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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that cameras are nice and so are Retina displays but what we'd really like to see is a big splashy page about whatever's new with the Secure Enclave Processor in the 7.

Not because there's anything wrong with the 6! Ivan Krstic's talk about Apple platform security at Black Hat was probably the best talk of the whole event. Nobody is delivering seamlessly integrated chipset-up-through-application security the way Apple is. Forget about in mobile devices; I mean, in computing, period.

I'm excited to learn what else is coming there!

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I found the talk (though I don't pretend to understand it all), video & slides are online if others are interested.

Behind the Scenes with iOS Security

Abstract - https://www.blackhat.com/us-16/briefings.html#behind-the-sce...

Slides - https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Krstic.p...

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U

It's probably in vain but I keep hoping that Apple will decide to enter the two-factor auth market with something like the U2F design where the Secure Enclave could sign challenges. It'd be really nice if there was an Apple ID-for-the-web to go along with Apple Pay.

Adding a simple spoken/typed passphrase or passcode would turn the iphone into a full blown three-factor auth method.

I'm also really excited about this. A lot of people have been distracted by a single issue and are missing some really nice features of this phone.

Beyond the secure enclave, if the haptic home button is anything like the new trackpads, it'll be an amazing feature. One less moving part to break. And the cameras...wow. Finally decent depth of field on the camera that's always in my pocket.

Finally decent depth of field on the camera that's always in my pocket.

Recently I upgraded to the Samsung Galaxy S7. It was about $400 and it has an incredible camera; far better than my old iPhone 5s, and it looks substantially better than the iPhone 6/6s photos I have seen. Plus, it has a headphone jack, microSD support (so nice to be able to upgrade), and a really beautiful screen. Yes, Samsung installed some bloatware but some of it is actually useful (their UI for toggling radios is quite good) Android Kit-Kat is solid. To me, this was Android's first reasonable phone.

Yes, but is it able to "simulate" depth of field like the software of the new iPhone by combining the image captured by the two lenses?

Xiaomi Redmi Pro, launched in July, can do this: http://www.mi.com/en/redmipro/

HTC One (M8), launched March 2014 can do this:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7893/the-htc-one-m8-review/2

It doesn't need to. The natural depth of field of its camera is more than enough. In fact it is too much sometimes.

Sorry, my comment was ambiguous. I meant "simulate a shallow depth of field". As you noticed, all smartphone cameras naturally have a very deep depth of field.

Sorry I meant the depth of field is too shallow in the S7.

Seriously? It's theoretically impossible with a such small camera. When you shoot a portrait of someone at 1.5 meters from the camera, is the background blurred (if the background is let's say 4 meters behind the subject)?

You're right. From 1.5 meters away, there is only a slight blurring of the background. I was mostly referring to the insane bokeh I see in macro photos I take.

Found a good example here: http://www.techinsider.io/why-the-s7-camera-is-better-than-i...

Search for 'bokeh'.

Yes, I known what "bokeh" is :-) This is why I was surprised you could get bokeh at a normal range with your smartphone. For macro photos, even with a smartphone, it's inevitable. Thanks for the link to the article.

Yes, your new phone has a better camera than your three year old phone.

I had an S2, an S3, and an S4. After trying each one for a month, I reverted to the respective iPhone. Trust me I've tried. I'm sure the S7 is great, and maybe it is the first "reasonable" phone from Samsung, but I have yet to use an iPhone that I didn't like. I have used 3 Samsung phones that were laggy and loaded up with garbage apps.

The S6 and S7 have really good cameras, competitive with the iPhone absolutely.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that! That was really my entire point, that good cameras (with natural DoF) exist outside of Apple.

Let me guess you are an iPhone user ;-)

iPhone users will always prefer iPhones for something.

My first smartphone was a no-name LG model that ran Android. I upgraded from it to the iPhone and didn't like it. Tried the S2 and reverted and so on.

My S2 was amazing. One of a few phones I actually somehow liked if memory serves me right.

I'd be all over the S7, but I don't like the bloatware and they have really slow Android updates don't they?

If it actually came with Kitkat then that's 3 major versions behind.

That's weird, my work phone is a Samsung S7 Edge and my personal phone is an iPhone 6S. The photos on the iPhone look so much better. The photos on the S7 look like they have been edited with a filter, like on Instagram. The colors don't look like the colors I see when I'm looking at the thing I try to capture. The iPhone does a better job at that.

You know it's not very helpful to come into a thread about thing X and say "Well I bought thing Y and I like it a lot." This thread is about thing X. (This goes for people coming into an iPhone thread to endorse their Android phone as well as vice versa.)

I think it is absolutely valuable to talk about products in the context of their environment. It happens all the time with software products here; someone will say "Slack makes this change" and people will say, "oh we use X because of Y feature".

The grand-parent implied that DoF phone cameras aren't available, but they are. That was my main point. The other stuff was because, well, I was frankly surprised at how good the new Android phones are. I suspect that a lot of iPhone users might not care about Android hardware enough even to consider that it might be competitive. And yet, it is.

> Samsung Galaxy S7

> Android Kit-Kat is solid

The S7 doesn't ship with Kit-Kat, does it? I think it has always shipped with at least Marshmallow

He meant it's solid as KitKat was, before they shipped shitty Lollipop which started a myriad of issues.

I guess this is pedantic, but clearly the haptic actuator is itself a moving part.

I take your meaning though, and that there is reason to hope it will work better than the mechanical button. And even if the feedback were to fail, the button might keep working.

Well the haptics engine was already there, so I don't consider it an additional moving part.

Verge is giving the haptic buttons a big thumbs down:

"Another thing I tried: the new home button, which uses a "taptic engine" to give you physical feedback when you press it — it's pressure sensitive too, so it can tell if you really mean to press it or just tap it. And it's awful. On a MacBook trackpad, you get this uncanny feeling that you're actually hitting a button. On the iPhone, the whole bottom of the phone just sort of "kicks." It's not bad haptics like you remember, with weird vibration, it's just a new kind of bad haptics. It doesn't feel like a button at all. It's a bummer."

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/7/12827772/iphone-7-plus-phot...

The Verge is not a source to be taken seriously on any Apple matters. Remember, this is a news website who's Editor-In-Chief had a temper tantrum on twitter after being called out on his poor criticism [1].

[1] http://nextshark.com/nilay-patel-apple-watch-review-bracelet...

If it was praise, I would take it with a grain of salt, but the verge has typically been very apple biased in their reporting. Generally I just try and steer clear of it these days. Hopefully anandtech put something out in a while.

My Nokia N900 from 2009 had decent depth of field and a decent lens. It's nothing really to write home about.

I wonder if Apple felt that talking it up would be needlessly provocative, given the new crypto wars.

They might be trying to avoid being a political ping pong ball in the war on people.

I am right there with you on this one. I scoured the product pages as soon as they went live on apple.com, looking for any new information on security features. Couldn't find anything.

Does SEP not allow peripherals (e.g. the radio module) direct memory access anymore? That would be a very tangible thing indeed wouldn't it; and if it does not then the radio etc. firmware is still super unsafe.

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