Side note, I think it is hilarious that Apple can't get the AirPods to ship at the same time as the iPhone. Anyone who buys the new phone on release is going to be stuck with the crappy lightning headphones for at least a month and a half.
Another dongle to loose. Tons of headphones obsoleted. Can't charge while listening. Laggy audio. more batteries in the world. They're ok with a bulge for the camera but not headphones? I work in a lab and a phone with headphones is standard equipment on the commute and work (for at least part of the day).
I would seriously move off iOS if I was making music with it. If only iOS devices were made by other manufacturers... (I know I know....)
on the plus side minimum memory had been bumped.
One thing I cannot get over though, is that they chose their own propietary, you-have-to-pay-Apple-for-a-license, cannot-use-them-with-anything-else Lightning 'standard'. USB Type C is the standard for this stuff now, and any trivial technical merits Lightning might have over USB Type C don't weigh up against the universal nature of USB Type C. The sheer arrogance.
Digital connectors the future? I'm on board with that. Propietary connectors? Fuck that.
Were any of them? MacBook Air released in 2008. DVD media sales rose YOY 2005 => 2009. Flash video did not decrease in popularity pre-iPhone, it decreased because of the iPhone.
> The headphone jack is just as popular today as it has ever been
"DVDs are as popular today as they have ever been" - someone in 2008
> they by design can't be a universal solution
They've been explicitly designed to be as close to a universal solution as is possible. Pair them with one of your Apple devices and that pairing is synced to all others. Instead of unplugging your cable from your phone to your Mac you simply start doing something on your Mac and the audio source switches.
If the Airpods did not require power and were simply completely wireless they'd be the perfect solution. Apple is betting that battery advances will mean that the utility of these headphones (no wire, built in sensors) massively outweighs the cons (require power). Right now they only benefit "a lot" of people.
But instead they chose Lightning, so now we have iPhone headphones and Android headphones.
Why did it have to be this way?
It took 30 fucking years and a lot of blood sweat and tears but finally finally there is a global, universal, cheap and simple charging standard that just works. You can find a USB port anywhere and there are extra cables everywhere and life is just slightly better all around.
Except for Apple.
I see this as the direction the market is headed anyway. Apple has just moved to embrace it early.
Ever been on a call with your fancy blue tooth headset while someone turned on a microwave near by? I have, that shit stops working!
I'm all for moving forward with an all digital solution, but blue tooth just doesn't cut it 100% of the time.
In any case, I just decided to replace my iPhone 5 with an iPhone 6s, which I should be able to find on sale.
Also back then Apple had a minuscule market share, so they did not really kill it. It just made most people have to buy an external floppy drive. Yes the floppy did have to go, but USB sticks needed to come first, and they were not there yet. There really wasn't any other alternative for say saving your work at school and going home.
I know it's hackneyed to glorify Steve Jobs but he always seemed to have his eye on the ball when it came to tech. Macintosh is the obvious example but if you look at his work at NeXT or building products like WebObjects, you see a CEO who predicted the resurgence of distributing computing and the overall dominance of networking in software. With the iPhone, Apple's move to phase out the physical keyboard on mobile devices was done to put content front and center - a design informed by Jobs' vision of a portable "post-PC" device that would act as the source of most of our media consumption.
What is the removal of the 3.5MM jack informed by? Trivial product metrics like thickness and water-resistance? A cynical attempt to make money from licensing proprietary standards? Or maybe Apple is going through the motions, asserting its reputation as a "gatekeeper" that dictates which standards should be left in the past.
Whatever the case may be, the iPhone 7 is not a compelling product. As an iPhone user, my next smartphone will most likely be an Android.
At $45 they're not the cheapest but they've got pretty good sound quality and work well from a physical standpoint
As far as traditional headphones go, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Unfortunately, Apple knows we've hit Peak Smartphone, and they are running out of grown opportunities, so this is simply an attempt to create more growth where it doesn't otherwise exist.
It's mostly milking their customers and the industry.
Whenever you install or upgrade to a new OS, Apple prompts users if they'd like to send the anonymous usage data and I feel the headphone jack would be an important data point they've been researching.
The other problem I've run into is having a phone and headset with the same version of bluetooth.
Bluetooth audio, once high quality enough through codecs like aptX will become like wifi, we will wonder why we were tethered with wires to begin with. Bluetooth 5.0 appears to have taken a big step towards the audio quality issue resolution. I've previously owned the Sony MW600 and SBH52 bluetooth receivers for the past 5-7 years. As the tech improves it's going to become more viable and is in line with Apple's generally wireless strategy between Macbook, iPad, iPhone, etc.
I seem to remember commenters on "social media" (or at least their precursors) being just as confused over all of those changes. (With the possible exception of less outcry over optical drives going away.) It seems like there's always some supporters and always some detractors when Apple does something like this.
Maybe that changes soon or maybe AirPods solve this for iOS users (they by design can't be a universal solution)
There's an Apple pattern, where they support a less popular but more capable existing standard or come up with something superior to a standard, which spurs the development of an even better universal standard. It's high time that someone developed wireless headphones that weren't as much of a compromise as they generally are.
Lightning headphones are a stop gap. The future is wireless.
It is more likely that we will see other manufacturers drop the headphone jack as well because Apple did. Again, most people will be fine with that. Bluetooth headphones and ear pieces have already been around for awhile. You also have to think about Apple's purchase of Beats Audio.
With that said I will concede that I am also a bit bummed about them removing the port now as well, but I have learned that Apple is incredibly stubborn when it comes to listening to their consumers about these decisions, and you just have to abide, or buy something else.
That that said, I have a few of them and pretty much never use them because the extra battery life hassles aren't worth it relative to just plugging into the audio source.
Apple has lost a few sales in my house because they failed to support one thing or another. My wife is an apple user, but I can never get over the lack of sd/pci/whatever slots, or frequently things like bluray playback... When shopping for a new device.
As far as headphone jacks? Probably just another reason for me not to buy an idevice, I have a fairly large collection of bluetooth headphones, because of some work I was doing with A2DP a few years ago, but I pretty much use wired headphones because I've had the headphone battery die before the phone/etc way to often, and frankly when it comes to comfort (while sitting at my desk), or fit when running I stick to certain headphones not because they have cables but because they are better in the given use case.
Why? The phone comes with an adapter. Any headphones that worked with previous iPhones will work with the iPhone 7 via the adapter. People will just continue to use the headphones they already have.
Pros for wired: better fidelity, no batteries to charge, lighter weight, more headphones to choose from, cheaper headphone options, no adapters to lose, can listen to music while charging.
Be bold.
Was that downward slope clear at the time Apple made the changes, though? I remember "no Flash on iPhone" being a major complaint of many pundits.
Let's say I go with AirPods. The presentation just showed initial pairing and focused on the phone. It seems to work with iphone 5 and forward, which is great, but does it work with my older laptop? What about non-Apple bluetooth devices? It would be also be a nice little perk to have it work with AppleTV for watching TV at night. Traditional bluetooth sucks when switching between devices (in addition to pairing). It would be nice if they could prove to everyone that was a solved problem (and prove the lighting earpods aren't just a stopgap) before ditching the headphone jack.
There will always be initial 'outrage' but that is nothing new. Apple have no doubt made a calculated decision, weighed up the pros and cons and determine this is the best course of action moving forward.
The iPhone6S series isn't going anywhere anytime soon and it's certainly still serviceable as a device, it didn't die today with the release of the iPhone7. If people are concerned, hold off on the purchase, do the research and make an informed decision for your own needs.
1. Switching to a proprietary connector for wired headphones.
2. Releasing improved wireless headphones as an optional add-on.
So you still get "convenient and dependable" wired headphones supplied with the phone. And you get an adapter for using 3rd party wired headphones, so you are not "stuck with the crappy lightning headphones." Wired headphones, whether existing ones from 3rd parties or the upcoming ones from Apple, are unaffected.
As for whether Apple is Really Wrong This Time in requiring an adapter for 3rd party wired headphones... Putting aside how utterly vindicated they've been every time they've done this in history... According to Apple this was to enable major iPhone 7 features like the improved camera.[1] Was that worth requiring an adapter for certain cases, cases which will probably diminish over time as more 3rd party headphones go wireless? I'd say it seems in the ballpark of the sorts of tradeoff decisions they've made in the past.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/inside-iphone-7-why-...
Otherwise a Bluetooth receiver with extended battery life to wired headphones seems more robust and practical to me anyway. Otherwise I never use headphones when on the go, so I cant really talk about that use case in practice.
There are other vendors that make Lightning headphones (Philips, JBL...) and plenty of wireless headphones in the market.
Yes, you could use Bluetooth, but I'm guessing (hoping...) Apple has done some work to make the stream quality sound better and the connection process more stable. If they were to freely license that technology, people could buy great sounding headphones, with an improved UX, from any company they chose too. Now, it just seems like Apple's "courageous" way forward is all about pushing you to high margin Beats and EarPods.
To ensure compliance, most manufacturers include cheapy bud and microphone wired headset kits in their boxes.
By virtue of their control of 12% or so of the phone market, Apple is putting a lot of Lightning headsets into the stream, and making a bet that a lot of those people in the ecosystem will upgrade to the pods.
[1] http://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/cellular-phone-u...
Yeah, we can lose 4% of Abba lovers. Go for it
I could just about tolerate a very simple small analog adapter, but this is going too far.
Apple wants to make a thinner phone and eliminate wires. If you want to use different headphones than the ones that come with...well, do so. Are AirPods the most advanced headphones ever to come with a music device? They're usually pretty bad.
Phones will continue to get thinner and thinner. Apple have looked ahead and said, in the future when this thing gets thin enough there won't be any space for any adapters. The main competitor for use of the Lightning port is charging (as we can see from all the comments), but what if come iPhone 8 they will introduced simple wireless charging. Suddenly the need for any port then would come into question and pave the way for a significant further reductions in phone thickness.
That said, I've had an iPhone headphone socket fail owing to pocket lint. (It was fixed at the Genius bar for no charge.) I've been told that pocket lint being forced into iPhones sometimes leads to more serious internal damage.
Besides that:
1) How often do you use headphones with your iPhone? I use my iPhone as a small sound system or a wireless source for my car far more often than I use wired headphones (basically, on planes). As I understand it, Apple has greatly improved the iPhone's speakers. (The 12.9" iPad Pro has ridiculously good audio.)
2) Have you gotten over Apple ditching serial ports in favor of ADB, ditching SCSI in favor of IDE (which was a technical regression at the time), ditching ADB in favor of USB, ditching the floppy drive, switching from round laptop power connections to magsafe, not supporting Flash, going from magsafe to magsafe2 and providing $10 converters, switching from the horrid old iPod adapter to the lightning port?
3) If you have one really nice set of headphones you use with your iPhone, just keep the adapter on it. (And if your cable is replaceable, which is the case with all the mid- and high- end headphones I've owned, you can presumably get a lightning-compatible replacement.)
If you have several — the adapters are $9 each.
If you have a ton of different crappy headphones that you use with your iPhone… Why?
4) I really hate dealing with headphone cables. Usually they get tangled unless I carefully spool them back into their case (in the case of Apple's earpods or whatever they're called). If I were paid $5/h for the time I've spent untangling or spooling headphone cables, I would be able to buy all the lightning adapters I'll ever need. If the wireless headphones live up to Apple's claims, I'll be pretty happy.
Now you just have to carry your phone plus a bluetooth receiver to plug into!
Apple is a digital content distribution company in the first place.
But seriously, how hard would it have been to do a generation of keeping the jack with the Lightning headphones (and putting Lightning on Macs)?
Pretty sure they can just use standard Bluetooth headphones. Also, these exist: http://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/gear-iconx/
Upgrade to iPhone 7 with Apple Plug.
I remember the lack of Flash support on iOS being fairly controversial at the time. IMHO, it was the combination of lack of iOS support + iOS usage skyrocketing that killed Flash; not that iOS dropped Flash because it was already dying.
Most of my friends are using bluetooth headphones nowadays.
I was never sure if the jack is all the way in or it is halfway in. Sometimes the audio would disappear, and I would find out the headphones have slowly came off; but not all the way out, just enough to distort the sound.
AliExpress can deliver you a decent set of Bluetooth headphones for $50-$100, or earpieces for $12.
And about the same as USB-C driven headphones. Which the iPhone supports just fine. How did you manage to avoid mentioning that in your comment?
Why crappy lightning headphones? What makes them crappy?
It looked like it was the wrong time to drop it, but Apple was able to move consumers along.
As you mentioned, when the other technologies were abandoned, a suitable replacement existed that was widely in use regardless of platform. With the headphones, buying a set for an iPhone will now no longer work with other non-Apple devices (at least, at the moment -- are they licensing this to others and are any others interested in lightning headphones?).
I have two friends, recently, who destroyed their iPhone 6 (toilet and cement drop) and opted to purchase a higher-end Android device as a replacement (slightly less expensive with slightly better specs and they liked my phone when I let them play with it). Had they owned a pair of $200 "pretend" high-end headphones[0] that would have only worked with an iPhone, I doubt they would have been so quick to switch. I guess that could work the other way -- preventing Android users from switching to Apple, except it's resolved by a dongle on the Apple side without loss of perceived quality.
Wireless isn't a suitable replacement, either. Every time I see a new set of excellent Bluetooth wireless headphones, I think of the drawer full of the previous BT headphone/headset devices I'd bought and the several that aren't there because I've lost them. Usually something fell off of the device or the battery stopped holding a charge as long as the phone (when I remembered to charge those, too). The AirPods are small so they end up in the pocket opposite my phone with other things[1], most likely, my keys. They appear durable enough to survive in that environment, but it'll take about a week before I pull my keys out (I've only got 3 keys and a couple of rings), one snags on a ring and falls onto the ground without me noticing. Welp, I'm done, off to the drawer you go, mono-Pods.
I lose wired headphones much less frequently. They're usually plugged into my phone (and recent phones hold them tight) and wrapped inconspicuously around my neck. If I pocket them and they snag on my keys, I notice. But the best part is if I lose them, I can find a pair that suites my needs for $15 or less. Something tells me the Lightning headphones aren't going to be that cheap for a long time[2].
[0] "Pretend" high-end headphones refers to the likes of "Beats by Dre" and many others that are little more than the "Air Jordans" of headphones. You pay five times the price of similarly capable headphones because it's got a logo of a perceived "bad ass" on it.
[1] Because, at least where I live, wearing them in your ears when your not using them is going to get you labeled a "Douche Bag" pretty quickly.
[2] A quick search yielded several with the "basic features" I'd be looking for at around USD$50.00. Yikes.
It already was, even more so now. Why am I even here.
People can't handle change. Reminds me of Steve Jobs ditching Flash in 2010... https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Not because there's anything wrong with the 6! Ivan Krstic's talk about Apple platform security at Black Hat was probably the best talk of the whole event. Nobody is delivering seamlessly integrated chipset-up-through-application security the way Apple is. Forget about in mobile devices; I mean, in computing, period.
I'm excited to learn what else is coming there!
Behind the Scenes with iOS Security
Abstract - https://www.blackhat.com/us-16/briefings.html#behind-the-sce...
Slides - https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Krstic.p...
Beyond the secure enclave, if the haptic home button is anything like the new trackpads, it'll be an amazing feature. One less moving part to break. And the cameras...wow. Finally decent depth of field on the camera that's always in my pocket.
1.) Audio+GPS+Charging in non-Bluetooth Car.
2.) Listening to music at desk and still have enough charge for the Audio+GPS for the drive home.
3.) No more listening to music/audiobooks as I fall asleep because in the morning the iPhone won't be charged for my desk usage the next day unless I wake up and plug it back in during my sleep.
They can do whatever they want with the headphone jack, but pretending like we don't need to plug the phone in!! Thats daft.
[0] http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGRM2AM/A/iphone-lightning...
> Audio+GPS+Charging in non-Bluetooth Car.
Can you really sleep with earbuds in? In that use case, I use the device's speaker.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/SunbowStar-Universal-Charger-Adapter-...
Well you could get a standalone charger and a spare battery-- oh wait, no, they got rid of that too.
Your desk probably has a power outlet located nearby in case you are willing to change your routine.
Is your car older than 3 years? If not, what prevents you from listening to audio via USB?
If you're at a desk you probably have a computer. Why not listen on that? Most people are using streaming services so it's only a matter of logging into Spotify's website or iTunes and you have access to all your music.
>> 3.) No more listening to music/audiobooks as I fall asleep because in the morning the iPhone won't be charged for my desk usage the next day unless I wake up and plug it back in during my sleep.
I fall asleep to podcasts every night - I have never, ever had my phone plugged into a charger whilst doing that. The main reason is safety (I'm just not comfortably with a charging battery next to my head while I sleep). But the other reason is that it's totally unnecessary thanks to the sleep feature built in to the iPhone (in the clock app). I've go to bed with about 60% battery, wake up with around 40% and then connect it to my laptop when I get to work.
iPhone 6s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10193201
iPhone 6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8292029
iPhone 5s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361558
Similarly, this year iPhone SE got even more upvotes (567) than all of these https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330226
Maybe due to an upswing in HN traffic? Lack of other news today (it has been slow)?
I'm not sure this release was particularly exciting.
With the 820 Qualcomm was able to make their own custom cores (I think they went with 2 or 4 instead of 8) and generally overcome the 810 trainwreck. Qualcomm's ability to integrate the radio, GPU, DSP, crypto chip and some other things with a custom CPU into a true SOC is really a massive advantage within mobile and I expect them to build on that with more custom designs.
One last note about big.LITTLE. It seems like a panacea - just move all the big jobs to the big processors and the little ones to the little processors, yay! But this is much, much harder in practice. Doing this wrong leads to disastrous UX, screen tears because rendering shifts off of the big cores being one prime example. Process scheduling is already very tough and current schedulers are the result of many years of experimentation and heuristic best practices. Of course Apple controls the whole stack (i.e. they don't need to worry about where Kernel maintainers want to go with the schedulers) and I'm sure they have some amazing engineers working on Darwin so maybe they were able to overcome problems here. If you can schedule correctly it does seem like a big power savings win. But (and I may be behind the times here) that is a big if...
"Water resistance IP67 under IEC standard 60529. Liquid damage not covered under warranty."
How does one make such a big deal of it being water resistant (Product film: 1m 35s; "...to make this the first water resistant iPhone") but not cover liquid damage under warranty?
The series 1 watch had the same caveats but proved very water resistant in practice. To make stronger promises you need to understand how the seals age and how the device behaves in lots of situations, or you need to over-engineer it with bulky seals and other compromises. You also need to understand and deal with extremely tight manufacturing tolerances.
If Apple said the iPhone was waterproof people would take it scuba diving then post YouTube videos showing how "crapp" the new iPhone is, then we'd have watergate (lol) all over the tech press.
Much like Trump/Hillary, people don't hold anyone else to the same high standard they hold Apple to. (If Trump manages to not vomit on himself at the first debate he'll be declared the winner by the media. )
If you brought in a water damaged phone how would you prove that you didn't exceed the rated coverage?
If you need to go diving with your phone, either get a proper waterproof case or get a properly ruggedized dumbphone.
The adapter is useless for me since it doesn't allow power to be supplied so my long drives are now problematic. I guess I'll have to take that into account on buying the next car.
Instead we got a button to switch from one lens to the other, for a 2x optical zoom. That's it. 99% of the time that second sensor and lens will do absolutely zilch. The computational bokeh appears to only use the 56mm lens for the actual photo, and the other lens to capture a depth map to compute the fake bokeh. This is hardly any better than the existing fake bokeh solutions shown many times before on Androids, Nokias and in iOS apps over the years that do the same, except it's a bit faster. The whole thing feels like just another checkbox feature, with very little actual value.
But in all seriousness, if they make the port count any lower, the MacBook Pro will cease to be a laptop. It will become an iPad without a touchscreen.
1. Most of the use cases being discussed here are irrelevant for the average iPhone user. Charging and listening at the same time is not a thing for most users. I know there are perfectly reasonable scenarios where it is useful, but most people don't care. Regarding battery life: personally, I use my iPhone quite a lot, often with bluetooth headphones, and I have had to charge it only once or twice during the daytime in the last two years. If you play a lot of games, or use GPS intensively for a few hours, then battery life could be an issue. For the average consumer, I don't think it will be a major concern.
2. OTOH, in the last few years headphones have become a very, very big market. They are a huge status symbol for teenagers and early 20-somethings. If you've saved a lot of money to afford a pair in that stage of life, the headphone jack is a big deal. It's not going to be "cool" to carry around an adapter all the time, and regardless people will hear "no headphone jack" and be annoyed. That demographic seems key to me in maintaining Apple's market lead over the long term, i.e. trend-setting young people.
Overall, I actually think that (2) will be a very big issue. Whilst I am of the opinion that wires are horrible in general, Apple may have misread its market here.
Let's be honest. You seen the adapter? It's not very thick and basically just a little bit of cable. Why do people make a big deal about "carrying around an adapter"? You connect it to the headphone and then you roll the headphone cable up just like before only this time there is an extra two inches of the adapter cable in there. How is carrying around that thing even an issue? If you want to keep your old headphones and use a new phone you just have to keep the adapter on your headphone cable all the time.
Many people nowadays don't have a computer -- especially in that big Asia demographic that Apple so loves. If your phone is the only device you own that is capable of playing music, then charging while you listen is often obligatory.
Feels to me like Apple has gone to far in designing the iPhone for a particular kind of luxury buyer (who can afford Beats or $159 earbuds) instead of targeting the mass market.
They are a huge status symbol for teenagers and early 20-somethings.
The high-gloss finish of the Jet Black iPhone 7 is
achieved through a precision nine-step anodization and
polishing process. Its surface is equally as hard as
other anodized Apple products; however, its high shine
may show fine micro-abrasions with use. If you are
concerned about this, we suggest you use one of the many
cases available to protect your iPhone.[1]
On a related note: I wonder if one reason for eliminating the jack is to close that open interface which some devices like the "Square" were using. I'm not sure how much of an impact this has though; it was just a thought.
iOS still continues its march of adding minor features that should be in regular OTA updates and packing them up with some serious marketing hype. There's barely any improvement here and most of the features are already well implemented in Android / Google Apps or Facebook Messenger.
Disappointing.
Yup. I remember the original iPhone/iPad announcements where many features were fairly innovative. Now applauded feature announcements are for features already out on Android phones.
The screen is beautiful. The two cameras are a clever trick that I hope work as well as advertised -- and their cameras have been historically very good. Splash resistance is overdue, but appreciated.
But A10 is a bit of a disappointment [1][2], only as powerful as the A9X. Do they have any new hardware encode/decode blocks at least?
With A9 they were having yield issues and had to different traces being manufactured by two different fabs to enhance capacity. What do we know on the chip front?
[1] https://www.techtastic.nl/smartphones/apple-a10-soc-van-ipho...
[2] http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/iphone-7-benchmarked-here...
[1]: http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/07/11/apple-chip-builder...
While messaging with iMessage, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, etc. can be done over WiFi only, calling is traditionally reliant on a cellular provider. The new iPhone only requires a WiFi network, and with the proliferation of WiFi and the first city-wide networks (e.g. Barcelona), it is possible that in the next decade all communication will be done over the Internet.
Also, during a recent trip to Japan I saw an $120 SIM card that gives unlimited Internet access for a year. This works out to $10/month, which is far less than what I pay for Verizon. So in a way this new iPhone may eventually cause cellular networks to primarily become providers of remote Internet access, as telephony shifts to the apps that the local people use to connect with each other.
Do you remember which telecom this was?
Oh so till now whatsapp calls were android only?
I could totally envision v2 of these having better battery life and being able to "enhance" hearing the same way a hearing aid does. Also, more people using these will hopefully reduce the stigma some see with wearing hearing aids.
You're just comparing them to shitty wired $5 chinese earbuds from Amazon in your head. $160 isn't even expensive for earbuds in general, more like lower mid-range.
[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/5/12798640/bragi-wireless-hea...
I ended up going for the Jaybird X2 which is about $150.
Also no mention of standby time that I could hear, only 5 hours listening, but no idea if just having them on (in case of infrequent phone calls) would use up the battery as fast or not
Also, did you see the event? Not the same phone at all.
Wide color, awesome new camera and dropping it in the toilet might be enough.
That said, the new home button sounds very interesting (I say that both as a developer and end-user), and the new camera will be a very welcome addition. And battery life improvement on top that? Perfect.
It is an iterative improvement for sure, but I don't see why that's a bad thing.
Apple looked so uncool and out of it when they continued to talk about it. Half the crowd has forgotten Pokemon Go even existed by this point.
"Unauthorized playback."
It makes me imagine how nice it would have been to ditch both the 3.5mm & lightening port & replace it with a USB-C port across product lines.
Obviously that would have been even more drastic in many ways, but I can't help but think that they have painted themselves into a strange corner.
http://web.archive.org/web/20160907200621*/http://www.apple....
Meanwhile, nobody has attempted to archive links for iPhone 8.
I guess maybe the IA crawlers found links to the page from elsewhere. Links made either by mistake or by someone making a joke about the release of iPhone 7 back in 2014 and betting on people not actually following the link. I dunno.
mobiles are mature products and the players are strictly in cash-cow or market share mode. nothing of importance is changing.
I've got an iphone se and an iphone 4 and you can't tell me that's the most they can do for 6 years of product development by one of the richest companies in the world. (yes i know that it's faster with more a and more b and more c etc)
Apple needs to drip feed improvements over the next x years to keep sales up so we can't expect anything game changing.
"The Others" are trying this and that but nothing seems to be sticking, probably not able to drive consumer desire enough.
so if nothing is happening, what is the post-phone next-big-thing to get into?
How the fuck is it acceptable to completely remove the jack and replace it with this 'superior' technology?
I'll be sticking with my 5S, and my wife is no longer upgrading her 4S to the 7 as we were planning.
We love our iPhones, but we do need to replace hers and now looking for non-Apple alternatives since while I prefer the SE over everything on the market, she thought she was going to want the 7 Plus.
Weak. Give me 400 monkeys, then 4000 monkeys, then 400 000 monkeys, and now the monkeys are forming a fractal, but the fractal is just the surface of a sphere, and zooming out there are a million spheres, and the spheres form… a monkey.
Now THAT's a demo.
5 minutes of dicking with bluetooth pairing later: "FUCKING BLUETOOTH GODDAMN IT. welp, never mind"
(conversational lull follows)
Honest question, not having owned an iPhone before - is this really the first iPhone that can produce stereo sound through the speakers? If true, that seems like a crazy thing to advertise given how standard a feature it has been in most phones for so long. On the other hand, if iPhones have had stereo output already, why shout about it now?
Wikipedia claims 1GB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_7). Can't be right?
Airpods might become the virtual reality for your ears.
[1] http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MNEN2LL/A/beats-solo3-wire...
Android is getting to the point where most users will not really notice a difference between Android and IOS, even on a very inexpensive device.
32GB standard for all models, except the matte black, which will ONLY come in 128GB, and you'll be paying $100 more at $750.
Nice underhanded move by Apple to maximize profit for what will undoubtedly be the most popular color.
First they force everyone to buy the 32GB upgrade last year on the 6S, now you're forced to do the same to 128GB, unless you want a rose colored phone.
The camera upgrade looks nice, but the headphone jack is a joke. Another wire that will inevitably fall apart like the other Apple lightning connectors.
EDIT: Jet Black, NOT Matte Black. Still dumb.
Regarding the comments about how do I charge and listen, I accidentally found this dock[0]. Not sure if it's a new product.
[0] http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MNN62/iphone-lightning-doc...
Was USB-C supposed to be their future or not...? It sounded like it when they introduced the MacBook. Do their teams communicate well with a lack of strife?
I know nobody else cares...
Meanwhile, just a decade or so ago most phones had camera bulges, edge bulges, antennas that stretched out from the body, were 3-4 times the thickness, etc.
Also what's up with Apple being so obsessed about pictures? I know you want to have the nude selfie in the toilet to be the best as possible, but come on!
And everything revolves around fitness. People wont get up from their bum, just because their watch tells them to. And the other who already do fitness don't need a watch to tell them how fit they are. They already know. Because they can feel it.
And I almost forgot that having now two different types of back casing is a feature apparently.
Last but not least, Apple is still ignoring the cries of millions of users about the battery life. That majority of the people would trade in the slim design for days worth of juice.
Who cares about paper thin phones when you have to put them into a case with extra battery within it to have it powered through the day?
Who cares about the seamless Jet Black casing when you put the phone into an ugly plastic case?
It looks like 'Form Over Function' again for Apple.
Good job apple, this is probably the most uninteresting keynote ever. Except for the people dancing in stockings at the end.
Siri integration and easier charging is definitely really cool, but not worth paying $120 over regular Bluetooth headphones that will probably be copy cat'ing that functionality in t minus 3, 2, 1...
It is truly a astonishing, how they manage to use the same TSMC 16nm, and get 40% single core performance increase. The rumors is the same SoC core from A9 but 40% higher clock speed from 1.8Ghz to 2.6Ghz, while keeping the same thermal envelop.
Some people were wondering if these Smartphone CPU can easily scale up the clockspeed. Turns out it can. And the performance could now exceed the baseline performance of Macbook.
i.e, Apart from compatibility reason, there is no longer a case for Apple to continue and use Intel CPU. A Quad Core A10 may even outrun the current Macbook Pro given the similar TDP.
Galaxies have been splash proof for some generations, and Bluetooth phones aren't new (only the design of this one seems to beat everything else).
Other than that, only traditional Moores Law advancements, like, more battery, more RAM, more processing power. None of these are enabling techs, in that they don't enable you to do anything that you can't with older devices.
So, I guess, update when the old one gives up the ghost?
It also looks really plastic-y in those renderings.
Anyway, AR is about to explode.
Unless getting dunked in water, I haven't heard of anyone having any issues with water damaging their IPhone.
Here's an ad for the 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Aire. (Available "with two four-barrel carburetors!" Two-tone paint! Tailfins!) There's about as much difference between the new IPhone and the N-1 model as there was between the 1956 and 1957 Chevys.
Also, I'm concerned about the LTE: on the Verizon network it sounds like they're using the same modem as the Galaxy S7. https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x12
Is that correct?
The main issue seems to be that you now can't charge and listen to music at the same time. How often do you actually do that? In the past 5 years I have probably done that once.
For those of you who do think it is an inconvenience, I bet there will be a product on the market in 2 weeks that eliminates this problem.
Compare it with cars clothes and other things
Even the packaging mostly ends up in landfill. There is something unhealthy about "shiny new toys" released every year that we must have according to the media's frenzy of Apple advertising.
Are they Bluetooth or not? Or is it the usual proprietary crap?
One point about the stereo speakers is that you'd need to put your face/nose right next to the phone to appreciate the stereo, surely?
Also, no new MBP is very disappointing.
[Edited for technical correctness]
(Edited for clarity)
End of discussion.
But honestly, complaints and analysis don't matter, people will line up to buy this garbage and to make it worse it'll become a stupid trend that will bleed over into Android-land and now instead of the perfectly fine $10 headphones I picked up at Big Lots, I'll have to shell out 10x that so I can listen to a podcast on my way to work.
edit and they don't even have the respect for their customers to ship their stupid buds on time with the product that requires them...so that their customers can look like bluetooth douchebags from both sides.