My father is still using an iPhone 4, 6 years after its launch and is now thinking of upgrading to a 7 in the fall and I have had a 5S for 2 years now and think I can pull another 2 years before I upgrade. These phones have longer lives then they use to but Apple sales I believe will remain steady since some old iPhone user has to upgrade and they most likely will pick an iPhone. There isn't much reason to switch to Android at this point.
The only thing that could take them off there perch is another revolutionary device showing up on the scene, but I think that won't happen for another decade.
Plus, for all the talk of "innovation" and all thrown around, has any other PC or smartphone vendor really done anything industry changing the last 15 years?
I mean except putting out similar devices to ones Apple popularized (and notice how I didn't say invented)...
I've seen Glass that went nowhere, Surface being an attempt at iPad (and capped at 1M unit sales or so), some smart watches that all together sold only 1/10th what the Apple Watch did (and are nothing to write home about anyway), anything else?
(In software and services of course, Google and others have frequently produced new stuff that spawned imitators).
I can only think of Amazon Echo -- but has than really sold that well, or is mostly a media thing?
The Surface is a pretty damn nice device that will be really great in a year or two when it's finally ready for prime time, and Apple finally deigns to do what a bunch of PC manufacturers are doing and clone it. It will be hailed as the Next Big Thing then.
I say this as someone who's been a Mac user since 2000, and finds Windows really annoying. Being able to run Serious Desktop Apps in a tablet is really amazing, and I would be using a Surface to type this right now if I hadn't had to return my S4Pro because my favorite Serious Art App ignores the first half-second or so of every stylus stroke. Instead I'm sitting in a cafe with my Air and my Wacom tablet next to it. Which used to be a delightfully lightweight portable art studio, but now feels absurdly massive.
(The Surface may not feel like a big deal to someone whose Serious App is an IDE and always needs a full keyboard anyway - but sitting on a bus, a plane, or a crowded lunch counter, with the Surface and a desktop-class art app is pretty delightful. Well, aside from the terrible battery life, made even worse by its tendency to wake up in your bag and burn through half its battery, occasional reboot-requiring Bluetooth disconnects, and unpadded stylus.)
I've been using Windows tablets for 3 years and they've been extremely nice the entire time. Among my collection, I have the original Surface Pro and a Dell Venue 8 Pro which are pretty old.
They're both easily more useful to me than any Apple product I've ever owned. But Apple products are nice if you like walled gardens and option-less, featureless software.
I usually recommend Apple products to home users who have simple needs. That shit would never fly in a business though.
I sure ain't gonna argue with that. My time with a Surface mostly just made me wish Apple would deign to release something in that form factor so I could stick with a prettier OS.
What separates the surface and iPad Pro? I get your saying desktop applications, but from a HW perspective that are basically the same device and the OS is equality capable. It seems more like the Surface just has better applications for artists, unless I am missing something.
The Surface is a laptop crammed into a tablet shell.
An iPad Pro is a tablet.
So the Surface has more RAM to work on serious projects, more CPU to do them with, and... a far greater hunger for power because of that. Like, 3h of continual use is a pretty good day.
It's also got an OS that is trying really hard to work as both a tablet OS and a desktop OS. Windows 10 is not quite there yet IMHO but it comes pretty close; another year or two of development and it'll be there.
For artists, "runs the Adobe suite" is something of a killer app, and has been since version 1. For other people? Well, what's that one app you really need a desktop/laptop to run? Maybe one with a limited version for tablets, maybe not. You can kick back on the couch with it now. I see a lot of people on /r/surface talking about how they use it for all their note-taking; it's got surprisingly good handwriting recognition, and is, again, ultra-super-portable.
(I hear it also does surprisingly well with games; plug it into your big screen's HDMI input with the casualness of bringing a tablet into the living room, instead of setting up a big noisy Gaming PC, and have fun. I never tried that during my time with it so I can't speak to how well it actually does. I literally did not install anything on mine besides Adobe Illustrator, Evernote, and a few programs for remapping keys/putting hotkeys on the screen.)
It's a pretty serious step into the world where you have one device that works as both a tablet you can poke at with your fingers, and a Serious Productivity Device that runs whatever twenty-year-old monster app that you've been using so long you don't even have to think about half its keyboard shortcuts.
It's not fully-baked yet, Win10 is a mess that still drops you into horrible little control panels from 1995 now and then, some crucial UI elements vanish if you use apps designed for tablet usage in "tablet mode", but it really felt like something magical in the same way my first iPad did.
The surface pro doesn't have a rigid hinge on the keyboard does it? I'd love to get one to replace my inspiron hybrid that doesn't really work as a tablet but this is a pretty big limitation for me.
No it doesn't, but I've never felt that as an issue though. The Surface Pro 4 has one of the nicest keyboards ever to be that small. It's much better than a lot of "real" laptops imo.
Two of my biggest use cases are sitting on public transport and lying down on the couch or in bed and using the keyboard. I'm not convinced the backstand would work well enough.
I really should loan one from somewhere/someone, it might not be the problem I'm imagining it to be, but it's a lot of money to spend and be wrong.
Surface fails for gaming (ex: no VR) which is why I keep my home Desktop around for. Sure, for work I use Windows, but a single tiny screen again makes it near useless for coding.
Which means casual web browsing. Which is where the iPad Pro crushes it. Better battery, screen, lower weight, etc. I get the Windows idea, but I know a lot of people that replaced their on the go laptop with a smartphone because if your going to compromise for form factor it's because your not doing serious work.
The way things are going, I see all parties approaching zero sum. Hardware is nearly identical and software stack is approaching too as everything is moving into web apps (see Progressive Web Applications (where Apple is in fact lagging)). Serious Desktop Apps is not such a big thing anymore. iOS has all the Serious Desktop Apps already. Android too. So does MS.
Sure there will always be some legacy code done in MS which is probably easier to port from 7 to 10 (and onwards) than into the web stack. But legacy is not what accounts for growth as so much new software is done on web stack.
Also, if you look this way, Chromebooks also compete in this space.
>The way things are going, I see all parties approaching zero sum. Hardware is nearly identical and software stack is approaching too as everything is moving into web apps
For the staff I do (image, audio, video, programming), that couldn't be further for the truth.
For the rest, that stuff is technologically trivial to begin with (email viewing, writing a document, creating invoices, etc).
Very much agreed. I had a Surface Pro 3 for two years and sold it to get an iPad Pro 9.7 a few months ago.
Much happier with this. Yeah, you can run Photoshop on the Surface, but for just sketching and digital painting, Procreate costs $6 and is far more touchscreen friendly.
Once in a while I miss a piece of desktop software, but I have an old MacBook Air that I can get out if I really need blender or something.
I work for a very wealthy man, and he bought everyone in the company an Amazon Echo because he thought it was a fascinating device. Honestly I agree, it's a very clever gadget and I constantly find more things to use it for. For instance, I just fit out my apartment with Phillips Hue lights, and when I walk in the door I ask Alexa to turn on the lights, and the whole place lights up. Give it a try
>For instance, I just fit out my apartment with Phillips Hue lights, and when I walk in the door I ask Alexa to turn on the lights, and the whole place lights up. Give it a try
Yeah, but that's hardly different than the clapping to open lights thing though, is it?
I don't understand the obsession with voice control.
If you seriously can't just turn on a light switch, wouldn't you just want your phone to use geo-fencing to automatically turn on the lights when you get home AND it's night time?
Then again, I don't understand a lot of this home automation stuff personally. If we come home and it's hot, we turn on the air conditioner. If it's dark, we turn on the lights. These are hardly difficult tasks for a child, much less an adult.
>Then again, I don't understand a lot of this home automation stuff personally. If we come home and it's hot, we turn on the air conditioner. If it's dark, we turn on the lights. These are hardly difficult tasks for a child, much less an adult.
Yeah. With the exception of disabled people (where those could be very valuable) for me it looks like a solution to a problem nobody had and nobody much cares about now that it's solved. Contrast to e.g. washing dishes.
(Oh, and by nobody I mean: aside from statistically insignificant outliers).
The one place I can think of that this might be useful, is where you already use a remote control and you're doing other things e.g., a geo-fenced trigger to open/close an automatic garage door/automatic gate.
That I could probably use - we have a ~6m wide rolling gate and are considering motorising it, as opening a gate in the rain in Thailand is basically like going diving without a wet-suit.
However, even that would need some decent consideration, and its entirely possible the standard remote system is more fool-proof.
Except if you're going for a "70s sexy purple coloured bedroom with Barry White playing" or "Acid party lightshow for the Timothy Leary society" on demand, how is "multiple scenes" even remotely a "killer app for voice control"?
I think you are vastly underplaying the Surface and the entire generation of so-called "hybrids". Also, the flat design movement affects everything now, not just the tech industry. Then there's the cloud...
Honestly, there's probably more examples, but the point is you're view is just a bit skewed.
I think we need to point out that you personally have a strong pro-Apple bias that can be clearly seen in your comment history.
Also that the whole "Apple is the only one who innovates" sentiment is a really old piece of fanboy pap. Seriously, it's ancient and it couldn't be further from the truth.
First off - Apple bought, borrowed and stole a bunch of stuff that already existed and put it together to form a product that their competitors followed up with almost immediately. And then their competitors took away 80% of the market.
So Apple made a bunch of money. Yay! Good for them I guess? Good for you? If you own stock maybe...
Meanwhile, Amazon changed the entire world with AWS. Also Kindle. Windows tablets in general are killing it (you only counted the Surface brand, why?). Google started a whole new genre of product with the ChromeCast. Smart TVs changed the way that tons of people watch TV.
The list goes on and on and on. Try googling something like "most innovative products" and you'll find that most of the items on the lists are not invented by Apple.
For me, it's very different. With an Apple TV, the Apple TV is intelligent. With Chromecast, the display is dumb and all logic runs on the device casting to it. It's kind of like a bluetooth speaker in display form. That's a real innovation in my eyes, and it feels like a much better model.
> The Apple TV is a set-top device, not an actual TV
Ah, sorry, did not know that. The name suggested to me that it's an actual TV. My bad.
Now I see, a set-top box does quite render a TV just a dumb screen. And similar devices/boxes/ideas did exist before, though severely limited by accessibility and expertise needed.
The Chromecast though — as I see it — truly presented that "just a dumb screen" idea in its simplest form. It's small, and thus ultraportable; it screams "plug me!" (into an HDMI port, that is); and makes that dumb screen accessible to a much larger range of people.
If I were to put it simply: Apple TV is to a Nokia Symbian phone, as the Chromecast is to the iPhone 1
I can second this. My wife has a personal 6S, her work phone (they pay for the plan, but not the phone) is a 5S we had laying around. She hates going on international business trips with that phone (we could swap the SIM), but "it's so slow", "it doesn't work", "i hate this phone" are common phrases with extended usage.
I like how every generation of every phone is marketed as "This time, the camera does true colour!" - I wonder how much real difference there is between gens.
For what it's worth, I also use an iphone 4. I like the size and don't really care about apps that require a more recent ios version.
Unfortunately, it no longer accepts my off-brand charging cable, and even using a (borrowed) official Apple cable results in the dreaded "accessory might not be supported" error.
The repair place cleaned out the port and says the battery is fine. Most likely the port itself has broken ... and that part is not replaceable :(
Now I'm limping along on a loaner phone from a friend and torn between buying another 4 (or 5), or buying a 6 in 2 months after the 7 comes out. :(
By DRM-free music files? By the Photos app that you can export anytime you want? By the iCloud storage which you can trivially replace with Google Drive or Dropbox? By the Contacts app that makes it trivial to export all your contacts?
What exactly will be the lock there? At worst you'd have bought some Mac/iOS apps from the App Stores that you'd need to rebuy. But that's always the case (App Store or not) for any platform transition since one platform's apps would not run at the other platform.
And for the big apps (MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite etc), their subscriptions allow you to migrate to one or the other platform...
> If there's some other use case that dominates "mobile phone" for mobile phones, let's hear it.
The use case is a lot larger than just "mobile phone". I'm an Android guy, but I rarely use my phone to make phone calls, in fact I don't use it to make phone calls at all on my provider's network, I use a SIP client to connect to a VoIP service for calling, I do secure messaging via Signal, I run emulators and play old games, I run a full linux environment to do some minimal development and to ssh into servers, I stream audio to my Sonos from YouTube videos and prevent apps from getting my private data by spoofing it and block ads in free apps because I'm a cheap fuck.
Many of these applications make an iPhone a poor choice for me, but not for many other people. If you just need a mobile phone, an iPhone still serves that use case perfectly well. So does the most basic android phone and probably a cheapass Nokia from 10 years ago. The use case is what makes the difference here.
A billion devices with heavy lock-in, reduced feature sets, and no alternative for OS updates sounds pretty darn anti-consumer. Even in this thread, commenters are having to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find uses for their old iPhones.
>Even in this thread, commenters are having to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find uses for their old iPhones.
And why should they? Do you keep old VHS drives and mid-2000s PDAs around?
Tons of people change cars every 5-6 years or so -- and we're talking about buying a new phone every 2-3 years as if its bad, in a field where progress (from 1995 to 2016) has been astronomical compared to the pace of car progress?
Cars have 30 years of resale value, if they're cared for. Like many other electronics, phones have basically stopped improving in the past few years. Processor and battery technology are used at their limits, and a phone from 5 years ago still works well today, if you can get software updates for it.
>Cars have 30 years of resale value, if they're cared for
Well, if resale value is what you're after, then you have the best deal with the iPhone in the first place, combined to any other mobile brand.
>Like many other electronics, phones have basically stopped improving in the past few years.
I beg to differ. Except if you mean "for what I do/care about".
50-100% faster processors and GPUs every 2 years are not "stopped improving". Newer camera systems (4K, image stabilizations, slo-mo), touch id sensors, etc. A lot of the things people do depend on those improvements.
Of course for mere phoning, casual app use, etc, then sure.
Have you ever considered how boring the world would be if you determined the only opinions people could hold? I can tell you've considered how great it would be, but I think it's important to think outside yourself sometimes.
What are talking about? I have Apple's latest phone and it has a headphone jack. Surely you're not getting all foamy around the mouth and basing your entire point on rumors?
As for what one can buy today, have you tested the battery hit when using BTLE? My experience and light testing says the draw is minimal. I'd guess driving the amp to play your music in the first place takes more power than running the BT radio (though jump in and correct me, HW folk).
I get that people have a handful of reasons why they would prefer that the headphone jack sticks around.
But do you think that in 10 years, and if not that, in 100 years, that the headphone jack will still be the primary interface?
And if the answer is no, that will not be the case, and we are ready to move on today, what's wrong for a company to move on? There will always be tradeoffs in the short term, but the vector of this movement is clearly down the path of no headphone jack.
Given the quality of today's wireless audio devices, and the slowdown in Moore's law, I don't see any replacement for the venerable headphone jack. Like TCP, it's a solved problem.
1) You need an analogue stage somewhere to produce audio; 2) Is it really that large? On my Lumia 950, the battery is virtually as wide as the headphone jack, and the camera lens protrudes from the main body of the phone already.
For those reasons, I'm not convinced a smaller headphone jack is particularly necessary.
Hell, Apple was first to ditch floppy drives, CD drives (some models), ethernet ports (some models), and Flash. They've got a pretty good track record of "we don't need this shit" lately.
It would be interesting to know how many of those phones are actually active as we speak. What happens to old generation iPhones? Are they sold to users that can't afford buying a new one or do they stay in a drawer as a legacy item the same way old laptops do?
I'd guess maybe half are in use in some form? (Probably on the high side.) I have my current one. My older 5 plays music and podcasts over my stereo and has a waterproof case for use as a hiking GPS--no cell service. I imagine it's pretty common for N-1 devices to be used as effectively iPods within families.
My 3GS is in my travel bucket for use with foreign SIMs but is effectively legacy drawer at this point.
I sold my old 5s. Presumably the guy who bought it is happy with it. He seemed like the sort of person who wanted a new phone, but didn’t want to spend the price premium for a brand-spanking-new one.
I hear other people give their aged iPhones to their kids to use as phones and/or portable gaming devices. Others use them as a dedicated jukebox where they entertain guests.
The Ars article is probably a better link, because it shows that Ballmer's position was uncontroversial in technology circles at the time. With hindsight it's obvious that the iPhone would be a success, because the entire smartphone industry is now modeled after the UI and interaction model of iOS. But that was a really tough thing to imagine 10 years ago.
A16Z's Ben Evans talks about the order of magnitude shifts in computers sold - 100,000 mini computers, 1bn PCs over 20 years and 4.5bn smartphones in what, 7 years? (that's last years figures). We should be passing 7bn soon.
A smartphone for every person on the planet.
I occasionally ramble about a golden future for humankind. It's a small chance we shall get there, ending poverty, war, disease, maintaining liberty and democracy.
It's one of those "so many ways to mis-step" issues.
But if I am honest, having everyone on the planet able to talk to everyone else on the planet seems like a good "safety rope" on the journey. Smartphones are helping that.
I'd say it's a high chance we'll get much of the stuff you list. People are natural pessimists but if you run the numbers and plot the trends things are heading the right way on the whole.
"The clathrate gun hypothesis is the popular name given to the hypothesis that increases in sea temperatures (and/or drops in sea levels) can trigger the sudden release of methane from methane clathrate compounds buried in seabeds and that are contained within seabed permafrost which, because the methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas, leads to further temperature rise and further methane clathrate destabilization – in effect initiating a runaway process as irreversible, once started, as the firing of a gun.
In its original form, the hypothesis proposed that the "clathrate gun" could cause abrupt runaway warming on a timescale less than a human lifetime, and was responsible for warming events in and at the end of the last glacial maximum. This is now thought to be unlikely."
Basically substitute "highly unlikely random cataclysmic event transpires" for "clathrate gun fires" and you get the sentiment of the post :)
> I occasionally ramble about a golden future for humankind.
What, filled with landfills of iphones? The hope to "improve" or "advance" humanity is the most nauseating part of silicon valley. Technology does not necessarily make the world a better place. In fact, it has actively accelerated the burn rate of our collective resources. Meanwhile, there is zero indication anyone is living a better life than they did before.
I'm living for sure a better life with my iPhone. If you don't need a smartphone and you are happy with a crappy dumbphone doesn't mean that a lot of other people in the world are not enjoying a better life thanks to the smartphones.
Reading all my books on the go, listening to music, find the right way instead of getting lost, studying and so on.
These are all things that I cannot do on a dumbphone and they indeed improved considerably my lifestyle.
I wont say technology is without cost, but i'll give you an example of humanity advancing -- near-free communication. In college (1996), i craved speaking to my mom, even for 5 minutes. But it cost about a week's student salary to speak for 5 minutes long distance. We just didn't. We'd speak for 1 minute ever 2 weeks or so. It was incredibly painful.
Towards the end of college, that cost went to nearly zero. Today it is essentially zero. I hope to speak to my kids plenty when they are in college.
Some people say...you are speaking about nickles and dimes here. But they fail to understand that for many people, $10 will bring their bank balance below zero.
Communication is a problem invented by humans—nobody said you needed to leave home.
Furthermore, the cost of talking to your mother—global industrial production lines, addiction to technology, and the loss of social skills—is extremely hard to weigh. I land firmly on the side of luddite—I value sustainability and social intimacy over convenience. However, it is not even clear that the average techie considers the above problems at all, let alone major ones.
So—again, you're just assuming that I would consider communication worth what we're doing to our children and our planet. It is emphatically not worth it and does not improve quality of life except for problems you cause in the first place.
I disagree - Yeah the latest iPhone app adds zero quality of life, but look at technology over decades - start with penicillin 70 years ago, or heart pacemakers, or simple mobile communications (that changed life enormously - and has huge role in expanding business and relieving poverty not just making it possible for rich westerners to arrange evenings out)
Yeah there are a million ways we as humankind can stuff this up, but technology has and does make life qualitatively and quantatively better for millions. It has been doing this at a accelerating rate for two centuries.
"look at" isn't an argument—I would willingly trade a lower life expectancy for a higher quality of life. Epicurean argued—very successfully, I might add—that a longer life is not a better life. Rather, it is only in addressing our fears for the future it provides any benefit at all, and it's not clear the industrial overhead of pacemakers are worth the reduced anxiety of sudden death, especially when the quality of life has already greatly diminished due to age.
Pre-industrialisation I fear you would have not had the leisure time to read Epicurean, and even if you had, you would not have been able to afford the book and frankly even if you got a copy no-one would have bothered to teach you to read.
The vast wealth generated by harnessing steam, oil and electricity has meant universal education is possible - I doubt that 95% of HN or Silicon Valley would be literate without it.
I just cannot see your argument as anything but a retread of "only those with money, think money is not important"
On pretty most quantifiable measures quality of life is better. I guess you can say in the old days there was terrible infant mortality, slavery, starvation and so on but I would have prefered that but I think most would not.
Sure, there was also the possibility of much more enjoyable lifestyles than urbanization can offer. The idea that a 40 hour work week is desirable to anyone is absurdity.
A 40 hour work-week is quite leisurely compared to the sun-up to sun-down 7-days/week of most rural folks I knew growing up. I couldn't wait to grow up and escape to the city where they had these things called weekends.
I grew up in the country, too. The only place I've ever encountered full working during daylight every day is on a farm—another technology that is unnatural. Truly, humans cannot comprehend freedom from society. However, our flight-or-fight responses give us some insight, and I'd put money on our stress rates being higher now than ever before. Regardless of whether there are threats, we perceive them everywhere.
Well, a lot stops me. Social life, love of culture, a lack of skills, and a taste for modern cooking. But I'm not advocating that; I'm advocating a look at progress based around sustainable, high quality of life. This involves actually making arguments for high quality of life, which is a very rare practice beyond mentioning technology. I think there's a lot to be said for non-materialist culture, if you can find a good way to encourage that, and families planned as well as we are able to.
So in other words the high quality of life which you have due to living in society is what stops you from leaving society for the higher quality of life outside of -- er wait, what?
I don't think I am advocating blindly pushing forwards.
Less crappy Apps, more fundamental research in sciences, more investment in clean energy, more "radical" politics that supports communities not commuting, more equality and diversity, better representation in politics, I probably should have a long list of specific policies (might be an idea) but "good work life balance, an appreciation for the natural world and the benefits it provides" is definitely in there. But so is antibiotics and not having wars.
You make a salient point, but I'm not sure Silicon Valley is unique in this regard, nor do I think "technology" is uniformly bent on accelerating resource consumption.
If you narrow your criticism you might find some insight worth sharing.
Your use of "bent on" seems to suggest intent, I'm not sure if that's what you meant.
I think you would be hard pressed to find an application of technology (in normal human terms, not the uptight definition of "applied knowledge") that does not consume resources.
Electronics in particular consume electricity which must be generated and stored, as well as refined mining products. The production of these resources also consumes additional resources. Distribution and eventual disposal likewise. All of these at a greater rate than would be consumed absent electronics.
You might consider these costs worth the benefits of having these electronics. Or you might, if you're more careful, pepper "some" throughout the prior sentence. Many of the impacts could certainly be reduced, but almost none of them can be eliminated.
Making things has a cost, often a greater cost than not making them. Dismissing that as insufficiently narrow for discussion is either ignorant or dishonest.
How many hours have been saved with people not getting lost (maps + gps) ... a few of my friends have called the coast guard to come rescue them. No idea if they would have died, but lets assume that some of those people with phones have used them to save a life.
An iPhone 6's dimensions are 5.44 x 2.64 x 0.27 inches. If you laid them flat on a football field, orienting them the same direction as the field, you could fit roughly 661 between in columns between endzones and 727 in rows between sidelines. That would give you a single "layer" of 480547 phones. To reach a billion, you'd need 2080 layers. At 0.27 inches thick, that would rise 561 inches into the air, or nearly 47 feet. That's a 4 story building plus an NBA player.
I believe the standard SI unit for this sort of thing is the Olympic swimming pool, but I think we can allow the use of football fields in a forum where many users are still familiar with the US customary system.
I guess at least 30% of them are not being used right now as they are not supported by the latest OS. What a waste.
The industry has a problem that we are not trying to optimize software so that we can do more with less hardware, instead, we make more powerful hardware to ousted old hardware, with the help of more complex software.
Many ended up in some landfill or lie in obscure drawers, but many of them may have been recycled/upcycled.
Say what you want about Apple but their recycling & sustainability program is really a gem. Lisa Jackson rocks.
"Learn about our efforts to prevent climate change, protect natural resources, and keep harmful toxins out of the ecosystem."
If they were really so concerned about the environment, they wouldn't push for new models year after year, but instead focus more on better software. Also they wouldn't hype their new models as "must haves" like they do now.
>If they were really so concerned about the environment, they wouldn't push for new models year after year, but instead focus more on better software. Also they wouldn't hype their new models as "must haves" like they do now.
They're more concerned about profits and selling units instead of "the stuff you've got is good enough".
How big is a billion? If you start counting and increment per second,it takes nearly 32 years (more than that) to complete. I think it's a big number for a product to sell that much. If you consider the world population, that makes it even more dramatic. Big accomplishment.
iPhone, iPad and Mac sales all have dropped; the iPhone drop was 50% greater (proportionally) than the Mac drop.
It's likely that Apple wants to continue to focus attention on the iPhone, not because of MBP sales, but because the iPhone continues to make up more than half of Apple's revenue (and probably a greater proportion of its profits).
ITT: people not understanding how much of an outlier 2015 has been.
By the way, last quarter Apple mad ~8bln in profits. Facebook made half of that. During the whole 2015.
I have an iPhone going back to 1 and I shuffle them around family members. There's no reason really to upgrade, but I'm surprised it took Apple this long considering the cult of Apple and the image factor.
Then I guess you will be without a phone. I am pretty sure Apple is one of the best companies in terms of supporting their old devices. My friend has a two year old android device and its pretty much unusable at this point. Iphone 4 was released 6+ years ago.
So do you really think AOSP/CyanogenMod support on some phones is a better user experience than OTA updates by the actual OS provider? Every iPhone introduce since 2011 is still supported with OS updates.
Err, right - and does Apple provide this "abstraction layer" you speak of? I'd hazard a guess and say no.
Or is it simply that their's is a closed ecosystem, with only 1 or 2 devices released a year, and they won't let you run their software on anything else?
The fact that Android runs on several hundred different phones from manufacturers around the globe, or that home hackers have managed to get it to run on the most obscure of devices is testament to its flexibility. So I'm not really sure where your argument is coming from.
Apple is a walled-garden, with a proprietary OS that literally will only run on their device. Even their SDK doesn't include an actual emulator for the platform - it's just a simulation.
I don't have any deep knowledge of phones - but I suspect it's not as simple as "Let's make VMWare for phones". Things like the cellular radio probably require low-level hardware access, the mobile tradeoffs (portability, battery life etc.) probably aren't conductive to virtualising everything, many parts of the silicon probably require binary blobs simply due to how the industry is etc
That problem is mostly because ARM SoCs don't even have the concept of a standardised bootloader or dynamic device discovery like x86 chipsets which means every SoC needs it's own custom bootloader and it's own custom kernel where the available devices must be hardcoded.
See basically any single board ARM computer which suffer from the exact same problem. This is why the community forms around the specific device rather than the architecture in general.
ARM's openness ironically makes it unsuitable as an open software plaftorm whereas on x86 you just put your iso on a flash drive and it works pretty much everywhere.
BIOS/UEFI might be bloated but at the very least it actually achieved what it set out to do, meanwhile we are still waiting for the ARM SoC manufacturers to adopt a standard.
> I had to trash a perfectly fine and working iPhone 4 because I was left with no security updates
Had to?
- You could have returned it to apple for recycling.
- You could have used it without a SIM as an iPod/Game device for a family member
- You could have used it without a SIM as a GPS device
- You could have used it as an ad-hoc home security camera
The list of things a slightly older iPhone can be used for beyond its purpose as a web-enabled phone is long.
As your primary concern was a lack of security updates from the vendor, and you're not satisfied with a device that received updates four years after release, and support by four major versions of it's OS, I assume your replacement phone will be a tin can connected to a long piece of string, as the main competition to the unsatisfactory device manufacturer, often ships devices with 2+ year old OS versions and literally no updates ever.
Would not care that much even if it happened, to be frank.
And I do have some old iPad lying around that I seldom bother to update at all, so 1-2 OSes might pass by before I do anything. It's at 7 IIRC, not even sure if it can go to 9.
The only thing that could take them off there perch is another revolutionary device showing up on the scene, but I think that won't happen for another decade.