Apple Announces iPhone 5 1052
Today Phil Schiller took to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where he announced the long-expected iPhone 5. The casing is made entirely of glass and aluminum, and it's 7.6mm thick, which is 18% thinner than the iPhone 4S. It weighs in at 112 grams, which is 20% lighter than the 4S. Schiller confirmed that the iPhone 5 has a 4" display, with a resolution of 1136x640. It's a 16:9 aspect ratio. The screen is the same width as a 4S, but it's taller. To accommodate older apps, they either center the app or add black bars to make it look right. The new device also has LTE support. Tim Cook spoke earlier about the iPad, making some interesting claims: "Yes, we are in a post-PC world." He also claimed 68% tablet market share for the iPad, and says iPads account for 91% of tablet-based web traffic. The event is continuing, and we'll update this post as further announcements appear. A real-time liveblog is being quickly updated at Ars Technica. Update: 09/12 18:16 GMT by S : Further details below.
Further details: for the iPhone 5, Apple also added support for HSPA+ and DC-HSDPA. The dynamic antenna is an improvement over the 4S, and can switch connections. In the U.S. LTE partners are AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. On to processing: the iPhone 5 runs an A6 chip that's twice as fast as the A5, in addition to being 22% smaller. Rob Murray from EA got up on stage to show a racing game, claiming that the graphics "have been built to full console quality." Battery life for the phone will be roughly 8 hours for either 3G talk-time or browsing. Engadget has a feature-by-feature comparison to the 4S.The new phone's camera has an 8-Megapixel sensor, with a resolution of 3264x2448. It includes a hybrid IR filter, an f/2.4 aperture, and a five element lens. And a sapphire crystal lens cover, for whatever that's worth. There's a new feature for taking panorama shots (claimed 'breakthrough software,' though similar software already appears on actual cameras), and new software for automatically sharing pictures.
Apple also detailed the new connector, dubbed 'Lightning.' It's entirely digital, and 80% smaller than the old connector. It can be plugged in in either direction. Apple has created a bunch of adapters to let old cables and hardware work with Lightning. They then spoke at length about iOS 6, which will run on the iPhone 5, and demonstrated their new Maps app, which includes turn-by-turn directions (also in 3D using a 'cinematic camera'). "Apple is betting heavily on Passbook and other features to give it a leg up in the competition over Google Android and the upcoming Windows Phone 8." Pre-orders for the iPhone 5 start on Friday, and the device will start shipping on September 21. iOS 6 will roll out on September 19.
Apple's Eddie Cue went on stage to discuss changes to iTunes and the iPod. iTunes has been redesigned to work better on the iPad, and, more importantly, iCloud integration has been built in. They've also made a 'mini-player,' which takes up much less screen real estate. The new iTunes will be available in late October. Changes are coming for iPods as well. The new iPod nano looks like a mini iPod Touch. It's 38% thinner than the previous model, but has a bigger, 2.5" multitouch display. It contains an FM tuner with DVR functionality, it has a Home button, and it uses the Lightning connector. The iPod Touch is now 6.1 mm thick and weighs 88 grams. It has a Lightning connector port too, in addition to the headphone jack. The screen is bigger; it's a 4" display, the same as the iPhone 5. It runs on a dual-core A5 processor that's twice as fast as the previous model. Graphics are claimed to be seven times faster. The battery allows for 40 hours of audio playback or 8 hours of video playback. The camera has been upgraded to a 5MP sensor. The iPod Touch comes in colors now. But not grape. Apple also took the wraps off what they call "EarPods." They're like earbuds, but they don't form a seal within the ear. They let air flow continue, and a tiny speaker directs the sound into the ear. The EarPods will come standard with the iPhone 5 and with the new revisions of the iPod Nano, and iPod Touch.
meh (Score:3, Insightful)
whatever
Oh yeah?? (Score:4, Insightful)
But but, Steve Jesus Jobs said "3.5 inch was the MOST PERFECT EVAAAR phone size"... and all you fanbois were falling over each other bashing Samsung and Android for large screen size. whatever happened to that????
post-PC world you can't code on ios and the scree (Score:4, Insightful)
post-PC world you can't code on ios and the screen is to small to do big typing / excel type work.
Re:meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Post-PC world? (Score:3, Insightful)
What kills me is that people are going to eat that shit up. They don't realize that they hold a PC in their hand which just so happens to have a phone app. My first computer had an AMD k6-2 300mhz processor (I'm 22, see UID), and I was astounded when I realized my OG Droid had double the compute power. It only took a decade for that to go from being the latest and greatest to being in the palm of your hand being used for fart apps. Tegra games already rival the current-gen consoles in terms of graphics.
PCs aren't dead, they're better than they ever have been before.
In other news, Steve Jobs shits his grave knowing his precious screens are used to display black bars.
Re:Still not HD? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why the weird screen resolution? (Score:3, Insightful)
1136x640? What kind of crack-smoking resolution is that? It's not any kind of standard and it isn't an integer multiple of the existing iPhone resolutions. I had expected it to be 1440x960 (3x the original iPhone resolution) so that they could keep using the existing Retina Display features, which use simple pixel doubling for noncompliant apps. But what are they going for with this?
Re: Where are the lawyers from Samsung? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when? (Score:3, Insightful)
For a company that wants to be seen as being on the leading edge they could have at least tried competing with the GS3.
leading edge of what?
Apple since their inception has been about bringing computing to the masses. It's been about making user interfaces more intuitive. It's also been about design.
I have never ever seen anything from Apple where they wanted their products to be leading edge in technology.
Re:meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why the weird screen resolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like they wanted to keep the same width and just make it taller until it got to 16:9.
Re:Something shiny! (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple doesn't general do "firsts", but they are the king at "The first X that doesn't suck"
The original iphone was criticized for not having 3g. At the time 3g was not widely available, and all of the 3g chips were power hogging monsters. All of the first 3g phones sucked.
I've got a 4 and I'm pretty damn happy with it. The 5 looks like a pretty good evolutionary improvement and I might pick it up. (The 4s was not enough of an improvement for me to shell out the extra $)
I've been seriously looking at a new andriod too. The S3 and the HTC X one are amazing devices with lots of great features.. But neither ship with andriod 4.1.
That's the problem. Do I get an andriod with really cool bells and whistles? Or an iphone that has a slick, long term reliable end user experience that I'm used to. I know if I pick the 5 all of my apps, music, messages, mail, everything will carry over flawlessly. Just like with my 4.. And my 3g before it.. I've still got the same music library, apps, and email settings carried all the way from my original iphone and that's damn awesome.
Re:Post-PC world? (Score:4, Insightful)
PCs have always been general purpose computers. The iPhone is not.
Meh (Score:3, Insightful)
The iPhone has been falling behind in the past year or so. Competitors now have better hardware and an equally good user experience. This is why Apple has been resorting to lawsuits: in the phone arena, they face the real prospect of losing serious market share to Samsung. The Galaxy S III is competitive with even the iPhone 5 (though its app ecosystem may not be quite as good) and the Galaxy Note is far superior to the Apple phones.
On the tablet side of things, Apple is faring better. There is still no serious Android competitor to the new iPad, with its unparalleled 2048x1536 display. Android fans usually try to respond by telling me that I don't really need a high-res display. This is a losing argument – once you've seen the new iPad in action, low-resolution tablets look crude in comparison. It really makes a huge difference, especially when reading PDFs and web pages zoomed out. None of the competing 10" tablets come close to the iPad's market share. The smaller, cheaper tablets (Nexus 7, Kindle Fire) are indeed cutting into Apple's business, but they apparently have an iPad Mini prepped and ready to go to compete there. If rumors are accurate and it goes for $249 or so, then it's going to get a lot of purchases. On the other hand, it's hard to say how many will be taken from Google and Amazon, and how many will be cannibalized from sales of the full-size (and presumably more profitable) iPad.
I'm hoping that Samsung's next Galaxy Note tablet will have a Retina-equivalent display. If they can do that and keep the price at $499 to open (like Apple did), then they will have a real competitor on their hands. I'd seriously consider buying one.
Re:Same 640 pixel width (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, letterboxing? Really? Really? Did Apple just never learn how to make an API for UI elements that doesn't suck? No, that's not right, Cocoa was fine; they must have just reinvented the wheel for iOS, poorly.
Seriously, when I run an Android app on a device with a different screen resolution, it just works. It's almost as if they designed for the idea that not every device would have exactly the same screen! I wonder how they realized that so far in advance! How did nobody ever think of that befo... oh, wait, no, every damn UI design for the desktop has realized this since back when a "phone" was that thing tied to a jack on the wall with a length of copper cable.
not impressed? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:An innovative 5th row of icons (Score:2, Insightful)
I expect Apple will sue HTC and win
In the US, they would.
iPad traffic (Score:3, Insightful)
"He also claimed 68% tablet market share for the iPad, and says iPads account for 91% of tablet-based web traffic"
Was anyone else's first reaction to this statement "Wow, that sounds like iPads are inefficient."
post pc my ass (Score:5, Insightful)
"Yes, we are in a post-PC world."
Who is "we"? Certainly it's not anyone who does work on a computer, or anyone who supports computers that people do work on, or anyone who creates things that people use to do work on a computer. Those poor clods are still stuck in the "PC runs damn near every aspect of business" world.
Fragmentation (Score:4, Insightful)
What is Apple going to do about this?
Why can't old apps dynamically adapt to the new screen size? The iPad has been out for how long now?
Further evidence that this isn't your dad's Apple computer anymore. Back in the early days of Mac, Apple specifically told developers to not make assumptions about the hardware, screen size, processor speed, etc.
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
But Android has 80% of the market, right? How is buying an iPhone "going with the herd"? Aren't you getting that backwards?
Re:Oh yeah?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Next year, the iMessiah introduced multitasking on the iPhone. But it has sucky "badges" to annoy and interrupt you.
Next year, the great prophet showed a new notification system with a notification bar at the top that could be pulled down to reveal a tray of notifications from various apps that wanted your attention. Wow, what magic will Apple think of next!
In another year, I don't remember which one, Steve the great profit, er, um. . . I mean prophet, said that "7 inch tablets are dead on arrival". The crowd cheered.
One great thing about the iPhone is perpetual continuous warranty coverage forever and ever. Amen. Warranty lasts until next year when next product is announced. Therefore the iFaithful have continuous coverage. (Unless you're a heretic!)
Re:Something shiny! (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, I only hear these claims uttered sarcastically by neckbeards and other tiresome people in the geekverse. It's like how I only hear "The Earth is 6000 years old" from atheists. And who gives a shit what connector it is as long as the device comes with a cable and I can get a replacement if necessary?
Back in the day geeks and nerds advocated competition and having multiple players in the market- it's how PCs got so cheap with a zillion motherboard and peripheral makers. People who really care about tech should hope for success for Apple, Android and, yes, Windows 8 phones so they can continue to fight it out. Anything else is fanboy horseshit. Yes, being a basher is simply fanboyism of a different platform- just as bad, if not worse.
Time travelling googlers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
" Nevermind that the iPhone was banned for two years in Korea."
Holy shit, really?
Citation?
This pisses me off for so many reasons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultimately, this product seems to be one that is geared towards fragmenting their own user-base. It's unhealthy for them as a company, and it's not remotely helpful to the consumer.
Re:remember when slashdot was good?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Irony is that it CAN wirelessly stream video to your HDTV. Still funny though.
Re:Since when? (Score:5, Insightful)
Computting to the masses what pot are the smoking when the set the price point then? OLPC is computting to the masses, a cheap dell is computting to the masses, $1000+ macbook is to the elite
Re:But Nextstep software.... (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>You can see what you are doing on a Pad. and get a full keyboard for typing.
In other words walk past the iPad in the store and buy a small laptop instead. Got it. Tablets are really just small internet-connected TVs..... passive entertainment devices. Laptops are the better choice for people who need to do actual work.
Re:Post-PC world? (Score:3, Insightful)
Login before you post.
Connector Hell (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple has created a bunch of adapters to let old cables and hardware work with Lightning.
Oh sure, and they'll be happy to let you have them for only apiece. You'll need at least 5 or 6, of course, since they're tiny and easily lost. This connector thing is the second time Apple has disapointed me with this crap; the last time was when they changed the power adapter for the Retina Macbook pro, for no good reason. Sorry Apple, I generally love your stuff, but that smells like an evil attempt to make a few (million) bucks off over-priced adapters. And it's enough to keep me with my good old iPhone 4.
Re:Since when? (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple since their inception has been about bringing computing to the masses.
Generally, bringing something to "the masses" includes lowering the price, not raising it. Oh, and having a larger market share than your competitor, not a smaller one.
Re:Fragmentation (Score:5, Insightful)
iOS6 is supported all the way back to the iPhone 3GS. How is this creating any fragmentation?
Re:iPad traffic (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:meh (Score:1, Insightful)
Because it's not insightful. It's someone trying to act all hipster by saying he doesn't care about the story. If he didn't care about the story, why did he go to the trouble of commenting on it?
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
You go against the herd mentality
Don't most Android fanboys like to talk up the fact that Android has far more marketshare than the iPhone now? So can you really say that you're going against a "herd mentality" by buying a product that has the marketshare lead?
Re:Same 640 pixel width (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple's view is that an app should be hand-customized to support the resolution and screen size of the device, not shoehorned in by an automated scaling routine. So the last thing Apple wants to do is tell developers, "Don't worry, the API will fit your app onto the new display." What Apple's API will do is allow developers to check the screen size and take advantage of the extra screen space in a way that fully exploits it. Based on the way that Apple's development environment works, this should be pretty trivial for the vast majority of apps. And for those developers who don't care enough to bother, the app will look exactly the way it did before, down to the pixel.
Re:Still not HD? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now not competing with the display on the Galaxy Nexus (also a full 720p display and released 9 months ago)... that's a bit harder to understand.
Well they've backed themselves into a corner with having absolute pixel positioning, so you can't just arbitrarily change the pixel count like you can on an OS with a UI layout manager. Sorry, let me re-phrase that: on a proper OS. They got away with it once by quadrupling the pixels, but they can't do that again (even if the tech was possible, there wouldn't be any point since we're at the limit of human eye capability). To go to something like 1240x720 would require all sorts of weird scaling, and not look very good. Soooo... what can they do? Maintain the pixel width and add black bars, and put some API for the developers to work around it. I'm very glad I'm not a iOS developer now, I have no idea how they can support that without it being pretty hacky.
Re: post-PC world you can't code on ios and the sc (Score:5, Insightful)
post-PC doesn't mean that the PC isn't around anymore. It just means it's not the main device in most people's lives.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But Nextstep software.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, that completely depends on what your definition of "actual work" is. What you consider "actual work" others might not. I'm sure a construction worker believes that you tinkering on a computer all day is "actual work".
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's more that they are voicing the thing that most of us are thinking - that Apple's hype is grossly overrated. Which explains why they have to resort to suing everyone else now.
Re:Post-PC world? (Score:3, Insightful)
To average users that's like arguing about a monolithic kernel or microkernel is best, they don't care. They want applications and the iPhone got apps for practically everything which in the public eye makes it a "general purpose" computer. Around here the perception is that Apple's walled garden is like being trapped in Gitmo, but to most people it's the size of the US - most people don't have or want a passport to go outside. Many of them don't mind putting it all on iCloud so Apple can store and sync it for them, they just don't want to manage their own systems. I'll just repeat that for the "you can pry my root password from my cold dead hands" crowd here at Slashdot, they don't want to. And in all honesty if I wasn't tech-savvy I'd probably pick Apple too over bugging friends, family, the neighborhood kid or geeksquad.
Re:Same 640 pixel width (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, iOS does support auto-resizing. Unfortunately:
No, that's not right, Cocoa was fine; they must have just reinvented the wheel for iOS, poorly.
No, Cocoa was not fine. The autoresizing system Cocoa uses sucks. iOS 5 supports it just fine, though, but it's nearly useless. And support is there by default, as there are still a few times when the view size changes in iOS and you need to rely on Cocoa Touch's autoresize:
1. Landscape versus Portrait. The view will autoresize by default. Unfortunately, autoresize is so bad at what it does, that I wound up overriding it and just manually setting the bounding boxes of the widgets on screen. I expect most apps do that because the autoresize support is so awful. (Apparently this is the reason why, until iOS 4 or something, Xcode's default template for iOS apps disabled the portrait mode entirely.)
2. The view shrinks because you're in a call. When in a call, the status bar doubles in size and your app loses several pixels off the top. (I think it's 22 in retinal, but whatever, you get the idea.) This is something that just about no app bothers testing for, despite the iOS simulator including explicit support for testing. But it's another thing autoresizing is supposed to deal with.
Fortunately, another AC responder indicates that they're adding a new "constraint based" system for iOS 6. Sadly, having also written a Cocoa app that used the new support for that, this is almost certainly going to be even worse. It's call "auto layout" and there are some 200,000 Google results on how to disable the damned thing [google.com].
Re:remember when slashdot was good?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why go thin? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, but why is it that every single iPhone I see is covered by a huge honkin rubber protective case?
My mother purchased an iPhone 4S a little while after it came out. A few weeks later I flew down to visit her and asked how she liked her new phone. She pulled it out and showed me the case she got for it. She talked about how pretty it was; and then mentioned how all of her friends really like her case as well. I asked my dad about if she really uses her phone and he mentioned how absolutely in love she is with the case. Honestly my mom would have loved a feature phone in an equally stylish case. One success that Apple has going for it, is large enough volume to justify manufacturing a diversity of cases/skins, that will keep people on the iPhone if only for that.
If the phone could survive a drop, why would people buy more of them?
Re:Post-PC world? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, yes. It is. An iPhone is a general purpose computer in a handheld form factor.
Keep in mind that a general-purpose computer is distinct from an ASIC (application-specific integrated controller), where the former is programmable and the latter is not (except when it is).
But even beyond that, an iPhone bears all the hallmarks of a PC: a CPU, RAM, persistent storage, run dynamic modern OSes, and allow various input/output devices to be connected. In fact, general purpose computers are becoming so cheap and effective that they're showing up in more and more cases where ASICs may have been used in the past, because it costs a lot less to write software than to design and build an ASIC.
The distinction between a "smart phone" and a PC is almost exclusively one of marketing.
Re:Same 640 pixel width (Score:2, Insightful)
Borders are what happens when a resolution doesn't make sense, it's the worst/universal solution for this kind of idiocy, the only alternative is stretching but that looks strange, especially where the colours need to blend.
Anyway the article reads iPhone 5, we're stealing some of Samsung's shit... and what new things we're adding aren't thought out or useful (1mm, ARE YOU KIDDING ME? How about 2x denser battery using up slightly more real estate?! How about a removable cover so you can change battery).
So Apple fanboys! Are you going to buy this new adapter or the "all new iCords", you know the ones that are 4x as expensive... but they're WHITE!
Re:Oh yeah?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, it was made bigger just to be made bigger obviously, otherwise it wouldn't be bigger at all.
Also, jeez, took them long enough to hit that 16:9 ratio for a device that brags about its media savvy.
You know what's awesome? The look on an iPhone user's face when you hand them a Galaxy Nexus with its 4.7" screen and they suddenly realize that more screen real estate actually can fit in your hand and does look better.
Re:remember when slashdot was good?! (Score:2, Insightful)
If I find NFC on any phone I buy, my first action will be to turn it off and weld it shut. Last thing I need is to get robbed by an NFC scanner in a public crowd.
Re:Post-PC world? (Score:5, Insightful)
An iPhone is a general purpose computer
Nope. With the artificial restrictions that Apple places on the device, it is certainly not general purpose.
Re:Connector Hell (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's something that I've noticed - in the presentation, they call it "fully digital". Which, if I understand it correctly, means that it no longer has any analog audio.
Now, when discussing Apple's proprietary connectors vs micro-USB/MHL in the past, the usual argument in their defense was that they wanted a single connector that can do it all, and that doesn't burden the device on the other end with overcomplicated circuitry for something that can be trivially done over an analog channel. If that advantage is now gone, it seems that there's no real reason for Apple to make this thing proprietary other than "cuz we can sell the cables for ten times the cost", is there?