Lights, camera, camera, camera, action: iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip biz in new iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip shocker As is traditional at this time of year, Apple on Tuesday showed off the shiny iThings it wants you to buy over the coming year. After sitting through the big launch, here's your humble Register vulture's complete rundown of what's new from Cook & Co. As expected, Apple launched a new iPhone – the 11th version of its smartphone …
Why does 'See' sound like they just read of more likely watched part of Day of the Triffids. Then thought that sounds like a good plot......
I'm still amused by a BBC reporter who said, "My money is still on smart glasses but I think it could still be years before we SEE anything." (my emphasis).
No, but if you add this year's incremental advance to last year's incremental advance... then after a few years the difference will be significant.
I have no reason to upgrade my 2017 Galaxy today, but the groundwork is being slowly laid (by the likes of Apple, Sony Sensors, Google, Qualcomm et al) for features I would find genuinely useful - such as 3D scanning, for example.
To be fair, having multiple lenses with differing focal lengths in a phone is huge technical innovation. Its not Apple innovation, Android phones have had these, and even 4 tiny lenses, for quite a while.
Once you use a phone with ultra wide and 5x optical zoom in addition to a standard lens there is no going back, it really is a game changer as far as leaving a DSLR at home and just making do with a phone. To fit the lenses in such a small space requires some clever tech like periscope lenses, and the image quality for such minute sensors is a technical marvel.
" ... nobody is coming up with anything new ..."
Vambrace instead of watch. Larger volume, more sensors, more processors, storage and battery. Flexible, roll-out screen with a stiffener on one side, or both. Charged by the user's movements, like those self-winding watches or like Dyson radios with their winders or by the user's heat or solar flux or even from the mains.
Back-pack power-cells to power H.U.D.-like display and sensor helmets. Packs to be little thicker than a semi-bulky jersey. Chargeable by the Sun, body motions and mains.
Non-Newtonian "impact-resistant" armour, basically custard as a cloth. Tune it so it allows for running but resists knives and bullets.
Chemical based data storage, essentially D.N.A. but probably using different molecules so it can be state-switched either optically or electronically, whichever is cheaper. Storing data on the molecular scale in light-sensitive, colour-changing glass ["crystal storage"] could be another choice.
Micro-bearing soled shoes to make personal transport [walking] easier. Sort of like skates but with a contained pad of bearings instead of wheels. Make the bearings magnetic or electro-resistive and you might even be able to use them in vehicles or power them by way of the back-packs.
Firefly lighting. Rechargeable luciferin-like pods, strips, walls and other lamps. Luciferin itself is not the only light-emitting chemical.
Magnetic fluid doors. Magnetic fluid wall screens; if the particles are coloured and small enough they could display motion, if not small enough they could still show selections of advertisements or scenery.
F.T.L. Starships.
Okay, maybe that last one is a little out of my price-range and maybe it is also not entirely within Apple's technological grasp this year but they have the money to search for them.
Speaking of funds: Apple, Google, Microsoft, the Mormon Church or a score of other buggers could put a research village on the Lunar Farside, complete with multi-kilometre sized radio and optical scopes. They could build cities, manufacturing plants and farms in Earth, Moon and Mercury orbit that could scale stuff down to the benighted poor trapped on the homeworld. By 2050 or so, there could be *hundreds* of fully operational stations out there. By 2100, it could be in the thousands, including vast cities made from those otherwise useless rocks in the Asteroid Belt.
By 2200, there could be City-Farms in the Oort Cloud. By 2300, some of them would be starting to feel a little crowded so they might just cut loose from distant Sol to drift into the nearby Cometary Zone of Proxima or Barnard.
And that is how we get a Human Galaxy.
None of the above is fantasy or even Science Fiction, it is all doable today or at the very least *startable*.
Nobody coming up with anything new? Bullshit. It is myopic, blind, vision-free managers pissing on the innovators, dreamers and visionaries when they *do* bring up the bright, entirely possible, cheap and extremely profitable futures that could be had for a small effort that are killing invention, stifling their own futures and throttling The Dream Of Stars.
Not all of those managers are corporate. Many are politicians or priests. The cost of them is the same.
We could have the stars.
We won't. Not ever.
no, no, no you don't understand. Apple have been developing this for years, sooooo many years. They started developing these cameras before the mobile phone was even invented. Huawei have spies everywhere, so stole their designs and used them before apple could.
Oh wait, it might have been, apple invented the camera and now have made it better than any other camera available and the multi camera phones available are crappy Chinese fake stuff..
I don't know, the reasons keep changing.
The US price excludes Sales Tax, the UK price includes VAT at 20% which makes it £833 before tax, which makes it $1,029 at todays rates. Granted nowhere in the states has sales tax at 20% so it will always be cheaper there but the bump in price is down to the UK Treasury and not down to Apple.. unfortunately for the narrative of this story.
In the US they have to take into account the possibility that Trump's tariffs are (maybe, probably, who knows with him) going into effect on Dec. 1st which would raise their cost in the US but not in the UK. So the US pricing may have been chosen with that in mind.
Though they could really give Trump a slap in the face if they raised the price of iPhones to account for the tariff. Probably not smart as he's as vindictive as he is ignorant and unstable, but it would be funny just to see his over the top reaction.
Just to annoy the President, his Senate, the House and the combined armed forces in theatre Apple could give a fairly good solar-chargeable wifi-enabled laptop to every person in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and possibly Russia. They could install free, unmetered, unlimited-access, absolutely anonymous and secure wi-fi all over those countries [well, maybe not all of Russia, that's a tremendously huge place but they could certainly serve some cities]. They could enable access to the world's libraries containing every book from those hammered into rocks in Ur to today's newspapers, uncensored, uncensorable. [That would piss-off the world's publishing industry but it would be *funny* and the tech-companies are big enough to weather the ensuing huffing and pouting.]
With some help from Microsoft and Google, maybe a couple of others, they could rebuild some of the infrastructure for "free" [free at point of use] including supplying fresh water for washing, drinking and crops.
They could drag an Arctic iceberg ... ah, but by this paragraph all of the "practical", "pragmatic", "Big Boy" "Players" have ceased to read. Utterly unable to see the Big Picture, convinced that their tiny, myopic vision of Capitalism is how the cosmos works, they would dismiss all of the foregoing as Skiffy, nerdy, geeky robots-and-rockets BukRojahs stuff.
And it's sure and certain that the bosses at Apple aren't going to nearly bankrupt their company, even temporarily, even if there would be a truly gigantic profit boost a couple of years down the road, just to make me happy. :)
Which is a shame. They could do so very much good with their funds.
But they won't.
I think the point is that the price has been raised due to the current exchange rates. The real test though will be once Brexit has happened. My personal feeling is that we'll see the exchange rate slide even further once inflation sets in from the higher import costs for EU goods. Not to mention the lower sales to the EU due to the higher costs of exporting to the EU. If only there was some sort of arrangement where we agreed free movement of goods and people across the border with our largest trading partner...
Assuming we’re talking about the pro, you’ve got the tax calculation wrong. GBP 1049 inc VAT is GBP 874.17 ex VAT (at 20%). I think you may have taken 20% off rather than reversing out the 20% added on perhaps?
Making it US$1080 at the current cross rate. I suppose 8% more is not the end of the world, and it won’t cover your airfare to go over to a sales-tax free state and buy one - but still annoying!
Maths pedant rather than grammar - but I’m sticking with that icon even though it guarantees I will have made an error in my post too!
"Making it US$1080 at the current cross rate. I suppose 8% more is not the end of the world, and it won’t cover your airfare to go over to a sales-tax free state and buy one - but still annoying!"
Not forgetting the all inclusive full 2 year "no quibble" warranty as standard in the UK. Is the US offering a similar 1 year warranty yet or do they still just get 90 days? That 2 year warranty might be "free" but it's factored into the selling price.
Correct, however goods imported from China are paid for in US Dollars for some reason.
My current reading for work is to do with the rules for exporting goods to the EU from the UK where they've first been imported from China. We've even considered the option of setting up an EU subsidiary and have the goods imported direct to the EU, but the sales don't currently scale up enough to make running an EU warehouse worth it. Instead we're paying all the customs charges ourselves and we'll have to increase our costs to the EU customers to cover the increased costs of doing business in the EU. Time will tell if those cost increases will result in lower sales, we're not the only company selling to the EU, we may end up being undercut by an EU based seller.
They're ultimately priced in US dollars because Apple is a US company. If I buy something from a UK based company (whether it is made in the UK or in China) I pay in dollars but it is ultimately priced in pounds because that's the currency of the UK.
A UK company that has determined 1000 pounds is the price they want to charge will set a price in dollars that roughly equates to that so they will receive around 1000 pounds for the product. International companies usually charge a bit more outside their "home" country to avoid currency risk, since changing prices due to exchange rate fluctuations is not always easy. Especially if you like nice round figures ending in 99. Who wants to pay $1034.17 one day and $1022.84 the next?
"Apple claims to have massively improved performance with the new chip – 20 per cent faster and 30-40 per cent lower power consumption than previous – through a series of complex tweaks."
Yeah, so what? I care not about performance, so long it does not perform like a dog. And that is true for most people. Do you think Grandma cares that her phone is 20% faster than her old one? Not a chance. She cares about the cost -- this new phone is still several hundred too high in any currency -- and the user interface. Of everyone who I know owns an iPhone X, most hate the new UI. Not all, but most do. Apple didn't address the two concerns people care most about.
Er, lower power consumption equates to longer battery life. I think everyone can find that useful.
I don't know if Apple have redesigned the controller for the OLED screens - Anandtech reported that their first gen OLED controllers were inefficient (in a bid to claim higher colour accuracy than Samsung phones) negating the inherent power efficiency of the OLED panel itself when displaying dark content.
Apple didn't address the two concerns people care most about.
These people (Grandma and other budget-conscious types or critical thinkers) are not the target market for this or any other "flagship" phone. Apple is targeting the people with disposable income and/or big egos who have to have the newest, fastest and shiniest whatever. And while I'm not a fan of their products, they seem to be quite successful at what they do.
Except that Market is shrinking year on year. P30 Pro, still better cameras than what's just come out from apple (arguably) and available on a UK network for £40 p/m as opposed to the Apple £80 p/m.
Apple wins in resale, as they are still worth silly money 4 years later, but again that's going away as people move away from them, the 2nd hand value is also going down.
it's not for grandmas, it's for grandkids, kids ALWAYS love "FASTER!!!", even if that faster is half a millisecond. Never mind the mili, it's 40% FASTER!!!! This is the real idiot tax extracted by apple, the age tax (it has always worked and probably will, can't help).
This is the real idiot tax extracted by apple, the age tax (it has always worked and probably will, can't help).
Who's buying their kids thousand pound phones???!
All the kids I know with iPhones have second hand hand-me-downs from their parents. (Okay, so my sample size is negligable, but lets not have facts get in the way of a rant eh.)
iPhone owner here.. I have a XS. I don't hate the new UI, I just wish it was more customisation.. little things like having a quick way of enabling mobile hotspot etc - can't be done on IOS.
Which is why I also have an Android dual sim phone.. but that's another story.
The UI is fine, it just needs more options.. as it always has.
No thanks.
I already have a few (ie Netflix, Spotify) that "only" cost $15AUD a month. I don't need any more.
I stopped "other downloading services" when I got Netflix but with all these services coming out it's wearing the market thin and each one seems to have one or two shows I might like but not worth adding all the fees up to get them. It looks like this is trying to get me/us back to torrents.
It won't last. There are just too many streaming services for them all to survive on their own. How many is the average consumer willing to pay for, 2? 3? maybe 4? I doubt many will go much beyond that.
I expect over the next few years there will be a shakeout with some of the services folding and others merging to leave us with 2 to 4 big players.
All the streaming services play nice with the inexpensive Google Chromecast dongle ( regardless of whether the user is holding an Apple or Android device), with the exception of Amazon. Grrr.
Amazon Prime Video, at least on Android, now plays quite happily with Chromecast...
"It won't last. There are just too many streaming services for them all to survive on their own. How many is the average consumer willing to pay for, 2? 3? maybe 4? I doubt many will go much beyond that."
It depends on fragmentation of content. Take the example of live sports TV packages for example. It used to be the case that one provider showed all the games, so you need to pay 1 subscription. In the interest of 'competition' it was decreed that rights should be sold to multiple providers. Fair enough - but in that case allow each provider access to all the games, and compete on price and ancillaries (eg commentary and analysis). But the way it was actually done is sell 'packages' of games to different providers, so to see all the games, you need to subscribe to all the providers, and needless to say, the cost of all the providers individually is higher than the cost of a single provider.
With Netflix, Spotify etc, I would like 1 provider through whom I can get all the video, music, books, etc that I want (OK at most 1 provider for each category). But providers do not want to really compete on price and don't want to be seen as commodities (which they should be). So they produce their own exclusive content, and I wouldn't be surprised if they also try/manage to license external content exclusively. So again users have to pay multiple times if they want to watch exclusive content across providers.
If anyone could license and provide any content, I can see there being more providers in the game, including new arrivals. As it is, there might be at most more niche providers (eg streaming service just for Japanese Mangas, or audio for classical music). The 'general content' providers will stay limited to the current ones (though I could see someone liek Facebook or Google try and take over Netflix)
It will never work that way because "exclusives" could be used to earn more. The problem then becomes if "exclusive" contents are fragmented over too many platforms people will soon get tired of having to chase them across many different subscription.
The solution would be "pay-per-view" (or "pay-per-content") - but that mines the whole advantage of the subscription model - a nice, constant cash-flow and lock-in, so it won't be ever adopted.
The fragmentation of premium sports broadcasting means that instead of paying one company for a premium service I now save money and skip the lot.
Sadly my live sports is now down to the England football team on ITV and whichever third rate sports the BBC deign to broadcast. I'd rather they stopped wasting licence fees on 15 year old schoolboy level football and instead paid for something like the Cricket World Cup.
True - lots, but switching between them has traditionally been both geographically limited and painful to change. How many people want the hassle of Apple TV, Amazon, Now, etc etc etc... I suspect that a fair number of people will compromise by choosing one (or maybe two if something like sport is important to them)
Agreed too many subs.
Suspect Disney is the only one that stands a chance to compete against Netflix because it's aiming at specific markets (Kids + Star Wars + Marvel) and owns the of the rights and has a huge amount of content already. Guessing it'll start pulling that content away from Netflix/Sky etc.
Can't see Apple TV+ doing well at all?
They will soon discover that the balkanization of services will lead to less customers, not more.
The film industry worked because each time you cold decide which movie to watch. On TV, the same. You weren't in no way bound to watch, say, only Paramount films or ABC shows because you were forced into a monthly subscription.
If they think they can chain people into subscription, as people see they can see some shows but not others, they won't buy more services if they can't spend that much, and may get rid of existing ones as well. Unless they find themselves to be forced into cross-licensing and bundles.
They will soon discover that the balkanization of services will lead to less customers, not more.
The problem is they've seen people /will/ pay 80 quid a month for things like Sky. So as long as they keep the cost roghly a portion of this people will pay.
Apple should be able to cross-license with Disney, but otherwise it will be difficult until the competition authorities wake up and force licence-holders to offer their content at reasonable prices (comparable to local-loop unbundling). Can't see that happening in America any time soon but the EU will be a different matter.
Anyway nice to see Apple being the cheaper option for once.
They will soon discover that the balkanization of services will lead to less customers, not more.
Maybe. Maybe not. It's too early to tell.
I've read that Sky are starting to lose subscribers. because people can now get films in other ways.
Amazon are a weird outlier, because Amazon Prime is pretty cheap and also gets you free delivery of stuff you may already be buying and free Kindle books on loan and access to Amazon music. That bundle makes their service look pretty cheap to a lot of people. So I can see a lot of people keeping them as a second service.
Sky are now starting to market Now TV as a short term solution to not paying the full-whack for Sky Sports. You can get "day-passes" and "month-passes".
Interestingly most of the online subscription services at the moment are only month-to-month deals anyway (Prime is just cheaper if paid for a year in advance). So this could be the way the market shakes out. Sub to Netflix for a month or two. Watch the shows on your list - then cancel the sub and move on to the exclusives on Disney or Apple.
But when I've suggested this to friends who have Netflix and are annoyed some show is exclusive to someone else - all of them have looked surprised and as if this is a strange idea. As if they feel their subscription is permanent, even though there's no reason for it to be.
So it may be that people don't like that idea, and will want to sign up to several of these at once.
It's generally understood, and you can see this from Netflix's accounts, that most video streaming services are loss-leaders. It's more of the traditonal attempt to get as many users as possible and lock them in, something Apple knows all about. We'll start seeing segmentation as the content holders start running their own exclusive services and try to freeze Netflix, Amazon, et al. out. By which point NetFlix hopes to have enough of its own catalogue to be able to keep subscribers interested.
Indeed not. Launching a subscription service in the current environment feels like financial suicide. Apple is going to lose a lot of money on this. Not even Apple has the clout to buy anything off Disney and Disney is holding all the properties people are willing to pay for these days.
I don't know what Apple is going to offer, but I highly doubt it will find customers flocking to its service. People are already subscribed to what they want.
"Suspect Disney is the only one that stands a chance to compete against Netflix "
Disney is the one that I would bet my house on surviving. I keep looking around Netflix trying in vain to find anything good that I haven't seen yet.
My kids will happily watch Frozen / Cars / etc for the 100th time with the same enthusiasm as the first
There's no room for a memory slot or a second port to allow for portable charging while using wired headphones, but it was no problem to add enough cameras to give you trypophobia. Still no USB-C port. Still a big ugly notch when other phone makers are shrinking theirs or switching to a mini-bezel.
Few people need a phone that's 20% faster. Phone apps are going to look the same until it's 2000% faster.
Of course you can't have a memory slot. Apple make a lot of their money overcharging you for a bit of extra NAND. If you want more RAM, then you need to pay for the next capacity up.
And of course you can't have an extra port. Then Apple won't be able to sell you adaptors.
Still sticking with my 6S, with nice wired phones for my endless conf calls. If I had to go wireless I'd need two sets, because nothing has enough talk time to last me through a day.
"As expected, Apple has launched a new iPhone – the 11th version of its smartphone"
Sorry, but Apple has dragged you into its distortion field. They may not know how numbers are supposed to work, but this is their 13th* generation. The only generation that lined up well was the iPhone 4, which was indeed the 4th generation. Everything else (with the possible exception of the 3GS) has been completely off. Other companies like doing this as well. I really have no clue why they like this so much.
*In order, the generations are: original, 3G, 3GS, 4, 4S, 5, 5S, 6, 6S, 7, 8, X/10, 11. I do not include the 5C, which was an iPhone 5 in an easy-to-break plastic case, or the iPhone SE which was an iPhone 6S in an 5 case.
Exactly. It was called the "3G" because it worked with 3G networks- the original iPhone only having supported the rapidly-ageing 2G networks (#)- not because it was the third generation of iPhone (which it wasn't). This hasn't stopped my boss and various other people referring to (e.g.) the iPhone 6 as the "iPhone 6G", the iPhone 7 as "iPhone 7G" and so on.
(#) Which was crap even at the time considering its "new and shiny future tech" image, and IIRC forced operators into slapping EDGE support onto existing GSM networks so fanboys could get borderline acceptable performance from their expensive new iPhones.
Do People who bought a new Samsung last year already think about getting a new one?
Very, very few iPhone owners think of upgrading every year - or even every two years.
This is a phone for people several generations behind, maybe 7 or even 6S/SE users.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that much money, considering what people spend it for otherwise.
Would the world really be a better place if people could replaced their phones more often and generated even more e-waste?
Would it be a better place if Google or Huawei had the location data of 100% of the people 100% of the time, and all their browsing history etc?
Is a bit of privacy worth the price difference of an iPhone? I don’t know. For me it is.
I also don’t get all the criticism about the headphone jack (which few enough people use so that most manufacturers have killed it by now, and most new headphones are wireless anyway, unfortunately).
Other Apple products and services I’m not really that interested in - because I have little use for them.
Waited for the "SE2", too. But finally got fed up with my 4S, so got an Xr.
This will be good for some time.
There might be an SE2 next year (as every year). But it won't be as small as the SE. Most apps look shit these days on small displays.
I've started to think that Apple does an SE2 every year but never releases it. It's only being done on the off-chance that sales tank dramatically and they need to pull the iPhone-equivalent of a rabbit out of their hat (made from bespoke materials).
Prototypes surface all the time, sometimes even case-designs. But the prototypes never make it to production. Hence the above conclusion.
The Xr has grown on me (ha). Sort of.
I miss the ease of handling the 4S had. It was much, much less prone to accidental dropping.
I think I could still use an SE or even a 4S (with more modern innards). Just would skip on a lot of apps and generally spend less time with it (which is bad for all the businesses who want to extract time, money and commitment from you via your phone).
So you see: those small screens aren't coming back. Ever.
Yes still on my SE. I would love to get better camera and get X style phone, but none of these new ones solves the problem SE did. One hand phone that can be in a pocket. I don’t want a freaking phablet. So where is the iPhone 11 Pro Mini or iPhone SEX (pun intended)?
China wants big phones.
Thus, you only get a big phone. And you get a big phone. And you. Everybody just get a big phone.
Just like cars will all look like Tesla Model 3 in a few years, because Asians like big displays also in the car.
So, better start liking them or your life will get miserable...
You know that Apple has your location data aw sell, right?
Extra points for throwing in the Huawei bogeyman.
I'd also need a citation for the fact that most new headphones are wireless - is that most new one produced, most new ones sold or the most available? I don't listen to music often enough to keep a wireless set constantly charged and I am forever forgetting or misplacing the USBC dongle to convert my 3 sets of cheap but reasonable skullcandy earbuds to make them usable. The missing headphone jack is the biggest issue I have on my phone,
"This is a phone for people several generations behind, maybe 7 or even 6S/SE users."
No it's not. I would assume that most people on an older handsets are still on them because they function perfectly well, and do exactly what they need it to do. I was perfectly happy on a 6 last year until it was stolen, so I just went to my mobile provider and got a reconditioned 8 for next to nothing because that is all they had.
If you ask me would I pay over £1,000 for a phone then I'd say that you must be joking. If my 8 broke, then I could go to CEX and get a 2nd hand 6 or 7 for around £200, or just get a reconditioned replacement for almost naff all. There has been no innovation in mobile devices for years that justifies the ever soaring costs, and this is true for these new Apple ones - with any use case for so called "premium features" [lol!!] becoming slimmer and slimmer. I'd actually suggest the only reason they are priced so high is because so many people are choosing to keep their existing handsets longer, but Apple just have to keep those profits coming from somewhere to keep the shareholders happy right?
So feel free... go fill yer' boots if you need to feel superior about it; but I think you're a total mug for doing so. Whatever you do though, don't allow yourself to admit that you've been taken for a ride by the marketing. Just stay in that bubble wrap of denial yes? * smirk *
Thing is, with the 6S and 7 you were ameliorating a £400 - £500 (or so) investment over (say) three years. Sticking to the same plan you are now looking at £1,000+ over the same period. How much you consider that to be 'value' is up to you...
Now you don't have much choice in Apple Land but in Android Land you can still get a £200 phone with manh/most of the whizz-bang features of these £1,000 monsters and it is still capable of 2 or 3 years use. My sub-£150 phone is now nearing six years...
M.
@Rainer: "Is a bit of privacy worth the price difference of an iPhone?"
What now? So you weren't targetted by the recently published zero-days Google discovered because you aren't an Uighur Muslim. That doesn't mean your security and privacy weren't at risk all that time.
Apple were sued yesterday by an NPE in West Texas over their update methods. They are accused of violating a patent that was granted to Phillips. It claims that IOS and App Store updates perform a 'reconfiguration' when the update is applied which in their eyes breaks the patent.
Nice timing! (I think not)
But the story of Apple and yesterday really has to include at least one of the lawsuits flung at them...
I watched the keynote.
Arcade with boring games at 4.99 and TV+ at 4.99, enough to cause a stir, unlikely cheap for apple offerings.
iPhone 11, Chinese looking lady talking excitedly, I liked her, she was likable somehow and demoing a new Chinese game that uses the GPU that you will be able to pre-order next month. A clear push to get iphone 11 into Chinese market.
iPhone 11 pro, American fella talking how PRO it is.. A clear hint that a true American should buy iPhone 11 pro.
Since all these offerings use the EXACT same dimensions and tooling as Xr, Xs, XS max I can see why Johnny Ives resigned. Absolutely NO update on the design front compared to last year. Only a new camera module and CPU.
The Xr got up to iPhone 8+ standard as it should have been from the start. Xr and 8 retained in the lineup but with a new gimped 128GB memory capacity as maximum size.
For me the standout is the wath always on display, (another given for a wathc you might think) and iphone 11. The pro model is just not for me as I am not into gaming. Unlike TheRegister, the ability to use both/all cameras at the same time, back and front will be a massive hit, is that also available on iPhone 8?!
Technology updates was fine, but ZERO deign updates. The Xr/Iphone 11 is still to thick/fat, then new iPad also looks too fat. The pro models are heavy.
TV+ may be $5 per month, but there's only something like 6 shows in the catalogue right now, and out of those 6 shows, how many are you actually going to want to watch?
Disney, HBO and so on, they have huge back catalogues of material that they can offer. Netflix and Amazon have licenced a load of stuff. Apple has nothing other than what they have been producing recently.
> This seems like wishful thinking: a professional filmmaker or photographer is unlikely to want to deal with all the restrictions that an iPhone provides when they can just hire one of the many professional movie cameras available.
There has been a cinema-released feature film, Tangerine, made only using phones. But yeah, equipment hire is likely to be only a fraction of a even an indy film's budget, compared to logistics, sets, crew, etc.
It wasn't that long ago that budding filmmakers' had to spend thousands on film stock, limiting the number of takes they could to film and often limiting them to black and white. I'm thinking of enthusiasts who would later be given bigger budgets, such as Peter Jackson and Kevin Smith. Peter Jackson did use a iPod to make Lord of the Rings, but only to move footage across the last mile of London to his editing suite.
There was that period from the late nineties where digital footage couldn't yet complete with film cameras, but were extensively used for sports videos and the like, with home computers capable of non-linear editing lowering the bar to entry.
These days we have directors like Gareth Edwards, whose feature film Monsters was filmed on 'prosumer' cameras and edited on laptops. Equipment was $15,000, total budget $500,000. Indeed, the CGI monsters were created in the laptops, no huge render farm required. Like Peter Jackson before him, he's since been given the reigns of a big budget film franchise, Star Wars.
There have been films shoot on Super 8, and arts photos made on Polaroid. There's an artist that use a simple pinhole setting on a room window.
You can use everything, as long as you're aware of its limitations, and design your artwork to stay within them.
That doesn't mean it's what you're going to use every day for every imaging needs.
Lens that is
Reminds me of watching all the 1960's footage of the space program this summer where the old TV cameras had a turret of lens on the front. Then people cracked acceptable zoom lens and the turrets went the way of the dinosaurs. I guess that including different camera for wide, standard & tele just means they haven't found out a way to make a zoom lens flat enough to fit in the phone yet.
It's very difficult to modify a lens shape and keep it within the required parameters to deliver good enough image quality. Even more so in phone lenses which are very small and with very short focal lenses. And, like folding phones, it must not break after many bends. And there could be more than one lens needing to change shape in a zoom.
There are experiments with different flexible materials - but AFAIK none is usable in production. Maybe in future it will be possible.
Telescopes do have flexible mirrors that can change shape, but first it's easier to install actuators on the non-reflecting surface, second they don't have to perform large modification, AFAIK it's used only to correct for deviations from the required shape and to counteract atmospheric turbulence.
Didn't Philips develop a fluid one for phones? Presumably there were problems with mass production, which is why we don't see it. Tha and, of course, other approaches that can be done in software such as HDR and adding a second lens.
.... thanks for giving us any useful information on the new chipset.
And for what it's worth, which is probably nothing in a snark-over-infromation article, a major US newspaper posted a video Monday in which the reporter asked people on the street in a a major US city (hint: the one in the author's byline) what they wanted in a new iPhone. The far and way most frequent answers according to the reporter were a better camera and longer battery life. Apple gave them that, as well as lower prices (particularly with trade-ins). But you wouldn't want to report that.
a professional filmmaker or photographer is unlikely to want to deal with all the restrictions that an iPhone provides when they can just hire one of the many professional movie cameras available. Likewise professional photographic equipment.
Maybe if you're making a Hollywood film, yes. But these cameras are up there with digital cameras that you'd spend £££ on plus they have the ability to edit and share the images. I had a photographer take photos of my house in a sale and they bragged "we don't use smart phones, we'll bring a proper camera". Ironically the pictures they took were worse than the ones I could take on an iPhone XR. The quality of the photos and videos on these is quite simply amazing. It's not just the Insta generation taking selfies that care about that.
Also, hiring a professional grade movie camera even for a day is definitely more expensive than buying one of these outright.
So that argument doesn't stand for me.
The CCDs and the software are indeed fantastic, but "ye cannae change the laws of physics" so a bigger lens and CCD is always going to help.
For the majority of snaps most people won't notice the difference. But, for professional work, it's less about the camera than getting the lighting and depth of field correct, these can make all the difference. Yes, with multiple exposures and software you can do pretty much the same in post-production, but for somethings it will be too late.
So, the badge is simply more aspirational marketing so that people will buy the phone intending, one day, to make a professional film with it, though that day will never come.
Sure, digital imaging made a lot of people sell themselves as "photographers" becasue they can press a shutter button. Cameras in phones even more so. Did you ask them for a portfolio, or at least some examples of their work?
Anyway renting a Sony Sony PXW-FS7 4K Super 35 Professional Camcorder willl cost you $375.00 for seven days... so far less expensive than a iPhone.
https://www.lensrentals.com/rent/sony-pxw-fs7-4k-super-35-professional-camcorder
Sure, you have to add a lens, if you want a 4K camera with a built lens it's even less expensive ($163 for seven days).
https://www.lensrentals.com/rent/sony-pxw-z90v-4k-hdr-xdcam
Can you whip up 3D movies from those cameras? And play them back on a VR headset? Does any MacApple video editor have the ability to pull that off from raw footage? Do 2 or 3 cameras record at the same time?
If they are not 3D, are they distinct lenses with different optics for wide angle or teleobjective and whatnot?
Anyone?
What is the point? Just selfies?
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So The Register gets to attend Apple Events now that Steve is gone, but we still get the Schoolboy Snarkie comments that probably caused Jobs' Vulture Revulsion .....
The headline gets the point that chips and power saving yield many benefits and the camera specs are impressive, but the snark sets in suggesting that video makers rent pro cameras instead. Really? How many pro cameras can you put on a table between two people and record both sides of the conversation at once? and stream real time?
The days when tech people had to rely on El Reg for negative comments on Apple are long gone, everyone can do it now. What this viewer at least would prefer is the insightful tech viewpoint .....
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