I new thinner/larger design would be nice, but I'm totally happy with the iPhone 4 at the moment. It's one of the best built and best looking devices I own.
My friends have various android phones with huge screens. The size is nice but they feel like cheap plastic.
A hardware upgrade with CDMA and maybe NFC with the same design is welcome.
I can wait another year for a new design with the iPhone 5.
The only change I'd make is getting rid of the rear glass. It sounded like a bad idea and I have confirmed (twice) that it is a bad idea in practice. It compromises the device for style.
I agree. It's so pretty, but my oh my is it slippery. Of course the old 3g and 3gs were pretty slick too. I wish they'd make the apple logo rubber or something just to give it a little more friction. As it is it ends up sliding off of anything that's not exactly level.
My iPhone 4 has a couple of velcro strips (sewing section in WalMart) stuck on the back. This really helps with identifying back and front, and not sliding off sofa arms, and also lets me put it down quietly.
Plus it's useful if I want to attach it to things. Just arrange some velcro tie-wraps, and the iPhone will stick right on. Super convenient.
My bet is they skip NFC and go straight to Bluetooth 4.0, which includes Bluetooth low energy. They already went that direction with the new airs and minis.
I find it highly unlikely, however, that they would use the exact same image: they would change /something/ about it, whether it just be what the wallpaper is, to the angles of the shots. Given that this is actually the same filename being shared from the other product, it seems much more likely that they haven't put the final images in place yet.
At least for the computer icon in Mac OS, they haven't historically changed without visible design differences. I doubt they would handle iPhones differently.
Agreed. I see why they did the 3GS so that the iPhone 4 was the fourth generation. However, they can't do that here because then the iPhone 5 would in fact be the sixth generation iPhone, and I think Apple would realize the customer support headache introduced with that.
I'm slightly disappointed. The iPhone 4 is a beautiful and high quality device, but I have never liked the way the square edges feel in my hand. I would love to see a return to the 3G/S curved back design.
I disliked the square design until I started using FaceTime regularly. The perpendicular edges make it trivial to prop the phone up vertically for a call. I don't think it's a coincidence that the design changed when FaceTime was added.
The iPad has the SmartCover to prop it up. Also, given its size, I don't think it would be a good idea to try to stand it on it's edge alone no matter how square it was.
I have found it 100x better in stands and the like, and really like the grip compared to the rounded edged phones (I have huge palms and short fingers, so that may be related to it).
I feel bad for Tim Cook if he has to go out and re-announce a 14 month old product with a spec bump. Not a terribly exciting way to publicly start his new job. They also tried this before with mixed results. The 3GS sold fantastically for the first 6 months or so but it was the Q1/Q2 2010 time-frame where Android phones really took off in part because they simply had better hardware. It's possible that will happen again. There are already some higher resolution displays out there, probably quad-core processors by the end of the year or early next year, and LTE support. I can't help but feel like the 4S is going to look very last-generation in a few months and it won't help if it physically re-enforces this by looking last-generation also. It's a risky move when there's so much competition out there.
The hardware in an iPhone really isn't that important as long as the interface is responsive. Apple has consistently made choices that ensure that performance can be squeezed out of slower hardware. These include restrictions on iOS development (less abstraction in interface elements because of limited aspect ratios, restrictions on background processes and aggressive memory management) and hardware acceleration and optimization that comes from very limited hardware profiles. That's why an iPhone 4, with it's single 800mhz core, in most instances feels as fast as the dual core, higher-clocked Android phones that have come out since its introduction.
"The 3GS sold fantastically for the first 6 months or so but it was the Q1/Q2 2010 time-frame where Android phones really took off in part because they simply had better hardware."
That isn't borne out in sales numbers. Apple sales continued to grow during Q1/Q2 2010, and in Q2 2010 Apple sold more iPhones than any previous quarter, even with the (very publicly) impending launch of the iPhone 4. Android sales were also growing rapidly during that time, and that is the period where Android unit sales passed up iPhone unit sales. However, that is more likely due to the availability of competitive Android phones on all the rival networks (iPhone was still AT&T only at that point) during the time when smartphones hit mass popularity.
To be fair, the practical difference between 3G and 3GS is huge, at least more so than between 2G and 3G. 3G and 3GS look the same, but the former barely got (insultingly bad) support for iOS4 and the latter one is happily running iOS5.
Makes sense - Apple's using an Intel-like tick/tock release approach. Coming out with a brand new industrial design every year is expensive, since Apple opts for glass/aluminum nowadays rather than plastic.
From what I hear from my insider friends, the next iPhone has actually been ready for months, they just didn't want to release it so close to the iPhone 4. In fact, they are almost done with the next next version of the phone, but don't expect to see it for at lest a year.
Until someone provides some real competition to the iPhone, they really have no reason to rapidly release new models.
Maybe Apple is segmenting iPhones into the cheaper and the more expensive version being iPhone 4S and iPhone 5. The iPhone 4S will be enough for most and may feature less space for music and apps (8GB) and the iPhone 5 will be the bigger devices (16, 32 & 64 GB).
You object to his dialect, but not to his sentence fragment? :) There are some interesting discussions on "anyway", "anyways" and "anywise" out there, but all three forms have been around for centuries.
Not Apple's case designs. It wouldn't be the first time manufacturers had produced cases for Apple products that they then had to bin when the product was released as they got the form factor wrong.
If Apple's own cases got leaked that would be noteworthy. But a lot of manufacturers are currently placing a bet, because they want to have product on the shelves for day 1 of launch. That bet may be based of various things coming out of Chinese factories, but it's nowhere certain.
And he goes on to talk about the iPhone 4s and the iPhone 5. Apple, as usual, keeps everyone on the edge of their seats.
My personal take is that Apple should just do the iPhone 4s. In head to head sales, the iPhone 4 still kills everyone else. I'd let it get a little staler -- and then drop the iPhone 5 say in June of next year.
They can do the tick-tock, like Intel. One year, new design, next year use better components. And they can have the iPad and iPhone tick/tock on opposing years.
If they plan to ship one or two phone models and upgrade them every two years, they had better have lots of patents, because they certainly won't be able to compete in a fair marketplace.
"The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough. These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months."
"And its survival in the computer business relies on good margins. Those margins cannot exist in the mobile handset business for more than 15 minutes."
Dvorak is basically a guy who gets press because his name is similar to a keyboard layout, but actually unrelated to him in all ways.
He's basically a nonsense generator, and always has been. I feel he'll someday retire and write a autobiography about how he was trolling us all for his entire career then start a second act as a comedy writer.
I don't see that the design of other popular SmartPhones has radically changed much in the last year or so either. We're at the point where the SmartPhone is pretty much a finished product. There will be spec bumps, software improvements, and some small arbitrary design changes but it can't get much bigger or smaller, it can't get much thinner before holding the device in your hands becomes difficult, and it's unlikely it will get radically lighter due to the weight of the battery. What else is left? We're really talking about very small changes that probably don't have much, if any, impact on the market. The 14 month old iPhone 4 is still the single best selling model of SmartPhone with the 26 month old 3GS coming in at number two.
What Apple does need is a competitor to the 4-4.5" Android devices. According to the rumors that's what the iPhone 5 was supposed to be. If they have to go another 12 months without a competitor they will probably continue to lose more marketshare. If you look at the sales of Android phones they are almost all 4-4.5" devices so you could say it's the fastest growing segment of the SmartPhone market. Hard to say if people are buying them because they are increasingly the only option for an Android phone or if they prefer the bigger size. Either way it's probably safe to say a significant chunk of the SmartPhone market wants the bigger size.
Apple had been releasing new iPhones like clockwork every 11-13 months, but this model is late. The iPhone 4S/5 hardware is rumored to have been completed months ago, but held up by iOS 5 bug fixing. I would expect Apple to try hard to get back on schedule for 2012.
* iPhone 1 @ June 2007
* iPhone 3G @ July 2008 (13 months)
* iPhone 3GS @ June 2009 (11 months)
* iPhone 4 @ June 2010 (12 months)
* iPhone 4S/5 @ October 2011 (16 months)
