"We have a new fingerprint sensor! But, you probably don't want to use it because privacy crazies online think Apple is a front for the NSA."
"We're moving to a 64-bit architecture! But, geeks with low reading comprehension think it's not that useful because we have tiny RAM, so you should just ignore this point too."
"We have the best mobile phone camera ever created! But, everything was already good enough, so we've probably just wasted two years developing this and wasting shareholder dollars instead of entering the virtual cow social abuse market."
As a photo enthusiast that part of the presentation was a lot more exciting than the (rather marginal) improvements to lens and sensor.
http://www.tbreak.ae/features/camera-comparison-nokia-lumia-...
Many better known sites like DPReview.com think that the Lumia 1020 has the best smartphone camera:
http://connect.dpreview.com/post/5234892048/nokia-lumia-1020...
Since most people use their cameras to shoot pictures of cute cats or children, and then upload them to FB, I think the vast majority of people would prefer the fast and very good quality of the iPhone over the slow but excellent quality of 1020.
There is also a new instruction set to go along with the bump to 64-bits which improves things. However, I remember Herb Sutter saying that, in the case of x64, Microsoft generally found that the improved instruction set performance gains were a wash due to the increased cache misses caused by the doubling of the pointer width. I'm not sure how much ARM 64-bit instruction set improves things.
Yeah, I don't think they ever supported GC in iOS. Now that you mention it, it's probably not a coincidence that it was added to the Mac shortly after the entire product line had switched to 64-bit. You could still do it in 32-bit, but I doubt they were expecting many developers to start writing new 32-bit apps at that point.
What does use a conservative garbage collector on iOS, however, is Safari's JS engine. But I assume that the conservative scan is only used on the stack (that's what FF does), since it would be kind of silly to do a conservative scan of the heap for a language that doesn't support pointers. So it doesn't seem likely under normal circumstances that you'd have many false hits even with 32-bits.
This discussion is frankly insane. This stuff is called "marketing". Virtually every company does it. Companies that don't do it are called "failures".
Shame on them. They should be like the more well-behaved companies, which emphasize numbers when they're behind and ignore numbers when they're ahead.
The problem is that they hardly have qualitative aspects left that they can claim over the competition. They are engaged in a race to the bottom.
When the highlight of the keynote is a feature that has been available on cheap Thinkpads for five years, you wonder if Apple will ever innovate again.
http://secureidnews.com/news-item/motorola-releases-fingerpr...
The last occurrence of that would have been almost ten years ago. They've always highlighted their technical superiority in presentations.
They could have put "2x faster than iPhone 5" in their slides, but they deliberately chose to put 40x (referring to the original iPhone) and leave it slightly ambiguous.
(This is a joke: I know 64-bit ARM is substantially improved, but it's really not a big selling point to the general population anymore, is it?!)
Touch ID is a lot! No more password entering on iTunes. A godsend for someone who has a 26 characters passphrase like me.
(A little paranoid, though.)
"Architecture transitions used to be a big deal. We have built a software and developer ecosystem that makes them worth a single slide. ARM: Don't get too comfortable. Intel: Show us what you can do."
Looking at Intel's roadmap and the success they've had with Haswell ULV, I think they have at least a fighting chance at ending up in an iOS flagship product within 2-3 years.
Isn't that always the case? But "now" is a moving target.
Flexible displays are coming soon.
The paths for easy integration with multiple low power wearable peripherals have just been forged, and the area is still in its infancy.
Mobile payments have not fully arrived yet.
The phones are all still in rectangular boxes - something that will look ridiculous in 20 years.
I think there is a lot yet to come hardware-wise.
Clickable buttons, raised hyperlinks, textures - all coming soon!
Wearable peripherals are a different category, they're not smartphones. Regardless, I dont have terribly high hopes for these future devices.
Mobile payment is mostly not a hardware issue. It's a software issue and a matter of coordination or market forces selecting a standard or two. It's things like THIS that are the next battleground in mobile: services and integration.
They are in rectangular boxes because that shape, for various reasons, happens to be extraordinarily efficient. TV's haven't changed shapes.
I think smartphone hardware is pretty much dead. The major leaps - touch screens (which is so ridiculously underappreciated as an innovation), HD screens, HD cameras, CPU horsepower, nice OS's, voice recognition, blah blah - are behind us. There is a reason that almost all of the best selling smartphones look alike, feel alike, and generally have the exact same feature sets. The differences between each other, in the grand scheme of things, are lamentably minute.
Integration with low power peripherals will be nice, but don't forget about high powered peripherals like tablets and tvs. If I put down my phone right now and pick up a tablet, I should be able to finish typing this comment with no interruption.
The processor is more powerful than many old computers, and the 30" screens need no more pixels than the iPhone screen already has.
People will be using their phones as desktops (if not serious workstations) sometime soon. And once they use them as desktops, phones won't be fast enough until they have performance comparable to workstations (which, as you point out, won't happen).
The only limit we face now is users finding sufficient aggregate need for all that power & bandwidth. Build AppleTV into a touchable monitor, drop a wireless keyboard on the desk, and eliminate that 4" bottleneck for most users - BAM, death blow to Windows etc.
I don't see them talking about this any more than they've talked about every iterative processor improvement in the past. Being the first 64-bit smartphone is a slightly bigger deal than selling 2.6GHz instead of 2.4.