9 ms·

Apple's problem is that their rate of innovation has slowed down. iPhone generates over a 100 Billion dollars in revenue. Per year. If any company has the resou

Apple's problem is that their rate of innovation has slowed down. iPhone generates over a 100 Billion dollars in revenue. Per year. If any company has the resources to innovate it is Apple. Apple, here are some free ideas. Some of these ideas go beyond the phone and into cell networks. If Google can do that ( https://fi.google.com https://fi.google.com ) why can't Apple? - Improve cellular reception. We are now heavily reliant on our cell phones, yet half the time our cell phones don't work because we are inside a building or not close to a tower and so on. This needs to be fixed ASAP. Apple has the resources to do something about this. Here are some ideas: https://www.wired.com/2014/02/steve-perlman-pcell/ https://www.wired.com/2014/02/steve-perlman-pcell/ and https://www.artemis.com https://www.artemis.com Quote: "pCell delivers 5G performance to standard LTE devices" - Improve cell plans. Why are we paying for voice, text and data separately? The only thing we should be paying for is data. Voice and text should go over data. Apple needs to disrupt. - Improve user experience. Here are some really cool ideas from Microsoft: https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11595564/microsoft-3d-touch-kinect-gestures-windows-phones https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11595564/microsoft-3d-touc... - Improve TV. There is a TV app on my iOS, but it doesn't seem to do anything interesting. This needs to be more like tv.youtube.com - Fix design. Fire Jony Ive's a$$ and hire some real designers. Apple used to be insanely great at design. Now they are a nobody. Take a look at HomePod. It is an amorphous blob. Every single Bose speaker looks better than HomePod. - Get rid of flat design, it is an unusable mess (see http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/ http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/ ). You don't need to bring back leather and stitches, but you absolutely need to bring physicality back into UI design in order to improve usability.

Judgmentality 8y ago
> Fix design. Fire Jony Ive's a$$ and hire some real designers. Apple used to be insanely great at design. Now they are a nobody. Take a look at HomePod. It is an amorphous blob. Every single Bose speaker looks better than HomePod. I'm not a designer, but wasn't Jony Ive largely responsible for leading many of the great designs at Apple, including the iPhone? Or do you think he's stagnated, or perhaps is unfit in his current managerial role, or something else?
- interlocutor 8y ago
  > wasn't Jony Ive largely responsible for leading many of the great designs at Apple, including the iPhone Steve Jobs was the tastemaker. Without Steve's input Jony is apparently not able to produce insanely great designs.
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    AirPods prove this wrong.
    - danieldk 8y ago
      I have two pairs of AirPods. Technically they are a marvel, but their design is quite ugly (large white bars).
      - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
        I disagree, but I’m not sure where else we can go with this, since it’s a matter of taste :)
- mwilcox 8y ago
  He was promoted to handle all design including software. He was best focusing intensely on industrial design for hero products, under Jobs
  - atulatul 8y ago
    Hopefully does not end up being a case of Peter Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Not so much. Most of his iconic designs are actually pretty direct copies of the looks Dieter Rams of Braun created a decade or three earlier. That includes a fair selection of the original iPhone apps and icons. Surprising perhaps considering the brouhaha over rounded corners. That doesn't make them bad, but Ive seems to take mostly the look not the design philosophy. Meanwhile he pursues the cult of thinness.
simonh 8y ago
Yep, apart from the latest iPhones having the best screens ever, the quickest most convenient and most secure unlock mechanism ever, the best computational photography ever, the fastest mobile CPUs ever released and overall being 2+ years ahead of their nearest competition, that was all a few months ago. Old news. What have Apple done for us just now?
- jpatokal 8y ago
  Those are all incremental improvements. Nobody's saying Apple's phones are bad, just that they lack compelling differentiators to other phones, including older iPhones.
  - pdpi 8y ago
    Their SoCs are a massive differentiator. Unfortunately I don’t think the iPhone is in a good position to leverage that.
    - dan-robertson 8y ago
      Having much better single core performance means the chips tend to be better at running (JS) websites. However most mobile websites are awful and full of “download our app” type popups/dark patterns that means “good at websites” isn’t really the advantage it ought to be. I suppose this also lets webview and JavaScript type “apps” work better.
      - saagarjha 8y ago
        There are very few workloads on mobile that can take advantage of more than a handful of cores.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - Tepix 8y ago
      Is it really a "massive" differentiator in 2019? Even an iPhone 5S is "fast enough" in most situations. Even a $250 Android phone bought today will not be so slow or incapable that it becomes an issue for 2 years.
Tepix 8y ago
In terms of design, those fat bezels around the MacBook displays feel very dated just a few weeks after I started using a Dell XPS 13 notebook (which was years ago). I can't believe Apple is lagging behind in this area so badly.
jdietrich 8y ago
>Fix design. Fire Jony Ive's a$$ and hire some real designers. I think that's almost certainly unfair on Ive. I do strongly suspect that Apple has a culture problem because of the secretive nature of their design lab. A very small team working in absolute secrecy enabled them to create disruptive new categories of product, but it carries a substantial risk of stagnation in the long term. It's difficult to sustain a culture of innovation when the flow of information is so strictly controlled. There's an inevitable risk of inadvertently fostering a yes-man culture, a risk well known to anyone who operates in a classified intelligence environment.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Ive is a great product designer. His weak points seems to be: - UX and Software design - Better integration with hardware/physical needs (see overly bendy hardware, cables that fall apart, etc) - (Maybe) Delegating and accepting new ideas
  - oneeyedpigeon 8y ago
    Ive is a great visual / 'tactile' designer, but only a good functional one. This leads to things like beautiful cables (cables!) that exhibit the problem you highlight, the removal of headphone jacks, and an amazing mouse that you can't use whilst it's charging because the port is on the bottom. I'm not sure which software he's been responsible for, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same sorts of issues could be spotted — macOS certainly looks really, really nice and works easily and properly in many situations, but there are certain very basic flaws which just seem inexplicable.
- Mindwipe 8y ago
  I'm not even sure Ive does that much design any more day to day. But there's definitely issues piling up in that regard. The most notable Apple design of the last few years is the notch, and that's very much in the "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" category. Apple got what people liked about the Macbook Air so completely, totally wrong I'm baffled. Apple's design lab used to be amazing at balancing usability vs design. It feels like that has tipped far too hard towards "thinner at any cost" as a design philosophy, and that's come at a cost of clean lines and product quality. The design lab doesn't need reigning in as such - Apple needs someone who can challenge them at a senior level and call them out, which Jobs did and it feels increasingly like nobody else has ever replaced.
lsc 8y ago
>- Improve cellular reception. We are now heavily reliant on our cell phones, yet half the time our cell phones don't work because we are inside a building or not close to a tower and so on. This needs to be fixed ASAP. Everyone wants to buy the cheapest cellphone plan, then they complain when it doesn't work in buildings. Your location matters here, but at least in the more enclosed bars in san jose, AT&T and T-mobile are super unreliable; Verizon works fine. I mean, I understand, I also want things that are good and cheap. And when you can get it, that's great. But I don't think this one is apple's fault. My biggest complaint about the reception on my own cell is that if I'm within range of a wifi network I've connected to in the past, but that network is broken at the router at this moment? My phone keeps trying to use wifi rather than connecting to my cellular network.
- interlocutor 8y ago
  Facebook is launching their own satellites to beam down high-speed internet. (See https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/21/17598418/facebook-athena-internet-satellite-project-fcc https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/21/17598418/facebook-athena-... ) Why isn't Apple doing that? More than anyone else Apple needs it.
  - lsc 8y ago
    People have been talking about LEO internet for as long as I've been working; It didn't work in the '90s, mostly due to launch costs (you see, for decent network performance, the satellites need to be low - that means you need a lot of satellites, because each one can't be seen from much of the earth's surface, and because they are so low, there is enough atmospheric drag that you have to replace the things every few years. If you use satellites at a regular orbit, you use fewer of them, sure, but you also then have the problem of really looong ping times.) I mean, I'm sure someone will eventually get it, but we probably need to lower launch costs, and we need to do a lot of engineering on the rest of it. It's not an easy problem.
- Ntrails 8y ago
  > Everyone wants to buy the cheapest cellphone plan, then they complain when it doesn't work in buildings. Your location matters here, but at least in the more enclosed bars in san jose, AT&T and T-mobile are super unreliable; Verizon works fine. In the UK we have one set of physical lines, owned and run by BT. BT has to, by law, lease the lines out to sub providers at it's own "internal" costing rate so that there is competition in telephone providers. It remains bemusing to me that Mobile Towers weren't treated in the same way, with every provider using the same network of towers and sharing. We do it for emergency calls (999 will route the nearest/strongest tower irrespective of owner), and frankly you'd have fewer towers over-saturating the high population areas for the 4-5 networks.
tapland 8y ago
> If Google can do that ( https://fi.google.com https://fi.google.com ) why can't Apple? I think Apple planned (still is?) to become a carrier as part of their eSIM rollout, but the carriers who sell a lot of their phones are not so welcoming to carrying a competing carriers products. If Apple can move iDevice sales to their own stores to a higher degree this is more likely to happen.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  I feel like Apple can just have a popup that says "Verizon has no service here. AppleNet has 4 bars service. Do you want to connect to AppleNet instead($35 per month)?". Click 'Yes' and you're subscribed, billed to your Apple account just like any other in-app subscription, and only used when your main provider has no service or you have no SIM inserted.
  - tapland 8y ago
    Yep. But with that functionality it could also be: Turn iPhone on, get asked the same, never worry about a separate carrier, ever. Carriers don't want that.
    - kkarakk 8y ago
      Apple has shown that they can dictate whatever terms they want to carriers before. Them not being able to do so in this particular instance doesn't make sense.
nabla9 8y ago
This presents wrong view of innovation: Apple has money and smart people, just throw more money and innovate more. Major part of innovation for tech giants like Apple is buying out small companies with big innovations and developing them into products. Big companies can usually develop true innovations faster than small companies but they rarely produce breakthroughs.
tabs_masterrace 8y ago
How about some more sensors. No phone can tell me the temperature, without checking weather online. What if I want to know the room temperature. Could put humidity, atmospheric pressure sensors in there too, IR cameras, all kinds of cool stuff. Think of the software applications, right know my "smart" phone has no way of knowing if I'm outside or inside. Then, voice mail. Why doesn't this still not work locally? There is no reason the phone shouldn't be able of answering and recording messages by itself.
- rhn_mk1 8y ago
  > How about some more sensors. No phone can tell me the temperature Electronics get hot when operating, and even more so when they are sitting in the pocket. Typical temp sensors are attached to 30cm long cables. Nevertheless, I'm sure phones can do that already if you install a weather station in your house.
  - ricardobeat 8y ago
    Someone figured out how to measure ambient temperature based on _battery temperature_ a long time ago, with high reliability!
    - epanchin 8y ago
      How does it compensate for being in your pocket?
- londons_explore 8y ago
  Most phones already have a bunch of temperature sensors, air pressure sensor, magnetic field sensors, humidity sensors etc. I'm pretty sure the iPhone has them too, but perhaps they don't make them available to app developers.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Off the top of my head, iPhone’s barometer and magnetometer are accessible via public API.
rigidglobe 8y ago
I would have switched to android this year due to high iPhone XS price had it not been the “need” to stay in iMessages. When most of your friends are having a blue chat bubble, you don’t want to be “that guy”. iMessages is apples secret weapon and I’m surprised android hasn’t done their own iMessages api where all android can interoperable. Or at the very least why hasnt Samsung done their own? Finally, other secret sauces apple has that keeps their customers in place: iCloud Keychain (very handy when switching between multiple iPads, MacBook, iPhone) without the need to pay a third party password vendor (whose security is not backed by a one trillion dollar market cap). iCloud sync: easy way for app devs to sync and for customers to have automated syncing between multiple devices that “just works”. I don’t know if android has such easy syncing between different android manufacturers (ie Samsung phone to asus tablet to chrome book, for example). I doubt it. Finally really nice features like Handoff where my safari tabs are all synced automatically between multiple iPads, iPhone, and MacBook. And final finally: part of the high price I pay for using apple evosystem is security: I know that safari (unlike chrome) isn’t bent in tracking my every move in order to sell me more ads; or that my cloud password manager is safe (even safety in numbers in terms of security by obsurity (one in many iOS users) backed by a trillion dollar company: pretty sure nobody wants to f with that); my os isn’t bent on tracking my every move or file to analyze later (chromeos, google calendar, google docs); apple has hard stops in place on apps from over snooping (android apps such as fb tracking your calls and sms data); you pay once for your apps and then you can reuse them on the next iphone (app devs are free to release new versions or discontinue support in some reasonable timeframe); and finally all of the above is in apples interest to do for you as long as you pay more for hardware. Heck even windows 10 tracks your every move and tried to serve you ads. Office has become a yearly subscription model (ewww!). Google offers you free products but you know your every move is tracked and stored into some obscure database only to be analyzed and used some years down the line. I have been tempted for a while now to switch to android due to cheaper phones but the above benefits are just too strong right now for me to give up over the worry of being labeled some kind of apple fan boy (I’m not; my first smartphone was a galaxy s1 and I prefers thinkpads). At this point, apple is a service company which offers a lifetime subscription model with free upgrades in exchange for high hardware prices. I’ll take that over security issues, data tracking, and highly convenient features that all “just work”.
criddell 8y ago
> Voice and text should go over data That's what Facetime and Messages are, no? If you need to call non-Apple users, then Skype should work.
- thekyle 8y ago
  I figured he was suggesting a voice over IP solution more like Google Voice that can still communicate with the regular cell networks.
  - criddell 8y ago
    Skype can call out to standard phones.
    - thekyle 8y ago
      That's true, although I was surprised to find a few weeks ago that Skype does not actually support porting phone numbers in, so you would need to get a brand new number.
ackfoo 8y ago
I agree with all your points. On the TV issue, put an SDR inside the phone. Let developers use it to decode the many signals around us, like digital broadcast television. The potential for interesting apps is enormous. Are you listening China? Want an iPhone-killer? Apple has descended into mediocrity at this point. Their devices are more about form than function because they have sacrificed functionality for thinness and style. They kill background processes to save battery so we can’t do anything cool. Also, they need a company-wide press to fix the goddam bugs in the APIs. Bloody new network framework doesn’t work worth shit. I can almost forgive leaving broadcast out of IPV4, although it is crucial for many technical tasks, but leaving multicast out of IPV6? You absolute effing morons! And geofencing is the stupidest non-functional horrendoma ever conceived by humans. You dipshits, we don’t want to know that we passed the geofence ten minutes and a mile-and-a-half ago, we want to know right-the-eff-now. What is wrong with you people? Seriously, one of the major applications for geofencing is security. I want to draw a precise perimeter around my kid’s school and get notified the very actual moment my kid crosses that boundary. Not ten minutes later when they’ve already been picked up in a white van are are in the process of being disssembled. And you changed the compass so that it is corrected by GPS, but you didn’t tell anyone? What is wrong with you, Apple? Are you insane? The way you do that is to create a new method, “NSHeadingWithGPSCorrection”. You don’t just change the way the existing compass heading works. You want planes to crash? Cos that’s how you get planes crashing, ya idiots. So they need both hardware innovation and software innovation that works properly. And someone like Steve to yell at them and make them feel bad when they are being twits. RIP Steve.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

Judgmentality 8y ago

> Fix design. Fire Jony Ive's a$$ and hire some real designers. Apple used to be insanely great at design. Now they are a nobody. Take a look at HomePod. It is an amorphous blob. Every single Bose speaker looks better than HomePod. I'm not a designer, but wasn't Jony Ive largely responsible for leading many of the great designs at Apple, including the iPhone? Or do you think he's stagnated, or perhaps is unfit in his current managerial role, or something else?

interlocutor 8y ago
> wasn't Jony Ive largely responsible for leading many of the great designs at Apple, including the iPhone Steve Jobs was the tastemaker. Without Steve's input Jony is apparently not able to produce insanely great designs.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  AirPods prove this wrong.
  - danieldk 8y ago
    I have two pairs of AirPods. Technically they are a marvel, but their design is quite ugly (large white bars).
    - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
      I disagree, but I’m not sure where else we can go with this, since it’s a matter of taste :)
mwilcox 8y ago
He was promoted to handle all design including software. He was best focusing intensely on industrial design for hero products, under Jobs
- atulatul 8y ago
  Hopefully does not end up being a case of Peter Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Not so much. Most of his iconic designs are actually pretty direct copies of the looks Dieter Rams of Braun created a decade or three earlier. That includes a fair selection of the original iPhone apps and icons. Surprising perhaps considering the brouhaha over rounded corners. That doesn't make them bad, but Ive seems to take mostly the look not the design philosophy. Meanwhile he pursues the cult of thinness.

simonh 8y ago

Yep, apart from the latest iPhones having the best screens ever, the quickest most convenient and most secure unlock mechanism ever, the best computational photography ever, the fastest mobile CPUs ever released and overall being 2+ years ahead of their nearest competition, that was all a few months ago. Old news. What have Apple done for us just now?

jpatokal 8y ago
Those are all incremental improvements. Nobody's saying Apple's phones are bad, just that they lack compelling differentiators to other phones, including older iPhones.
- pdpi 8y ago
  Their SoCs are a massive differentiator. Unfortunately I don’t think the iPhone is in a good position to leverage that.
  - dan-robertson 8y ago
    Having much better single core performance means the chips tend to be better at running (JS) websites. However most mobile websites are awful and full of “download our app” type popups/dark patterns that means “good at websites” isn’t really the advantage it ought to be. I suppose this also lets webview and JavaScript type “apps” work better.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      There are very few workloads on mobile that can take advantage of more than a handful of cores.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Tepix 8y ago
    Is it really a "massive" differentiator in 2019? Even an iPhone 5S is "fast enough" in most situations. Even a $250 Android phone bought today will not be so slow or incapable that it becomes an issue for 2 years.

Tepix 8y ago

In terms of design, those fat bezels around the MacBook displays feel very dated just a few weeks after I started using a Dell XPS 13 notebook (which was years ago). I can't believe Apple is lagging behind in this area so badly.

jdietrich 8y ago

>Fix design. Fire Jony Ive's a$$ and hire some real designers. I think that's almost certainly unfair on Ive. I do strongly suspect that Apple has a culture problem because of the secretive nature of their design lab. A very small team working in absolute secrecy enabled them to create disruptive new categories of product, but it carries a substantial risk of stagnation in the long term. It's difficult to sustain a culture of innovation when the flow of information is so strictly controlled. There's an inevitable risk of inadvertently fostering a yes-man culture, a risk well known to anyone who operates in a classified intelligence environment.

raverbashing 8y ago
Ive is a great product designer. His weak points seems to be: - UX and Software design - Better integration with hardware/physical needs (see overly bendy hardware, cables that fall apart, etc) - (Maybe) Delegating and accepting new ideas
- oneeyedpigeon 8y ago
  Ive is a great visual / 'tactile' designer, but only a good functional one. This leads to things like beautiful cables (cables!) that exhibit the problem you highlight, the removal of headphone jacks, and an amazing mouse that you can't use whilst it's charging because the port is on the bottom. I'm not sure which software he's been responsible for, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same sorts of issues could be spotted — macOS certainly looks really, really nice and works easily and properly in many situations, but there are certain very basic flaws which just seem inexplicable.
Mindwipe 8y ago
I'm not even sure Ive does that much design any more day to day. But there's definitely issues piling up in that regard. The most notable Apple design of the last few years is the notch, and that's very much in the "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" category. Apple got what people liked about the Macbook Air so completely, totally wrong I'm baffled. Apple's design lab used to be amazing at balancing usability vs design. It feels like that has tipped far too hard towards "thinner at any cost" as a design philosophy, and that's come at a cost of clean lines and product quality. The design lab doesn't need reigning in as such - Apple needs someone who can challenge them at a senior level and call them out, which Jobs did and it feels increasingly like nobody else has ever replaced.

lsc 8y ago

>- Improve cellular reception. We are now heavily reliant on our cell phones, yet half the time our cell phones don't work because we are inside a building or not close to a tower and so on. This needs to be fixed ASAP. Everyone wants to buy the cheapest cellphone plan, then they complain when it doesn't work in buildings. Your location matters here, but at least in the more enclosed bars in san jose, AT&T and T-mobile are super unreliable; Verizon works fine. I mean, I understand, I also want things that are good and cheap. And when you can get it, that's great. But I don't think this one is apple's fault. My biggest complaint about the reception on my own cell is that if I'm within range of a wifi network I've connected to in the past, but that network is broken at the router at this moment? My phone keeps trying to use wifi rather than connecting to my cellular network.

interlocutor 8y ago
Facebook is launching their own satellites to beam down high-speed internet. (See https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/21/17598418/facebook-athena-internet-satellite-project-fcc https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/21/17598418/facebook-athena-... ) Why isn't Apple doing that? More than anyone else Apple needs it.
- lsc 8y ago
  People have been talking about LEO internet for as long as I've been working; It didn't work in the '90s, mostly due to launch costs (you see, for decent network performance, the satellites need to be low - that means you need a lot of satellites, because each one can't be seen from much of the earth's surface, and because they are so low, there is enough atmospheric drag that you have to replace the things every few years. If you use satellites at a regular orbit, you use fewer of them, sure, but you also then have the problem of really looong ping times.) I mean, I'm sure someone will eventually get it, but we probably need to lower launch costs, and we need to do a lot of engineering on the rest of it. It's not an easy problem.
Ntrails 8y ago
> Everyone wants to buy the cheapest cellphone plan, then they complain when it doesn't work in buildings. Your location matters here, but at least in the more enclosed bars in san jose, AT&T and T-mobile are super unreliable; Verizon works fine. In the UK we have one set of physical lines, owned and run by BT. BT has to, by law, lease the lines out to sub providers at it's own "internal" costing rate so that there is competition in telephone providers. It remains bemusing to me that Mobile Towers weren't treated in the same way, with every provider using the same network of towers and sharing. We do it for emergency calls (999 will route the nearest/strongest tower irrespective of owner), and frankly you'd have fewer towers over-saturating the high population areas for the 4-5 networks.

tapland 8y ago

> If Google can do that ( https://fi.google.com https://fi.google.com ) why can't Apple? I think Apple planned (still is?) to become a carrier as part of their eSIM rollout, but the carriers who sell a lot of their phones are not so welcoming to carrying a competing carriers products. If Apple can move iDevice sales to their own stores to a higher degree this is more likely to happen.

londons_explore 8y ago
I feel like Apple can just have a popup that says "Verizon has no service here. AppleNet has 4 bars service. Do you want to connect to AppleNet instead($35 per month)?". Click 'Yes' and you're subscribed, billed to your Apple account just like any other in-app subscription, and only used when your main provider has no service or you have no SIM inserted.
- tapland 8y ago
  Yep. But with that functionality it could also be: Turn iPhone on, get asked the same, never worry about a separate carrier, ever. Carriers don't want that.
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    Apple has shown that they can dictate whatever terms they want to carriers before. Them not being able to do so in this particular instance doesn't make sense.

nabla9 8y ago

This presents wrong view of innovation: Apple has money and smart people, just throw more money and innovate more. Major part of innovation for tech giants like Apple is buying out small companies with big innovations and developing them into products. Big companies can usually develop true innovations faster than small companies but they rarely produce breakthroughs.

tabs_masterrace 8y ago

How about some more sensors. No phone can tell me the temperature, without checking weather online. What if I want to know the room temperature. Could put humidity, atmospheric pressure sensors in there too, IR cameras, all kinds of cool stuff. Think of the software applications, right know my "smart" phone has no way of knowing if I'm outside or inside. Then, voice mail. Why doesn't this still not work locally? There is no reason the phone shouldn't be able of answering and recording messages by itself.

rhn_mk1 8y ago
> How about some more sensors. No phone can tell me the temperature Electronics get hot when operating, and even more so when they are sitting in the pocket. Typical temp sensors are attached to 30cm long cables. Nevertheless, I'm sure phones can do that already if you install a weather station in your house.
- ricardobeat 8y ago
  Someone figured out how to measure ambient temperature based on _battery temperature_ a long time ago, with high reliability!
  - epanchin 8y ago
    How does it compensate for being in your pocket?
londons_explore 8y ago
Most phones already have a bunch of temperature sensors, air pressure sensor, magnetic field sensors, humidity sensors etc. I'm pretty sure the iPhone has them too, but perhaps they don't make them available to app developers.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Off the top of my head, iPhone’s barometer and magnetometer are accessible via public API.

rigidglobe 8y ago

I would have switched to android this year due to high iPhone XS price had it not been the “need” to stay in iMessages. When most of your friends are having a blue chat bubble, you don’t want to be “that guy”. iMessages is apples secret weapon and I’m surprised android hasn’t done their own iMessages api where all android can interoperable. Or at the very least why hasnt Samsung done their own? Finally, other secret sauces apple has that keeps their customers in place: iCloud Keychain (very handy when switching between multiple iPads, MacBook, iPhone) without the need to pay a third party password vendor (whose security is not backed by a one trillion dollar market cap). iCloud sync: easy way for app devs to sync and for customers to have automated syncing between multiple devices that “just works”. I don’t know if android has such easy syncing between different android manufacturers (ie Samsung phone to asus tablet to chrome book, for example). I doubt it. Finally really nice features like Handoff where my safari tabs are all synced automatically between multiple iPads, iPhone, and MacBook. And final finally: part of the high price I pay for using apple evosystem is security: I know that safari (unlike chrome) isn’t bent in tracking my every move in order to sell me more ads; or that my cloud password manager is safe (even safety in numbers in terms of security by obsurity (one in many iOS users) backed by a trillion dollar company: pretty sure nobody wants to f with that); my os isn’t bent on tracking my every move or file to analyze later (chromeos, google calendar, google docs); apple has hard stops in place on apps from over snooping (android apps such as fb tracking your calls and sms data); you pay once for your apps and then you can reuse them on the next iphone (app devs are free to release new versions or discontinue support in some reasonable timeframe); and finally all of the above is in apples interest to do for you as long as you pay more for hardware. Heck even windows 10 tracks your every move and tried to serve you ads. Office has become a yearly subscription model (ewww!). Google offers you free products but you know your every move is tracked and stored into some obscure database only to be analyzed and used some years down the line. I have been tempted for a while now to switch to android due to cheaper phones but the above benefits are just too strong right now for me to give up over the worry of being labeled some kind of apple fan boy (I’m not; my first smartphone was a galaxy s1 and I prefers thinkpads). At this point, apple is a service company which offers a lifetime subscription model with free upgrades in exchange for high hardware prices. I’ll take that over security issues, data tracking, and highly convenient features that all “just work”.

criddell 8y ago

> Voice and text should go over data That's what Facetime and Messages are, no? If you need to call non-Apple users, then Skype should work.

thekyle 8y ago
I figured he was suggesting a voice over IP solution more like Google Voice that can still communicate with the regular cell networks.
- criddell 8y ago
  Skype can call out to standard phones.
  - thekyle 8y ago
    That's true, although I was surprised to find a few weeks ago that Skype does not actually support porting phone numbers in, so you would need to get a brand new number.

ackfoo 8y ago

I agree with all your points. On the TV issue, put an SDR inside the phone. Let developers use it to decode the many signals around us, like digital broadcast television. The potential for interesting apps is enormous. Are you listening China? Want an iPhone-killer? Apple has descended into mediocrity at this point. Their devices are more about form than function because they have sacrificed functionality for thinness and style. They kill background processes to save battery so we can’t do anything cool. Also, they need a company-wide press to fix the goddam bugs in the APIs. Bloody new network framework doesn’t work worth shit. I can almost forgive leaving broadcast out of IPV4, although it is crucial for many technical tasks, but leaving multicast out of IPV6? You absolute effing morons! And geofencing is the stupidest non-functional horrendoma ever conceived by humans. You dipshits, we don’t want to know that we passed the geofence ten minutes and a mile-and-a-half ago, we want to know right-the-eff-now. What is wrong with you people? Seriously, one of the major applications for geofencing is security. I want to draw a precise perimeter around my kid’s school and get notified the very actual moment my kid crosses that boundary. Not ten minutes later when they’ve already been picked up in a white van are are in the process of being disssembled. And you changed the compass so that it is corrected by GPS, but you didn’t tell anyone? What is wrong with you, Apple? Are you insane? The way you do that is to create a new method, “NSHeadingWithGPSCorrection”. You don’t just change the way the existing compass heading works. You want planes to crash? Cos that’s how you get planes crashing, ya idiots. So they need both hardware innovation and software innovation that works properly. And someone like Steve to yell at them and make them feel bad when they are being twits. RIP Steve.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]