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Honestly that's kind of always been Apple's strategy. They're usually not the first mover, but they try to be the best mover. I think they've been a little bi

by GVIrish 12y ago

Honestly that's kind of always been Apple's strategy. They're usually not the first mover, but they try to be the best mover. I think they've been a little bit slow to follow shifts in the smartphone market though. They should've had a larger iPhone quite some time ago, and they were unfashionably late on notifications and 4G. Still, this latest release will sell briskly per usual. Jury's out on the Apple Watch. Especially since battery life was conspicuously absent from the unveil.

bane 12y ago
I'm not an iPhone fan by any stretch of the imagination. But I recognize the importance of Apple playing a major role in the smartphone market in terms of making the competition much much better than they would be otherwise. The glacial slow response from Apple on things like phone size is really strange. I can really only attribute it to a larger picture shift in focus and approach between Apple and Samsung. There's other weird uneven things going on though in the internals. 64-bit CPUs and 1GB of RAM? 16GB base models near the end of 2014? I'm sure there's strategy behind it, but as a consumer it's just weird. The important thing is that it doesn't really matter. When people like my mom go into the phone store, they'll see nice big, and in their minds competitive, iPhones for sale and will now give them a second look.
- Kurtz79 12y ago
  About the specs: I don't think the average iPhone buyer is concerned about them as much as the average HN user. In the end what it counts is user experience, and if the average user see sharp, quick, responsive UI and fast applications he/she couldn't care less about how much RAM the phone has. Storage is a different issue, but Apple got away until now offering more storage as a premium, so why change ?
  - bane 12y ago
    I don't really disagree with you, but specs can be an indicator of capability. With modern Android phones hitting 3GB and soon 4GB of RAM, multi-tasking is really nice on that kind of phone. This all sounds like feature talk, but here's my use-case at least: being able to listen to music, get directions in the background and switch between a game, the web, and a book in the foreground without worrying about any of the apps getting killed due to low memory is really empowering and enjoyable. My old phone would kill one or two of those apps outright and it was nothing more than memory getting cleared up. If the rumor is true, 1GB of RAM is really a full phone generation behind. Even weirder, I would have expected Apple to be using their 64bit CPU tech to push the boundaries of memory on phones.
    - runeks 12y ago
      > With modern Android phones hitting 3GB and soon 4GB of RAM, multi-tasking is really nice on that kind of phone. Could it be, given that iPhone 6 apps are native code and Android apps are bytecode, that iPhone 6 apps have less memory overhead than Android apps?

by GVIrish 12y ago

bane 12y ago

I'm not an iPhone fan by any stretch of the imagination. But I recognize the importance of Apple playing a major role in the smartphone market in terms of making the competition much much better than they would be otherwise. The glacial slow response from Apple on things like phone size is really strange. I can really only attribute it to a larger picture shift in focus and approach between Apple and Samsung. There's other weird uneven things going on though in the internals. 64-bit CPUs and 1GB of RAM? 16GB base models near the end of 2014? I'm sure there's strategy behind it, but as a consumer it's just weird. The important thing is that it doesn't really matter. When people like my mom go into the phone store, they'll see nice big, and in their minds competitive, iPhones for sale and will now give them a second look.

Kurtz79 12y ago
About the specs: I don't think the average iPhone buyer is concerned about them as much as the average HN user. In the end what it counts is user experience, and if the average user see sharp, quick, responsive UI and fast applications he/she couldn't care less about how much RAM the phone has. Storage is a different issue, but Apple got away until now offering more storage as a premium, so why change ?
- bane 12y ago
  I don't really disagree with you, but specs can be an indicator of capability. With modern Android phones hitting 3GB and soon 4GB of RAM, multi-tasking is really nice on that kind of phone. This all sounds like feature talk, but here's my use-case at least: being able to listen to music, get directions in the background and switch between a game, the web, and a book in the foreground without worrying about any of the apps getting killed due to low memory is really empowering and enjoyable. My old phone would kill one or two of those apps outright and it was nothing more than memory getting cleared up. If the rumor is true, 1GB of RAM is really a full phone generation behind. Even weirder, I would have expected Apple to be using their 64bit CPU tech to push the boundaries of memory on phones.
  - runeks 12y ago
    > With modern Android phones hitting 3GB and soon 4GB of RAM, multi-tasking is really nice on that kind of phone. Could it be, given that iPhone 6 apps are native code and Android apps are bytecode, that iPhone 6 apps have less memory overhead than Android apps?