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Better photos, TouchID, snappier performance -- a traditional incremental Apple upgrade befitting the "S" moniker. I've long been wondering when/if Apple would

Better photos, TouchID, snappier performance -- a traditional incremental Apple upgrade befitting the "S" moniker. I've long been wondering when/if Apple would take on NFC and things like payments more aggressively. I get the feeling that they're going to skip NFC entirely, and that TouchID is going to be a large part of processing transactions without the need for any physical device interaction (swipe/tap/bump). Right now I've got that hazy tip-of-iceberg feeling that Apple is probably in the early phases of executing some grand vision that I can't yet see the entirety of. And that's why Apple continues to be the leading consumer device co: who else out there has "vision?" Google is the closest, but IMHO Android has always felt reactionary, not visionary.

nutate 13y ago
The new PayPal Beacon works with bluetooth LE... NFC seems like a step back from that.
- rodedwards 13y ago
  Hmm - I'm not familiar with Beacon, but will take a look. In my mind, NFC has always sort of felt like a clunky way of imposing a physical constraint on what should be a purely electronic transaction.
  - arrrg 13y ago
    NFC didn’t really break through in the market. Not yet, not ever, I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure that Apple is betting on Bluetooth LE, something their devices already have. I could see that work out.
    - alexcroox 13y ago
      Don't you wonder that the reason it didn't break the market was because iPhones never shipped with it. Same as QR codes, no default app to use them = poor adoption of the technology.
- blisterpeanuts 13y ago
  NFC is rather different from bluetooth and hence not really comparable for many use cases. Primarily, NFC is much lower power consumption than bluetooth, much smaller field, and much lower data/bandwidth. NFC is more in the category of RFID. Secondly, NFC tags are unpowered and rely on the reader for energy. They store several dozen bytes up to several thousand bytes and are useful for QR-style applications, like "Tap here for our address" and so forth. I did up some business cards with tappable tags on the back that take a device to my website. They also make tags fully embedded in paper and cardboard for cosmetic appeal. NFC tags are very cheap, on the order of a few cents each up to a dollar each, and are therefore well suited to the smart objects applications such as, for example, tapping a pill bottle to retrieve non-trivial amounts of information about the medicine, or storing identity information on personal possessions. Really, the applications are endless. I think Apple has missed the ball on this one. They should have included NFC early on. You can buy an iPhone case with NFC, which is useful but of course it's never as good as having it built in. (Interestingly, the linked article is on TechCrunch, a news website that recently published an article "NFC = No One Fking Cares!". Of course, the author, a journalist apparently with no engineering background, drew a lot of caustic comments for that one, and subsequently I stopped reading that publication. This iPhone 5 article is poorly edited; it's too bad this out of probably dozens of choices is the one that made it into YC.)
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    Bluetooth Low Energy, which the parent commenter was referring to, uses a minuscule amount of power compared to the old standard. BLE devices can run for months on a coin cell, it has negligible impact on the battery life of a smartphone. Using NFC, the act of reading uses very little power, and of course tags are unpowered, but the reader needs to constantly scan for nearby tags, and that can be a battery hog. There are reports of 50% shorter battery life on NFC-equipped android phones.
    - blisterpeanuts 13y ago
      Yes, there's that Examiner article claiming 50% drainage. But look further and you'll learn that in Android, at least, NFC polling is off when screen is off or locked, and when screen is on and the NFC subsystem is active, it polls intermittently at a very low frequency of about 10 Hz to save power. Google I/O had a discussion of this (sorry I don't have the link) and they reported about a 0.5% power consumption hit when NFC was on. It definitely hits the battery but negligibly. I have NFC turned on all the time on my devices (GNex, N7, N4) and they run for 12 hours (about 30-50% usage rate).
- dzhiurgis 13y ago
  Exactly. I think it has a massive potential to take off together with Touch ID.
bsimpson 13y ago
The motion coprocessor stuff sounds a lot like the Moto X.
marknow 13y ago
How odd, I feel the opposite, re: vision... Google is leading the way with progressive developments in many varied fields. Expecting more today from Tim Cook, the Apple announcement left me flat. Understand, that while I'm a long time Apple user, my Android phone(s) have offered features to which Apple is still playing catch-up. Apple is the reactionary these days; they may have introduced the iPhone as a ground-breaking product back-in-the-day, but Android is outpacing the iPhone with each new release. <opinion>Aside from the MBP I use for work, I won't be purchasing another Apple product anytime soon, FWIW.</opinion>
- gfodor 13y ago
  I think 2014 is going to be Apple's big year. If we don't see the watch or the TV next year then I'll be worried.
- r00fus 13y ago
  Here's the rub. Google's vision is definitely out there, but it's intangible. Glass is a $1500 product that is geared towards geeks. Folks who don't even know how to properly use a BT headset would be overwhelmed by Glass. I guess it's about target market. Apple makes it available, like, everywhere, and accessible to folks like my parents. Google puts it way out there (cool), but it requires a nerd to use or grok.
- rodedwards 13y ago
  To echo r00fus, Apple's visions are more tangible to the everyday consumer - or at least better elucidated. Apple is the master of "segmentation" - i.e.: identifying a pain point or desired experience, and building it. TouchID, for instance, solves a problem - passwords suck. "Here's a simple, frictionless way around it, that incidentally will be powering all of your apple-conduit payments inside of a year." That's a vision that relatable, easy to understand, etc., compared to something like glass which is much more "out there." To put it another way, each apple feature is clearly tied to a consumer-relatable use case. Collections of features form pieces of apples vision, rolling up use cases into the "experiences" that they mentioned today.
  - 13y ago
swamp40 13y ago
Well, there has to be some kind of interaction with a Point Of Sale device. Either Bluetooth 4.0 or NFC would suffice. NFC has enough Point Of Sale inroads (esp. in the rest of the world besides the US), that it is a more natural choice. It's possible Apple didn't want to radically redesign the 5S case and internals in the manner necessary to include NFC. But if Apple hasn't implemented NFC by next year's redesign, then they must have something else in mind. Personally, I'm betting they put NFC into the new iWatch. Authenticated via the new fingerprint reader in the 5S. I'm also betting that new M7 chip shows up in the iWatch.
- alexcroox 13y ago
  Didn't Apple say they wouldn't consider NFC until the technology has matured enough not to hammer the battery life so much. As much as I want NFC I'm inclined to agree, if I wanted terrible battery life I'd buy an Android.
  - swamp40 13y ago
    The battery life is fine nowadays, it's a mature technology. They now send out a small pulse a few times a second, and then watch the decay on their own antenna. A change in the decay rate means another resonant antenna is nearby and stealing its energy - so then they power up fully to check things out. Apple always says stuff like that until they're ready to unveil what they've been working on. Bigger screens, Hi-Def displays, etc. - all right out of the same playbook. You can't trust exactly what they say, because they have their own agenda.
  - sytelus 13y ago
    Why should it drain battery? Shouldn't NFC be activated only when user interacts with some payment UX on phone?

nutate 13y ago

The new PayPal Beacon works with bluetooth LE... NFC seems like a step back from that.

rodedwards 13y ago
Hmm - I'm not familiar with Beacon, but will take a look. In my mind, NFC has always sort of felt like a clunky way of imposing a physical constraint on what should be a purely electronic transaction.
- arrrg 13y ago
  NFC didn’t really break through in the market. Not yet, not ever, I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure that Apple is betting on Bluetooth LE, something their devices already have. I could see that work out.
  - alexcroox 13y ago
    Don't you wonder that the reason it didn't break the market was because iPhones never shipped with it. Same as QR codes, no default app to use them = poor adoption of the technology.
blisterpeanuts 13y ago
NFC is rather different from bluetooth and hence not really comparable for many use cases. Primarily, NFC is much lower power consumption than bluetooth, much smaller field, and much lower data/bandwidth. NFC is more in the category of RFID. Secondly, NFC tags are unpowered and rely on the reader for energy. They store several dozen bytes up to several thousand bytes and are useful for QR-style applications, like "Tap here for our address" and so forth. I did up some business cards with tappable tags on the back that take a device to my website. They also make tags fully embedded in paper and cardboard for cosmetic appeal. NFC tags are very cheap, on the order of a few cents each up to a dollar each, and are therefore well suited to the smart objects applications such as, for example, tapping a pill bottle to retrieve non-trivial amounts of information about the medicine, or storing identity information on personal possessions. Really, the applications are endless. I think Apple has missed the ball on this one. They should have included NFC early on. You can buy an iPhone case with NFC, which is useful but of course it's never as good as having it built in. (Interestingly, the linked article is on TechCrunch, a news website that recently published an article "NFC = No One Fking Cares!". Of course, the author, a journalist apparently with no engineering background, drew a lot of caustic comments for that one, and subsequently I stopped reading that publication. This iPhone 5 article is poorly edited; it's too bad this out of probably dozens of choices is the one that made it into YC.)
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  Bluetooth Low Energy, which the parent commenter was referring to, uses a minuscule amount of power compared to the old standard. BLE devices can run for months on a coin cell, it has negligible impact on the battery life of a smartphone. Using NFC, the act of reading uses very little power, and of course tags are unpowered, but the reader needs to constantly scan for nearby tags, and that can be a battery hog. There are reports of 50% shorter battery life on NFC-equipped android phones.
  - blisterpeanuts 13y ago
    Yes, there's that Examiner article claiming 50% drainage. But look further and you'll learn that in Android, at least, NFC polling is off when screen is off or locked, and when screen is on and the NFC subsystem is active, it polls intermittently at a very low frequency of about 10 Hz to save power. Google I/O had a discussion of this (sorry I don't have the link) and they reported about a 0.5% power consumption hit when NFC was on. It definitely hits the battery but negligibly. I have NFC turned on all the time on my devices (GNex, N7, N4) and they run for 12 hours (about 30-50% usage rate).
dzhiurgis 13y ago
Exactly. I think it has a massive potential to take off together with Touch ID.

bsimpson 13y ago

The motion coprocessor stuff sounds a lot like the Moto X.

marknow 13y ago

How odd, I feel the opposite, re: vision... Google is leading the way with progressive developments in many varied fields. Expecting more today from Tim Cook, the Apple announcement left me flat. Understand, that while I'm a long time Apple user, my Android phone(s) have offered features to which Apple is still playing catch-up. Apple is the reactionary these days; they may have introduced the iPhone as a ground-breaking product back-in-the-day, but Android is outpacing the iPhone with each new release. <opinion>Aside from the MBP I use for work, I won't be purchasing another Apple product anytime soon, FWIW.</opinion>

gfodor 13y ago
I think 2014 is going to be Apple's big year. If we don't see the watch or the TV next year then I'll be worried.
r00fus 13y ago
Here's the rub. Google's vision is definitely out there, but it's intangible. Glass is a $1500 product that is geared towards geeks. Folks who don't even know how to properly use a BT headset would be overwhelmed by Glass. I guess it's about target market. Apple makes it available, like, everywhere, and accessible to folks like my parents. Google puts it way out there (cool), but it requires a nerd to use or grok.
rodedwards 13y ago
To echo r00fus, Apple's visions are more tangible to the everyday consumer - or at least better elucidated. Apple is the master of "segmentation" - i.e.: identifying a pain point or desired experience, and building it. TouchID, for instance, solves a problem - passwords suck. "Here's a simple, frictionless way around it, that incidentally will be powering all of your apple-conduit payments inside of a year." That's a vision that relatable, easy to understand, etc., compared to something like glass which is much more "out there." To put it another way, each apple feature is clearly tied to a consumer-relatable use case. Collections of features form pieces of apples vision, rolling up use cases into the "experiences" that they mentioned today.
- 13y ago

swamp40 13y ago

Well, there has to be some kind of interaction with a Point Of Sale device. Either Bluetooth 4.0 or NFC would suffice. NFC has enough Point Of Sale inroads (esp. in the rest of the world besides the US), that it is a more natural choice. It's possible Apple didn't want to radically redesign the 5S case and internals in the manner necessary to include NFC. But if Apple hasn't implemented NFC by next year's redesign, then they must have something else in mind. Personally, I'm betting they put NFC into the new iWatch. Authenticated via the new fingerprint reader in the 5S. I'm also betting that new M7 chip shows up in the iWatch.

alexcroox 13y ago
Didn't Apple say they wouldn't consider NFC until the technology has matured enough not to hammer the battery life so much. As much as I want NFC I'm inclined to agree, if I wanted terrible battery life I'd buy an Android.
- swamp40 13y ago
  The battery life is fine nowadays, it's a mature technology. They now send out a small pulse a few times a second, and then watch the decay on their own antenna. A change in the decay rate means another resonant antenna is nearby and stealing its energy - so then they power up fully to check things out. Apple always says stuff like that until they're ready to unveil what they've been working on. Bigger screens, Hi-Def displays, etc. - all right out of the same playbook. You can't trust exactly what they say, because they have their own agenda.
- sytelus 13y ago
  Why should it drain battery? Shouldn't NFC be activated only when user interacts with some payment UX on phone?