What is APPLE planning?

There's so much goofy, uninformed speculation out there. I happen to work in the semiconductor equipment industry and although I'm not privy to details it's clear that a major shift is occurring.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13...sung-may-have-lost-apples-a7-contract-to-tsmc

While the rest of us can speculate about what models of iPhone we think Apple could best sell (there's certainly no shortage of that in the world), anyone who knows anything about how Apple actually functions has to agree that the company has precisely-mapped mountains of data about what sells and what doesn't, from colors to capacities to price points. Anyone who thinks they know any of this better than Apple is either wrong or wasting their lives if they are not already generating billions of dollars in value with their grand expertise.

Exactly.

For each of the last six models of iPhone, the "latest" model was the top seller. But now we are reaching a maturing point where there is more middle-market potential than there is high-end demand. This was proven by the unusual iPhone demand Apple saw this summer, significantly driven by iPhone 4 despite the device being a relatively ancient three years old and of little interest to the gadget hounds of the media sniffing out "innovation" by the scent of new SKUs.

Indeed. Most of us are gadget hounds, including myself, and it's not always easy to see what's happening in the big picture.

No one is "really" talking (except in this article) about the big things such as... OpenGL ES 3.0, TSMC, 20nm chips... That Apple was able to include OpenGL ES 3.0 into this iOS device (and presumably the next iPad too) is just utterly amazing.

And some can only opine that this is the "saddest announcement" Apple has ever made.

Yeah. :confused:
 
There's so much goofy, uninformed speculation out there. I happen to work in the semiconductor equipment industry and although I'm not privy to details it's clear that a major shift is occurring.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13...sung-may-have-lost-apples-a7-contract-to-tsmc



Exactly.



Indeed. Most of us are gadget hounds, including myself, and it's not always easy to see what's happening in the big picture.

No one is "really" talking (except in this article) about the big things such as... OpenGL ES 3.0, TSMC, 20nm chips... That Apple was able to include OpenGL ES 3.0 into this iOS device (and presumably the next iPad too) is just utterly amazing.

And some can only opine that this is the "saddest announcement" Apple has ever made.

Yeah. :confused:

Why is OpenGL 3.0 such a big deal? Has there not been a phone with enough GPu power to run it before?

I think people that call it sad are just not getting what they expected. The 5s seems like a much better phone than the 4s was.
 
OpenGL ES 3.0 has been out for about a year and I don't think many expected Apple to adopt it as quickly as they did. Others have included before but typically as is always the case Apple takes their time and doesn't rush into adding anything new before it's really ready. Most expected this to take another year. Speaks to the power of the A7 - which was totally unexpected.
 
You could say the same thing about horsepower. ;)

I think the consumers will dictate where it stops. When a phone is too big to use then it stops. I think 5" is tops. Maybe even too big.

So since performance increases are not enough, besides bigger screen, what would you want/expect from a new iPhone?
All we see from Samsung and friends are faster clock speeds, bigger screens, and gimmicky stuff like that bump-to-share thing that I've never seen anyone use.
 
So since performance increases are not enough, besides bigger screen, what would you want/expect from a new iPhone?
All we see from Samsung and friends are faster clock speeds, bigger screens, and gimmicky stuff like that bump-to-share thing that I've never seen anyone use.

I'd like the see NFC, but besides that I think it's not missing anything else. I don't use NFC much so I could take it or leave it, but at this point I see no reason not to include it. Samsung boost up clock speeds because android runs like crap on low spec phones.
 
It is pretty rare to see anyone discount a new iPhone. Is this just a t-mobile thing?

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I think if they had released the 5s with the same specs but a 4.3 -4.7 inch screen people would be thrilled.

I don't understand this minor update they do every second year. They need to be faster to keep up with android IMO.

I would personally consider getting an iPhone with a larger screen.


Like some others have said, keeping the screen size down is part of the appeal of the iphone for me. I want to be able to hold the device one handed and operate it easily with a single thumb while moving around and doing other things. The 3.5" screen on my 4S allows me to do just that, and from what I've experienced the 5's 4" screen starts to push those limits. My hands are just a tad below the 50 percentile male at ~7.4" (compared to 8.4" for the 99 percentile male - and 6" for a 1 percentile female) so you can imagine how that influences one's perspective here. People do say the iphone is too small for them to comfortable use as well so this works both ways. A better solution here may be to simply offer the 5s in perhaps 2 sizes for the sake of ergonomics (both grip and UI sizing). They can simply scale the UI like they did with the ipad mini (same resolution but a higher DPI for smaller interface elements) to avoid creating any further dev fragmentation.

The other big reason for me is comfort in the pocket where the iphone is already bigger than I'd like (compared to the pre-smart phone era phones like the razr which were nicer to carry). I can't fit some of the larger android phones in my hand or pocket well either.

A larger screen is without a doubt a better visual experience during use but IMO it's not a win across the board in other respects, it's not fair to treat it as a bigger is better "tech spec" like is happening in the Android and WP8 realm.
 
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I like the physical phone size, but wouldn't mind a larger screen by having and edge to edge screen instead of the thicker boarder. Otherwise one reason I haven't gone with other phones is because they are actually too big in size.
 
Yeah, to its credit the iPhone 5 screen gets pretty close to the edge but I do think that physically this phone is about as big as I'm willing to tolerate. Sure a larger screen is great, but at that point one starts going for tablets for the bigger screen/deeper experience... not a gigantic phone.
 
I just put on ios7 on the iPhone 4 and iPad 3. First impression is I hate the icons. They look awful. The newsstand icon looks like it was done by a 5 year old in ms paint.

I do like the new animations and "multitasking". Feels more fluid. I like the parallax scrolling effect on the backgrounds and control center. If I could get my old icons back I would really like it.

It runs slow on the iphone4. I guess that should be expected. It's a little choppy on the ipad3 but not bad.

I want to see it on iphone5 but my wife didn't like how it looked and told me not to update her phone.

Anyone else update tonight?
 
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Have it on my ipad 2, actually pretty impressed with how it's not laggy at all. Seems like a good upgrade...there will always be people that complain about change. If we listened to them, we'd still be riding horses.
 
I've been running it for a few months. Once you get used to it, it's hard to go back. The gestures mean you don't have to stretch to reach the back button and you don't have to target your finger--you just swipe. The art is "flat" but the UI is not flat at all, with layers that interact. I missed the old art for a few days, but I'm fine now. I agree with you it chugs on older hardware--I have an iPad 3 and it is a little slow probably because there are so many pixels to push. On the iPhone 5 it runs full speed with no feeling of slowness, although when I saw the 5S videos I can see that it is faster still.

The 5S CPU kicks ass according to anandtech. Amazing that Apple's cranking out these very efficient custom processors and that's not their specialty at all.

http://anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review
 
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I've been running it for a few months. Once you get used to it, it's hard to go back. The gestures mean you don't have to stretch to reach the back button and you don't have to target your finger--you just swipe. The art is "flat" but the UI is not flat at all, with layers that interact. I missed the old art for a few days, but I'm fine now. I agree with you it chugs on older hardware--I have an iPad 3 and it is a little slow probably because there are so many pixels to push. On the iPhone 5 it runs full speed with no feeling of slowness, although when I saw the 5S videos I can see that it is faster still.

The 5S CPU kicks ass according to anandtech. Amazing that Apple's cranking out these very efficient custom processors and that's not their specialty at all.

http://anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review
Which gestures?
 
The swipe from left and right edge go forward and back in system apps like Safari, mail, settings, and so on. This sounds really trivial as an improvement, but I'm finding it demands less effort to swipe than to hit the back arrow because there is no need to hit a certain spot. These gestures have been built into apps and are in other phones in the past, and I think it helps.

This article describes what is missing on iOS 7 on the iPhone 4: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-death-sentence-ios-7-on-the-iphone-4/
 
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I've been running iOS 7 since the Golden Master was available. I gave up the jailbreak on my iPhone 5 on 6.1.2 for the 7.0, and I have no regrets. I concur about the newsstand icon, but other than that, everything else is okay with me. I'm loving it. The only thing I kinda miss is native tethering, but I hardly used it before. I'm a happy camper so far.
 
The swipe from left and right edge go forward and back in system apps like Safari, mail, settings, and so on. This sounds really trivial as an improvement, but I'm finding it demands less effort to swipe than to hit the back arrow because there is no need to hit a certain spot. These gestures have been built into apps and are in other phones in the past, and I think it helps.

This article describes what is missing on iOS 7 on the iPhone 4: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-death-sentence-ios-7-on-the-iphone-4/

Cool thanks.

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I've been running iOS 7 since the Golden Master was available. I gave up the jailbreak on my iPhone 5 on 6.1.2 for the 7.0, and I have no regrets. I concur about the newsstand icon, but other than that, everything else is okay with me. I'm loving it. The only thing I kinda miss is native tethering, but I hardly used it before. I'm a happy camper so far.
Why would you need tethering when you can do wifi hotspot?
 
Why would you need tethering when you can do wifi hotspot?


Because I don't want to pay AT&T for that.

Oh, and I am grandfathered on that unlimited plan. I would have to go to a tier plan if I want to do wifi hotspots.
 
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Because I don't want to pay AT&T for that.

Oh, and I am grandfathered on that unlimited plan. I would have to go to a tier plan if I want to do wifi hotspots.

Gotcha. My friend was grandfathered in too. He didn't want to lose his unlimited data. Turns out he was using under a gig a month. :)

I dumped my unlimited for the share plan on verizon. We never come close to the 4 gig on 3 devices, but I am on wifi a lot. We saved a ton also.
 
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I dumped more Apple crap into my "iCrap" folder and thankfully now the Newsstand can be dropped in there too. I do like the swiping stuff as well, although it was not initially intuitive.
 
Anyone else having a lot of problems with YouTube not loading right in ios7. Seems many of the embedded videos never seem to load.
 
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