I agree, but it sure does feed the hype machine. Think about how many news sites are hosting live blogs, and how many incidental visitors are seeing front page articles about it, and have been seeing ads for the live blog for days leading up to today.
Now contrast that to a company where anyone can watch the announcement live. I think most places you'd just get an article or two at the end of a product announcement, because the people who really care will just watch the announcement themselves.
That one's updating much more quickly, though has fewer photos.
EDIT seems to be fixed now EDIT2 yet, there seems to be a darth of images again... engadget still has them EDIT3 OK, engadget is offline EDIT4 engadget is back (am I really blogging bloggers?)
"2:02PM Phil's taking a shot against the Atrix, Thrill, and Inspire 4G. "The iPhone 4S is just as fast as these phones.""
Wow. "Guys, this is awesome! Our new phone is just as fast as an Android phone that came out a year ago!" (The Atrix, about to be supplanted by the Atrix 2).
> Wow. "Guys, this is awesome! Our new phone is just as fast as an Android phone that came out a year ago!" (The Atrix, about to be supplanted by the Atrix 2).
He was pretty clearly using them as examples of "4G" phones when it comes to data transfer speeds and nothing more.
I guess with all the toddlers supposedly owning iPods/iPhones/iPads, this has some valid use cases. But actively supporting personal surveillance systems seems like a weird move to me after the media hubbub about the location cache.
Yes, this is something people legitimately want. There are lots of occasions where I will go somewhere with friends/spouse and want to wander but occasionally sync up or know where someone else is. It sure beats SMSing "where R U" messages back and forth.
I guess I edited my posting while your were answering, sorry about that.
I clarified that I am actually more worried about the public reaction to this rather than legitimate use cases. Not really worried, just, why not leave it at a third party app?
To answer my own question, Apple's solution has probably both more polish and more lock-in power, just as with iMessage vs WhatsApp & Co.
Damn, I have never heard of glympse. I actually made my own app for this six months ago: http://l.oc8.me . Glad I'm not going to spend time creating native versions, and can move on to my next pet project. :)
The killer feature Glympse appears to have in comparison with iOS 5: it's cross platform. Not everyone you're going to want to sync with will have an iPhone or iPad.
I've got an app that does real time location sharing:
http://convoyapp.net/ aimed at people driving in groups. I wonder how well this location sharing feature will compete against it, and if it makes it obsolete?
Lots of AT&T 3GS owners just out of contract, though. They'll probably go for the 4S. And Apple gets to save the iPhone 5 for another big announcement in 6 months.
Once Apple can put the tech that would justify a jump from 4 to 5 and retain their (50% of ASP!) margin, they will.
Idly, I wonder if they're getting a sufficient cut from the carriers to make the 3GS at no cost profitable, or if rather this is what they mean to do with their cash hoard: chase market share AND increase profitability.
DISCLAIMER: I used to work for Apple. I have no specific knowledge about the phone.
The prices you saw are the carrier subsidized prices. The carriers buy the phones from apple and then subsidize the cost, and try to make a profit over the length of the contract.
The presentation was a little bit sloppy, because previous presentations would have footnoted that these were with a new 2 year contract prices, not "we're selling these phones at these prices".
I understand that part. I'm just amazed that the demand for the 3GS is sufficient, and AT&T desperate enough, for Apple to retain the tooling to build them.
The "iPhone 4S" name was a pretty common rumor, so it is not unexpected. Given the iPhone's "tick-tock" release schedule (3G->3GS->4->4S), I was not surprised.
Both GSM & CDMA. This is going to be one of the huge factors for the 4S & 5. If I can now play Verizon, Sprint, & AT&T off against each other then this may be a big, big win for US consumers.
Yeah. I wonder how things like carrier lock are going to work on this new model. If I have Verizon service in the US and go to Europe can I drop in a local SIM card and use that? If so what is to prevent me from using that same feature when I am back in the US? Hmmmm....
Verizon's other world phones (Like the Droid 2 World) have a 'US only lock'. It will lock out USA SIM cards, but it otherwise unlocked everywhere else. It's also subsidized. I think that is a very fair way to do it.
Think Sprint may still be able to sell that big chunk of phones they committed themselves to. I can definitely see going back to Sprint, if they get reasonable roaming deals, particularly on international data.
I'm having a hard time separating the wheat fromt the chaff in all that camera talk, is anyone familiar with these changes/sensors (since I suspect they're not unique to Apple devices)?
It's still a phone camera. It's better than it was, but image quality is still not going to be as good as a dedicated camera, even one of a few generations back. It should blow away the ipad2/ipod touch cameras. It may be a noticeable difference from the iphone4, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The best camera is the one you have with you. And on that front, it's a good camera.
I'm an amateur photog, and I'm excited about the camera:
- backlit sensor = better low-light pictures, with dramatically less noise
- faster lens, hopefully with better clarity (less haziness that's characteristic of phone cameras)... but we'll see how well it actually works out
- and most importantly, fast. I know I hate using my phone's camera since by the time I pull it out and the phone lets me take my first picture, the moment's already passed. The whole "1 second to first picture, 0.5s between shots" I think is going to be HUGE. It's going to get people using their cell phones as cameras a lot more than than they are now.
"my wife" is Almost Certainly* explicitly flagged in his address book, either as an alias or through a "relationship" field. he didn't show you that part. (the same is likely true of the geofence, though a location-aware algorithm could probably do a better job inferring where your work is than who your wife is.)
I have no problem with that. This a great demonstration of what Apple does best - optimizing products to fit the needs of most users. Google already has the voice tech in place, but often fails to follow through on the usability front. A perennially annoying example for me is when I'm on the road somewhere, bring up Maps, and ask for directions from wherever-I-am to 'home'; it doesn't know where 'home' is. This is even more annoying, because there is a 'home' tag in Maps, but it doesn't get searched on. Likewise, there's no easy way to tell it that one person is my wife, another person is my business partner, a third person is my nemesis and so on.
Apple are leveraging a culture of paying attention to detail to overcome technical handicaps, but it's hard to quantify or A/B test that, and most firms aren't comfortable with a budget line item called 'magic.'
To add to the frustration, Google knows where "home" is for me, even without me telling - Latitude inferred it. Can't ask Google Mobile Maps for directions to home, though.
yeah. I'm just saying that the magic in the system is that it's a well-designed system with attention to detail, not that it's capable of leveraging anything approaching human intuition.
And when you leave the work radius at lunchtime with the cute coworker you're flirting with, you suddenly hear your wife over the in-vehicle bluetooth handsfree.
I wonder how many conditionals you can string together. "Remind me to call my wife before I leave work" is great, but "remind me to call my wife before I leave work at the end of the day, unless she calls me first" would be awesome.
In reality none of this stuff is even remotely useful, because I can't even begin to guess whether or not a given command will be interpreted properly. Natural language is hard, and reminders need to be 100% reliable.
According to the video, he said that Siri knew his wife's name from "a previous conversation". Which seems to indicate that Siri has some learning capability built in.
a) Siri won't work at all, or will degrade to something like Voice Control, if the server is unreachable or you're out of coverage;
b) all of your dynamic data (address book, calendar, etc.) needs to be synced to iCloud for Siri to see it;
c) third-party extensibility won't be available until iOS 6+.
Yeah. I remember the Wolfram Alpha video demo - it looked amazing and natural, but when you got to use the real thing 95% of your queries didn't work at all.
Much worse, AAPL is going to take a big plunge - no matter how awesome and flashy the 4S features are. After the HUGE pre-event hype and blabla, everyone is only going to take "What, NO iPhone 5????" away from this, sadly.
Unfortunately, I have to agree, I am a 3GS owner and was waiting for the 5. The thing that I keep thinking is with this being the first big announcement since Steve left the company they really needed to show the world that they where going to keep hitting home runs. While the 4S is an nice upgrade, it is in no way the home-run I would have expected to show that they are no worse for wear without Steve. I was very surprised when I learned that it would not be a 4G phone, that would have at least been an easy win for getting people to make the upgrade decision. My wife picked up an Atrix almost a year ago and it was 4G. I know the coverage is still growing and there are areas that do not have it, but it is not like 4G is not standard equipment on the higher end Android phones. To me that was the biggest miss.
Does anybody know if the GSM concept of unlocked has an analog in CDMA? IOW, if I buy my new 4S factory unlocked, can I use it on Verizon OR Sprint? I'm assuming yes, because it really looks like a single SKU, but I don't know.
The unlocked iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S will not work with CDMA-based carriers such as Verizon Wireless or Sprint.
Sounds like that's a no-go for the 4S. Which sucks because my wife wants to replace her Android phone, but we're not upgrade eligible from Verizon yet. So that means I'm going to have to pay same price as the unlocked phone, but it's going to have the GSM side locked out if I ever want to sell it.
Is Siri specific to iPhone 4S, or will it be a part of iOS 5? It sounded like it is only a part of iPhone 4S, but it seems like it's all software. Perhaps the iPhone 4 isn't powerful enough to do the voice recognition seamlessly?
From what I hear the A5 in the 4S has some hardware components not available before - including a hardware DSP and image processor. That's what's powering Siri and the newfangled fast-camera features.
119 comments
[ 23.1 ms ] story [ 765 ms ] threadhttp://www.ustream.tv/channel/applelivekeynotes
the total views is going up at like 1500/second
Now contrast that to a company where anyone can watch the announcement live. I think most places you'd just get an article or two at the end of a product announcement, because the people who really care will just watch the announcement themselves.
ars is still up at least: http://live.arstechnica.com/Event/iPhone_5
Do we have a summary so far? There's an iPhone 5, I assume? How does it differ from the iPhone 4?
EDIT seems to be fixed now EDIT2 yet, there seems to be a darth of images again... engadget still has them EDIT3 OK, engadget is offline EDIT4 engadget is back (am I really blogging bloggers?)
by Jacqui Cheng 1:24 PM
(ok, images seem to be going through again, hang tight)
by Jacqui Cheng 1:25 PM
...nope, back to clicking refresh and killing live blog servers.
apparently ars is down accept for the liveblog
http://arstechnica.com/
http://live.thisismynext.com/Event/Apple_iPhone_5_event_live...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3071680
1:26PM That got applause. People seem desperate to clap for something. That was it.
Pretty much sums up what we have seen so far
Wow. "Guys, this is awesome! Our new phone is just as fast as an Android phone that came out a year ago!" (The Atrix, about to be supplanted by the Atrix 2).
He was pretty clearly using them as examples of "4G" phones when it comes to data transfer speeds and nothing more.
http://www.glympse.com/
sharing your location for a set time is really useful
I clarified that I am actually more worried about the public reaction to this rather than legitimate use cases. Not really worried, just, why not leave it at a third party app?
To answer my own question, Apple's solution has probably both more polish and more lock-in power, just as with iMessage vs WhatsApp & Co.
Err, no, I really don't believe it has.
heh, they didn't ripoff that guy that did the watch version of the nano, but instead complemented with "16 new clock faces."
Idly, I wonder if they're getting a sufficient cut from the carriers to make the 3GS at no cost profitable, or if rather this is what they mean to do with their cash hoard: chase market share AND increase profitability.
DISCLAIMER: I used to work for Apple. I have no specific knowledge about the phone.
The presentation was a little bit sloppy, because previous presentations would have footnoted that these were with a new 2 year contract prices, not "we're selling these phones at these prices".
Except its called iPhone 4S and not iPhone 5!
Easy to say in hindsight and based on the rumors, but still they didnt really have a tick-tock release cycle before.
The best camera is the one you have with you. And on that front, it's a good camera.
- backlit sensor = better low-light pictures, with dramatically less noise
- faster lens, hopefully with better clarity (less haziness that's characteristic of phone cameras)... but we'll see how well it actually works out
- and most importantly, fast. I know I hate using my phone's camera since by the time I pull it out and the phone lets me take my first picture, the moment's already passed. The whole "1 second to first picture, 0.5s between shots" I think is going to be HUGE. It's going to get people using their cell phones as cameras a lot more than than they are now.
* a term of art meaning "certainly"
Apple are leveraging a culture of paying attention to detail to overcome technical handicaps, but it's hard to quantify or A/B test that, and most firms aren't comfortable with a budget line item called 'magic.'
Indeed; hence Apple confirming its interpretation of the reminder with you before committing anything.
Might be implemented as:
while (get_location() == work) { sleep(1min); }
go_back_in_time(10min);
trigger_reminder();
time.h certainly got a lot more features since the last time I used it...
a) Siri won't work at all, or will degrade to something like Voice Control, if the server is unreachable or you're out of coverage; b) all of your dynamic data (address book, calendar, etc.) needs to be synced to iCloud for Siri to see it; c) third-party extensibility won't be available until iOS 6+.
Siri: Eat up Martha.
The unlocked iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S will not work with CDMA-based carriers such as Verizon Wireless or Sprint.
Sounds like that's a no-go for the 4S. Which sucks because my wife wants to replace her Android phone, but we're not upgrade eligible from Verizon yet. So that means I'm going to have to pay same price as the unlocked phone, but it's going to have the GSM side locked out if I ever want to sell it.
Footnote 2: CDMA available only if iPhone 4S is sold and activated for use on a CDMA network.
Oh well.