This thread needs to lighten up. The 11 is an incremental improvement - is that so wrong? Who still upgrades their phone every year anyway?
I bought my iPhone 8 two years ago thinking of it as a 5 year investment.
I bought my iPhone 8 two years ago thinking of it as a 5 year investment.
I'd kill for a flagship iPhone with plain rectangular screen (no notch or rounded corners!) and with an USB-C port. If it is also vactually rugged then I'll wet myself.
USB-C is just my personal guess. It's been such a glaring, weird omission for years, and between the 11's lightning-to-C cable and the prospect of a redesign, 2020 seems like the perfect opportunity to finally do it.
Redesign -> CPU leap -> Camera leap
iPhone 6 -> 6S -> 7
iPhone X -> XS -> 11
If Apple has made that decision then there's a context which isn't generally appreciated. It's not just that you've stopped buying new phones so Apple needs something else to sell you: it's that AR/VR is more or less inevitably the future mainstream interface of mobile computing. The box-with-a-screen-on-the-side physical UI has hit its limits (this is Amdahl's Law of Mobile UI ;) ), which is also why there's so much interest in trying to make folding screens work.
Apple has made it pretty clear they don’t see upgrading their phones every 1-2 years anymore. Personally if my iPhone 7+ hadn’t gone and bricked itself I wouldn’t have bothered trading it in (after replacement under warranty) for the XS. My wife is still rocking an iPhone 7 and I see no reason to upgrade it either. Never in my life until the year before last have I been satisfied to just hold onto a phone, especially after my contract or payment plan has ended.
This is the new “normal”, and everyone except the most enthusiastic of enthusiasts are going to bother buying a new phone more than every 3+ years.
But that doesn't mean you just stop updating your products every year.
I don’t know what the hell is going on here. Usually the lack of VAT in US prices explains weird conversions, but even factoring that in it comes to £970. Keeping it at £999 would be fine; to put it up by 50 quid is some serious bullshit.
Hedging their bets against the pound tanking in 7 weeks time ?
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/09/03/markets-live...
It’s not just Apple. Take a look at how AWS prices vary by region for another tech example.
Agreed. At this point the iPhone is basically a slab of glass. The are not many form factor changes to be made except the further shrinking of bezels and the notch. They could swap the back materials or flatten the sides like the iPhone 4, but that's just change to change.
IMO, +4 hours of batter life on the new Pro is a huge deal. Every person I know carries around portable battery packs and is always stressing over battery life. Adding 4 hours (even if it ends up only being 2 in real world) is a bigger deal than probably even the cameras.
You're thinking of that backwards, I think. You don't change the hardware first. You come up with some new software (an OS feature; a library) that requires hardware that isn't already in the phone, and then redesign the phone to fit that new hardware in there. Like with the face sensors, or the ML-model-running cores. The hardware is designed, certainly, but it's designed as an answer to a constraint-satisfaction problem (i.e. a checklist of everything the new model needs to have/do), and big changes in the offered solution only happen when there are big changes in the constraints.
That being said, Apple seems to be lacking, lately, in inventing (or acquiring!) the kind of software features that necessitate new hardware. They're not even first to the Night Mode thing, which would totally have been one of their type of differentiators just a few years ago. Have they lost some critical software-R&D talent or something?
I don't know about "people," but for one thing they only mentioned privacy in passing. Or how about IOS improvements? The world is probably waiting for ways not to have to touch the screen so much, and in a finger-mouse style. Let's see some cutting edge HCI.
The iPhone is now like Photoshop; it has all the features I've needed and more for at least 3-4 generations now.
Maybe a stripped down iPhone with less features, smaller size and (magically) longer/better battery life would be a better angle for Apple to take at this point?
- 20% faster processor
- 4 - 5 hrs better battery life
- 30% faster FaceID (I don't know how slow the previous one was, but I know the speed difference between the TouchID on my iPad Mini 3 and my iPhone 7 makes me love it on the latter and never use it on the former)
- 2000000:1 contrast ratio (!!)
- wide angle and "telephoto" lenses, plus 4k video support, and better low-light imaging
- AI image processing magic
- Dual SIM cards (a must for the Asian market)
- "immersive audio" (this is a maybe: I'll be impressed if a phone can pack speakers that beat my studio headphones, but the 2019 MacBook Pro 15" is 95% as good, so there's a possibility)
- incremental improvements to WiFi and LTE
That all sounds pretty compelling to me. I'm not sure if I want it enough to pay $1000, but this sounds like a pretty solid improvement in pretty much all ways.
What so exciting here? It's OLED. They all have that kind of contrast ratio. The huge number was just mentioned for marketing sake. Your eyes won't know the difference between 200000, 2000000 or Infinity.
Haven't heard of that. Why is it a must?
I don't think that is a problem mind you. Lots of manufacturers are flinging shit at the wall trying to find the Next Big Thing(TM) in smartphones. I don't think it's going to happen any time soon. Smartphones in general have gotten incredibly good in the last 4-5 years.
That came a hell of a lot longer ago than that. OLED has been on the market since 2010.
I can't figure out any way that this is not going to be mid-side "wide" mode, from speakers on each end when the phone is at landscape.
https://soundbridge.io/make-wider-mixes-mid-side-ms-techniqu...
iPhones don't already support 4k video? Good Android phones have had 4k cameras for years.
> Dual SIM cards (a must for the Asian market)
Obviously not a must if they're only adding dual SIMs now.
they do
Tagline for HN in general.
Lol the irony.
apple product cycles have lengthened, so this was inevitably going to be a lower-the-base-price and harvest-the-late-adopters year for the notch model era. i think apple may even keep the same style next year to introduce 5g (to reduce additional manufacturing challenges) and settle into a 4-year cycle so they can really milk the capex (which is what happened to macbook pros as the product line matured).
i’m still happily using my 6s.
* edit: apparently i missed the part where they talked about the U1 chip in the new iphones, which does the UWB positioning.
I hope not...but sure looks that way. Still sporting a 7+
Really glad I got the 128GB 6s now... lots of storage makes the difference in longevity.
That's exactly what's wrong, that users don't feel compelled to upgrade. It's bad for business.
I'd say the biggest e-waste offender right now is the server market. Enterprises are replacing entire data centers full of servers every 3-4 years because of depreciation and OPEX efficiency upgrades.
For consumer devices? Very unlikely. Do you have a citation?
> has a trade-in recycling program
Just because you send something off to be recycled doesn't mean it actually ends up being recycled. It's much better off to not have to recycle in the first place at all (eg. by making your hardware easy to repair, which Apple is notoriously bad at).
"So far, we’ve identified recycled alternatives for 24 different grades of plastic, allowing us to use an average of 38 percent recycled plastic across 82 components for products released this year."
https://www.apple.com/euro/environment/pdf/a/generic/Apple_E...
On a side note, I would like to see some figures how much energy and materials are actually spent when replacing something like a phone, compared to things like driving to work each day, running the AC for 12+ hours a day, flying around the globe once or twice a year or eating meat and dairy products every day of the week. I would be surprised if it’s even remotely significant compared to these things (yes this is a cynical and not very constructive argument to make, but perfectly rational)
This is good for their business.