Apple in XS new sensation: Latest iPhone carries XS-sive price tag Apple on Wednesday held its annual mobile device pageant at its Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino to acquaint the fascinated with its latest fondleslabs, phones and wrist wraps. Despite the secrecy – which failed after developer Steve Troughton-Smith found Apple's products listed in an XML file on the company's website – and the …
When they studied the falls were they fake ones onto a crash mat or were they real ones with video or some kind of validation? Also, were they young or old people falling?
I've been involved in clinical trials with accelerometers and detecting falls is very hard; not to mention the liability from missed falls and also false alarms.
It will be interesting to see what the percentage of false alarms turns out to be as well as other statistics such as whether it can detect car crashes and the number of people who party a little too hard and pass out.
Siri, how many folks are passed out at the pub this evening?
@tea hound,
True, but you have to send it in, and Apple don't guarantee that you get your own phone back (they tell you that you must back it up in its entirety and then factory reset it and turn 'Find my iDevice' off).
Given that I have some items in the secure enclave on the phone that I *really* *really* don't want to have to reset, I am loathe to swap the phone unless it's an upgrade. :-/
Call me a... What exactly do you call someone like me? ;-)
Surely I'm not the only person underwhelmed by this? The only one that looks at this and sees nothing more than incremental change?
The whole smartphone market really has reached the point where it's flat, dull, and stable - which has to pose a problem when you're trying to shift phones at $1000+ a pop.
Yep, it's boring, but that's not a bad thing. It's the difficulty in bringing anything radically new to a pocket device (size and power constraints) that forces designers to look at the small details. Polishing away lots of little niggles can lead to a markedly better user experience over time. Or in Apple's case, include long missing g features such as waterproofing, wireless charging and multiple SIM support (this isn't a jibe, Apple have done done things first too, and often find them very well. I don't see value in being first for the sake of being first, but some features were long overdue).
Look at Samsung - very little difference between the S8 and S9 other than the finger print sensor has been made slightly less awkward. Otherwise it's just a slightly better screen, slightly faster processor, slightly this, slightly that. And that's okay.
If you want a crazy radical phone, wait til next year when Samsung and some if their Chinese partners roll out some phones with flexible displays. But the first generation with likely be clunky, poorly supported in software and not proven to be durable. I'll take boring.
"Surely I'm not the only person underwhelmed by this? The only one that looks at this and sees nothing more than incremental change?"
To be fair, the jump to $1500 for a phone is a pretty big increment.
"The whole smartphone market really has reached the point where it's flat, dull, and stable"
People tend to comment on it now being a mature market, but I'm not convinced it wasn't born mature. My very first smartphone was an HTC Hero. Obviously the underlying hardware and software has improved since then, but I can't point at anything missing that would distinguish it from a modern phone. Hell, it has a removable battery, 3.5mm socket and accepts SD cards, so it's actually well ahead of many of them.
It's not really smartphones and the market that have changed, but rather society. When smartphones were new, people saw them as exciting shiny things, and were happy to buy new ones regularly because they were even newer and shinier, even though they didn't actually bring anything new to the table. Now, they're just ubiquitous tools. Upgrades are no more or less meaningful than they used to be, most people simply stopped giving a shit.
only if the shark stays within 2 metres of the surface, and not submerged for longer than 30 minutes.
Flying sharks should be ok, as long as the impact of re-entering the water isnt too great.
The laser beams are neither energetic nor particularly noticeable - otherwise the 'duckface unlock' feature would be far more amusing.
Attachment to the shark can be achieved using a range of adhesives, strapping, or my personal favourite, a nine inch railway spike driven by a sledgehammer - although this may cause some discomfort to the shark.
Can I use it to tell the time?
OK, enough said, that's all I want.
No honestly, that's what I want a watch to do, I want it to tell me the time.
Anything else?
Errrr yes, OK, it you insist, I don't want to worry about the batter more than say once every 5 years or so.
Yawn. Can I go back to sleep now?
Anything else??"
I'm a much more demanding user than you. I want a watch to tell me not just the time but the date too!
I wound have been with you up until a couple of years ago. Sadly I can now only read the date on my watch when I'm wearing my glasses.
Same here - I'll be sorting out a replacement battery for my 6S+ before the cheap offer ends in December. That should keep me going for a few more years yet. If it hadn't been for the removal of the headphone socket I'd probably have updated to the iPhone 7S 8 last year. It might be a small point for some but I found the early smart phones (HTC and iPhone that I know of, and I'm sure others) use of a standard headphone socket refreshing and genuinely useful compared to the Nokia practice of every handset using a different proprietary standard for the headset connector.
I'm just tired of the rehashed arguments against the headphone socket, "It's an obsolete standard", "use bluetooth headphones", "use the lightning to 3.5 jack adaptor", "It's brave innovation".
"It might be old but it's not obsolete - comparisons with floppy disks are misleading (floppy disk storage capacity was long eclipsed by user requirements but audio can still travel along copper wires that terminate in a jack plug which connects to near enough any audio device)", "I don't want to spend money on new headphones to replace my Sennheiser HD-25s that will be something else that needs regular charging, plus carrying another charger", "Why should I need an adaptor for the basic action of listening to music on a fucking £700+ phone?", "removing useful functionality is not innovation (unless you're Apple)".
@MrBanana
A grand is expensive - but is it too much? I’m not sure that it is. Bear with me on this. I’m about to indulge in some high octane devils advocacy.
Once upon a time (the 1980s) a mobile phone cost as much as a car, a ‘humble’ ZX Spectrum cost the equivalent of 800 nicker (and still didn’t have any built in storage or a display). These costs covered R&D for hardware, R&D for software, manufacture (not in a sweatshop) and this mysterious thing called a ‘profit’.
Nowadays, ‘free’ or as close to as possible is the preferred price point. No one wants to pay for software and shitty, cheaply built, hardware rules the roost. Sure, it doesn’t last long - it who cares? It was cheap! Yay! Many mobile phone manufacturers don’t make a profit - it’s a loss leader (for whom though, I wonder) and I wonder why they bother. Similarly, I can’t see the profit in a sub £100 tablet, and still these things get shovelled from sweatshop to landfill with a brief interlude with user.
So I look back to the 1980s, when everything was better and we could cheerfully sing ‘Hold a Chicken in the Air’ whilst walking to the Grundig rental store because the telly wasn’t working and the Ford Orion has broken down again. Prices were higher, adjusted for inflation, but they were the right price - and it seems to me that competition today has driven prices to being too damn cheap.
So yes, these new phones are expensive, no I can’t afford one (but, luckily, my iPhone siX is still quick and works perfectly) - but I don’t think that these new phones are too pricey for what they are. I’m sure that they’ll sell by the boatload - and look on the bright side, they’ll probably be cheaper than whatever gets pushed out next year!
Average 5 pints of beer per week in a pub for a year £1000
Two reasonable bottles of red wine per week for a year: £1000
Cost of a 20 a day fag habit for a year £2000
Cost of gym membership for a year £600
Cost of a latest model iPhone if sold on after 1 or 2 years about £200
Seems to me that iPonies (and most Apple products) hold their value much better than this in the secondhand market.
Post not clear enough and open to misinterpretation. £200 is how much it will cost the original buyer. For example, pay £1000 for it, sell it for £800. Assuming they buy the phone, as for many the cost price is irrevelant, they will buy it on a contract and have to wait to the end of their deal to recover the value in the phone.
The main point being that because of its secondhand value a latest model iPhone will cost its buyer-from-new only a couple of hundred quid in depreciation. All these people choking on their kebabs at the price didn't think too deeply about it.
certainly used to be the case, but i was (out of sheer curiosity) having a look around the webs this morning, to see how much i could sell my 64gb 6s, should i chose to, err, 'upgrade'. i was seeing offers between £80 and £100.
OK, the 6s is now (counts on fingers) 5 generations old (!) (6s,7, 8, x, xs), but, as many others have said, still works fine, so i will be keeping it for now, and talking to the previous poster about what sounded like a beer subscription service.
@werdsmith: "Cost of a latest model iPhone if sold on after 1 or 2 years about £200"
"BRITISH PEOPLE SPEND OVER £680 MILLION EVERY YEAR FIXING BROKEN PHONE SCREENS, SURVEY CLAIMS"
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/broken-phone-screen-fix-iphone-cost-price-uk-a8536236.html
FO? With bells on!
I use my phone as a phone. I have a couple of simple apps like a scientific calculator, periodic table, tables for ASCII and Hex character equivalents and little things like that, but I'm not going to do photo of video editing on the damn thing. I've had dual sim capability for years and I like having a physical sim which lets me swap it quickly over to a replacement phone or pull out my "home" sim and replace it with a 30-day sim when I travel to a different country. Cheap phones also let me have one or two spares on hand in case. Music? iPod. SatNav? Garmin. The SatNav doesn't throw up a window covering the map when the phone rings and if I run the battery flat listening to music, I can still make a phone call.
Please tell me that this can be turned off. The last time apple did this, they did it badly. They installed an easy to call the emergency services using the same shortcut that used to be for respring (essentially, stop apps and reload the interface, but don't reboot), which could be useful if you were developing an app that had bugs and caused the phone to lag. So, I ended up on the phone talking to the emergency dispatcher who did not need to hear from me, and my phone was still laggy and required a force restart. If I was crazy enough to have the apple watch, what would happen if I dropped it on a desk, or I set it down to charge but accidentally knocked it off the table, or I dropped it somewhere where I couldn't get it, such as through a grate? I don't want to burden the emergency services with a bunch of useless calls.
I was assisting a guy with a large hold in him and pulled out an iPhone to call the cavalry, only to find the battery had run out...
Thankfully, I knew the battery was crap and also took out my cheap Android phone which has my old UK number and was able to get him the help he needed.
"As emergency call will be useless without GPS turned on"
Well, not necessarily. If you're connected to your phone and GPS in turned on on it, then the watch can still know your position from the phone. Also, even if you're not with your watch, it's possible that the watch is smart enough to turn on GPS itself if it needs it in an emergency, then off again after it's made the call (speculation on my part, but that's the obvious solution to the problem).
I've mentioned several times that I do volunteer work for seniors. One of them recently bought one of those fall alarm / panic switch type devices, with my help picking it out. She's an artist, paints portraits, mostly of bearded men (yes, she's done one of me). When we were discussing the pros and cons of wrist mounted versus pendant around the neck style, I pointed out that waving her arm around like she was painting broad brush strokes, might be misinterpreted as wildly waving your arms around as you fall down. My comment was accompanied by appropriate mimed arm movements. She went with a pendant.
It can be programmed with five numbers, it'll call each in sequence until it gets a result. The recommended sequence is family members, trusted friends, doctor / nurse / other designated care person, then emergency services if all else fails. Those five designated numbers can also phone the device, but otherwise doesn't allow incoming or outgoing calls.
The only ongoing cost is for the SIM and phone calls (depending on plan).
I can't recall the battery life, but way longer than 18 hours, that's pitiful. Yes, it has a GPS, water proof, and other features I can't recall off the top of my head.
She is very pleased with her new pendant, and has been extolling it's virtues to the other seniors. Two of them where complaining about their devices being broken, so they need to buy new ones. I pointed out to them they should probably buy a different brand, those brands are obviously not robust.
People are enthusiastic about BXactions - an app that lets you remap that Bixby hardware button. I haven't got it working though for some reason (it requires plugging into a computer to unlock its features, and this stage fails for me. Possibly an antivirus clash. I'm finding I can't be arsed fault finding computers these days).
I'm surprised other phone vendors aren't providing a spare hardware button or two and letting users map them to common features such as Flashlight or Pause Audio.
"a spare hardware button or two and letting users map them to common features such as Flashlight or Pause Audio."
A built in feature of my current phone is movement gestures. Shaking it sideways twice turns the flashlight on and off, I don't have to fumble for a button in the dark. I use that a lot, it's a well practiced gesture now. I can whip it out of my pocket and have the light on before I've finished pointing it in the general direction of where I need the light. Other gestures and functions are available, but that's the one I actually use.
Some of us are getting older and as a consequence need larger letters on a screen. That makes a 6 inch plus screen almost a requirement but NOT at Apple prices - my 6.1 Inch screen phone only cost €195 and does everything I want and it has dual SIMs and a replaceable battery.
Feature complete Photoshop is coming to iOS next year - on iPads. The issue with a desktop on a small screen is obvious. The DEX system is handy for niche use cases, but only where you know you'll have a monitor, keyboard and cables ready.
Since Apple haven't even brought the Apple Pencil to iPhones, their policy of distinguishing phones from tablets (which are becoming laptop like) remains clear. They'd like you to buy both.
- sent from from DEX compatible Samsung.
Feature complete Photoshop is coming to iOS next year - on iPads. The issue with a desktop on a small screen is obvious.
I've been using Lightroom on an iPad for a while and it's surprisingly good, to the point that I use my desktop PC much less. On the iPhone, I find it a bit painful as the screen is too small so there are a lot of "clicks" to get to each menu item (admittedly this is on a 5S).
I don't understand the fetish for FaceID, which is annoying at best and absolutely useless when I'm in the car and Siri tells me she can't do something because my phone is locked (so yeah, thanks Siri, you know it's my voice but you can't unlock the damn phone based on that). I had the iPhone X for about three days before it was returned because it basically became useless while driving and I was having to pull the thing out of my pocket and hold it up to my face for three seconds to check a text.
I don't care about the price, or the size. I care about "technology moving on" (that's a quote from Apple sales) when it's not really moving on. So instead of just pressing my digit against the sensor, that old technology has been dispensed with, and we've moved on to make my phone more useless in the car, and more difficult to use on the go.
My iPhone 7 Plus is probably good for a while longer, but if TouchID doesn't come back next year I'll be going back to Android.
I had the iPhone X for about three days before it was returned because it basically became useless while driving and I was having to pull the thing out of my pocket and hold it up to my face for three seconds to check a text..
Perhaps being a pain in the arse to check a text while driving is a good thing.
I had the iPhone X for about three days before it was returned because it basically became useless while driving and I was having to pull the thing out of my pocket and hold it up to my face for three seconds to check a text..
Hold phone button on steering wheel down for 2 seconds, wait for beep and then say "read last message" to hear the message read out to you by a nice voice over your loudspeakers.
Saves you getting spotted checking your text and points on your licence.
Wait and see how the under the screen fingerprint readers mature. The OnePlus 6T will have one. There's optical ways of doing it, and ultrasonic ways - the latter Apple has some interest in. Though of course they have patents, exclusivity deals and interests in many things they don't end up using in products.
But checking a text whilst driving? Maybe investigate a text to speech accessibility function.
I had the iPhone X for about three days before it was returned because it basically became useless while driving and I was having to pull the thing out of my pocket and hold it up to my face for three seconds to check a text.
A quick google search found this answer:
From your post, I understand that you are not able to ask Siri to read your incoming text messages while you are driving; you are being prompted to unlock your iPhone. I’m happy to help you troubleshoot this situation!
From what you have stated, it sounds like you may have Messages previews disabled. Navigate to Settings > Notifications, Messages > and adjust Show Previews to Always. After making this adjustment, test this functionality again.
I just tested this on my iPhone X with latest iOS 11 and it works as advertised.
Woah everyone. I understand that sentence wasn't properly claused there, my bad - I don't check texts or emails while I'm driving. :) Thinking about it, if I didn't care about having my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel, I probably wouldn't be bothered with having to hold the phone up and use FaceID.
But I do use the phone for maps, traffic alerts, music, radio when I go out of antenna range, etc. I can make and receive calls via the steering wheel, and move between songs, but that's it. Most things Siri tells me I need to unlock my phone for - or the worst one, when she tells me I can't ask about traffic alerts while I'm driving so I have to unlock the phone and check manually (this is me, asking Siri to tell me about traffic on SH1 and she tells me she can't do that while I'm driving). Right now with the iPhone 7, I can just lean over and do that stuff like I would on the car stereo's LCD. With the iPhone X, that was impossible - I'm having to enter in my passcode instead. It went back because that wasn't a safe situation.
The text and email thing - that's me walking down the street and losing the ability to discreetly pull the phone out of my pocket to check text and emails. I turned off screen lock screen previews for those for privacy reasons. iPhone 7, I can pull it out and press TouchID; iPhone X, I have to pull it out of my pocket and hold it up to my face.
Headphones I can live without. Sure you can get nearly free basic headphones, but is that an issue when you're spending $1k on a phone?
I've been purely Bluetooth user for the last 10 years or so. My noise cancelling Bose headphones were rather expensive but the battery life is measured in days and they also work very well with my laptop and other stuff.
My beef with these new phones is the big form factor. They're just unwieldy. And just fucking pricey.
I use 3.5mm a lot in my car. I use 3.5 mm earbuds or headphones when I'm working. I hate catching the cable on things and having the buds pulled from my ears. Grr. Haven't yet invested in decent Bluetooth buds or cans.
Don't know where all my half decent wired buds are. They disappear like socks or 10mm spanners.
"...The Series 4 will also notify wearers if their heart rate is too low or if atrial fibrillation is detected."
Attention: Your heart has stopped. Please acknowledge by saying, "Siri. Leave me alone. I'm already dead." Also. Be advised that your death will result in the revocation of all rights to all media that you may have "purchased" (sic, LOL) through iTunes.
"A $900 CPU and camera jammed into a $99 phone is just what I was looking for," said nobody. Why is 64 GB storage and 3GB RAM even an option anymore? Do iPhone users huddle around WiFi access points and urban cell towers so their cloud apps never stop working? What is a super-fast CPU expected to do when the rest of the phone might not have enough memory for gaming, augmented reality, or anything else that might be fun?
Oh right, just upgrade the storage. Apple's only charging $350 for a workable 512GB.
Eh? Music files haven't drastically increased in size, so what would you use all that storage for? Even movies are only a few GB a piece, how many do you need to watch on your commute between your home WiFi and the hotel? People use Netflicks these days. iPhone RAM quantity hasn't been a bar to games on the platform, nor to AR, an area Apple are active in. It might help that iPhone NAND storage is very fast indeed (see Anandtech) and developers know it, so shunting between NAND and RAM can be done nearly seamlessly for many tasks.
All the above is true of Android flagships. Most Samsung flagships only offer 4GB of RAM, OnePlus's 6GB RAM option largely considered a gimmick for now. Flagship phones have NAND so fast that high frame HDR video can be filmed without buffering.
According to one games website, it's hard to distinguish between popular game Fortnite on an iPhone X and a Galaxy S9. Fortnite developers have noted that porting the game to Android was a pain the arse though, due to variety of devices and OS version.
The Razr was a phone Steve Jobs approved of. The Motorola Rokr - the one that had iTunes on it - he clearly didn't like. When he presented it on stage he held like it was a bag of dog poo.
Sidenote: if you think these iPhones are expensive, check out how much Samsung want for a modern Android clamshell phone (China only): £3,000
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/1/16724656/samsung-w2018-flip-phone-android-china
“As an attempt to sweeten the deal for luxury lovers, Samsung says that W2018 buyers also get perks like concierge help at airports and subways, free software tech support, and a hotline just for VIPs. The phone will get released in China first and the price is yet to be announced, but we can guess it might be even higher than the W2017’s price tag of $3,000.”
If you haven't noticed that there's huge number of people in the world whose wallets are more than big enough to shrug off an iPhone (or Range Rover, or ounce of cocaine, or shit, just being able to go the pub five nights a week) many times over then you've clearly not been paying attention to what's around you.
Dual sim is something many Android phones have sported for years. It's kind of embarassing for Apple to announce it as if its some big deal.
I'm still somewhat perplexed why they didn't go through with their software sim idea from a few years back. Then in theory a phone could hold multiple "sims" and you could flip between them at will.
I've an Iphone SE. I wouldn't change it except I find the screen keyboard too small for my fingers.
At these prices I'll bite the bullet and go to Google. Fuck paying nearly £1k for a phone.
I hope to see the Huawei P20 Pro on discount in October. If I'm saving £500 over a bigger iPhone I'll just have to live with the data snarf. I don't bank or shop on a phone anyway. If they want to read my FB posts (which are 90% daily mash shares) they're welcome.
...yet they are everywhere. Most commonly these are bought on "payment plans". £19k for the most basic Golf. Apple aren't stupid. Money is not tight, and people are happy to pay big-time for things they use every day. Maybe Apple should make cars? Oh, hang on...
"The chip also appears to support pointer authentication, a feature Arm introduced to its Armv8.3-A"
I looked at that link to the ARM slide presentation.
My impression (could be wrong) is that it is like prison officers knocking off at 5 pm and asking the prisoners to lock themselves in the cells at 10 pm. It looks like the checks are optional.
Yes, we need to get away from insecure pointer languages like C and C++, but we also need to make non-optional checks in hardware.
We need architectures like the Burroughs B5000, which has been with us since 1963 (and still going). Any program that violates security is unceremoniously dumped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems_descriptors#Buffer_overflow_protection
Tony Hoare also notes that protection should never be turned off.
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/360000/358561/p75-hoare.pdf
Save yourself some money and just use Google Voice for a 2nd phone number. Actually save all your money, since it's a free service.
And save even more by not being one of the twats that has to have a new phone every year or so when they don't even understand all the features on their current one.
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