocery store, but at the end of the day there are other reasons why you shop at Costco and if you decided you needed to go to a different grocery store, those free samples aren't going to sway you to come back.
If I was used to paying for goods with my iPhone using touch ID and I had to start entering a passphrase instead with another phone to make payments, it might very well be one of the biggest complaints I had.
It's a consumer product, so it's more about the feeling that only your fingerprint can unlock your phone. If it takes off, and people like it, you're going to see it everywhere. The politicking is just slippery slope stuff, who knows what's going to happen.
"Does the entire company believe in this technology?"
Huh? Apple isn't a bunch of fiefdoms with competing and disparate product silos. Apple as a whole is completely behind this technology, and the fact that you don't understand that renders your opinion fairly moot.
> Not responding to the fawning per se, but specifically the "unlocking mechanism that is going to be market-defining": face unlock seems undeniably cooler still, works reasonably well, has been shipping on all Android phones for nearly two years now, yet certainly hasn't "defined" any markets.
See, that's exactly what the OP means. I tried to use face unlock on my Nexus 7 - it's just noot good enough. Too slow, too unreliable, especially in bad light conditions. I obviously haven't had the change to play with the iPhone 5s yet, but I'm quite confident that after getting used to keeping the thumb on the home button after turning it on, you won't event notice the fingerprint scanner.
I remember when two of my friends got Android phones that were face unlockable. First thing we did was hold up an iPhone with a picture of their face to it and it worked to unlock the phone! We tried this a bunch of times and it worked every time. I don't know if the technology still sucks like it did about a year ago but I have a feeling that Touch ID will not be foiled as easily.
Face unlock is a gimmicky BS feature. It used to be fooled even by an image, and it can fail easily in low light or such.
But the most important thing is that it's a BS procedure, to have to look into the camera and get it to capture your face. Not the natural way to hold the phone when casually unlocking it (I, for example, as lots of people, do it casually at an angle to my face).
Putting your finger on the home button, on the other hand, is something you have to do anyway to open it, and you can even do it while the phone's getting out of your pocket.
Don't Android manufactures/users defending this see these OBVIOUS flaws?
They updated it to check for a blink, but even the android phones that had a fingerprint scanner a few years ago, and made by the same company Apple later bought, isn't getting any respect so clearly any non-Apple approved security engineering decisions are declasse.
More trolling from you, just like elsewhere in this thread. As you are no doubt well-aware, Apple's fingerprint scanner is not at all the same technology as the Android phones of the last few years, which all, without exception, use the type of sensor you must swipe your finger across. These are less reliable, less fast in recognition, and less secure.
Not necessarily. Technology can go from 'gimmick' to 'wow' in a few years. For example, faster CPUs or improved software may have decreased both the false positive and true negative probabilities.
I don't know whether that applies here, though. I have no experience with either the 'old' and the 'current' technology, and this review does not give much info, either.
Or, you know, the Android guys put it out early, when it wasn't early, usable, or fast enough yet, just to seem "innovative", and Apple put it when it's confident that it (as much as possible) "it just works".
You know, there were lots of mp3 players before the iPod too. If you wanted a bulky, crappily assembled gadget with a frustrating UI (and FM radio!).
Check out this video of a biometrics professor fooling high-end fingerprint scanners with a gelatin finger printed from a digital image of a fingerprint: http://youtu.be/K1Sx_BmfZ8I
Now consider that an attacker with physical access to your phone can either lift your fingerprint from the screen (you have been touching the screen, haven't you?), or can retrieve the software image of your fingerprint by plugging your iphone into their computer.
After reading about how Touch ID actually works, and how it reads the characteristics of the electrical field created between the sensor and the valleys of your finger's living skin tissue, I think it will take something more sophisticated than this professor's gelatin mold. Also, there is no software image of your fingerprint stored on the iPhone, it's a hashed signature of various data points from the electrical field, not a 2D or 3D representation of your fingerprint. Of course I'm not a biometric security expert, just someone who's been reading about Touch ID, so maybe I'm wrong.
To be fair, the technology doesn't have to be completely safe, it just has to be good enough. It probably is good enough, for those who don't even use a code.
Face Unlock doesn't work very well, is less secure and much more difficult. This is hardly a "cute trick". We are going to see the rapid expansion of fingerprints in place of passwords and it is going to be pretty neat.
The problem with fingerprints is you can only change your password 10 times and faking them at readers has been easy since at least 2001(Including the ones doing heat detection and ridge depth checking).
I sincerely hope not since, as a recent HN submission pointed out, you [EDIT] possibly [/EDIT] lose all 5th amendment protections in the US when your device is no longer protected by "something you know"
Good question, not a clue but anecdotally I have never seen a finger-print scanner enabled computer that didn't use it as part of a two-factor auth as well as password in a corporate environment.
The cynical part of me thinks that the proliferation of mobile devices + the close proximity of these new devices to danger (danger being people who would quite like you to give them access at every opportunity it seems. e.g. employees of an increasingly privacy-hostile government, such as the police) in the hands of users who don't know the implications is the biggest change/problem.
It's a camera taking a picture, of course it can be defeated. It's a good thing the fingerprint scanner isn't... wait. These things are toys. If you expect meaningful security from any of them, you've been fooled by marketing.
The fingerprint sensor is not an optical device. It's a capacitive device, so it will take a bit more to fool than a photo. See page 8 of the review:
Touch ID is a capacitive fingerprint sensor embedded behind a sapphire crystal cover. The sensor works by forming a capacitor with your finger/thumb. The sensor applies a voltage to one plate of a capacitor, using your finger as the other plate. The resulting electric field between your dermis (layer right below your outward facing skin) and the Touch ID sensor maps out the ridges and valleys of your fingerprint.
The fingerprint scanner uses RF to look at the layer of cells below the outermost layer of dead cells, so it's doing far more than taking a photo. (That's been covered in recent days on HN)
That's exactly the point. It doesn't matter whether it's really hi-tech or unique or not. It's Apple's ability to present these things in a way which just makes you salivate that matters. This is a point which seems so hard for tech people to understand... it doesn't matter if you think people should see through Apple's claims, the spoils go to Apple because they know, as seemingly no other company on earth does, how to entrance people. A few key features, lavish, presentation, a feeling of luxury... that's what builds anticipation and excitement. Apple's closest equivalent are food companies, who have mastered the dramatic, salivatory description of products.
>> How exactly is putting a little scanner inside a button going to be meaningfully better?
Quoting from the article:
"Apple's Touch ID was the biggest surprise for me. I found it very well executed and a nice part of the overall experience. When between the 5s and the 5/5c, I immediately miss Touch ID."
Coming from someone as respectable as Anand, I would call that reasonable grounds to call TouchID "meaningfully better".
Maybe you can point to something similar for face unlock?
How do you use face unlock while glancing at your phone from the corner of your eye?
I think it's these sorts of practical considerations that really make Apple products special. I feel like there is someone at Apple thinking through what happens when a dad carrying a baby gets a phone call. I don't feel like that's the case with say Samsung.
Not to bag on the iPhone's fingerprint detection in general - it looks to be impressive to me, in fact - but one thing it probably won't do very effectively is protect you from your spouse, or anyone else who has access to your hands while you sleep. The same risk will be present during overnight stays in police cells, probably.
"Slightly easier protection against spousal snooping doesn't qualify"
It is about far more than that: it is about a new payment system, both more secure and more convenient. If that doesn't seem ambitious enough for you, I don't know what would.
You wouldn't trust face recognition to allow payments on stores or the Internet. Touch ID is designed so you can trust it, down to the separate secure storage for your fingerprint data.
It starts with being able to use your fingerprint to authorise payments at the App and iTunes Stores, and escalates from there.
How does this "protections against spousal snooping" joke of an argument not apply 100% equally to your "undeniably cooler" face unlock? Both have PIN fallbacks anyways.
You're not seeing the big picture. Touch ID isn't just another gimmicky feature, it's something Apple spend a lot of money on. They acquired the company that made the technology, and improved it in a way only Apple could.
Today it's a method to unlock your device, but there is no way that this is all Apple wants it to do. The possibilities are endless. Imagine not having to put your password into another website, instead you just touch the home button. Making a purchase on iTunes? Use the scanner instead of the password, etc.
But that's not all. This could easily be used in a retail environment, where a prompt on your screen shows up and says "Buy foobar for $5.99?". Touch ID does the rest.
I think you've got some selective bias here (you couldn't tell by your writing :)), I see two things happening here.
Keep in mind, I think TouchID is a great feature, but...
1)Minor improvements get fawned over and made to seem like such a life-changing massive improvement and Apple fans gloat about how Apple is the best because of x, often when other manufacturers have had the same feature/capabilities for a long time. Doesn't matter, now Apple has it, it just sucked before.
2)Apple actually seems to regularly release just about as many new features/capabilities as the next guy, but then focuses in on the things that it's fan base promotes and is excited about, and that becomes a feedback loop regarding the 'few key features'. There was a tag-cloud image from the keynote that listed all the new stuff, and most of it you'll never hear about again. It isn't the focus on key features in every release, it's you, deciding what features are key and then telling your friends all about them, and then Apple also amplifying your message. If people latched onto iBeacons, we'd be reading about that non-stop now. The difference (and where you're correct) is that Apple focuses on these features vs. Samsung with the S4 commercial that tries to show you everything and you end up not remembering any of them. Contrast that with the MotoX ads (very well done), which are still a bit scatter-shod, but much more focused.
Question for you though, what's with the comment about "Google competing in the medium-term"?? I think you're more confident about Apple then they are ;)
> Doesn't matter, now Apple has it, it just sucked before.
Because this is very often exactly the case.
Apple get things wrong (especially when it comes to network services). But when they get things right — really right — you realise that no one else had done it properly before.
> Apple actually seems to regularly release just about as many new features/capabilities as the next guy, but then focuses in on the things that it's fan base promotes and is excited about
This is not true. Apple focuses on the features that it feels defines their products — not what their "fan base promotes." Apple didn't focus on Touch ID because everyone was clamouring for a fingerprint scanner; they focused on it because they felt it was a truly good solution to the problem of unlocking your phone (something many people didn't even consider to be a "problem").
The tag-cloud image is from WWDC. They always do this to show the new APIs and features that developers will be excited to use.
Apple focused on three features with the 5s. They did not choose to focus on these because of what people were talking.
I am not sure why you state:
> It isn't the focus on key features in every release, it's you, deciding what features are key and then telling your friends all about them, and then Apple also amplifying your message
This does not happen at all. Apple does not "amplify" what people are talking about.
other manufacturers have had the same feature/capabilities for a long time
No they haven't, nobody had such a fingerprint reader in the phone, all others (specifically I know of only one at the moment, do write if you know more) are "slide you finger, not too fast, not too slow, don't press the side, oops not good enough, slide it again." Having used such readers, I know they are really annoying. Not the one on iPhone 5S. You press the finger not having to care about the angle and that's it. Compared to the slide ones that reject your whole slide because it was a little to the left or to the right and where only one slide direction is allowed and it takes exact time, iPhone's is pure magic.
"Having something" is not "we can write it on the spec sheet even if it's unusable."
Motorola Atrix shipped with fingerprint scanning back in 2011. The reason any other device doesn't have that feature ? Apple bought the company that made the scanners and stopped all further support. This even killed support for new android versions on the Atrix. They then took 2 years to implement it on one of their devices.
Also having not used the iphone 5s, you can not blindly say the solution will be market defining or very secure. Any technology like this will consistently work. Your phone will most likely ship with a backup security system that will be used when the phone can't match the finger prints. What would that mean ? Any random person can exceed the number of tries with finger print unlock and then go to the back up system that is no more secure than existing solutions.
> Apple is so far ahead of the competition it's ridiculous - maybe Google can compete in the medium-term, I'm not sure
This line just reeks of Apple fan boyism. There is literally nothing on the ios now that is ahead of android. Infact for the last couple of releases ios has been catching up with android (notifications, quick settings etc). It still does not have intents, widgets, default apps that can be replaced. But yes, live inside your own bubble and drool at everything apple.
The fingerprint scanner on the Atrix was of the primitive kind, where you have to swipe your thumb and hope it scanned. Half the time it didn't. The reason it took Apple 2 years to implement it was because they waited for a better solution to come up. Their implementation is less of a hassle than previous fingerprint scanners were for consumer devices. This is where Apple shines: execution.
Let's not get carried away. Apple makes the best hardware. They always have, and probably always will. But there's a lot more to a phone than the hardware. Lots of people genuinely prefer the way Android does things and I don't think Apple will ever figure out how to do cloud services properly.
Would be great if there is insider info on the process Apple made their decisions on what features to put into new product. It definitely not just marketing driven, but a mix that includes the technical and supply chain. Material for a book.
From what I heard the fingerprint reader is partially enterprise driven. Apple are doing everything to ensure maximum security on devices so they can replace BlackBerry and have a strong USP against Android in enterprise sales.
Interestingly enough the GPU is approximately the same speed as the upcoming (or current?) generation of Android phones with the Snapdragon 800 SOC. In the past Apple has generally held a large performance advantage in that area. There is potential that in 6 months when the next Galaxy/HTC phones are released that they will be significantly ahead of Apple for 6 or more months.
As Anandtech points out: the iPhone 5s' PowerVR Series 6 moves to a fully scalar architecture (allowing better shaders and GPGPU performance) but loses a lot of raw triangle performance in the process (30-50% slower than iPhone 5 in some cases). On shader heavy scenes (T-Rex HD) the tradeoff is worth it (iPhone 5s is 30% faster than any other GPU).
Apple (and PowerVR) have made a couple tradeoffs in this generation that sacrifice performance on some tests for better shader capabilities.
Final point: it'll be interesting to see what these numbers look like when the bugs in the different graphics tests are resolved (are they compiled using the armv8 instruction set?)
That 30% faster figure is because the iPhone is rendering the scene at a lower resolution than many of the phones with larger, 1080p screens. Look at the next graph where each phone is rendering a 1080p scene to see the difference.
The Snapdragon 800 tested is a relatively power-hungry tablet part. I _think_ the phone ones will have fewer execution units. If history is a guide, the iPad 5 A7 (A7X?) will have twice the execution units.
"""
...but if Apple doesn’t offer a larger display option soon then I believe it will lose some users not because of cross shopping, but out of frustration.
"""
I don't get this huge screen trend for phones. That's not a smart move from an ergonomics perspective. Almost person person that has a phone with a big screen has to use both hands to comfortably use the phone, one to touch and the other to hold.
One would argue that more pixels == more content. But that's not an issue with iPhone 5 even though was with previous models. I mean, not an issue if you don't have ads taking up your precious pixels. And that is easily solvable by paying for your content and apps which has other benefits too.
Anyway, I feel the iPhone 5 screen size is perfect. And I still have one hand free to do whatever I want. I think more pixels are not more useful than a hand. People who think that too won't get phones with cumbersome screens, unless they have huge hands.
Almost everything looks better on my wife's bigger Galaxy Note 2 screen compared to my Galaxy S2 screen. I can see more TODOs in my toodledo.com task manager (my primary usage), you can read more without scrolling in your browser, YouTube videos are a pleasure; it's like you're traveling with a mini-home-theater that can fit in your pocket, and using the stylus to make handwritten notes is actually practical.
I hardly notice the issue of having to use two hands to hold the phone. On the other hand, if you have to look at your phone while walking, which is uncomfortable when using a smaller screen and dangerous (bumping into people; maybe even uncivil towards others, come to think of it), the larger text on a larger screen makes it more comfortable and you get done taking a glance at what you want more quickly.
In the US, unlike here in Hong Kong, there seems to be a stigma attached to holding a large screen phone, almost as if people are extremely worried about looking uncool. In Hong Kong, the recognition of the practical advantages of the larger screen and the shift away from Apple to Android phones was overnight; the pace at which everyone adopted the Galaxy Note 2 (and other Android phones) after the iPhone 5 was fairly dramatic. I wish there were some statistics on this.
Apple users always emphasize how things "feel". When I come back to my iPhone after having used an Android phone for a few days, I feel cramped. I feel like I'm constantly scrolling and zooming. I'd love a bigger screen. The thing is, "I feel the iPhone 5 screen size is perfect"... for YOU. Lots of people said the iPhone 4 screen size was perfect and Apple would never change that. Lots of people are buying the Galaxy Note devices too (especially in Asia).
I think certain kinds of content just look better on a big screen ex: videos and images. Also, if you have a limited budget you are not buying both a phone and a tablet (for the bigger screen to consume content). Instead you could buy a phablet to do both. So trade off one handed use for your phone against the cost of a tablet and not having access to the tablet at times. That's the tradeoff from the consumer's standpoint. From Apple's standpoint, they would have to design a phablet that works wells and can be economically produced. So for example, if they want the same quality screen as the iPhone, would the screen have really low yield rates and would thus be uneconomical to produce? Are there issue with building a larger aluminium frame? Do they have higher priorities or different products that they want to create?
Reading through the comments here, I see a lot of reference to GPU speeds. Anand mentions in the article that the new iPhone 5s is more powerful than the 2010 Macbook Air 11" and has more graphics performance than the iPad 4. I used to be one of those guys who would build his own PC and spend hours overclocking everything for the maximum performance gain but I do not understand this;
What's the infatuation with performance in a cell phone?
Snappy is snappy but there are diminishing returns here past a certain point; I think Anand stated it best when he said it is "the most future-proof of any iPhone ever launched"
> What's the infatuation with performance in a cell phone?
With better raw CPU and GPU performances, it's easier and faster to write decent code with less time spent on optimisation and well as a great UI — Motion Effects and UIKit Dynamics (supporting parallax effects, physics engine, 30D/layered look) requires a powerful GPU. Games, of course always push the performance of CPU and GPUs. I doubt there'll ever be future-proof hardware in terms of performance, unless the software is dead.
Phones haven't quite reached the point that desktop computers have. With a desktop, a 5 year old machine today is still completely useable even with the latest software. Meanwhile, a 5 year old phone is the original iPhone. This generation of phones might be the beginning of that era, but the increased performance in phones is still enabling new features that weren't possible before (full res burst with image evaluation, 120fps video editing, etc).
If it's true that the iPhone 5s of today matches or exceeds the performance of a laptop from 5 years ago, that could mean we're not long away from full-featured convergence devices (plug your phone into a monitor+keyboard to turn it into a complete PC)
I care about cell phone performance because I'm excited for the day when I can realistically start booting a general purpose OS on my phone and call it good enough w/ a monitor and external keyboard.
Cell phones don't need uber graphic performance but we are a long way from these devices being merely cell phones. They are general purpose computer with sophisticated displays and interfaces. Performance matters here.
>> What's the infatuation with performance in a cell phone?
Assuming you're talking about GPU performance: Apple cares a lot about GPU performance because iOS uses the GPU heavily for a lot of tasks - all the animations, transitions, blurring and blending effects that you see are executed on the GPU, mostly via CoreAnimation.
Also, there are new games and other applications that are pushing GPU requirements to near desktop-class. For example, the Infinity Blade demo that was shown during the launch.
I think a lot of people care about having enough GPU performance to enable all of these.
While I don't generally get why people get so hung up on specifications ("my phone has more cores than yours"), the performance is actually put to good use. You wouldn't be able to do HD video recording and editing, slo-mo and burst shots and a host of other things had it not been for more powerful and efficient processors. It has nothing to do with snappy, and everything to do with functionality.
One advantage: the faster the hardware, the more time it can spend in idle states at the same load. So, if you manage to speed up your hardware by a factor X while increasing power usage by a factor < X, it is a net win (I don't know whether they achieve this)
That's not really true for the sorts of architectural changes happening here. Because smaller process nodes mean that leakage power for transistors has grown faster than active power there's now a lot to be said for running those transistors fast for short bursts rather than at a reduced frequency. But adding more transistors still increases your power usage linearly, and performance only goes up with something like the square root of the number of transistors you use. There's things that make this not entirely true on the system level, if a better branch predictor or better cache then you might see less bandwidth to main memory and you'll be saving power there. And you can do things with the silicon level process to reduce leakage power at the cost of performance but then make the performance back up with more transistors and still come out ahead. But in general a smaller core will be more power efficient than a larger one.
Personally, I prefer proximity unlock, I shouldn't have to touch the phone at all. This might be done with Bluetooth LE devices, the same way modern keyless entry works for cars.
If my phone is within a meter or two of my keychain, or I'm in my car, then it is unlocked. This is especially important if you want to use it while driving via voice and don't want to have to unlock after each interaction.
Ditto for Moto-X style notifications. I shouldn't have to press the home button to see that tweet that just came in, in fact, I should be able to ask the phone to read it to me, through my headphones.
The fingerprint scanner is definitely a step up from 2-N touches (swipe to unlock + passcode), 1 touch is better than 2*, but zero touches is even better in some circumstances. Never having to think about needing to unlock.
The number one place I would want security on my phone, would be at a bar (or party), where someone might take my phone when I'm distracted, and then doing either something innocent ("lol. im gay. party hard!!!") or nasty (transfer $100 to own account), depending how well I know them. This could easily be done within a meter or two of me, without me noticing. Adding some rules could be nice (be in car, charging at home etc), but generally, I would want my phone to be locked unless I'm holding it.
That's what I'm worried about with Touch ID. The new "draw a penis on someone's forehead when they're passed out" is going to be "unlock their iPhone with their finger and post things on their Facebook".
You can do this quite easily with Tasker[0]. At home, you could use the presence of your home wifi network as the indicator that the lock should be disabled, while in your car you could use a passive NFC tag (about 50¢).
How about proximity + voice print or proximity + face unlock. It's basically 2-factors. Maybe this is the use case for Google Glass, retinal unlock just by looking at the screen.
And if you want to use your phone in the toilet you need a Bluetooth Beacon in the toilet. Moreover all these beacons must somehow remain synced with your identity, so more cloud, more sensible data stored on big companies servers.
In summary, I think beacons are useful but I think the most interesting stuff is for a smartphone to unlock a car not the other way around.
Anandtech has really stellar reviews, and this review is just one example. I'm sure the number of charts and plots loses the people with shorter attention spans, but the alternative really is a far more vague review. I remember The Verge's video review of the Moto X filled with the phrase "the ___ is awesome", making it borderline useless. Moreover, I actually feel like I am gaining a much deeper understanding of the hardware internals when reading Anandtech reviews. While other reviews would simply say "the processor makes for a very snappy experience", Anandtech explains the new 28nm architecture and thus exactly how much potential it has to be more efficient, the overhead required to deal with 32 vs 64 bit apps, etc. Unless someone can show me otherwise, my tech news reading experience over the last few years leads me to believe that Anantech is in its own class when it comes to consumer technology reviews.
By engineers, for engineers, I might add. No offense, but most writers on tech sites tend to be writers who are interested in technology, whereas AnandTech is full of engineers who are interested in dissecting and explaining technology. Not to pick on anyone, but if you gave the writers at The Verge, for instance, a month to review the iPhone 5S they would not cover the depth that the first page of this review covers.
> The use of actual lab-bench display testing alone puts them in a category of their own.
That and the architectural dissections they do every time a new CPU or GPU is even announced, only through anandtech do I look forward to new Intel or NVidia stuff, even though I'm not a hardware geek at all the reviews are engrossing, interesting and interested and strike a very nice balance of depth and clarity.
They're pretty great at most things. Real World Tech goes into more depth on the architecture side, though they don't really benchmark and they're much less prolific. I like The Tech Report's way of measuring GPU performance more, too. But in general I'll go to Anandtech first.
I miss Steve Jobs. I once remember him saying something
like,'I'm a little worried about Cook; he's not a gadget
guy.'
Did anyone notice during the Apple press conference, the
head honchos tried to capture Steve's enthusiasm, but it
seemed forced?
I don't understand why they are making such a big deal
out of multiple colors? I guess it's a calculated marketing
decision? Maybe they think the Iphone will end up a fashion
statement? Sorry, but I don't think Job's would care about different colors, or a fingerprint scan--at this point in
history. I'm pretty sure hackers will find a way around
around the scan pretty quick? Out of respect for Jobs, I'm more than content with my Iphone 4, and my Ipad 2. They get the job done, and their still perfect for my needs. I don't think I'll buy another mac book pro for a long time. I have a feeling I'll be able to buy parts forever?
If you watch the keynote when the mac came in different colors, you'll see he emphasizes their new see through body and colors just as much as apple is emphasizing the iPhone 5C's colors.
In fact, Apple had a poster with all the different colored macs in a circle, and below that it just said "Yum".
Steve Jobs said Tim Cook isn't so much of a product guy, correct. But that was Steve's opinion. I don't necessarily agree with that sentiment.
And out of respect for jobs you're sticking with dated technology? I don't quite understand... If he were alive he'd probably push you to update your device.
I would say phones are already fashion statements (or at the very least lifestyle statements, if you want to make the distinction).
I'm sure Steve Jobs understood this - since his return, Apple has consistently made emotional appeals, not technical ones. Their "innovations" are generally improving on the execution of existing technology (music players, smartphones, tablets) but packaging it in a way that people connect with.
Colour, on a device that you carry with you everywhere you go, is very much a part of this.
Fingerprint scanning is yet more evidence that the iPhone was designed in sunny south California rather than chilly northern Europe.
Resistive touch screen may not allow multi-touch, but at least I can use them when wearing gloves (and no - gloves with a capacitive finger tip don't count).
Just because there are segments of the population who can not take advantage of a feature at all times does not mean the feature is unwarranted or designed without considering this fact.
It allows for 5 stored "fingers", so you could set things up for each thumb, each index finger and your nose. Assuming there aren't any security issues about using a nose -- and that you're not worried about security much anyways -- you should be golden. How unique are nose prints?
5S definitely a nice upgrade and I don't see any reason to get a 5C beyond color and slight battery life advantage (presumably on non-motion usage). Saving $100 on a $2,000+ service contract is nothing.
But I'm super disappointed that Apple didn't target 5S battery life for dramatic improvement. The 5's battery life is already awful and it looks like 5S is even worse. Ugh.
You're being snarky, but using my smartphone as an actual phone might be my least-performed activity. There's a running joke between me and all my tech buddies that my phone (32gb iPhone 5) is a terrible phone, but an awesome pocket-computer.
I know exactly how you feel, but I'm pretty sure people using smarthphones nowadays practically stopped caring about battery life as it's close to non-existent anyway since you have to plug in your device every single day.
Personally I couldn't live like that (nor can you probably, if I interpret the tone of your post correctly), partly because I don't want to be enslaved to charging partly because I would forget it anyway, so the only option left is to either buy a phone that's not so 'smart' hence doesn't starve the battery in a day or get a smartphone and don't use it's smart features. As far as I can see, there's just no way around it. Which is an utter shame of course. As a comparision: I've always been a portable audio fan and in that area there seems to actually have been an increase in battery life while for the phone market it seems to be the other way around. I have a semi-professional portable player/recorder and using two standard AA batteries it serves me well playing audio for over a month. Or actually so long I never counted, but will be easily over 40 hours. It's a joy to use compared to any phone I ever owned, except the fixed on on my desk :]
I agree. I was really, really hoping for a MacBook Air-style 2x improvement in battery life (either through a physically larger battery and/or silicon improvements).
The problem with battery life:
1) It's already terrible. If I go out to a bar or whatever after work and I haven't charged it through the day to >75%, it will be dead most likely by the time I'm trying to get directions home/phone a taxi.
2) No VoLTE support, so you need to have both the 3G & 4G radios on when making a call and using data at the same time, which sucks.
3) iOS7 will likely allow much more aggressive multitasking by developers, which will reduce battery life further. This hasn't really been seen on these benchmarks but I think once developers start pushing through these things, battery life is going to take a nose dive.
4) iPhone batteries aren't user replacements and people use them very heavily. I imagine many people will easily do 500 cycles a year, which makes performance suck pretty quickly.
VoLTE is largely a matter of carrier support, when it does get enabled on a major network it shouldn't be too hard to add support for it via a software update. The baseband might need to be updated as well, but the radio support is all there simply by supporting LTE.
Does anyone else think like we're already in the "core 2 duo" era of smartphones? I look at my galaxy s3 and the newer phones and don't feel much motivation to upgrade.
In the daringfireball.net review Gruber specifically mentions in benchmarking the 5s outperforms the 2008 15" macbook that he has.
It's hard for me to justify from a 'need' perspective to go from my 4S to the 5s, since to be honest the 4S has no slowdown at all and is a great phone.
I'll probably end up donating it to my mum and moving her from dumbphone into smartphone land.
The nice thing about the mobile platforms like iOS and Android, is that they feel as fast as the Core 2 Duo era, even with lower end hardware than that, because the apps themselves and the OS, too, are a lot leaner than the ones on the PC a few years ago.
Supposing A-series chip performance continues to improve at the rate it has been, how long until an Apple TV with the then-current high-end A chip puts games on a TV of the same quality as current-gen video game systems? What about next-gen?
While it's far from a complete measure of performance, one data point is that the PS4 GPU is capable of 1.84 tflops, the 5s GPU is capable of 76.8 gflops, only ~4.2% the throughput of the PS4.
The GPU in the PS4 is, essentially, an Nvidia 7900-class GPU. Anandtech recently did a comparison of old PC GPUs to current SOCs and the results are surprisingly close. I'd imagine Snapdragon 800 and Oscar close the gap considerably. http://anandtech.com/show/6877/the-great-equalizer-part-3/3
edit: I'm stuck in past. This comment is about PS3 not PS4.
So really with the 64 bit architecture this phone has effectively less RAM than the iPhone 5?
To maintain backwards compatibility between legacy 32 bit and new 64 bit processes Apple will have to stick two copies of their library into RAM, plus any native applications running in 64 bit mode will consume more RAM than their 32 bit counterparts anyway (12%~ more).
I love how this review is basically "THIS IS THE MOST EXCITING S RELEASE EVER (but I cannot really explain why, here is me dismissing most of the new features of this phone: Evolutionary camera, 64 bit which is meaningless today, gimmicky fingerprint reader, faster A processor which makes it almost competitive with Intel's last generation, etc)."
I think it is entertaining that tons of Apple's fans have been claiming entirely without basis that this phone would have 2 GB of RAM in it and that was largely their explanation for the 64 bit-eating RAM-issue, now it only has 1 GB still I wonder how they'll magic that huge deficit away.
It takes a lot to hit that RAM barrier on iOS with code. Yes 64-bit code takes up more space than 32-bit code, but the majority of memory is not used for code. It is used for images etc. -- Most apps do not use large amounts of memory for pointer intense structures or contain tens of megabytes of code.
Also, 64-bit addressing may be "meaningless" today if you disregard memory mapping of content (into virtual memory), but , as stated in the review, the 64-bit architecture comes with couple of other improvements including increasing the # registers.
The iPad definitely needs more RAM though. Whenever I use it, I quickly get annoyed by Safari/Chrome reloading pages and background apps disappearing due to OOM.
I never considered video editing a key application for my mobile telephone. Even with the camera, I would expect to take the video on the phone, and edit it elsewhere.
You'd be amazed. You can shoot, edit, and post an entire short movie from your phone, without involving any larger device. I have done it myself.
Another way to look at it: if you're not rendering video ... I think we've reached the point where faster (benchmarked) hardware adds little to no functional benefit. So why upgrade?
A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod … a phone … and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone … are you getting it?
DRAM requires periodic refreshing or the cells lose their memory. This refreshing uses energy. More bits, more energy. You get the same issue with SRAM (think CPU caches) though without the refreshing.
Any ARM experts around? The sagacity of the move to 64-bit is explained in terms of getting rid of cruft, and via analogy to a similar move by Intel on the x86 line. But I thought that the largest boost to that line comes from the many additional registers available under 64 bit mode. In ARM, with its RISC architecture, there are already a nice number of registers, so I'm wondering where the true advantage lies -- especially an environment of strongly constrained memory.
Yes, the biggest boost to x86 performance in the move to 64 bit came mostly because they doubled the number of regsiters available to what was previously a very register poor ISA.
The ARM ISA has different legacy issues: the design makes it much more expensive than it otherwise would be to pipeline the CPU in order to get decent performance. The ISA was designed for an in-order CPU: at the time pipelining was something that mainframe / workstation class CPUs did. (ARM was designed in the very early 80s; Intel released a pipelined CPU in 1989 - the 486, and then only for simple instructions.)
For instance, every ARM32 assembly instruction has a bunch of condition codes which determine whether to execute the instruction depending on the state of the status bits in the program counter. You can also determine whether a given instruction will set the relevant status bits in the processor. This means you can do nice things like encode an if (R2 < 0) then (Add 1 to R3) else (Add 1 to R4) in just three instructions: one for the test, an instruction if the relevant flag is set & a second instruction to run if it's not set. No branches! You can also branch on any or all of the condition flags. This makes for very compact code. The trouble is that it's hell to pipeline because you have to keep track of all the possible states of the status bits and follow all the possible branch paths that result, whilst keeping track of all the dependencies.
They've also done things like simplify the exception handling so that the CPU needs fewer shadow registers, which again reduces power requirements.
It's worth noting that there are double the number of general purpose registers concurrently available in A64 (30 up from 15). I have no idea what effect that has on performance, but it's not the case that there is no improvement in that regard.
> It's worth noting that there are double the number of general purpose registers
Yeah same as x86 -> x86-64, but x86 was really starved in general purpose registers with only 6 GPR. Even in ARMv7, ARM had 2.5 times the number of registers of x86 making register pressure a much lower issue.
This means the performance gains from lowered register pressure are going to be significantly lower on ARM, as register pressure was much, much lower in the first place.
From the data presented, it looks like most of the performance gains are actually from improvements in Apple's micro architecture (they show up even using ARMv7 code).
I wouldn't call it "by far" the best. TechReport IMO has taken a similar style of super-duper in-depth reviews. Phoronix is the only review site that does this kind of in-depth review... except from a Linux-slant. (how good are the drivers for various graphics cards. Which CPU offers the best compile times, etc. etc.)
What CNet lacks in depth, it gains in breadth. CNet has far far more reviews of decent quality than any other site I know. In comparison, the few reviews that Anandtech / TechReport do are far far deeper than anything from CNet.
I think overall, I prefer TechReport over Anandtech.
