I think if you read in between the lines you can understand the generally underwhelmed reaction to the iPhone 5. There isn't anything on the iPhone 5 that feels like a step forward for mobile computing. The biggest change is the change in screen size, which is awkward and driven by keeping up with consumer expectation.
An NFC chip. Apple already has Passbook - imagine if that were NFC-enabled. I want to be able to use my phone to enter my home and workplace, to board transportation systems, and to pay for everything. And it isn't as if I would have purchased an iPhone if they had included NFC, but more that Apple has such a widespread and mainstream user base and such collaborations with Passbook-supporting businesses that "NFC everywhere" might stop being a dream.
Seconded. I can't think of any huge, groundbreaking features that have been included in, say, new laptops over the last 10 years. Faster, thinner, lighter, better battery life, nicer displays, what more do you want? It's turning into a software game.
I would say SSD replacing disk drives has been the most jarring performance improvement. It's really a night-and-day, sudden difference. But yes, that's not a new feature, per se.
Thirded. And I think is the year smartphones finally reached something like feature and quality parity with each other. Sensor sets are mostly universal, few cameras embarrass themselves anymore, battery life is all in the same ballpark, etc...
The market is in no way stalling out, but really, the next "obvious" hardware feature isn't so obvious anymore. Putting these in the hands of five billion people is what's next.
The fact that nobody at Fox questioned it before the reportage aired is a sign of two things:
1. Fox News isn't the pinnacle of journalism, to put it mildly (seriously, how can the whole team miss the almost over-published iPhone 5 announcement details and instead find a old mockup video?).
2. Technology has come a long long way when holographic images are just considered a "cool new feature" by the average Joe. It's amazing how fast technology has changed our lives, what was total magic just ten tears ago is almost taken for granted now.
Well if I pick one thing it might seem a little silly - if I was apple I'd want to have implemented something and found it to have worked and be ready to go with it. But I think speed to access is a big deal, so maybe wake on swipe and or voice. Perhaps an api for lock screen apps - not so much a hardware thing, but I don't think Apple should care about that.
What would constitute a "step forward for mobile computing"? For me, it'd be having the computing power of MacBook Pro on an iPhone. For example, I would hook up—or more likely, wirelessly connect—this hypothetical iPhone to a desktop monitor and run OS X. Arguably, this is 3-5 years down the line and only if Apple pursues this line of thinking.
Well here's a list of directions, with the caveat that you'd actually have to try some of these to see what worked. Improving safari with smart 'readability'-esque relayout engine. Safari performance for webkit. Widgets. Lock screen apps. Built in speech-to-text api. Flutter like non-touching gestures and interaction. Augmented reality api - with maps data. A todo app and api/data store (ok you'd make a million app developers cry with that one). iCloud for data.
Of course some of these are available as third-party apps and apis. Some would suck (widgets for one probably). But I don't believe we're anywhere near running out of things to innovate on to make mobile computing worthwhile/suck-less.
I was thinking on phone processing of speech, not sure how much difference it would make. The point of that list isn't that those things don't exist, but they are areas where Apple could push hardware, operating system and web services in order to do something innovative in mobile computing.
The biggest problem with iOS is the siloing of apps. A task-centric UI just makes so much more sense and sharing information and functionality among different apps is so incredibly awkward for the user and developer.
Both Android and WP are much better in this regard but there's still a lot of room for improvement.
Please god no. Xcode is miserably slow on a 2011 Macbook Air. I don't even want to think about running it on something with a small fraction of that horsepower.
There's not much stopping Apple from enabling this right now but maybe they see the developer market as a way of generating more Mac sales? Look at the $35 Raspberry Pi - it has a HDMI port and runs Linux, with a fraction of the power of the iPhone 5.
