Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

The main differences between those generations are the core CPU (the 2nd gen is an A12, the 1st is an A10) and the wifi 6 (vs 5 on the 1st gen).

Probably one (or both of those) aren't good enough to do what is necessary for the FaceTime.

View on HN

And in my experience during the beta it was already pretty jank. Looking forward to trying it now that it may be fully polished.

The A10 came out in 2016... Facetime came out in 2010 on the iPhone 4, a device running iOS 4 on a an Apple A4 CPU and 2.4GHz-only 802.11n. Surely the A10 can handle making a call.

Whatever hardware they use for near field comms between the phone and the TV maybe?

But can A10 handle the coordination involved between a phone and an AppleTV so that it can show the image on one but use the camera and microphone on the other but keep them in sync?

I looked up the specs, and the biggest glaring omission is that the A10 (not A10 fusion), does not appear to have hardware encoding of HEVC.

The Apple TV has to stream camera from the iPhone to the TV and the other participants (up to 32 participants) in real time without dropping frames or garbling the audio.

I'm not sure the the A10, say nothing of the A4, could reliably handle group calls. To be fair to the A4 and A10, group calls weren't a feature of FaceTime until 2018. Could the A4 handle an audio or low-res video call? Probably.

> Facetime came out in 2010 on the iPhone 4

You have a great recall of the timeline. I thought that it came out much earlier but I was mistakenly thinking of iChat AV. "In June 2003, Apple announced iChat AV . . ." [1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceTime

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IChat

FaceTime in full HD was not supported until 2020, and it was only on devices that released in 2017 or newer. It is more than just a 'call'

Reply on news.ycombinator.com