
iPhone 5 - CoachRufus87
http://www.apple.com/iphone/
======
mtalantikite
To talk about the software, I've been using Apple Maps in beta for the past
couple of months, and having no transit directions while living in NYC is
enough for me to consider a switch to android.

Trying to take the subway to unfamiliar parts of the city forces me to use
google maps in the browser. Addresses seem to be hit or miss -- I've often
spent time searching for an establishment or address just to give up and use
google maps in the browser.

I've basically had to revert to how I got around the city prior to having a
smartphone -- use my computer and remember how I need to get there before I
leave.

Apple Maps is potentially a huge fail for anyone living in a major city.

~~~
TheGateKeeper
So let me get this straight. A single app on iOS, which doesn't live up to
expectations or desires AND is still in BETA (re: unfinished, unready) and
this makes you consider buying an entirely new phone?

You sound like those soccer moms I make house calls for who just think it's
easier to throw away a working system and buy something else.

~~~
mtalantikite
Yes, that's correct. Out of curiosity, do you live in NYC? The subway is part
of the life blood of this city, and not being able to navigate from A -> B
using maps is a major loss.

Normal situational example: I'm in a neighborhood, say Fort Greene, and I'm
meeting a friend for dinner at a restaurant I've never heard of in the East
Village. First, I need to be able to find that restaurant by searching for it
in Maps -- this largely doesn't work anymore. I often get results that are
totally incorrect.

But say I do find the location, I then need to figure out how to get there
from a neighborhood I don't actively live in. Do I take the A train and
transfer to the F and walk from the lower east side? Maybe it's faster to walk
to the Q and get off at Union Square. Or maybe the manhattan bridge is under
construction, and it actually would be faster to take the G to north Brooklyn
and transfer to the L. This subway system is so massive that even native New
Yorkers get turned around and need directions.

If you don't actively live in NYC I think it might be hard to realize how
significant losing transit directions is, not to mention useful location
search.

~~~
mortenjorck
It's a little easier in Chicago due to our more boring grid layout (Lincoln
Park? I'll take the Red north and transfer to the Brown. Logan Square? I'll
take a westbound bus and get on the Blue), but iOS 6 has still given me
exactly the same thought of switching to Android for the transit navigation.

~~~
mtalantikite
Totally, I was in Chicago for work earlier this summer and Apple Maps was
completely useless. Luckily I still remember the transit from when I lived in
Chicago a while back, but had I not had that prior knowledge I would have
gotten myself lost many times.

------
chuinard
How is the 'biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone' simply a taller
screen and newer processor? What about NFC? Wireless charging? Sorry Apple,
but this just isn't that impressive.

~~~
batista
Plus, "simply a taller screen and newer processor", really? New screen, new
processor, new innards, new machining and construction, new connector, new
iOS, new camera, improved battery life AND lighter.

NFC and wireless charging? Who promised you that? And who delivers those at
the moment?

You might want to see this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk>

~~~
quaunaut
Name for me one brand new feature. This is a product update, this isn't
deserving of a new version number, and it certainly isn't "the biggest thing
to happen to the iphone since iphone".

This isn't to say it's a bad device, just infinite hype for zero payoff.

~~~
bratsche
Why does every new phone have to be a fucking revolution? It's a better phone
than the last one. If you're not impressed, don't buy one.

~~~
rodion_89

      > Why does every new phone have to be a fucking revolution?
    

I completely agree.

But Apple has a habit of making it seem like everything they do is
revolutionary. It's very good marketing.

    
    
      > Apple reinvents the phone [1]
    
      > This changes everything. Again.
    
      > The biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone
    
      > A magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price
    
      > Resolutionary
    

Again, I agree with you. But what I'm getting at is that Apple's brand of
marketing creates a lot of hype and I'm sure they like it that way.

[1] <http://web.archive.org/web/20070113215301/http://apple.com>

~~~
cheap
Dear Mister Obvious,

Every marketing team ever has created hype. Ever.

~~~
freyr
Right. And when Apple creates hype, people for some reason buy into it. In
droves.

I don't understand why so many people blame Apple for this.

~~~
rodion_89

      > people for some reason buy into it
    

It's not just "some" reason. They have one of the best marketing departments
in the world who do an excellent job.

    
    
      > I don't understand why so many people blame Apple for this.
    

I'm blaming Apple for doing a damn good job of marketing their products.

------
csmattryder
I remember when the 4 was 'The' phone to have, and two iterations later, Apple
are now seemingly playing me-too with Android/WP7-based handsets.

Especially the odd approach they're taking with NFC & Passbook in iOS 6. Why
make a product perfectly suited for NFC, then just not use it in your newest
products?

I was holding off on a new handset until the iPhone 5, but the Nokia's Lumina
series seems to do more.

~~~
bratsche
"Apple are now seemingly playing me-too with Android/WP7-based handsets"

This seems like it must be a joke, but I read a lot of people saying things
like this. The sum of a phone are the features that come with it right out of
the box, like little checkboxes to look for, without regard for the quality of
their implementations or their usefulness in general. And here of all places,
Hacker News, to show such complete disregard for the 3rd party app market (and
the quality of their apps). iOS has much, much higher quality apps available
in general than either Android or WP7. And while iPhone may not yet have NFC
capabilities that the average user probably has little or no use for right now
anyway, it does have things like a very nice music player that stomps on
Android's. A fucking music player, that's like the first app that both iPhone
and Android had, and the one in iOS has always been superior. But somehow iOS
is the one playing catch-up.

I just don't understand this new mindset that iOS has fallen behind Android,
much less WP7.

~~~
barrkel
_iOS has much, much higher quality apps available_

iOS has visually slicker apps, but they are less functional, because iOS is
more locked down. With Android, I use a custom home screen and a whole bunch
of widgets that make the device far more useful to me than iOS devices which
seem like toys in comparison. For example, the 3G Watchdog's widget showing
quota usage, and calendar and weather displays. The fact I can use rsync to
sync folders between my phone, tablet and home NAS without storing my files in
the cloud somewhere or having the files siloed in a specific application or
generic "photos, movies or music" buckets is a game changer for me.

The only time I use my iPad these days is on transatlantic flights when I want
to watch my own movies or play some slick games. But that's even being
transplanted by my Nexus 7, which is much nicer to use owing to lower weight -
and bonus, I get most of the apps that also work on my phone.

iOS reminds me a little of DOS circa 1993, while Android feels a bit like
Windows 3.1 of the same era. DOS apps were typically silos using custom
graphics libraries, while Windows apps were drab but more consistent and had
some pretense at integration (early OLE).

~~~
bratsche
Okay, point taken. But I guess I spend so much time around a computer, I carry
my laptop with me most places, that I honestly don't ever find myself with a
desire to do things like rsync files and folders.

For me, a mobile phone is not a replacement for a computer. There are a number
of things that I can do on a phone now that I couldn't do 10 years ago.. but
there are a ton more things that I hope I never have to do on a phone. There
are already plenty of things that phones do now, in their race to out-feature
one another, that I think are just plain retarded as fuck. Do I want to watch
a movie on a 4" screen? Fuck no. That sounds like the most awful cinematic
experience imaginable.

I own a Galaxy Nexus right now, and I think it's a really nice phone except
for a few things that drive me nuts (like the music player being awful). I
used to use an iPhone 3GS, and everyone at work has iPhone 4 or 4S, and I
think the iPhones just feel like nicer phones. Better quality cameras,
generally nicer apps with it (with the obvious exception of maps.. Android's
navigation feature has been the one thing I loved better about it for years),
nicer designs in general, etc.

It's all about what you get out of the phone though. The two apps that I use
the most are music and maps/navigation. That's been kind of an issue for me
since Android has had the nicer maps app, but iPhone had the nicer music app.

~~~
barrkel
Re movie watching, I used to watch movies on my 3rd gen iPod Nano - beat
sitting in an aircraft for 11 hours with nothing else to do. On a phone, way
nicer. You have to consider the visual angle rather than absolute screen size.
My Galaxy Nexus has a 12cm diagonal; at 30cm from my eyes, that's over 22
degrees of viewing angle measured diagonally. At a distance of 9 feet, that's
around a 42 inch screen. It's better than the setup I use to watch movies with
my girlfriend (we don't own a TV) - and that works fine, it's a lot better
than the 13-odd inch TV my family had in the 80s.

I'd love to own an iPhone - but only the hardware. I'd want to run Android on
it.

~~~
bratsche
Holding a 12cm phone 30cm from my eyes sounds like an _awful_ cinematic
experience. On a plane. Holding a device up. Focusing your eyes on this little
thing right in front of you. None of this sounds like the way to watch a
movie.

But maybe I just put too much value in the experience of watching a movie. I
love live concerts, but I don't refuse to listen to pre-recorded albums so
maybe I'm just being absurd about demanding to watch a movie under certain
conditions.

~~~
barrkel
You don't hold the device up. You prop it on the fold-down table and look down
at it at a fairly comfortable angle. BTW, around 30cm distance is pretty
normal for lots of things - e.g. books, in use for centuries.

On planes with seat rear screens are probably even closer than 30cm to your
eyes when the guy in front is leaned back and you're not.

(Not a fan of live concerts; sound is much better on studio recorded albums in
any case.)

------
zerohm
Thinner, lighter, faster, better battery life, and it has a bigger screen. I
will take these over NFC and wireless charging any day. Sometimes they are
ahead in raw specs (screen ppi), sometimes they are behind (LTE), but
everything they include, or don't include, is well thought out. (e.g., at the
time of the 4s release 4G LTE phones suffered from terrible battery life)

------
fcambus
This pretty much sums it up : <http://blog.textoo.net/graphics/iphone5/>

~~~
brackin
Not really, it's not actually bigger. Just taller, only 4" not 6.

~~~
Tichy
They had to save some things for the iPhone 6.

------
cryptoz
I was really hoping for a barometer so I could recruit iOS users to
pressureNET. No such luck. Maybe next time.

~~~
nostromo
Cool project dude!

But why on Earth does any phone ship with a barometer? Weather is the only
application I can think of, and surely it's easier just to pull weather
conditions from the network.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
It's mainly[0] to give the phone/tablet a rough altitude reading to make GPS
locks faster.

[0]
[https://plus.google.com/112413860260589530492/posts/jVJhPyou...](https://plus.google.com/112413860260589530492/posts/jVJhPyouWDP)

EDIT: relevant thread

~~~
mikeash
That makes no sense. My iPhone takes two seconds to get a solid GPS lock and
it doesn't have a barometer. My stand-alone TomTom car GPS takes about 30
seconds to get a lock from a cold start, which is entirely attributable to the
time required to download the satellite positions over the extremely slow
70s-era channel that they're broadcast over. Actually solving the equations
takes no appreciable time on anything resembling modern hardware.

As far as I know, aGPS as found on modern devices is all about getting that
almanac faster (which is why my iPhone only requires two seconds), not about
using a rough fix to then get a better fix.

I realize that isn't your post, but it seemed appropriate to reply here since
you posted the link.

~~~
calciphus
Many android devices support actual GPS, not just aGPS, so you can use them in
places where you have no cell signal (say, while hiking).

Your iPhone takes 2 seconds because it's never a cold start. You're always
connected to at least one cell tower you know the location of, you have
several nearby wifi access points, etc. It might not be a feature you need for
your limited use case. Cool. Then you won't miss it.

~~~
anonymfus
>Many android devices support actual GPS, not just aGPS

Every phone with A-GPS support actual GPS. A-GPS is additional feature on top
of regular GPS.

~~~
mikeash
There are actually two different kinds of A-GPS as best I understand it.

One is the bad kind where GPS only works when you have a cell signal. It
offloads a lot of the processing to the cell tower. This is used by cheap
phones to comply with FCC requirements for location reporting for 911 calls,
and isn't found much elsewhere.

The other is the good kind where it grabs the almanac off the network when
possible for faster cold start times. This kind still works fine when you have
no connection, it just takes longer to figure out your location when you turn
it on, because it has to download the almanac the slow way.

They're basically unrelated except for the name, which is confusing.

~~~
kaiuhl
You are misinformed. Assisted GPS is simply a feature that reduces the time-
to-first-fix of GPS. Triangulation from cell towers exists, but nobody calls
it A-GPS.

I've used the iPhone 3G, 3GS, 4, and 4S extensively in the wilderness. Every
version since GPS was introduced has been "real" GPS.

~~~
mikeash
I'm not talking about cell tower triangulation, I'm talking about offloading
computation to more capable hardware located remotely. It exists:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS#Modes_of_operation>

I can't find anything about chipsets that only do that, but I'd be surprised
if nobody had ever done it.

------
rdl
Lack of NFC makes me sad, but I've been screwing around with Bluetooth 4.0 LE
recently, and I think I can do basically all the things I want (in a closed
ecosystem -- access control, digital leash, etc.) using 4.0 LE, and then use
2d barcodes on screen for interfacing to existing systems. It fails to mass
transit, but I have a car.

The main things I would have liked: * "geofencing" in some security-strong way
to let a phone use a 4-digit pin when in home/office, and a longer PIN when
outside the home/office. Could ninja this on Android I think (you'd do some
kind of low-latency challenge-response on a LAN -- depending on the threat
model, even 802.1X might be ok, but wouldn't resist an RF relay over a long
tunnel...)

* Biometric authentication on the device

* Integrated credential management ("Passbook for Websites") where SSL client certs, passwords, or something got managed inside the secure element of the phone

And, a real stretch, but a 128 or 256GB "pro" version of the phone, even if it
cost 2x as much. Kill the iPod Classic.

~~~
bduerst
Can you get bluetooth 4.0 to passively listen to active NFC signals?

~~~
heartbreak
Unlikely. NFC operates around 13MHz, and Bluetooth is 2.4Ghz, I believe.

~~~
rdl
The least crazy thing old be an iPhone case which does NFC and talks bt 4.0 to
the phone.

------
jdavid
The Amazon Kindle HD press conference was more exciting.

Kindle x-ray is an amazing feature, and the front lit display is really an
achievement.

I guess apple doesn't have the same fire to innovate that it used to. This
might be proof that Patents don't spur innovation.

~~~
podperson
Really? I found the pacing incredibly slow.

~~~
jdavid
but the products were more innovative.

Apple held back calling last year the iPhone 4S, the 5 because it wasn't good
enough to bare the name, but this time there are hardly any core feature
upgrades, and you get pulled further away from good google services.

the iphone 5 is more about flashy hardware and dumping google than it is about
wowing customers.

the iphone 4s had a focusing lens, siri and was twice as fast as the iphone4.

this phone really doesn't wow me at all.

~~~
podperson
How are the kindle products innovative? I guess the "white" page book reader
is innovative in the sense of licensing a new generation of the e-ink tech
(and I have to say it make the readers more attractive to me; I never liked
the gray one gray displays), and the front-lighting is new and useful. Aside
from that they're tablets with literally zero features we haven't seen before,
indeed nothing over the iPad 3. Apple just needs to cut the iPad 3 price by
25% and they're not even compellingly cheap.

The iPhone 5 may not wow you, but what does that matter? In general each
iPhone generation has only really been compelling to owners of _two_ year old
iPhones. I thought the iPhone 4S was nice enough but hung onto my iPhone 4. I
thought the 3GS looked nice, but held onto my 3G.

(For contrast, I have an original Kindle Fire and the new Kindles do nothing
for me. Indeed, having bought a Kindle Fire I probably won't buy another
Amazon tablet because they're _far_ more crippled than anything Apple has ever
done. E.g. I can't read epubs on it.)

The iPod Touch is a _huge_ upgrade. It's literally an iPhone without the
cellular plan (it has a 4S CPU, but an iPhone 5 screen).

------
draz
has anybody seen the pricing for this?? outrageous!!
[http://static.ips.apple.com.edgekey.net/ipa_preauth/content/...](http://static.ips.apple.com.edgekey.net/ipa_preauth/content/catalog/en_US/index.html)

Look specifically at the data plans

~~~
pooriaazimi
!!!

Why is Verizon so popular in the U.S.? I see no (absolutely no) reason why
someone should choose Verizon over Sprint... Verizon plans are about a hundred
times more expensive.

~~~
scdc
Coverage. Especially in the west.

~~~
dsl
Sprint users get free access to Verizon's network until 2016.

~~~
tesseractive
I know they have a 3G agreement, but do they use Verizon's LTE network too?
That makes a huge difference.

~~~
dsl
The agreement is technology agnostic. I had to escalate up a few times and
after some persistance, got a call back from someone who was engineering
level.

------
PhrosTT
What percentage of people sitting on upgrades are now debating just switching
to Android?

~~~
jes5199
I had to switch away from Android to iPhone because although there's a lot
about Android I prefer, I need my basic apps to run without fucking crashing.
I'm talking about _sending sms_ being impossible because the _stock SMS app_
crashes. Being unable to use Maps because typing in the blank caused it to
crash. And the thing is, I suspect that there are good Android phones that
don't have these problems, but several of my friends have phones from several
different vendors that are nearly unusable. It's like a minefield - I want to
buy my girlfriend a replacement for her mostly-broken Android phone, but I
have no idea how to evaluate whether a given model will be a broken piece of
shit. At least iPhone is a known quality - I miss having a decent Maps app,
but at least it isn't _broken_.

~~~
herval
The most recent builds (coupled with decent hardware, of course) have less and
less of these problems. The only lingering problems I see are the lack of good
apps (there ARE good apps appearing on Android, but the good/bad ratio is
still pretty bad) and the always bad battery life (no matter how low end or
high end the device is)...

------
nodata
There's a lot of defensive reactions on here. That's interesting.

Where is the feature in this phone which makes you stop and think "wow, how
did we not have this before?". There isn't one. That's not good.

Apple set the stage for something revolutionary, and what they unveiled was
not. It's boring. Again. Come on Apple.

------
codex_irl
I have always been impressed by Apples products (I use them to earn a living
after all) & was planning to upgrade my tired old iphone 3G to an iphone
5...but now I'm having second thoughts.

When a friend handed me his S3 I immediately felt a little wow'd by the screen
size, responsiveness & general look / feel of the phone, this new iphone does
not look like it will give me the same "wow factor".

I am extremely disappointed that Apple have not worked harder to improve the
battery life, it has been & remains pathetic, primarily for this reason I will
not be buying an iphone 5.

Come on Apple, I want to give you my money - but please start putting some
creative innovations back into your products, if you cannot do that then at
least give us a phone with a battery which can last for a full / busy day.

~~~
clarky07
i've never had any trouble with my battery life while i have friends with
android phones that say the lte drains it in 1.5 hours. I'm not sure what you
are hoping for, but i don't think switching from apple is going to help your
battery life.

~~~
codex_irl
My hope is a very simple one, I was hoping that I could buy a phone, charge it
and that it would not run out of power within a few hours of heavy usage, my
co-worker gets a full day of challenging battery use from his S3, which I have
been a little more impressed with.

Impressive screens & faster chips are all well and good but only if their is
enough power in the dam thing to actually keep the device powered on.

------
nikic
I wanted to watch the video on the page, but it told me to install QuickTime.
Yeah, sure...

~~~
upinsmoke
No Silverlight I guess.

------
kayoone
Solid device, nothing groundbreaking but catching up with the competition..I
am not sure about the form factor though

------
jstalin
The marginal improvements are diminishing...

------
slykat
I was hoping for some discussion of the new OS and phone's impact on
development instead of a Droid/iPhone flame war since I've just started
developing my first iOS app. What's the biggest impact to iOS developers? The
only one I can think of is a new aspect ratio.

Update: Discussion on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/iOS-Development/From-a-
developers-persp...](http://www.quora.com/iOS-Development/From-a-developers-
perspective-what-new-and-interesting-features-and-notable-changes-are-in-the-
iOS-6-SDK)

------
meritt
New iEverything except iMac. Come on Apple, we know it's imminent. Just
announce the damn thing.

~~~
calciphus
No new iPad either. Also no new Mac Pros.

------
bstewartnyc
20% lighter - because that was a big problem lugging around that heavy iphone
4.

slimmer - because that thick fat iphone 4 taking up way too much room in my
pocket

faster - because my iphone 4 is too slow?

what I'd upgrade for: screen that is readable in direct sunlight or when
wearing polarized sunglasses, camera that takes picture the instant I touch
the button, better phone reception

~~~
jws
_20% lighter_ – Without exception, my $20 t-shirts wear out by failure of the
fabric at the upper righthand corner of the pocket[1]. I get a little hole
from keeping my iPhone in there. 20% lighter might save me a few t-shirts a
year.

 _camera that takes picture the instant I touch the button_ – sounds like you
want the 40% faster image capture time.

 _readable in direct sunlight or when wearing polarized sunglasses_ – yeah, me
too. Still waiting on OLED to beat LCD.

EOM

[1] that wouldn't stop me from wearing them, but as soon as my wife sees the
hole the shirt vanishes.

------
kmtrowbr
This announcement plays into my theory that Apple will miss Steve Jobs a lot.
It was very much a 'gradual improvement' -- and 'routine' announcement.

A few missteps, from my perspective: * Apple Maps -- while this may prove good
for mapping technology in the long run, I think the iPhone users will miss
Google Maps quite a bit, for now. * Seemingly no fundamental improvement to
Siri. "Conversational Searching" is the best way for Apple to bring the fight
to Google, because this is the natural evolution of search. Why type queries
into a search engine, when you can have a conversation with an AI instead?
Google sees this danger and is developing Google Now, leaping ahead quickly. *
No signs of trying to get into the emerging mobile payments battle.

All in all I didn't get the feeling of a large vision being played out or of
an arc of forward advance, but rather a feeling of slowing momentum.

------
zmmmmm
Definitely an interative / evolutionary improvement - but I think they've done
a substantial number of things across the board that make it a significant
upgrade. I think it's a hard sell though because they have no new "headline"
feature to talk about and most of the new things are already in competing
forms in other phones, in many cases arguably better. With the 4s they had
Siri, past generations had things like Facetime, etc. With this they've got to
convince people to get excited about what looks like an incremental
improvement, and worse, they have to start doing what they hate - talking
about tech specs - the processor is "twice as fast", the phone is thinner,
etc. Apple hates competing on tech specs because they know it just sets a bar
for all the OEMs to jump over and commoditize the feature. But that is what
they have to do with this phone.

------
podperson
One of the things that impressed me (we'll see how well it works) is the
panorama function. Plenty of cameras have a automatic panoramas but you'd be
surprised how cruddy the results tend to be (often very low resolution). It
looks like the panorama function generates very high resolution output.

------
grecy
Hmm "Lightning to USB Cable".

Doesn't say if it's USB 3, and doesn't say if in the future, it could be
Lightning to Thunderbolt.

~~~
veemjeem
I like that their new cables are reversible. I hate how the micro-usb
connectors can only fit one way, and it's not obvious which way the connector
is when viewing from a distance. I always have to squint at the hole & cable
every time I charge my phone (I have a nexus s)... it's too bad I'll never
find an android phone with this kind of connector.

------
SnaKeZ
No USB connector, really sad.

~~~
Watabou
There is apparently.

[https://dl.dropbox.com/u/34865/Screenshots/Screen%20Shot%202...](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/34865/Screenshots/Screen%20Shot%202012-09-12%20at%2011.57.29%20AM.png)

~~~
scdc
To me, "Lightning to USB cable" means something to connect it to a charge
brick or your Mac/PC, just like the 30-pin to USB cables they used to include.

~~~
Watabou
Yeah. I was thinking for a second there that it was Lightning to Thunderbolt
and that I would have to pay extra just to buy the USB adapter to charge the
new iPhone. Glad that's not the case.

------
JohnsonB
No dedicated Camera button. Apple sacrificing usability for design once again.

~~~
jamroom
the up volume button controls the shutter when in the camera app.

~~~
JohnsonB
And that's not dedicated, so you have to launch the app any time you want to
take a picture, so you miss photo opportunities doing that. Dedicated is like
Windows Phone where pressing the button takes a picture, regardless of the app
you're in.

~~~
podperson
I'd call this an antifeature. Generally, I want to decide when to use the
camera. (Also, I have children.)

~~~
cooldeal
I guess he misspoke. Regardless of which app you're in or even if the screen
is switched off, pressing the camera button for a couple of seconds _opens the
camera app_. Whether you take a picture or video is up to you. It's much
faster than fiddling around for the power button and then tap the camera
button on screen.

------
kimmiller
This iteration is for the masses, it's not for you.

It's for my mother (who is taking one-on-one classes in an Apple store), it's
for my partner who is just starting to get work done on her phone (she's had
an iPhone 4 since they came out) and its for everybody that's just trying to
understand mobile.

Apple's network and ecosystem is now mature. Any change has to be so
thoroughly considered. Anything at all risky (say NFC) gets binned until its
proven because they can't upset what they have.

Unfortunately this isn't about technology, it's about strategy.

------
DigitalSea
Yawn. Looks like a taller iPhone 4 with an ugly back. Looks like Apple have
stopped innovating, I guess the patent litigation industry is more profitable
for them these days.

------
iag
Wow, I can't believe I missed the Apple announcement today. I've caught every
other announcement til now.

It's sad but that just shows little hype there are around this new iphone. =\

------
superk
I was watching the video:

<http://www.apple.com/iphone/#video>

And at about 3:35 when they're showing the step-by-step driving directions and
I was like WTF:

Super attention to every detail, state-of-the-art everything, and then that
scratchy godawful synthesized computer voice comes on and it's sounding
slightly worse than my Amiga back in the 1980's... srsly Apple...

------
skMed
I'm seeing a lot of surprise by the lack of NFC, but given the lack of market
adoption, I can understand why they may not take it as a high priority. Plus,
we've all seen the reports of Apple purchasing AuthenTec and its IdAM
solutions. Fingerprint + Passbook + NFC and they will have all the pieces in
place to create the NFC market with aggressive merchant partnerships.

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navs
Oh no a bigger screen. I for one am happy with the current screen size. Sure
make it faster, slimmer but not wider and longer!

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bane
I think the fact that this post is about to fall off the front page after less
than a day says a lot. Even though it was flagged I still think this post had
quite a bit to say <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510356> that's still
relevant after the announcement.

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DomKM
<http://www.apple.com/iphone/LTE/>

Why aren't all bandwidths supported by a single GSM model? It seems odd that
Apple would create one CDMA model and 2 GSM models, but I'm sure there's a
technical/financial reason for that decision. Does anyone know what it is?

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elorant
I don't understand threads like this. What's at stake here, whether Apple is
really innovative or not? Whether there should be more features on the phone?
Well there aren't. Live with that.

If you don't like the phone don't buy it, it's that simple.

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jmspring
I wonder if the CDMA versions are also going to be GSM compatible as the 4S
was.

~~~
chasingtheflow
The radio is universal CDMA/GSM/LTE.

~~~
ebuchholz
I didn't realize they had the single Qualcomm chip for CDMA/GSM back on the 4S
too. That's a nice piece of tech.

~~~
veemjeem
That's what people in semiconductors do -- they try to take a bunch of
features and package it in a single chip to reduce costs. There are chips out
there with temperature, accelerometer, and proximity sensors packaged in a
single unit. There was a time when an actual quartz crystal was needed as a
resonator, and now those are replaced with mems technology so that one can
package more into a single silicon chip.

I'm sure we can all remember the time when the cpu & gpu were separate chips.

------
shayonj
To sum it all up, were you really expecting Time travel? If so, move on; It's
an amazing phone. At time times you need to take little small steps and a
little moderate steps, to archive something big ;).

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TazeTSchnitzel
Are Apple skipping the keynote altogether now, or did I miss something?

~~~
stordoff
You missed it. Engadget's live coverage (for example) is here:
<http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/12/apple-iphone-5-liveblog/>

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Oops. I guess it wasn't that hyped, then.

------
cstrat
There is one huge product flaw that will become apparent in about 2 months, it
will begin on YouTube.

Vertical video is about to get even worse.

------
andrewfelix
Flagged. Because this is on just about every other news site in the world.
This phone upgrade has minimal bearing on hackers.

------
ComputerGuru
I would argue the biggest thing to happen to the iPhone since the iPhone was
the retina display, no?

------
joelrunyon
When are these actually available?

~~~
ciniglio
Sept 21st with preorders on sept 14

------
tsahyt
Someone has to do it: A cheap copy of the Goophone i5 we had here a couple of
days ago!

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gbraad
"Bigger, thinner and lighter" as if it was a commercial for period stuff :-/

------
morphir
is the screen still made of glass that will shatter if you drop it to the
ground? If glass, I hope they have managed to hardend it. Also I dont want
those silly bands/rubber rings around the phone.

------
uvTwitch
What the fuck kind of retarded vertical resolution is 1136?!

------
te_chris
There's a css bug for me on the carousel on chrome

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badlogin443
This changes everything, again.

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onetimeuse001
Looks pretty cool to me. As for specs some people love: I don't care much,
provided everything works smoothly and seamlessly. (Fine tuning Apache and
MySQL has saved me tons of cash by doing a lot more with the same hardware.)

Now replace Redmond with
...<http://farm1.staticflickr.com/29/43356340_36deb98522.jpg> :)

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propercoil
facebook integrated - no thank you apple, we want privacy

~~~
seangarita
All you have to do is... well nothing. Just don't add your facebook account.

