Apple’s boring hardware updates
marco.org
marco.org
Whoa! Marco is beginning to sound more annoying than Gruber.
The Apple fanbois make statements like this all the time -- Apple doesn't support something, so therefore it's irrelevant? LTE is available in NYC, LA, and Chicago (and 20 other cities), which are the three biggest markets in the US. That's not "nowhere", that's "a good chunk of the population".
Let me know when you can buy a Thunderbolt peripheral :)
Yes, I find that to be the case also. While it's true that Apple builds good products, the fans generally try to make them look more innovative and to put the competition in a bad light. This can be explained by cognitive dissonance.
LTE is a perfect example. I don't give a damn whether my next phone has LTE. I have better things to do with my time than figure out whether the coverage — independent of carriers' marketing claims — is decent, make guesses — independent of etc. etc. — as to the extent of the coverage rollout over the next year, read up on the battery-life implications of LTE, and ponder whether the bottleneck on my phone has anything to do with the network speed in the first place.
(Actually, I already have a very strong suspicion about where the bottleneck is on my phone, and that's why I really don't care about LTE right now.)
Overall, I trust Apple to sell me the best all-round phone given the constraints of current technology. So far I've been very happy with that approach. So, yes, if Apple isn't putting some seeming obvious feature in a phone, I figure that there's probably a good reason for it, a reason that I'd understand and possibly even agree with if I invested a lot of time in the question.
The risk is that, should Apple go rogue, they could rip me off for an iteration or two before I wised up. In which case I would just go buy another phone from someone else and be done with it.
It's not like I'm blindly trusting Apple to not, say, saw off my leg and feed it to alligators; I'm trusting them to make decisions about a whole bunch of tradeoffs, decisions that will at best be valid only for a few months anyway, decisions on which hinge the expenditure of a few hundred dollars.
I'm not saying that becoming a micro-expert on your purchases is wrong, just that there's something to be said for not bothering. This is very much not the Nerd Way, but I have to say that I'm much happier since I stopped having to personally establish the perfect correctness of all my techno-purchasing decisions.
As for me, I fall on the other side of that point. Whenever I use an Apple product, I find that I'm often annoyed at the decisions that have been made for me, but more than that, I'm not allowed to change that decision.
It's interesting, though, that people on either side of line regard the other side's feature as a bug.
The big win in an inflexible system like the iPhone — aside from it being inherently more discoverable and predictable — is that it's much easier and more reliable to get an intelligent, thinking, learning human to adapt to an inflexible system than it is to build a system that can deftly adapt to various imagined human desires.
It's this inflexibility, oddly enough, that gives Apple its reputation for ease of use: it's possible to make much more concrete statements about the operation of a Mac or an iPhone or iPad than it is about most competing systems and devices. The system perceived as 'friendly' is, oddly enough, the one that imposes its will upon the user.
LTE has nothing to do with my message, you're responding to jrockway now.
I was talking about how Apple fans slightly alter history to make Apple look better. Lesser known inventors/persons/products are brushed aside and Apple gets all the credit. Tesla vs. Edison.
How many Apple fans know about LG Prada and how many of them think that Apple invented the touch-screen phone? Apple is very good at POLISHING existing concepts. This is a very important skill in itself, but why not call it for what it is instead of lavishing such praise on them?
Here's another one: most Mac users still have the impression that Macs are inherently more secure than Windows machines when the opposite is in fact true. This has been mentioned by several security people here on HN to the surprise of others.
And here's you doing it: "Overall, I trust Apple to sell me the best all-round phone given the constraints of current technology." A good phone first of all has to be able to make and take calls, but iPhone 4 has a critical hardware flaw that makes it drop calls. There are no technology constraints that prevent Apple from making a phone that doesn't drop calls when touched.
An yet, in spite all of this, do you think that iPhone 4 is a mediocre phone? No, you still think it's the best "all-around" phone.
Also consider the significant fact that new iPhones come with huge public exposure. Usually glowing stories on The Today Show and Good Morning America, articles in The New York Times, etc. This is publicity you can't buy. Free iOS updates, even if they have major version numbers attached to them, just don't have the same sex appeal with the public.
New hardware just seems to focus the customer's mind in a way that I'm not sure software can.
Plus a launch of iOS 5, with a revamped notification system, more developer API's, and possibly some UI reworks (iOS is looking pretty long in the tooth compared to things like Windows Phone 7)
Perhaps they'll also try to bump up the resolution to 720p, and add HDMI out. A reason not to is so they don't cannibalize iPad sales - but that's short-sighted, and historically not Apple's style.
We may also see the rumored cut-down, retail-for-$200 iPhone - my addition is that it will have a similar form-factor as the current nano.
Also, Apple added HDMI out to the current iPhone 4 via a dongle they announced as part of the iPad 2 launch.
They might not, but it would somewhat surprise me.
My brother is saying they will be integrating a credit card system. That could be possible.
nobody cares about a new port. event or not.
It's called Unviersal Serial Bus for many reasons, but I still think USB will remain king, regardless of transfer speeds
Normal people don't buy a new iPhone every year. And even nerds should know that the market is moving at such a speed that it will be nearly impossible for them to own the latest and greatest at any point in time. All iPhones were at least 24 month devices.
IIRC, they allowed anyone to upgrade to a 3GS and cut off ~6 months for an iPhone 4, in addition to special iPhone 4 pricing for those under longer remaining contracts.
But yes, I imagine Apple has lost some leverage here now that AT&T is no longer exclusive.
They can always improve on speed, camera resolution, and storage; they could add LTE and NFC, but I can't think of much else that would even need hardware support that they couldn't add in software.
The only apps that rely on physical size are some sort of virtual rulers. When pixel size is changed, they need to be modified to adjust to that.
Continual planned obsolescence is great for hardware sales but tends to make your customers feel a little sour about the product they bought from you last year. If you really want them to be loyal, buying apps and staying with the brand, it seems like a better plan to keep them happy through as much of the product cycle as possible by reducing hardware churn and focusing on software upgrades you can use for marketing but also distribute to your existing base.
> Would any of those justify an event?
Yes.
LTE would be deserving of an event, especially if the launch of the iPhone coincides with the launch of LTE from ATT.
Apple has been known to wait until the chipset hits their power envelope requirements - witness the original Edge-only 2G iPhone when cheap phones of the same vintage were already 3G.