Apple Introduces the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Please, let's make us some smartphones that are nice and compact and small. Or at least medium.
iPhone 6: 5.44" x 2.64" x 0.27"; 4.55 ounces
iPhone 6S: 5.44" x 2.64" x 0.28"; 5.05 ounces
iPhone 6+: 6.22" x 3.06" x 0.28"; 6.07 ounces
iPhone 6S+: 6.23" x 3.07" x 0.29"; 6.77 ounces
https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/0342.jp...
It looks like 6+ and 6s are the same size, with 6s+ being huge.
I have no idea what they did with that slide, I guess somebody didn't want to overshadow the new phones and thought extra color was not sufficient.
I'd have to hold one to be sure, but I really like how light the 6 is. I'm not sure I'd like a heavier phone - the 6's specs are already great.
The different aluminium alloy might be a few % heavier, but it wouldn't increase the whole phone's weight by 10% (replacing aluminium by steel might)
[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+Macbook+2015+Teardown...
fuck it i don't want calling minutes anymore, just gimme data.
http://blog.htc.com/2015/09/re-instating-the-sidetone-option...
ifixit sells complete replacement kits (battery + plastic forcing tool + pentalobe driver + replacement philips screws) for $25, or just the battery for $20, you can probably find even cheaper parts elsewhere.
Phone resurrected, money well spent.
I would keep the device and wait for iPhone 7, but lack of RAM makes the use beyond basic a pain. Even some basic stuff lags ridiculously (opening Music and navigating to your playlists now takes up to a minute). Forget multitasking beyond 3 apps. With two are always gaming whether app will come back from memory or storage.
Apple is really evil in this sense. The sub par amounts of RAM are forcing us to upgrade quicker than it should be. And so many people (even tech) are rejecting the idea that RAM is needed on iOS.
Why would you hold a phone up to your ear? Trying to take a photo of your ear canal or something?
the Z5c is pretty tempting, but I'll admit the 6s+ is also tempting. I'm growing tired of Play Services killing my battery on a whim
The touch screen is built in such a way that any small crack and half the screen or more stops accepting touch.
I love my Aquos SH-02F though.
I really wanted to sign up for Google Fi, but I want a phone, not a tablet.
i.e. a 50% smaller screen doesn't use 50% less battery for the screen, let alone cut 50% battery.
For one, part of the screen is powered by a controller that's pretty similar whether it's a 4 inch or 5 inch screen. So if you cut the screen in half, you save maybe 40% battery going towards powering the screen.
But then the screen is only a fraction of the power usage, let's call it half. So cutting the screen in half drops battery usage not by 40%, but 20%. And then the screen is off half of the time while the phone is still using battery, which is why it's even lower than that.
So half as big a screen might reduce total battery usage of the phone by say 20-30% tops. And that's without taking into account that a big chunk of a phone's internals are going to be non-battery (e.g. flash storage, cpu, ram) which don't get bigger (or at least anywhere near 2x as big) if the screen is twice as big, and so the battery-to-volume ratio on a bigger phone is bigger than on a smaller phone.
In short, while yes obviously smaller phones have smaller screens that use less energy, overall bigger phones have better battery life because they have comparatively bigger batteries.
As for tablets vs phones comparison, it's an apples/oranges comparison as they do different things but, no way.
If you want to make the comparison, top iPad has a 42 watthour battery, iPhone 6 has 6.9. About 6x battery difference, despite the fact the 9.7 inch vs a 4.7 inch screen. That iPad has 3x as many pixels to power but 6x the battery to do it.
But again, it's apples/oranges.
Compare the iPhone 6 to iPhone 6 Plus. According to you the reason tablets get worse battery life is because they're bigger and have bigger screens, which are the main battery sink. So the 6 Plus should have worse battery life, according to you under the same principle.
But it's wrong, the iPhone 6 Plus has 60% more watthours of battery, despite being 32% bigger. And if you look at Apple's references (usually pretty good), they rate for the Plus vs the standard iphone: 10 hours more talk time, 34 hours more standby, 2 hours more internet time on 3G or LTE, 1 hour more on wifi, 3 hours more video playback and 30 hours more audio playback. Note the video (where the screen is one of the biggest battery sinks you can imagine), it's got a battery lifetime of 27% more despite a 32% bigger phone, for all the above mentioned reasons that a percentage increase in screen size has a somewhat larger percentage increase in extra battery volume.
So I'd say that the notion that bigger phones have better battery life, in general, is true. And when choosing the plus version on the iPhone, the battery life is a benefit. While choosing say the mini version on android phones (even as they're often underpowered, such as the Galaxy S mini series), tends to diminish battery life.
They already have an inexplicable obsession with it. I'd rather have a slightly thicker phone and more battery
I don't have a problem with the larger phones, personally, but I think it's interesting to see how quickly the industry has come full-circle.
I tried out the Moto X for about 3 months, like it a lot, display was just a little too big.
Now my wife has small hands and small fingers. She can't handle the N5 comfortable even.
I don't know the averages though.
I'm just glad I can still laugh at Apple users for only having 1GB RAM.
and they can still laugh at me for even needing more than 1GB RAM.
The iPad Pro is much more affected by this because it competes with Wintel devices. When you compare it to the Surface Pro, the later isn't considerably beefier except when it comes to RAM, which is enough on its own to give it double the life span...
I thought it usually was known once ifixit or similar did a teardown of the device.
(that said, I'm quite happy with the 5S. I don't have much need for what the 6 models offer.)
It strikes me as an innovation in the same category as the finger-no-stylus approach of the initial iPhone and, more recently, Touch ID. These features initially seem overhyped because they're such 'little' things, but because they affect your interaction with the device constantly, it'll be hard to live without once you're used to them.
edit and you have to be fucking kidding me with 16GB base models...
edit2 oh, I get it, it's a push for iCloud storage, lame
Mac<thing>: e.g. Macbook, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro
i<thing>: iPod, iPhone, iPad, iSight
Apple <thing>: Apple watch, Apple pencil
I think the Apple one is the worst, because <thing> seems to be common non-trademarked words and has a weird marketing exec "let's get the branding out there!" strategy.
And now it kind of smells like they might be thinking about going to a "Smart <thing>" naming scheme.
It makes calling things kind of hard and schizophrenic, most people just default to i<thing> when they don't know what to call it. I hear iWatch at least once a week.
Facebook effectively owns the word "like" at this point, has "internet.com", and so on.
Apple wants people to be calling the "Apple Watch" just "the Watch".
I could hazard a guess at the reason, too—everyone knows what a phone or a tablet (or a laptop, or a PC) is, and theirs don't break from the trend, so they need to differentiate their product in those lines using the name. Whereas, with the "watch" and the "pencil", they're making a new thing that attempts to redefine the category it's in, and so they want people to start using that name for the category as a whole. Specifically, they want people to think of any accessory-computer used for passive alerts and alarms and checking notifications as a "watch"; and a stylus used primarily for finesse drawing with extra sensory features to enable that as a "pencil." (The latter is also, I think, trying to avoid the current image of a "stylus" as effectively a prosthetic finger for those dumb devices that can't read your touches without it.)
"gchat" was actually Google Chat and was about voice and video chat. Now it was replaced by Google Hangouts. It's a pretty cool service, except that they have had two problems - their fuckup with Google+ and the popularity of Skype. Now Skype is a very memorable brand. And it has lots of problems, but people keep using it because it works for group video/audio calls and because it has good prices on calling phone numbers - like, Skype has a freaking monopoly on emigrants and their families or on companies working with remote consultants or employees.
In other words, I don't think the actual name matters that much, plus if you pick a weird word you might get more out of it. Googling is now a verb in the dictionary and tweeting should probably be as well.
Hasn't stopped Microsoft being successful with this strategy, e.g. Office, Word, Windows, etc.
I liked the name Force Touch. A little creepy, sure, but it made sense, and basically told you what to do.
[1] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85616589&caseType=SERIAL_...
There might be a concern for people with motor ailments though (e.g. post-stroke), but hopefully force touch will stay a feature for shortcuts and peeking. Application features only being accessible via force touch would be terrible (outside of games maybe, since they're not really accessible in the first place)
The assistive touch "wheel" menu might also include a way to trigger it.
So, first of all, there are three levels and the first level is a peek, nothing serious and totally non-committal. Frequently accidentally engaging this would probably still be super annoying, but if it happens once in a while and is also super responsive then that’s not a big deal. Making this first step non-committal is probably a big part of making this all work.
Second, the peek seems to show off some direct input based on force (with the preview dynamically resizing based on it), so that you are not blindly guessing the pressure you have to apply. This direct feedback is probably also a big part of the puzzle.
If they get that right and given their implementation (distinct, few and pretty clear and consistent places to force touch, at least within their applications, that all do predictable and understandable things) I think this is a winner and will make using everything much more of a joy to use. It could also suck. We don’t know yet. I’m just really happy someone is trying stuff like that. The vocabulary on touch devices we have is nice, but it is still sparse. Maybe this extension will work out, maybe it won’t. Either way, I’m excited.
This seems like one of those features that looks kind of cool in a demo, but in practice you don't end up using it much. Time will tell.
http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1509pijnedf... [1]
[1] From a previous HN post:
It seems highly similar to the Watch — including the haptic feedback (which to me is an important part of what makes the interaction work on the watch).
A lot depends on how developers use/abuse this feature. If only power-user features are hidden in the 3D-touch menu then it will be OK. But if ordinary features are only exposed via this menu then apps will become harder to use.
Things like right clicking, force/3D touching, or stylus's are specific modes that need to be activated and de-activated discreetly -- showing a separate set of otherwise non-discoverable features.
My impression based on demos, without trying is, the unintutivity increased.
When something is usable, that doesn't necessarily make it useful.
And to handle the backups yourself, import your own photos, store them wherever you like. None of this has changed as far as I can see.
Because even 128 GB is not enough for most photo libraries.
The amount of control over our own data seems the same as we had before — basically dependent on how much work we want to put in managing it vs. trusting and paying for cloud storage providers.
tl;dr: Apple is actively and knowingly encouraging the use of more data while refusing to upgrade internal storage space and instead pushing iCloud storage. This leads to misaligned incentives.
And you can also use iCloud alternatives (we use Flickr and Dropbox on iOS for photos and movies, as iCloud is too pricey and inflexible).
Your argument was relating to the 16 GB option of the phone, but asked the question "is control over our own data dead?" in connection with that 16 GB version. I was unsure why you asked that because of two things: 16 GB is an option, not the only size available; and one still has ultimate control over their own data, be it on the cloud or local.
It's short term gain for long term pain to the quality of the brand.
Note that's the default. It's still optional (e.g. pay $100-200 more for more storage, or buy seemingly increasingly more niche phones that offer SD card slots).
And of course the age old alternative, which is making a compromise. i.e. not store all and any music, video, photo etc on your insta-use phone. Instead keep old albums on an external drive in your home, just like movies you've already seen or movies you won't get to anytime soon. Or albums you rarely listen to. Compromise.
/5c with 16GB and 0 free space... even with "optimize storage on phone" for photos enabled they still take up all my space
I have several gigs taken up by whatsapp alone and I do not want to delete my history.
The minimum at this point should be 32GB.
I need to keep a separate iPod because there's not enough room on my iPhone for much of my music collection. (I only have a handful of apps). And for what? An extra sixteen gigs of flash memory costs a few bucks nowadays.
Would you care to expand on this? Thanks.
Source: http://uk.businessinsider.com/iphone-storage-data-market-sha...
The real kicker is Apple has provided no first-party way to extract images from message history.
(EDIT: I am aware of the "keep entire message history"/"keep 1 year message history" setting - we are trying to extract photos from backup using 3rd party software so we can flip that switch. This is very non-intuitive and requires the use of an external device)
With 4K and 12 megapixels? It's going to go by so fast...
When grandma needs to learn how to manage storage, this is going to make everybody's life harder, from people who do tech support to application developers who need to rethink how they use application storage space.
Literally, the only player who benefits here is Apple. And even that is disputable due to the problems it will cause to iPhone app developers who now need to be extremely cautious about storage use.
That's no discussion. That's a commandment like it's a fact no-one needs 16 GB. That's what I'm disputing.
"Brand New" and "Same as used in X" - choose one. (I think this is just standard TechCrunch, not from Apple, but still rather irritating)
[0] not solely, they're also used in bike frames. Basically 7000 is zinc alloys, and have the highest available tensile strength, rivalling low-level steels at a third the density.
One thing I wasn't sure about though was do you own the phone or are you just leasing it? When you upgrade after a year do you have to return your old phone?
EDIT: "Just trade in your current iPhone for a new one, and your new program begins."
Source: http://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program
I think there's a lot of people that will be enticed with this.
Here's the big difference, though, at least with AT&T's Next: With Next, the "how often can you upgrade" and "how long do you have to pay" are highly mismatched.
The most frequent upgrade plan is once very 12 months ("AT&T Next 12"). To get this, I have to commit to paying 20 months (or ~3.33 years).
If I want to upgrade two years in a row, I've committed to paying 40 months (2 terms of the plan). That at least gets me 3 upgrades in that term. If I want to go for a 4th upgrade, we're now at an overall committed payment term of 5 years.
That's fine if you're doing this long-term, but Apple's appears much simpler: You pay for 2 years. In that time, you get 2 phones.
Verizon's program lets you upgrade "any time" you want, but only once you've paid off the cost of the new phone. Unless you pay a chunk of change early, this means one upgrade every 2 years, just like a contract, compared to Apple's once-a-year.
What I'm not sure about with Apple's is whether you can end your 2 year plan with a second phone, and then terminate and keep the phone. This is what I'd most like to know before considering this further. The Terms and Conditions page doesn't seem to be up yet..
Given that the upgrade is once every 12 months, timing also seems important. I'd imagine you'd want to activate the plan just after a new iPhone comes out, and hopefully time it so that you end the 2 years right after another new iPhone comes out, if you really want the latest-and-greatest.
Overall though, it seems to be more fair compared to AT&T's Next and Verizon's Early Upgrade programs.
Except for Berkshire Hathaway moving from textiles to being Warren Buffet's investment vehicle -- that was a good move...
http://priceonomics.com/porsche-the-hedge-fund-that-also-mad...
And, if you were hoping to use someone cheap like Cricket instead of Verizon, no such luck there either:
"1. The iPhone Upgrade Program is available to qualified customers only with a valid U.S. personal credit card. Requires a 24-month installment loan with Citizens Bank, N.A. and iPhone activation with a national carrier — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, or Verizon. "
Think about it - why do professional photographers bother with shutters or try to time the perfect shots? Why not just constantly shoot video and pull frames out of it later? Because it would look like crap.
This wouldn't be hard to imitate. Record the live preview into a 3 second buffer. When the user presses the shutter, switch into still mode, take a real photo, wait 1.5 seconds, and then write both the buffer and the photo into the same archive. On playback, by default show the normal photo, but on whatever UI gesture, play the first 1.5 seconds of the video, then the photo for one frame, then the next 1.5 seconds of the video.
Only barrier I could see to re-implementing this on other phones is long wait times while the camera switches modes, during which information is lost.
Photographers are doing this.
https://news.creativecow.net/story/879117
>"RED cameras allow Inez and Vinoodh to simultaneously capture high-resolution images for their photographs along with their artistic videos"
You can get to comparable image quality, but it's going to cost you.
Two separate files tied together by the UI.
That "Live Photo" will still be a normal jpg
I love all of this, but it seems to me that there is really becoming a divide in the type of people who can fully appreciate/employ the UI nuances? I'm not a photographer, and basically only use photoshop to crop and do bullish things. But I know there's a whole universe of things I could do, if I appreciated the power set tools.
I think that's where many "smart" products are going, but because they are distributed to the masses (unlike PS for instance), that divide means something else.
For some people this is going to make their "daily lives" more enjoyable. For another set of folks, perhaps equal in size even, I think a lot of this stuff will just go over their heads.
She'll get it if she uses it. It's not any more difficult than using the current touch gestures.
If she means to use it. Not difficult to imagine people triggering this by accident.
I figure as long as you don't hide essential functionality in your app's 3d-touch interface, and primarily use it for short cuts, you are probably okay...
How discoverable is Siri? It’s super obscure, nowhere to be found in the UI, you can only activate it via an obscure long-press.
> iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 6c
What made the iPhone iconic was that there was one powerful and curated model, and that you trusted Apple to make design choices for you. You paid extra because you knew you were getting a quality phone, not the low-tier/hard to compare versions of the multitude of Android-based phone. Why move away from simplicity and curation?
Personally I'm sticking with my 5s until it dies at this point, the 6 is too damn big.
If you keep doing the same thing your market price will start to fall. Smartphones are old and boring. They can't capture more users simply by being Apple any more, they have to offer the variety users want in order to increase their piece of the pie.
So they get three years out of a fabrication process and supply chain instead of 8 months if they only allowed you to buy the newest models every year.
It's not a big choice. You have "free on contract", "cheap on contract" (last year's models), or "best on contract" (current models).
Just two flagships. And they are differentiated on size, that's all.
This is no different to the 5/5C situation really (in fact, a clearer differentiation tbh).
The previous years models have always been available since the 3GS was released.
Seems like you're running about 6 years behind the times...?
Maybe this sort of taxonomy only confuses me?
In a way, you're completely right -- they are all versions of one flagship model. The "S" are always upgraded internals of last years model (the 3GS, 4S, 5S, and now 6S). And plus is a bigger version of that flagship model.
But it's not like they released the 6, the 6a, and the 6b all the same year. It's quite clear.
Or when he was like 'this is based on revolutionary technology never seen before, and it's totally not half-a-vine, either, it's a new breakthrough, 3 second videos'.
I mean I don't even grin anymore when they say 'the iPhone 6 was the most popular iPhone.... EVER' or when they say 'the iPhone 6S is the best iphone... EVER' (no shit). I've gotten used to that level of hyperbole, but the rhetoric around the live photos was pretty ridiculous. (and I like it, too, I think it's a neat little feature that fits nicely in between photos and vines - the original massively-popular 7 second videos - the way it was presented was just way over the top.)
It makes a whole lot more likely that the base model is just to get you to upgrade to the 64GB at this point.
It's the same with the European cars. BMW or whatever will sell you (in this country) a tiny underpowered four-cylinder engine for $N. If you want the four-cylinder engine with more power it will be $N+10K, if you want a six-cylinder engine that doesn't feel sluggish it will be $N+20K, and if you want something that actually feels as fast as the car looks it'll cost you $N+30K.
Meanwhile you can buy a fast engine in a crate for about $5K.
>Sometimes the mere existence of the base model causes some problems that can't be fixed with the existence of an upgraded option. This is a consistent problem in an enterprise environment. The base model is always the one purchased more frequently whether through BYOD or enterprise owned devices. This means that support staff has to spend a lot of time working with users to manage space.
Live photos are not really "completely new technology", but I think Apple does it better, since most likely every Apple device plays the live photo.
So fucking irritating that more/less the primary way Apple does price differentiation for their product models is by locking you in at storage capacity sizes.
My life is a hell of iCloud + Dropbox backups & constantly deleting all media so I can keep all of 40 apps on my 16GB iPhone.
In the previous models (5/5s, 4s) the base model provided enough memory for doing most things comfortably. Now you actually HAVE to get the intermediate model to do anything useful (unless you're in masochistic mood). So the intermediate model (costing $100 more) becomes the entry level model.
I would even go so far to say that the 16/64/128GB memory gradation, coupled with the slippery 6/6s (slip and break more often ==> more AppleCare purchases and/or service repair costs) are intentional.
I understand capitalism and all that, but this is just pure greed and they're not doing much to hide it.
But in this case, how much is your time worth? If you're like most people hanging out on hacker news (assuming a tech career) its not unreasonable to expect your salary to be $100/hour.
If you're spending more than 2 hours mucking with moving things around, then perhaps your next phone purchase should consider how much time you're spending vs. the price of increased storage.
But I digress. The 6S was clearly never getting an SD card slot.
But the iPhone has shipped with 16GB minimum storage ever since the 4s four years ago. Since then the speed, resolution, and camera have all increased by at least one factor of two. All of these things also increase the storage requirements for photos and apps.
If I was the type of user who was satisfied with the base model of my old phone, and I buy the new base model and am not satisfied, then I am not going to be happy. I use my phone the same way I did four years ago. If I wasn't a 'pro' user then, why am I now?
The new iPhone 6S will make this issue much worse. 4K video, larger pictures, "live" pictures (oh god). The small memory on these devices and lack of SD is intentional to push iCloud and device upgrades.
If you buy a new iPhone just get the 64GB.
Another thing is that any 4k capable codec is also probably magnitudes more space efficient than baseline jpeg for stills, with or without added temporal information.
I guess they differentiate it as follows:
- It's the full photo data (12 MP) for each frame - It captures 1.5 seconds before and after you press the capture button - (Speculation based on a dot-point in the keynote) It's stored using some frame-to-frame compression thing, probably similar to a movie but with the option to recover any individual frame as a full size, full quality image
I reckon much of their photo technology comes from their acquisition of the SnappyCam app and that developer's custom JPEG encoding.
Yes, yes, we teck-heads can geek-out at the idea of a force sensing screen. We are not the market. The maket is the average Joe or Jane. And it is my impression Joe and Jane, for the most part, won't give a shit. I know plenty of people with 4s's who have not updated the OS in a while, no longer get any apps --free or otherwise-- and feel perfectly served with what they have. When we ask them if they'd be interested in spending several hundred dollars to upgrade, the answer is often monosyllabic: "Why."
I use an iPhone 4. Battery life went to hell at one point now it's back to being decent. It was a software problem.
Wouldn't mind it being slightly thinner, lighter, bigger with better screen and far better camera. But now the screens got too big.
Historically, US carriers don't change plan pricing based on having a contract. So, you can be month-to-month for $100 per month, or get a two year contract for $100/month plus they give you $500 up front towards the purchase of a $1,000 phone (as received by just discounting the phone up front).
The shortcuts are nice, though.
If people suggest significantly better sources, we can edit the URLs.
I thought 16GB was bad in 2014 but it's just comical now considering the 4k and 12MP camera.
The RAM should hopefully be at least 2GB.
Here's hoping that this excellent, science fantasy franchise will hit the mainstream!
Or is 3D Touch somehow achieved with passive sensors?
It doesn't add unusable thickness to the phone and as a bonus it gives you more friction so if your hands are sweaty you're less likely to drop your $1,000 magic pocket supercomputer (completely smooth rounded corners look nice, but sure are slippery and drop prone).
It is live on most devices, and reflects pressure quite accurately, and is doing it by measuring the touch area per contact on the screen, which with a human finger varies based upon the force of the press. Presumably on the Huawei they would just use the actual pressure sensor instead of the proxied size.
The harder press would be the on-press and on-release states.
I miss all of those interaction states, with multi-touch.
Not only will Apple not do that, but we won't even have the options to do so. It'll be all about new, gimmicky peek and poke style gestures. I'm sure they'll be nice, though.
I haven't watched it in years, time for a Matrix marathon :-)
Is that what we call a complete dud? Even worse than last year's event?
It's not new, except in the sense that now also Apple delivers it, a few years later than everyone else.
I think you need to take a step back and look at what Apple usually deliver - not the latest and greatest technology, but well thought-out features with impressive vertical integration. It's compelling for some people - just like the Samsung "all the features" approach is for others. They're both valid; use what suits you best.