The Apple iOS 9 Review | Hacker News Reader

The Apple iOS 9 Review

anandtech.com

74 pointsOberstKrueger56 comments

> Obviously Windows has a similar implementation, but the unfortunate truth is that the Windows tablet market is almost non-existent at this point outside of the Surface lineup.

This struck me as an odd comment. Because the iOS tablet market is non-existent outside of the iPad lineup.

I think it's a comparison of popularity. The iPad market is larger than the Windows tablet market as a whole (which is mostly driven by Surface alone). More hands will see iOS implementations than Windows tablet implementations.

Developers making tablet apps will most likely see more profits from their iPad versions than their Windows tablet versions, so iOS takes priority due to the sheer number of users in the market, not variety of devices in market. And so on.

I'm guessing the author was talking about "Windows RT". And "Surface" in that sentence meant the tablets running regular Windows. The WindowsRT tablets from ASUS/Dell/Samsung didn't sell like Android and iOS.

If one does a search&replace: s/Windows/WindowsRT/ :

"Obviously Windows RT has a similar implementation, but the unfortunate truth is that the Windows RT tablet market is almost non-existent at this point outside of the Surface lineup."

(I would appreciate if the downvoter who thought my interpretation was incorrect to reply with the correct way to read the author's sentence. It seems that Brandon Chester is quite aware of the difference between Windows RT vs Windows tablets : http://www.anandtech.com/show/8736/best-tablets-holiday-2014...)

That seems like an unlikely meaning to me when Windows RT is effectively discontinued as far as I can tell. There is no Windows RT equivalent of Windows 10 and no Windows RT version of the Surface 3.

There are plenty of Windows tablets at all sorts of price points, but most seem to be using x86 instead of ARM.

>There is no Windows RT equivalent of Windows 10

The author didn't mention "Windows 10" specifically but instead, just "Windows" which can include the previous incarnations (both Windows 8 & Windows RT 8). The non-premium Windows RT had "multitasking" several years ago when iOS did not and that was the particular point of comparison to trigger his hard-to-parse statement. He also qualified his sentence with "outside of the Surface lineup" which seems like he was aware that Surface has turned into a somewhat of a success story for Microsoft.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-surface-hits-1bn-reve...

http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/23/microsoft-q3-2015-earning...

But Windows can run on more than just Surfaces.

It strikes me as an odd comment because every consumer store I walk into has a variety of non-Surface Windows tablets for sale.

In addition to the many iPads, I have seen a few surfaces in the wild, and a few years back, a few android tablets, but never a non-surface Windows tablet. They may be on sale but that doesn't mean there is a market for them.

Anyone else snicker at the bit about page faults on page 8?

Apple is apparently now promoting the use of mmap:

> While this is a “solution”, it introduces the possibility of the user encountering page faults, which is an error/exception that occurs when the system is trying to access memory that is mapped into virtual memory but not actually loaded into RAM. This is something that, for the most part, has never existed on mobile devices.

"the possibility of the user encountering page faults" is absolutely hilarious. Clearly trying to take a stab at Apple because the author thinks that there should be more RAM in the boxes, and trying to come up with some justification without understanding that page faults are a basic and normal thing that happen all the time on any sort of modern device.

Also, regarding the "never existed", check out this post from 2010 from John Carmack, discussing the challenges of dealing with iOS's mmap limitations at the time:

http://www.bethblog.com/2010/10/29/john-carmack-discusses-ra...

Yes. That is a sad, sad paragraph. It reads like genuine ignorance on the part of the writer.

Something that has not been mentioned (because it is such a small feature) is that you can now disable the vibration on a per alarm clock basis. I've been waiting for this for several versions now. You could argue that 3rd party alarm clock applications provide that, but they don't get the special treatment the built-in app gets, mainly that alarms set are still activated even if the app is closed. Maybe it is also the case for 3rd party but I couldn't get it to work.

Yes, it's important. I've had to disable all vibration on my phone, which increases chances of me missing things, because the lady downstairs doesn't like vibration noise in the morning, haha.

The new battery widget seems cool. It's clearly designed for the watch but it's nice it works for other connected devices. My wife never has any idea how charged her bluetooth headset is, she'd find this incredibly helpful.

There have been Bluetooth battery level indicators since at least iOS 7, for Bluetooth devices which support the feature. Admittedly, those were harder to read and did not show a percentage. Here's a screenshot:

http://community.silabs.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/391...

That feature was added to iPhone OS 1.1.1 with the Apple Bluetooth Headset.

Android has had apps for that since the dark ages.

It doesn't really matter what Android has if you're an iPhone user.

Just found out (the hard way) that content block extensions for Safari does not work on an iPhone 5c which sucks. According to Apple it is due to performance (the 5c uses the same SoC as the 5).

I can't help but think this is a massive failure on Apple's part as my daughter has a 5c as do most of her friends as they are/were the best (read: cheapest) option to get an iPhone. I would have loved to be able to load a content blocker on her phone to block adult content as well as ads.

They missed a trick there imho.

Apple apparently restricted this due to performance limitations.

I have an iPhone 5, and found a way to get around this restriction by building a content blocker myself. It's pretty easy, just a list of JSON rules. You can use this project as an example: https://github.com/krishkumar/BlockParty

I am running my own content blocker on my iPhone 5, and it works nicely.

Note however, that webpages do seem to load slower than when a content blocker is not installed (this is why Apple limited it to 64-bit devices)

Content blocking requires an ARMv8 processor (so 5S and later) - must be a requirement of whatever they are using for regex.

Apparently it's a performance issue.

From apple[1]: Note: Apps containing content blocking extensions for Safari on iOS are available only on 64-bit devices, due to performance limitations of 32-bit devices.

    [1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_9.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014305-CH9-SW9

> The satellite imagery in Google Maps is also much better; it never turns to black and white like Apple Maps, and is noticeably higher in detail and resolution.

That's not been my experience; at least in San Francisco, the satellite imagery in Apple Maps is remarkably good and noticeably sharper than in Google Maps. I wouldn't be surprised though if this varied by region.

Agreed, I find Apple Maps to generally look much better than Google Maps in London (more specifically west London).

I've never seen Apple Maps turn to black and white on satellite, and I live in fucking Michigan. Both of you live in huge, techie, heavily populated cities. I live in Michigan, and the satellite maps are just fine.

It's been a while since I've been on Apple Maps, but as I remember, it looks way better in big cities than Google maps, but outside of big cities, Google has the better data.

Agreed. Just verified this by checking Apple Maps. I do not understand why you are being down voted.

Actually Apple Maps are completely utterly worthless in India.

I noticed the moralistic hand wringing about the propriety of ad blockers.

Which is odd, it seems like people who are outspoken against ad blockers are either becoming more numerous or are becoming louder. I recently had a conversation here where someone was arguing that ad blocking is akin to MP3 pirating:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10222013

Even a few months ago, I was kind of like that. Then I started thinking about it in terms of my own "autonomy", for lack of a better word -- what gives them the right to "force" my browser to make extra requests to download and display ads, to use my home network for that, to use my bandwidth and data cap for it, to use my CPU, to use my eyes and brain to look and understand the ad. They have no technical ability to enforce some of that, and any agreement that viewing ads is "payment" is implicit and thus the moral argument is weak. They don't even implement some technical measures they could do, such as YouTube bundling video ads directly into the stream so it would be harder to detect and block, so maybe they don't really care enough either.

At some point it starts sounding too much like "it's stealing to watch broadcast TV if you mute your TV and look away from the screen during ads", and hopefully most people would say that position is insane. (And yes, I do recognize that automatic blocking is a bit different, but at the same time, sending instructions that your computer download and display something to you is different than changing the radio waves from a representation of a show to a representation of an ad.)

It only works because the majority of TV watchers and internet users are too lazy or unskilled to block ads. When the majority are blocking ads, the model will either change, or blocking be explicitly criminalized (a session of Congress I'd pay to watch.)

Courts have ruled that Tivo automatically skipping ads is perfectly okay. That's literally automating the activity you're talking about! So yeah, not really any different.

Maybe relevant case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N... It's a bit more complicated since it involves a contract between the provider of the ad-skipping device and the content creator. Hmm, it could get interesting if contracts arose between browser vendors and advertisers.

Is there a list of features you want to disable if you care about privacy?

There's a dedicated "Privacy" setting in the Settings app. You could disable everything from there, including some Location Services, even the ones used for system services like Cell Network Search and setting the time zone.

Additionally, you can turn off Siri completely under Siri settings. You can also turn off Siri and Bing/Spotlight suggestions under Spotlight settings. iCloud could also be turned off.

That said, by turning the above features off, why are you using a smartphone in the first place?

Apple has been making great strides in user privacy lately, and I think they genuinely care about our privacy, what with them encrypting everything and not having the keys to decrypt it themselves (so they say).

I choose to trust my privacy with Apple. They've given me no reason to doubt them, yet.

> That said, by turning the above features off, why are you using a smartphone in the first place?

Disabling some of the location services, spotlight suggestions, and all that nonsense doesn't really reduce the functionality of the phone.

That said, by turning the above features off, why are you using a smartphone in the first place?

Cheap shot but surprisingly close answer: Because I couldn't find a feature phone with decent build quality any more.

Slightly less cheap shot and still remarkably accurate answer: Because almost all I want in a smartphone is the phone itself plus mobile Web access on a usefully large screen.

My interest in mobile devices really has very little to do with apps, even less to do with cloud services, and absolutely nothing to do with "digital assistants".

Oddly enough, I feel the opposite. I can't find a smartphone with decent build quality anymore. The iPhone 5s was the last phone where I thought it both looked and felt good, but it's still so damn fragile. The Lumia 920 was the last device where I felt it was strong enough to withstand a normal level of use without treating it like an expensive hunk of glass and metal.

Big screen, I can understand. But build quality... for $700 you can do a lot better in an expensive feature phone than a cheap iPhone.

You can disable the privacy-invading features by removing the battery, at that point they should be offline.

To be safe you can also encase the device in a Faraday cage for additional security.

I'm not sure if it would be prudent to place it in one of those electro-static baggies for electronics and then in a freezer, but I saw it in a movie once.

You can also fashion one of those bags into a hat for your benefit, too.

I know your joking, but http://killyourphone.com/

Not everybody lives as an uninteresting life as you. There are people, including common people, from journalists to clerical workers and what have you, who have been targeted all over the world as dissidents by this or that regime.

Can the URL be changed to http://www.anandtech.com/print/9605/the-ios-9-review which has all the content on one page?

I disagree. HN should not do this.

I think the downvoting you're receiving is unjustified. Content creators have a right to monetize in a manner they choose, even if it is shortsighted or easily bypassed. I would think the entrepreneurial crowd on HN would agree with that in principal.

Then perhaps they shouldn't provide an option to view it as one page...?

They provide an option to print which consequently puts the content on one page. Which you, me and everyone else is aware of.

Let's be real here: It's not even in your interest as someone that doesn't care for this to become the norm for aggregators like HN because content creators will start doing annoying stuff like referrer checks or other cat and mouse bullshit.

You should REALLY consider adding an option to "show entire article".

Hit the Print This Article link.

Who are you talking to? This is a link aggregator.

Reading mode in Edge solves this problem, if you're looking for solutions.

The new app-switcher screen is terrible. Shockingly terrible.

Can anyone point me to a more in-depth analysis than this rather superficial look?

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/09/ios-9-thoroughly-review...

Ars thoroughly reviews iOS 9.

The attempts to resolve cognitive dissonance by fanboys is a sight to behold. I'm not sure why people can't say "I prefer Apple, but iOS 9's split screen multitasking implementation is the same as Microsoft's from years ago". Rather than "It's not the same at all, because it's not about the feature, it's about how the feature is implemented" and all of these similar un-attackable arguments.

You do realize there are multiple ways to implement a feature, right? And if you want to talk about having two windows on a screen at once, that feature didn't originate on the surface, but on the 1984 Macintosh (with overlapping windows) and before that at Xerox (where Apple licensed some of the technology.)

The splitscreen implementation is completely different from windowed operating systems. I think every single person on hackernews is at least vaguely aware of the history of computing.

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