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When I see Apple putting forward as a key feature the number of bits in their processor in a general public announcement... I'm really feeling the "new" product
by alxbrun 13y ago
When I see Apple putting forward as a key feature the number of bits in their processor in a general public announcement... I'm really feeling the "new" product is not really new. In the past Apple was always laughing at the PC ads boasting processor speed and memory capacity.
- wmf 13y agoAt least it's running in 64-bit mode, unlike the G5 when it was announced.
- xutopia 13y agoThat did seem rather bizarre to me as well.
- seiji 13y agoIn the past Apple was always laughing at the PC ads boasting processor speed and memory capacity. The last occurrence of that would have been almost ten years ago. They've always highlighted their technical superiority in presentations.
- davidcollantes 13y agoThe leaks contribute to take away some of the awe. Yet, A7, M7, iOS 7, new camera, new flash, Touch ID. It looks new to me.
- alxbrun 13y agoMy "is it new?" test works this way: how would I explain what's new to my father (who is 74 years old and knows not much about tech). A7, M7, iOS 7, better camera and flash: not much to say. Touch ID OK that's new, but that's not much.
- davidcollantes 13y agoI am sure you can find a way to explain, it is not that hard. Touch ID is a lot! No more password entering on iTunes. A godsend for someone who has a 26 characters passphrase like me.
- makmanalp 13y agoIf you have a 26 character passphrase, then how are you having an easy time trusting the fingerprint auth?
- davidcollantes 13y agoIt is my fingerprint. Why shouldn't I trust it?
- makmanalp 13y agoIt's not about your fingerprint though. It's just that cheap scanners are easy to trick and you leave fingerprints everywhere, including on the very surface you scan it on.
- ricardobeat 13y agoScanners like the one used only work with live fingers, and read geometry deeper than the surface. You're not going to trigger it with an ordinary collected fingerprint.
- uptown 13y agoIf you're cautious enough to use a 26 character passphrase, why are you comfortable revealing how many characters your passphrase contains?
- acchow 13y ago"The photos look way better" is pretty easy to describe.
- orbitur 13y agoAnd if they reply that they don't think iPhone 5 photos look bad?
- therandomguy 13y ago"Dad, it looks better, is way faster, makes you healthier, take much better pictures and you don't have to type your pass code 200 times a day"
- kmfrk 13y agoIt needs to be contextualized and explained for practical usage. They had the same problem with Siri, which was pretty awesome, but presented very gimmicky.
- hbbio 13y agoThe iPhone 7 is really great.
- nicholassmith 13y agoThey've discussed processor performance gains in all the iPhone press events I can remember.
- jschmitz28 13y agoI think the "Touch ID" fingerprint matching that was just revealed is way more interesting than their performance improvements. I wonder why they chose to order the announcements like that.
- gfodor 13y agoAn increase in processor word size has been part of Apple's marketing materials in the past, as was the transition from PowerPC to Intel. Apple tends to not get hung up on speed and capacity, which is just always regularly increasing, but step-wise jumps like word size are a different type of change since they require substantial technical hurdles and, as is the case here, can double the speed of certain applications in a single generation.
- bedhead 13y agoSmartphone hardware is in the 9th inning. These devices have mostly hit the natural limits of what's achievable for now. Bad for Apple since this effectively levels the playing field.
- ako 13y agoLimits of what is achievable, or limits to what is useful for most users? I assume most users won't notice speed improvements anymore.
- bedhead 13y agoBoth, although more so the latter.
- uptown 13y ago"These devices have mostly hit the natural limits of what's achievable for now." Isn't that always the case? But "now" is a moving target.
- mikeash 13y agoUsually, but not always. In 2007, it turned out that the available technology allowed something way better than what was actually being sold. Apple realized this and used this fact to go from zero to smartphone dominance nearly overnight. Gaps do happen, they just don't last long before someone comes along and gets rich by exploiting them.
- swamp40 13y agoI disagree completely. Perhaps the 9th inning of a preseason game? 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.
- 13y ago
- yapcguy 13y agoApple are hoping that journalists are lazy or rushing to meet a deadline, so they get headlines line "New iPhone is 40x faster than old iPhone!". 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.
- windexh8er 13y agoThat's how good marketing gains traction quickly. Count on the ignorant to do your bidding.
- superuser2 13y ago2x was the number in the slides when the A7 was introduced, at least from TechCrunch's photos.
- mikeash 13y agoApple laughs at numbers-based ads when they are behind, and play up the numbers when they are ahead. Remember the Pentium snail ads? There's nothing surprising here. They have a spec advantage right now and they're playing it up. If and when they drop behind again, they'll be back to talking about more qualitative aspects.
- Cookingboy 13y agoIsn't that what EVERY company does when it comes to marketing? I have never taken a single marketing class but I'd think putting emphasis on your strong points and gloss over your weak ones is common sense?
- seiji 13y agoNot on Hacker News. On Hacker News your press conference should alternate new feature paragraphs with apologies. "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."
- pavlov 13y agoThe Lumia 1020 will be hard to beat for the title of "best mobile phone camera ever created".
- potatolicious 13y agoIn terms of raw sensor performance, certainly. The new camera moves the software stack forward in a way that Nokia didn't though - extremely high frame rate to "catch" the best moment, programmatic selection of said moments, merging of exposure information across multiple consecutive frames, etc. As a photo enthusiast that part of the presentation was a lot more exciting than the (rather marginal) improvements to lens and sensor.
- x0054 13y agoIt's the first smartphone with 64bit CPU, it's a significant achievement, and they are rightly proud of it. I thought comparisons to the original iPhone were very silly though.
- scott_karana 13y agoYes, the iPhone 5S definitely needs to address more than 4GB of RAM directly, or do 64-bit integer math for Angry Birds to render accurately. (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?!)
- jmcdonald-ut 13y agoNon techies that I know hear 64 bit and immediately think that it's better. When friends show me a new lap top or whatever else, they say it's 64 bit. When they're shopping they ask if something is 64 bit. They don't understand why it's important, but they think it is.
- scott_karana 13y agoAlright, fair enough. Guess it's still a marketing buzzword for some!
- superuser2 13y agoGoing to 64-bit is a lot bigger deal than adding a few hundred MHz in terms of what it enables for the platform.
- hahainternet 13y agoSuch as?
- superuser2 13y agoThis is being discussed around the page, but here's a start: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/607322/what-are-the-advantages-of-a-64-bit-processor http://stackoverflow.com/questions/607322/what-are-the-advan...
- superuser2 13y agoApple's advantage on craftsmanship is already well-established and doesn't really need to be sold (to people who haven't already decided they hate Apple, that is). 64-bit is not the primary differentiator of the iPhone the way a few hundred MHz is the only real difference between laptops in a Best Buy. 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.
- twoodfin 13y agoI suspect that slide was partially a message to ARM and their partners as well as Intel: "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.