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Comment by clistctrl | Hacker News Reader

I would guess they're banking on LTE for the iPhone 5... so in that step up you'll see a much bigger upgrade, but as a technology LTE is probably a bit immature for Apple's standards.

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Unless data caps get overhauled with LTE rollouts (hahaha, right), it's impossible for me to get excited about stupid fast connections you can only use at full throttle for about 45 minutes per month.

Sprint just capped their WiMax phone tethering and modems, they'll surely cap the phones themselves when load increases.

Well I think in LTE the number of resource elements assigned to a UE will vary depending on the other phones connected to the eNodeB. So in theory it's not a problem anyways, because everyone will have an iPhone ;)

LTE is still ridiculously power hungry in every device that has it. I'd like to see them avoid it until it gets a bit more under control

If it's not a unique disadvantage, do you really think it will affect sales? To overcome it I suppose they would need to find a more power efficient processor. MIMO is kind of a power hungry application what with the calculating a new spatial correlation matrix every few milliseconds. It would seem like the limitation will be universal to all other phones unless a phone manufacture buys some chip manufacturer with a mythical chip that solves the problem then keeps the tech to themselves.

>will it effect sales?

Sure it will: People will use it if it's there. If they don't put it in, people won't use it and will continue to laud the iPhone's battery life.

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