Foxconn churns out '150,000' iPhone 5s a day The word out of Taiwan is that the iPhone 5 is now being churned out of Foxconn Electronics sweatshops factories at a rate of 150,000 per day, and that five to six million of the li'l fellows will be shipped by the end of September. Not a bad run-rate for a product that has yet even to be announced by Apple – although the …
Wishful thinking. In fact i'll put money on it that there are people 'stupid' enough to buy millions of these - probably 22 million in fact in the next quarter.
Get your head out of the technical press and go walk around the streets and you'll see loads of 'stupid' people. Certainly on my packed commute it's an extreme novelty to see someone without and iPhone 4. I don't see then moaning to their comrades about the antenna or tracking......
The iPhone never sent data back to Apple, it merely stored it unencrypted on the device. You must be thinking of Android (the ultimate war driving device) and WinPhone6.x, both of which did.
You need to turn your hatred of Apple down a notch and try and keep to the facts.
As for the aerial issues. I know 10 people with iPhone 4s, none of whom report this issue. % of them have managed to break the glass face of them though! A bigger problem IMHO
Dweeb
Tracking is a non-issue since the police just get the info direct from the telcos anyway without a middleman.
But regarding aerial issues ... as happy(-ish) as I am with my iPhone 4, I don't get as strong or reliable a signal as my wife's Nokia 5800 does in the same location.
Annecdotal of course but, to use the vernacular, just sayin'.
Keep the brew bubbling with a little stir just to get the noxious odour of rotten apples in the air. Meh!
I loved my iPhone 3g but then fell behind with the payments. Not to my phone provider but to Apple. You see I didn’t upgrade to a 3gs, or a 4 and so each little update that comes out each month makes me and my phone just a bit more obsolete (and slow!) Every application takes an age to open and when I went into the Covent Garden Apple store their first question was “is it updated?” When I said yes, that was the problem he just looked at me with pity whilst pushing an iPad towards me. Bastard.
No, contract is up in December and I’m going Galaxy S2 and Apple can rot.
PS - What a twat. How many things can he advertise hoping to get more free things? Pah!
So your problem is that the 3G has insufficient support from Apple? Hahahahahahahahahaha
You realize that people buy brand spanking new Android phones frequently don't get the latest version of the OS, and indeed frequently can't ever upgrade to the latest version without rooting the device and voiding the warranty?
Complain about the fragility of the iPhone-4, or the price, or the lack of an SD card or any number of things and you may have a point - but in terms of after sales OS support Apple is without question ahead of the Android pack.
I was wondering about the 3G viability in iOS 4+. I had a refurbished 3G until last year, but it finally gave up the ghost after I cracked the screen*. So I got an iPhone 4, but I had held my 3G to iOS 3.x up to that point.
Having shelled out $300 for a no-contract/no-subsidy crap Nokia 3600, not even on S60 3 yrs ago, I can kinda see the extra value a $675 no-contract/no-subsidy iPhone 4 has**. The Nokia salesperson had the gall to answer my questions about missing features on the 66xx with "what do you expect? it's not expensive". Yeah, right.
However, I can only really see that level of spending if I keep a phone 3+ years. Plus, I don't like putting electronics in landfill. So what worries me is iOS running ahead of older models, esp as the iOS 4x. was being forced on 3G. I don't mind missing out on new features, including apps that don't work with older OS versions, but I resent being forced to upgrade.
My other big concern is battery life. Apple is really, really, getting on my nerves with their non-replaceable batteries.
So, how do other users feel about smartphone longevity? In iPhone and Android land.
* FWIW, I dropped my iPhone 4 last weekend doing 50km/h cycling downhill. No protective cover, because it did not work with the headphones I was wearing***. Screen is nuked. Phone works fine - I am taking it in for repair today.
**(My decision, for those who like to criticize how others spend their money).
*** Yes, I was stupid. Wasn't wearing a helmet either, same reason.
A couple of months ago, I heard that there were 550,000 new Androids being registered a day (not counting re-registering of reset older ones). What is the figure now?
I suppose, if we discount the older or less powerful ones that are not a fair comparison with an iPhone, it might be better - somewhere between a third and a half of the number of new Androids.
I suspect that Android users tend to wait until the end of the contract before replacing. iPhone users I have talked to pay extra to get the newest toy when it comes out.
Why do we pay so much attention to this overpriced fashion accessory? I thought this was a technology blog.
Yes I want one, yes my contract expired months ago, yes I'm ready for a new phone, but ENOUGH already!
How much more of this do we have to listen to?
If I didn't like my iPhone as much as I did, this incessant rumor mongering would put me off it altogether. I'm loath to read the Register now for fear of more redundant iPhone 5 news.
... but I've noticed something er, funny, about the ongoing iPhone fanbois/haters wars.
I've read several messages with the gist of "apple buyers are idiots and I would never ever ever buy one even if it is cheap or free with plan blahblahblah why don't sheeple obey me instead of Steve Jobs wahwahwah", but I am yet to see an equally eloquent message about buying it at whatever cost no matter what... guess the haters forgot to take their medication.
OK, I get it, Apple's gizmos are all the rage etc. etc.
BUT: There was a time when having an iPhone could mean some sort of exclusivity, a sense of belonging to a club of select few, the in crowd, yada yada yada.
Right now, at the numbers this thing is selling is more like queuing up for a Volkswagen rather than brandishing a bespoke, customized, limited edition Aston Martin. So what gives?
iPhone now, is as mass market box as it gets. Hell, Volkswagen (occasionally) even gives you a choice of colours....
When you know that all/most of your friends have the same phone as you, and access to the same apps, that work in the same way, you can get more out of an iPhone, than say someone who has a 3gs surrounded by people with Androids.
"so plentiful - you'd think they'd be cheaper."
It's called supply and demand - when you can sell every one you make there is not much incentive to drop the price (quite the opposite).
I really don't know why so many people hate Apple - if you don't want their products DON'T BUY THEM but the fact is lots of people do want their products. The problem is these forums end up the ranting place of a vocal minority of people who probably all work for Samsunk (sorry Samsung but I could not resist leaving that typo in).
I agree, I'm no Apple fan, and haven't bought one, but the amount of hatred about the product itself is a bit much. From what I have seen of it, it's rather good. I'm sure there are other phones as good out there too.
I'm more of a 'don't like the way Apple do business' person, rather than a inveterate hater of the product itself.
I have worked for Samsung, and Nokia btw. My Samsung phone is crap, but impressed by the latest Nokia's.
@Anonymous Coward - If I hate Apple I'm blatantly not going to buy their products - thanks for your sage advice there.
What I dislike about Apple is the fact that their products are so 'mickey mouse' - but not content with providing functionally deficient devices, they proceed to charge the earth for it. I suppose the fact that so many people are prepared to buy these things (when HTC are producing far more functional products for much lower prices) underlies the fact that there are so many stupid people about.
And I hate stupid people. Don't you? They get in the way and cost us money.
I hate stupid people, ergo I hate Apple.
There's your answer.
I'm confused; HTC's high-end devices are usually about the same price as the iPhone de Jour; on contract, some of them, notably the Thunderbolt in the US, are actually more expensive. HTC, of course, competes in the low-end market, too; they still make some ARMv6 devices, even! Apple doesn't touch this.
Aren't they getting old?
Clearly many people like iPhones and MacBook Airs. Give us a break! Damn it I love UNIX, Linux and good technology in general, and I have an iPhone 4. I run Linux on some computers at home, Mac OS X on others and love the fact that I can open bash on both and type most of the same commands. They are not toys, they are not for stupid people, they are just devices that work, and work pretty well if you ask me.
I have absolutely nothing agains Android. Nothing. Zero. I had a Nexus One and used it for a few months until I unfortunately lost it on a drinking binge, but I _personally_ (that means me, not everybody else) prefer the iPhone user interface. I program in low-level embedded C and assembly during the day and still use an iPhone because when I use a phone I do not want to open a shell and start churning out code, for that I have computers at home.
I can't believe all the Apple bashing after all they've contributed to open source (WebKit, LLVM) and after the fact that they have taken a UNIX based operating system and made popular to the masses. Would you rather have Microsoft and their crufty, 20-year old APIs rule the mobile world too?
We cannot have it all, what we have is not so bad after all.
I know what you mean. Working in IT people get surprised that I'm not rabidly pro/anti MS/Linux. I remember the IT manager at a previous place was so rabidly pro MS that he actually had a visible look of hatred on his face if you ever mentioned the fact that we had a single Linux machine at one of the sites that couldn't be disposed of as it ran the site's entire document management system. I personally started as an engineer, so I don't care about the OS or the manufacturer, my concern is usability and cost of ownership. Personally I now have an iPhone4. Reason? My old Sony Ericsson has a major design flaw that the Carphone Warehouse insists is my fault. I refuse to use Sony Ericsson again for that reason (the fault is present in all of their USB charged phones) and the iPhone just does what I need it to do with no issues.
I am exactly the same, happy to use whatever is to hand if it does the job I want but Jebus H! If we have to be quiet about it. If we start making too much sense the Police will be round wondering what's wrong with us, it might catch and then other people will start making sense!!!
DO YOU REALLY WANT THAT ON YOUR CONSCIENCE?! DO YOU?!?!!
MY GOD THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!
The Find My iPhone* app (*and, critically, also works with wifi-only iPods) wouldn't work without the devices making themselves visible to Apple on a predictable schedule on the timescale of a minute.
Furthermore, I've seen otherwise inexplicable "Apple.com" in the browser's address bar while trying to get past hotels' Terms & Conditions pages on their free wifi hotspot. Evidence of a check-in to home base.
Based on the above, I simply assume that Apple.com is tracking my location (network, probably not GPS due to battery limits).
So, based on your misunderstanding of how the Find My iPhone thing works, you simply assume that Apple is tracking your location?
Find My iPhone's workings are not a secret; if you were curious you could just have Googled. What happens is, all iPhones keep a constant XMPP connection open to Apple for push notifications and various other things. (Androids do the same to Google for C2DM and marketplace stuff). When you go to the website and ask it to tell you the device's location, Apple sends a message to the phone over that connection. In response, the phone activates its GPS and sends back coordinates. Apple is not receiving your phone's location on a regular basis; only when you ask them to relay it to you.
Incidentally, Google is far more likely to know an Android user's rough location than Apple is to know an iPhone user's. Google's AdMob service, the mobile advertising market leader, offers location-based advertising. This is almost never used in iPhone apps (because it causes a dialog popping up asking if the app should be given permission to access location data), but is more commonly used in Android apps, where permission to access location data is granted in the big list of permissions on installation. There's nothing particularly sinister about Google collecting this data, of course.
As for the hotel thing, well, surely a rather _unsubtle_ check-in to home base, if it was one? I've never seen this myself, but I suspect it could be that Apple provides a service to hotels to send proxy config data to client devices, or something of that nature.
Well, yes; given that they were activating 380k per day last quarter, 150k is nothing like enough. Apple has traditionally struggles to meet demand on release. 150k a day will build up a bit of a reserve for a launch next month, but only a week or so's worth. They'll have to wait for Pegatron's production to come online to meet demand longterm.
As for pricing, same as high-end Androids. They're highly unlikely to make the 5 more expensive than the 4.
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