Posts by Rupert Stubbs 173 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2007
Well, I've had my 4S for 3 years now, and it still all works superbly (including FaceTime). And, yes, I'm using iOS 7 and will be installing iOS 8 as soon as I can. I'm sure that the iPhone 6 will be much faster, but since the 4S is as fast as I need already, I'm fine carrying on with it.
Can anyone with a 3 year old Android phone say the same?
Sony are supposed to be bringing out an RX100 mark 3 on the 15th - which sounds like a mashup of the (fantastic) LX7 and the RX100 Mk2: 24-70mm f1.8-2.8 lens, with maybe an integral EVF.
However, it will undoubtedly be at least £700. On the plus side, the original RX100 should come down a bit more, and is still excellent. Although I love my old LX3 - especially for BW shots - it just isn't as pocketable as the RX100. Go with the RX100 chaps.
I am still running my 4S very happily. Apple is still supporting it with every OS update, and although the newer iPhones may be faster I don't have any problem with the speed.
BTW, the article's assertion that Apple has made the iPhone's battery "impossible to replace" is just bunk - Apple replaced mine for about £45. Not bad to keep a two and a half year old phone going.
I suspect that the iPhone 5 style will be seen as a bit of a dead-end - the iPhone 6s look to have bigger screens and may well have more of an iPad styling. I'm sticking with the classic look of the 4S until the new ones come out - and maybe even after that.
He's a sad, embittered man, ekeing out his fast-fading fame long after his Fake Steve Jobs column (which was genuinely funny and insightful), shuffling from high-profile publications to ever-less-relevant ones. He now spends his time snarking at Apple, so I suppose Microsoft should feel vaguely flattered that he's flinging muck at them too...
"Why are Apple allowed to call their Streaming Media box that has NO tuner and NO screen an "Apple TV"?"
Damn, how did the Literal Naming cops let that one through? And then with the iPad (it doesn't absorb blood). And the iPod (there are no seeds or astronauts in there). And the Macintosh (not waterproof)...
of lots of different content providers trying to keep control of their little empires.
There are already widgets for things like Netflix and iPlayer on loads of different boxes, but it doesn't mean that all their services will work together. What everyone is waiting for are things like unified search - if I want to watch Midnight Run, I don't care which of the services is providing it (as long as it doesn't cost extra).
The Nook devices look perfectly fine, and are priced competitively - the problem is that their ebook ecosystem isn't one that anyone uses. Who checks out the reviews of a book on Barnes & Noble?
Amazon has - for the moment - the ebook lock-in, so unless the Nooks became magically enabled to work with WhisperSync etc. there's little chance that anyone will buy them apart from misguided Grannies thinking they'll make nice pressies for the little ones.
But iOS 7, for all it's small inconsistencies, is a much better OS than iOS 6.
One of the best changes is one that has been most criticised: the folders only holding 9 apps on each "page" of the folder, even on the iPad. Screams of rage or laughter from the usual suspects. However, having used it for a while, I realise that Apple was right - it makes more sense:
1. I can see all the icons for the apps on the first "page" in the folder icon on the main springboard screen, so I already can see where the app I'm wanting to use will be when the folder opens. As it's opening, my finger is starting to move to where it needs to be to tap the app - the whole process is much faster.
2. Although I have loads of different apps, in each category there are only a few I use at all regularly - most are just the 'nice to have around' ones. So the 9-app limit isn't really a limitation at all - it's a form of prioritisation, which means I can put far more apps into a single category (Photography, say) with the ones I most want to use much more easily distinguishable than if they were competing with 20 other icons.
3. The square 9-app grid is orientation-independent, so the muscle memory for tapping certain apps stays consistent.
The net result is that I now fit far more apps into far fewer folders, but can access the apps I need far more easily and quickly. If you'd asked me what I wanted before iOS 7, I would have said bigger folders - just goes to show that the customer doesn't always know best.
Where Microsoft have - ironically - inflicted FUD on themselves, Apple have made it very clear: there's just one version of iWork now. It may have slightly more controls on the desktop version, but anything written on any device will work on any other device, in the same way.
From this base they can add features where they make sense, but seeing as the iPad has done pretty well for years without Office they really don't need to add too many bells and whistles.
What Microsoft, I think, has never appreciated is that most people don't actually LIKE Office. They just had to have it, because everyone else had it. Now they don't.
What could have been a vaguely interesting speculation on Ahrendts' career prospects at Apple became a reiteration of the same tired old tropes about Apple.
"No innovation since Steve Jobs." Have you seen the new Mac Pro?
"The "cheap" 5C failed to take off." The only people who have ever positioned the 5C that way are journalists who persist in using their brilliant business brains to demand that Apple do things the way everyone else does. The 5C is - as Tim Cook has explicitly stated - Apple's mid-range iPhone, and they are delighted if the more expensive 5S sells better. Can you imagine if it had gone the other way? The headlines would then read "Apple's profit margins endangered by more successful mid-range device!"...
"It feels like Apple hasn't moved on." Apple does those famous paradigm shifts very, very rarely - because they are very, very hard to do. They don't happen on demand, but when the hockey puck strays just far enough from the expected path for a company as brave as Apple to skate towards somewhere new. Otherwise, Apple have always been iterators - they bet on a long-term device and improve it incrementally, year on year. What were the great innovations in the iPhone's life cycle? Adding 3G? Improving the screen? I can remember when adding cut and paste was seen as a big deal.
Tim Cook isn't a visionary, but that's not what Apple mostly needs right now - they need someone who can keep an incredibly lean production process on track. There are enough people in Apple who have got Apple's DNA in their guts (mixed with a bit of Steve Jobs'), and Tim Cook's job is to make sure that Apple is brave enough to keep betting the farm on their instincts. Will Ahrendts add enough to that process? This article sure as heck didn't really attempt to find out.
Really - you're setting up contentious arguments as fact (All That Matters Is Market Share, for example) and then drawing resounding conclusions from that.
There are any number of reasons why market share in these sorts of markets is not the be all and end all - user experience being one of the major ones. Suppose loads of people buy cheap 'n' nasty Argos tablets for £79 this Christmas - who are they (or more likely, the unfortunate recipients) going to blame when they find the experience of using them to be equally nasty? I suspect that "You should have bought me an iPad" will be the most common response.
I'd suggest you look at the number of people who switch from Apple to Android tablets vs the number who go from Android to Apple. That will tell you where the future profits lie.
I just love how lazy writers demand that Apple do something new, just to give them something to write about.
Apple innovates in the new product lines it comes out with - the iPhone, the iPad, the iMac, the MacBook Air, Apple TV, etc., etc. After that it iterates, as it should.
There don't need to be huge innovations to the iPhone - just incremental improvements that add up to a better experience at each iteration. You can still use the original iPhone 1 in much the same way as you do the 5S - however, each new version has a tick-tock of improvements to the form factor or the processor, with camera improvements and added sensors/chips as the technology allows.
Also missed out in these rants is that the operating system is always improving and iterating as well, and the hardware and software are designed to work together.
Yes, at some stage it will make sense to have an even bigger screen size iPhone, and new technology like the fingerprint sensor (which works in an utterly different way to the older versions) will be brought in when it's mature enough. If only we could say the same about the writer...
Unfortunately, in the mobile world, they chose the wrong brand out of two.
Nokia - as many commentators have noted - has huge respect around the world for its phone hardware. Robust, well-designed, works for years, great signal and sound quality.
Microsoft - no respect in the mobile world at all.
Yet MS are junking the Nokia brand. And for those who say they can use "Lumia" - that has virtually no recognition around the world either, apart from being mistaken for Panasonic's Lumix.
Yes, Samsung has shipped loads and loads of phones. But who is making the lion's share of the profits in the mobile industry, let alone the smartphone one? Yup, still Apple.
Apple has never focused on market share, despite every pundit in the world urging them to. They have little interest in competing with the commoditised cheap and cheerful market. But they sure like the profits in the premium market.
My kid's primary school has a suite of very old PCs that are basically only used for Scratch, web searching, and learning how to use (God help us) PowerPoint and Word.
According to my daughter, it takes about 15 minutes just for all the class to get logged in, and even then about a quarter of the machines just won't be working, so kids have to double up. These things are slow, and yet still require some serious IT support which costs the school much-needed cash.
Given that most kids over 10 these days seem to have either iPod Touchs or smartphones - and definitely will have more computing power accessible at home than the entire school suite - having IT as its own separate world is bonkers. Like it or not, the future is one of augmented memory and networking - and technology like tablets work far better than clunky PCs.
Check him out - as the only educator in the UK (that I'm aware of) actually working with tablets on a fundamental basis, he is worth listening to because he can talk from real world experience...
Gosh, it can't be because he actually uses iPads, can it? Surely El Reg wouldn't be so bigoted...?
A nicer screen (but what is the point of higher than perceptible resolution?), a faster processor (nice, but again not exactly a quantum leap), loads of rather gimmicky new features that will be mostly ignored after the first five minutes...
This doesn't mean the S4 is boring, just that smartphones are maturing and that's what happens - there are diminishing returns. Expect the iPhone 5S to be greeted with the same chorus of "where's the next big thing?"...
I have three credit/debit cards that require PIN numbers (most people I know have more). It seems insecure to use the same number for all of them, so I have three different 4-digit numbers to not only remember, but also to allocate.
So I did what probably everyone else does: I put them in my phone's Contacts carefully disguised as innocent phone numbers for the appropriate banks (just focusing on the last four digits). I ended up realising that this wasn't going to fool a halfway intelligent thief, so now I just put it in 1Password on my phone.
There isn't any single solution to this, of course. However, the sooner there is a tex/email notification of money withdrawal/spending on a card the better. Shops should like it because they can send email receipts thus getting the customer's email address, while customers will appreciate getting an email receipt (like in Apple stores) rather than a useless bit of paper.
I know I shouldn't, but what on earth was the gratuitous dig at Apple about?
"Mind out, Apple" implies that Apple is under threat from this development - when in fact Apple has been one of the cheerleaders of the idea. "Well done, Apple" are obviously words that The Reg is these days unable to type...
This is not a flame - this is my experience. Although I use a Mac at work, I'm not an Apple apostle - my work keeps me in contact with many new phones - pre-release - to produce documentation for them. Let me tell you about the latest one.
It is a mid-range Android phone, 4.5" screen, running Jelly Bean. There is no Home button, so whenever the screen powers down you have to reach up and click the power button on the top of the phone to start it up again - I very quickly set the power off time to Never.
Important icons are scattered all over the place, with no consistency. In the Phone app, switching between the Phone section and the Contacts section is done at the top of the screen (hard to reach one handed), with the Options icon at the bottom. In other (native) apps (like Messaging) the Options icon is up at the top right.
When browsing, the bar that slides down to actually allow you to switch tabs etc is maddeningly inconsistent as far as the way of triggering it is concerned - sometimes it comes down, sometimes it doesn't. Same with gestures - you just don't know if something's going to work or not.
Now, this may be due to pre-release bugs, but I've been through enough Android phones to feel that it's not. It's certainly better than previous Android versions in many cases, but the overall experience for someone who's used an iPhone is TO ME, decidedly sub par.
This is just my opinion, obviously.
Go to www.netmarketshare.com and look at the US marketshare for the various mobile browsers - iOS has over 62%, Android 21%.
So, despite Android's trumpeting how many more Android phones there are than iPhones, it can only get 21% of the share of actual usage (and remember, that's where Google gets its money). Does it really make sense that Android tablets are 27% (and surely Kindle Fire's would count as Android in the stats, too)? Seems a bit fishy to me...
They're certainly not flooding the Macintosh Achinaea Forum in Ars Technica - which is where the reasonably knowledgeable Apple folk congregate. I'm pretty sure if there was a really widespread issue it would have been mentioned there.
So is there a real, intrinsic, problem? Or is it just the law of large numbers throwing out the tiny fraction of the millions of new iPhone 5 owners who do have some discrete manufacturing issue (and add those who just don't know how to set up a WiFi network)?
I remember the phone industry before the iPhone - there was a huge amount of innovation, almost all of it utterly pointless. Remember the Nokia circular keypad? The only goal is to make things work better - if that means subtle improvements to something that already works, then that's what you do.
People don't want Windows on their phone.
They don't think of Metro as being Windows, and the more MS tries to drag it back to being a Windows phone, the more baggage (both emotional and code-complexity) it will accumulate.
People - mostly - don't LIKE Windows. They don't necessarily hate it, but it doesn't inspire much affection in the general populace. Why saddle the 'new broom' products and OS with this association? Especially the utterly perplexing "Windows RT" for tablets...
Apple, for all its faults does at least know when and how to kill its own babies. MS could learn a lesson or two there - but it may well be Nokia who ends up paying for it.
Re. Voland's right hand's comment "Apple effectively killed the 3rd party power adapter market for the Macs a few years back." Bollocks. Since the power adapters are basically a USB cable and a power brick with a USB port, you can pick them up for peanuts in any mobile shack. Once you have a Lightning cable, I'm sure the same will apply (heck, you can just use the same power brick, although it may take a bit longer to charge).
The Lightning/30 Pin adapters are a rip-off, though - and I'm sure that black-market ones will be available a few weeks after they get their hands on the real thing.
Look at the total cost of owning any smartphone over 2 years, and the vast bulk of the cost is network fees (this assumes you use your smartphone for more than just texting, ie. lot of data use as well as calls).
Look also at resale cost when you upgrade to your next phone.
iPhone looks pretty good overall.
There are so many hypotheticals in this "analysis" that - as usual - it is utterly meaningless.
Yes, MS may subsidise the price - like Amazon and Google already do with their tablets. But, unlike those two, MS doesn't have much in the way of content or services to recoup profits from (they're going to have to bundle Office anyway).
Yes, Surface may disrupt Ultrabooks - but they're just a marketing attempt by Intel anyway, which doesn't look wildly successful at the moment anyway...
This is yet another bit of random speculation dressed up as analysis, enlightening nothing.
As far as the UI is concerned - LCDs have made the picture quality pretty similar (except for the cheap ones).
The main problem is the incredibly slow response time when trying to do anything - press a button on the remote and then have a little wait to see if it's going to do something - nope, press the button again and - whoops - the first press finally registers and the seconds press buggers up what you were doing...
However, the difficulty is that more and more people are going through a set-top box to get their content (Freeview or SKY or cable), and that adds its own layer of UI hell. Unless Apple is seriously expecting people to move all their viewing over to iTunes/AppleTV - at the expense of lots of missing content - I cannot see this working.
This couldn't possibly be an attempt to boost his AV business, could it?
Frankly, as a Mac user I have utterly given up using AV software - in practice it causes far more problems (slowing down machines, causing incompatibilities) than it is ever likely to solve. In all my 25 years of MAc computing I have never had a major virus, and only a couple of times had any malware at all. Unlike my ex, who was often reduced to tears by the logjam of viruses and (mostly) AV warnings that popped up all the time on her Windows machine.
That said, Apple is extremely slow at responding to genuine problems - but to assert that Apple's inaccurately-labelled Walled Garden* approach makes it less secure than the "install what the heck you like" approach of Android is disingenuous to say the least.
* It's a pretty rubbish walled garden that is open to the internet, surely?
Amazon's Fire uses a forked version of Android, as the author bloody well should know. So the idea that Android's openness is unifying is downright wrong - it's actually potentially its Achilles Heel (from Google's point of view).
Never, ever forget that Google is not a benevolent servant of mankind, but an advertising company, selling data about everyone who uses it. They are not "open" about that data, which is why even their faithful partners Samsung keep alternative OSs going...
Have a look at Flipboard or Zite on the iPad, and then at Currents - there really is no comparison.
Currents has some nice features - the translation one, certainly - but in terms of polish and attention to detail it is merely workmanlike to me.
God knows how Piper Jaffray make their money, because so far they have been - like most so-called analysts - utterly useless at accurately predicting what Apple will or will not do.
My bold, high-value prediction: at some stage in 2012 Apple will release a new iPhone, which will be called "The New iPhone", and will be better in lots of ways than the one before it. The blogosphere will shriek that it isn't as innovative as they predicted it should be, and marks the End of Apple. Lots of people will buy it.
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