New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

Guys this is 10% about Jonny Ive jerking off to "simple" design, 10% about saving a teeny bit more space for other shit, and 80% about selling proprietary headphones.

otm. greed has defined the cook era imo.

The Home button is now force sensitive. Instead of knowing you pressed the button because it clicked, it will vibrate. Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller said the revolutionary new button is "creating new feelings and experiences that could not have been created before."

Ooooooh......

I'm not sure i'll prefer a buzzing home button to the clicking one we have now, whose tactile feedback I find perfect. But i'm all for new feelings and experiences, so we shall see....

Or trying to anyway, because I think the Airpods will be the biggest apple product flop in years.

I'm not sure i'll prefer a buzzing home button to the clicking one we have now, whose tactile feedback I find perfect. But i'm all for new feelings and experiences, so we shall see....

imo it's more about cutting apple's in-warranty repair costs than anything.

also a heap of android phones have a non-mechanical wake-up function, also i don't see why the iphone home button needs to vibrate. you know when it registers because something happens on the screen.

haptic feedback on a trackpad makes sense because a click does all sorts of things. a home button on an iphone goes home, and you know when it worked because you're in the home screen. so they took away a headphone port just for a vibration that tells you what the screen is telling you anyway.

I've never found Android haptic home (and other) buttons as intuitive as the iPhone dedicated clicking home button

Also, removing the headphone jack is not like removing the floppy drive from the first iMac or other numerous times Apple has dropped widely-used but aging technologies. The things that replaced the floppy and CD drives were not proprietary Apple tecnologies as the Lightning jack and Airplay are. Also, will there be any way to split the audio and power functions of the lightning jack so I can listen to music in my car and charge the phone at the same time? Bluetooth audio drains the battery fast, and anyway my old car doesn't have bluetooth, just an aux-in jack.

true, but nine years on we all know what a home button does, so haptic feedback at the expense of headphones is a bit over the top imo xp

new iOS wakes up when you pick up the phone iirc, and the unlocking and clicking to open the home screen are two separate actions, although you can default to the old behavior. I am not sure if the separate unlock lets you mess with secured notifications on the home screen or what. separating "open" and "unlock" might mean other ways to unlock than touchid, or some other thing I can only wildly guess at

I guess their bet is that just as few people need Ethernet really, most will find they get on fine without the jack. I think they're wrong. People will hate not being able to charge, despite Apple pretending that battery life is good enough, and they'll hate not being able to stick their headphones into other devices and it's just going to be endless friction and irritation — the opposite of what Apple was supposed to be about.

― stet, Wednesday, September 7, 2016 9:00 PM (forty-three minutes ago) Bookmark

i like how the lightning earbuds (with wires) won't work with any macs, only iphone

odds on they'll work with the new macs though. so all you need to do is buy the following affordable accessories with your new headphones:

- a mac

(i'm only half joking)

potential for fuckery seems high - imagine taking a usb-lightning cable and plugging both ends into a mac with a usb and lightning ports

Even better, removing the audio jack also eliminated a key point of ingress that Riccio says helped the new iPhone finally meet the IP7 water resistance spec Apple has been after for years (resistant when immersed under 1 meter of water for 30 minutes).

suspected as much

samsung managed decent waterproofing with a headphone port though, right?

Usually when a tech sticks around for 100+ years it's because it's really good and nothing better has come along. Apple has yet to make the case that this expensive proprietary technology is, on the whole, better than the inexpensive and universal analog jack. I guess we will see. The early Airpod reviews are pretty meh at best. It's possible that I the long run we will come to feel like this is more good than harm. I still miss analog keyboards but having more screen space seems worth the irritation of touch screens and autocorrect.

Wait so how is the Apple Watch "swim proof" if the iPhone it has to be paired with is only "water resistant"?

samsung managed decent waterproofing with a headphone port though, right?

yes, somehow the Galaxy S7 received a higher water-resistance certification than the iPhone 7 despite having a headphone jack (although independent testing has shown the Samsung is still easily damaged by water)

(although independent testing has shown the Samsung is still easily damaged by water)

wow i didn't know that. not good for a key feature.

http://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-galaxy-s7-not-quite-waterproof-torture-tests-reveal/

http://www.consumerreports.org/smartphones/samsung-galaxy-s7-active-fails-consumer-reports-water-resistance-test/

hmm

Even the iPhone 6s/6s+ had better water resistance in the CNet/Squaretrade test

due for upgrade in a couple months, but eh i might just skip this year and see how this all shakes out. just as likely I give into consumer hype get a 7 or 7+ for that stupid new camera, though

the watch does a lot of shit on its own, they are really bad at explaining how the watch works. no one I've met with one plays music directly from it, but you can do that. with gps it'd play music and keep your running route or a/e with the phone nowhere nearby

you can use Apple Pay without the phone in range, which is nice

obviously posting on iPad with my awesome caps and weird autocorrect here

it's another of those "internet of things" objects that doesn't really work how you want but does stuff you don't realize or utilize. constricted by implementation details so you get things that are neat but not what you want. pretty much all the HomeKit stuff works the same way

we're going to get an entirely different and potentially better set of personal area network interfaces out of Apple in about 10 years they are just selling a ton of marketable prototypes in the meantime because even after they pay $13B back to Ireland they have more cash than most sovereign states and still make a profit on every unit

Like Apple can either take itself almost completely private so it can focus on making money from its current businesses or it can spend the iPhone money trying to design and build (say) autonomous vehicles or some other basically new multi-billion-dollar market

it kinda barely matters what they make at this point, it doesn't have to be good (and computers have always been bad anyway), a lot of it has been pretty good anyway though

they aren't that invincible, no one ever is.

i'm sort of sorry for this spit-take analogy but w/e. they're like the greeks ca. 450 bc. they had a few moments, but now they're full of themselves, extracting more $ than ever with no more wars to fight. queue shifting alliances, inevitable mistakes and slow decay while a million things change around them.

cue

no, hence some well-funded entity doing R&D to make something actually different and good (computers are never good) might have a shot at challenging Apple's profit share in mobile computing before we reach some post-multitouch world (lol VR) but there's a big firewall made of Apple's cash making it hard to compete on the supply chain side

it feels a bit like sony's walkman juggernaut days v now, in that sony is still huge now but in other areas and for less unique things

Apple may be making bad choices on what they bring to market and their industrial design team looks like it's just churning out ideas to differentiate each model year and keep average selling price up and software orgs are never ever functional but they are doing stuff in chip design and fab that the Android OEMs aren't and never will, because Apple is probably booking every Samsung and TSMC fab a decade out

and if apple loses its market stranglehold, what happens to those decades-out bookings? does apple then begin to compete on price, or does it just wind back its factory order projections?

idk what's going on internally obv but outwardly it looks like apple has disappeared up its own arse and deeply believes it will always win.

Why is the camera on iPhone 7 so advanced? It has an improved Apple‑designed image signal processor built into the A10 Fusion chip.

This is puffery of course but all these coprocessors (the ISP, the GPU cores, the motion processor, the secure enclave, whatever's in the AirPods) are where a lot of Apple's investment has been and what whatever their next consumer product that actually wows people (if indeed there ever is one; it's not clear to me that there has to be for the company to keep being profitable indefinitely) will depend on to be even possible to build. (This is already true of the watch but nobody wants or understands the watch.)

Like here's what I believe: Apple's still on the annual refresh for the iPhone because it believes its investors will throw a shit-fit if it stops and average selling price will go down. Whatever the company is spending money and and the top tier of engineer and designer and executive leadership time on is years away from market and still highly compartmentalized to avoid leaks. (Obviously the car thing is a winky open secret, but it's far from obvious what "the car" would be as a product.) In the meantime, stock buybacks.

Or I could be wrong and there's nobody in Apple working on anything particularly cool and it's all mediocre phones and slow refresh cycles on everything other than the phone from here until San Francisco is underwater.

we're at the point now where cameras in most phones are fine. not lytros with funky focal points, not low-light superstars, just fine. fine is enough for most people.

the difference between two-year iphone iterations (3g to 4, 4 to 5) once felt significant. 5 to 6 felt less so, but at least it had a bigger screen. 6 to 7 just feels like an annoyance. google's about to launch daydream vr, and some new ip7 owners will start to wonder why they dropped a grand on same-again with 3d touch (yay?) and a camera that's a bit better than what they had. nothing at all compels me to trade my 6 for a 7.

Or I could be wrong and there's nobody in Apple working on anything particularly cool and it's all mediocre phones and slow refresh cycles on everything other than the phone from here until San Francisco is underwater.

― slathered in cream and covered with stickers (silby), Thursday, September 8, 2016 4:15 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

personally i'm hoping for at least ten more pet projects with massive hubris but what i'm really crossing my fingers for, and this is undoubtedly a long shot, is some sinister google-style government cuddling up with, say, china.

they have so much more drama left in them.

their phone sales are down in china, and i can't see this iphone swinging them back

Wait are you saying Apple is looking to acquire Hong Kong from China?

xp in the US iPhone sales are always "down" in this part of the product cycle, like within 6 months of a new number of phone coming out, you sure it's not just that?

could be. https://www.techinasia.com/apple-surpassed-xiaomi-huawei-china-iphone-market-share-falls indicates a 10% year-on-year drop with huawei & oppo strengthening. i saw more specific reports but can't find them now.

imagine taking a usb-lightning cable and plugging both ends into a mac with a usb and lightning ports

pure filth

had to go into an apple store today. i got talking to someone there about the new phone and the lack of headphone port. he said lightning sound is better anyway and that the headphone jack is old technology (he used the actual phrases "more than 100 years old" and "dinosaur"). really i'm just impressed by how quickly apple gets the official talking points out to the people in the shops.

I do remember audio geeks praising in the past the better sound they got from lightning port