Apple’s boring hardware updates

http://www.marco.org/4222285032

by remi • 15 years ago

131 60 15 years ago

jonknee2• 15 years ago

Moving to a longer cycle also has the benefit of being friendly to people who purchase the iPhone with a service contract. It's tough to be in a two-year deal for a one-year device.

liamk• 15 years ago

It's even worse if you're in a 3-year contract (common in Canada). With that said, it's not to difficult to delay gratification and hold upgrades off for a few years.

querulous• 15 years ago

do any of the canadian carriers not allow upgrades at the two year mark (with a three year contract extension, of course)? i know rogers and telus both do (did).

ugh2• 15 years ago

So the iPhone self-destructs now after twelve months? Devilish what Apple is coming up with these days.

Normal people don't buy a new iPhone every year. And even nerds should know that the market is moving at such a speed that it will be nearly impossible for them to own the latest and greatest at any point in time. All iPhones were at least 24 month devices.

jonknee2• 15 years ago

I think the point was more of a focus on software. Where we are today I think the iPhone 4 stands up in hardware, but is lagging in software (notification UI, reliance on iTunes, etc). An extra four months for some more RAM and maybe faster data access isn't going to bother most people.

matthew-wegner• 15 years ago

AT&T has been fairly generous with upgrade amnesty, allowing iPhone upgrades while under contract (which resets your two-year timer, of course).

IIRC, they allowed anyone to upgrade to a 3GS and cut off ~6 months for an iPhone 4, in addition to special iPhone 4 pricing for those under longer remaining contracts.

But yes, I imagine Apple has lost some leverage here now that AT&T is no longer exclusive.

ROFISH• 15 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if AT&T still did it to band-aid hemorrhaging to Verizon.

dvdhsu• 15 years ago

> Or an LTE chipset

> Would any of those justify an event?

Yes.

LTE would be deserving of an event, especially if the launch of the iPhone coincides with the launch of LTE from ATT.

zdw4• 15 years ago

Agreed, but the timing might not be this summer.

Apple has been known to wait until the chipset hits their power envelope requirements - witness the original Edge-only 2G iPhone when cheap phones of the same vintage were already 3G.

zdw4• 15 years ago

My wager for this summer/fall is an "iPhone 4S" with the A5 processor, with almost no other hardware changes.

Plus a launch of iOS 5, with a revamped notification system, more developer API's, and possibly some UI reworks (iOS is looking pretty long in the tooth compared to things like Windows Phone 7)

joshzayin• 15 years ago

I would tend to doubt that the changes will be that small, considering the massive negative media attention 'antennagate' got--I think it's likely that they'll at least move the antenna to eliminate that problem, which would seem to necessitate some appearance redesigns as well.

They might not, but it would somewhat surprise me.

ugh2• 15 years ago

You mean that antenna stuff nobody cares about anymore?

wdewind• 15 years ago

Mine too, but the current VZW iPhone doesn't support 4g/LTE, so my bet would be for that.

twodayslate2• 15 years ago

I was hoping for dual cores and iOS5 (notification feature mainly).

My brother is saying they will be integrating a credit card system. That could be possible.

zdw4• 15 years ago

Integrated CC system sounds much too niche, especially with Square and similar solutions.

pohl• 15 years ago

Sounds like he was referring to the near-field communications hardware rumors.

6ren• 15 years ago

I think it will be dual A5, like the iPad: they have to keep up with (and actually, they surpass) the competition - HTC and LG have already announced dual core.

Perhaps they'll also try to bump up the resolution to 720p, and add HDMI out. A reason not to is so they don't cannibalize iPad sales - but that's short-sighted, and historically not Apple's style.

We may also see the rumored cut-down, retail-for-$200 iPhone - my addition is that it will have a similar form-factor as the current nano.

ZeroGravitas• 15 years ago

I think A5 (and the Cortex-A9 it implements) implies dual core. Saying they'll surpass the competition with the A5 is debatable, I'm assuming based on them having a better GPU (and NEON) than Tegra2 phones, but HTC/Qualcomm are coming even later to the dual-core party with a rumoured 1.2GHz and an Adreno 220 GPU.

Also, Apple added HDMI out to the current iPhone 4 via a dongle they announced as part of the iPad 2 launch.

kaylarose• 15 years ago

Unfortunately I agree. I hope we are both wrong though, and it really is an iPhone5.

mcav• 15 years ago

The iPhone doesn't need to get any smaller, and the display won't need any more increases in resolution. That's practically it's only noticeable physical feature. Anything they add to it at this point will be hard to notice unless it adds substantial new functionality.

They can always improve on speed, camera resolution, and storage; they could add LTE and NFC, but I can't think of much else that would even need hardware support that they couldn't add in software.

kenjackson• 15 years ago

A 4" display would be a pretty big deal. As would 3D support.

barefoot2• 15 years ago

How about a display on the back? That way there would be (nearly) no wrong way to hold your phone.

laujen• 15 years ago

Apple's events are almost always an hour. With that in mind, it is hard to see how any of these hardware announcements, event LTE, would take up an hour long presentation.

jad• 15 years ago

It's important to keep in mind that for Apple, hardware and software are not independent products. The software, as great as it often is on its own, exists to sell the hardware. Most of the iPhone's most compelling features, judging from what Apple chooses to promote, come in the form of software that takes advantage of new hardware. Think FaceTime with the iPhone 4, or video recording with the iPhone 3GS. These aren't the kind of big splash features that can typically come with just a software update.

Also consider the significant fact that new iPhones come with huge public exposure. Usually glowing stories on The Today Show and Good Morning America, articles in The New York Times, etc. This is publicity you can't buy. Free iOS updates, even if they have major version numbers attached to them, just don't have the same sex appeal with the public.

New hardware just seems to focus the customer's mind in a way that I'm not sure software can.

jsz0• 15 years ago

I'm not sure we're at that point yet but it will happen eventually. Once the iPhone gets a multi-core processor, much faster GPU, and 4G what else is really left for a yearly update? I doubt we'll see an octo-core iPhone 6 with 4 cameras, 2K display and 5G radios in 2013. The possible delay for the iPhone 5 seems more about re-aligning the product release schedule. It doesn't really matter when the iPhone is released. Most people only buy a new phone with they are eligible for a subsidized upgrade. The iPad, and iPod Touch, are the items that need a big back-to-school/x-mas production push. It must be difficult (or at least expensive) for Apple to release the iPhone mid-year and 2 months later gear up for the iPad/iPod rush. I think we'll probably see the iPad 2 get an extended shelf life too. The rumors of an iPad release in September were probably correct they just got the year wrong -- it'll be 2012. The last piece of this is they may move to more frequent, but minor, OS updates. This has already started to happen with 4.x where each release brought some significant features. Perhaps all the bundled apps will be updated through the App Store instead of OS updates as part of this.

bigfudge• 15 years ago

256k should be enough for anybody.

jrockway• 15 years ago

... LTE chipset (which currently has coverage almost nowhere)

Whoa! Marco is beginning to sound more annoying than Gruber.

The Apple fanbois make statements like this all the time -- Apple doesn't support something, so therefore it's irrelevant? LTE is available in NYC, LA, and Chicago (and 20 other cities), which are the three biggest markets in the US. That's not "nowhere", that's "a good chunk of the population".

Let me know when you can buy a Thunderbolt peripheral :)

chrisbolt• 15 years ago

How good is that LTE coverage though, even within those cities? Granted, I'm on AT&T, but today I was on the sunset strip in Hollywood and my iPhone dropped to EDGE. The sunset strip doesn't even have 3G and I'm supposed to get excited about 4G?

joebadmo2• 15 years ago

I don't understand your logic or why you are getting upvotes. You're comparing Verizon's LTE (for which the reviews are generally amazing) to ATT's notoriously bad 3G, especially on the iPhone.

beaumartinez• 15 years ago

Okay, in the US it has some coverage. But globally?

blub2• 15 years ago

"The Apple fanbois make statements like this all the time"

Yes, I find that to be the case also. While it's true that Apple builds good products, the fans generally try to make them look more innovative and to put the competition in a bad light. This can be explained by cognitive dissonance.

tinotopia2• 15 years ago

Alternately, it can be explained by the fact that a lot of happy Apple customers — 'fans', I suppose — are fine with farming out some of their technological decision-making to Apple. Seriously: if Apple isn't putting some seeming obvious feature into a phone, or computer, or whatever, I figure that there's probably some good reason for that. I'm not sufficiently interested to need to understand the minute details of every choice they make.

LTE is a perfect example. I don't give a damn whether my next phone has LTE. I have better things to do with my time than figure out whether the coverage — independent of carriers' marketing claims — is decent, make guesses — independent of etc. etc. — as to the extent of the coverage rollout over the next year, read up on the battery-life implications of LTE, and ponder whether the bottleneck on my phone has anything to do with the network speed in the first place.

(Actually, I already have a very strong suspicion about where the bottleneck is on my phone, and that's why I really don't care about LTE right now.)

Overall, I trust Apple to sell me the best all-round phone given the constraints of current technology. So far I've been very happy with that approach. So, yes, if Apple isn't putting some seeming obvious feature in a phone, I figure that there's probably a good reason for it, a reason that I'd understand and possibly even agree with if I invested a lot of time in the question.

The risk is that, should Apple go rogue, they could rip me off for an iteration or two before I wised up. In which case I would just go buy another phone from someone else and be done with it.

It's not like I'm blindly trusting Apple to not, say, saw off my leg and feed it to alligators; I'm trusting them to make decisions about a whole bunch of tradeoffs, decisions that will at best be valid only for a few months anyway, decisions on which hinge the expenditure of a few hundred dollars.

I'm not saying that becoming a micro-expert on your purchases is wrong, just that there's something to be said for not bothering. This is very much not the Nerd Way, but I have to say that I'm much happier since I stopped having to personally establish the perfect correctness of all my techno-purchasing decisions.

culturestate• 15 years ago

I wonder how much of them leaving it out has to do with their willingness to wait until tech fits into their defined power envelopes? Is LTE significantly more power hungry, or is this a blu-ray style "we just don't want to" thing?

vl• 15 years ago

My bet is on a larger screen: resolution is high enough to support larger screen and competition has nice large screens already.

eelco• 15 years ago

iOS and all the apps are build for a specific _physical_ size. A larger screen would mean apps would need to scale (or run in an awkward smaller size) which would look terrible and be awkward to use (very large buttons). The alternative would be to ask developers to make another, slightly larger version of their apps. Not going to happen ;)

allwein• 15 years ago

The apps are built for a specific resolution. As long as the screen resolution is 320x480 or 640x960, the actual physical dimensions of the screen are irrelevant.

oleganza• 15 years ago

If you mean that developers adjust pixels sizes for the finger (like "button should be no less than 40x40 points"), then it's not that strict. iPad has less points per inch than iPhone, but the standard buttons all have the same logical sizes on both devices. If iPhone 5(6,7) has a bigger physical screen, then all the controls will simply become a little bit bigger (but still smaller than on iPad, btw) and retina display resolution will still be high enough to have sharp text and graphics.

The only apps that rely on physical size are some sort of virtual rulers. When pixel size is changed, they need to be modified to adjust to that.

Flow• 15 years ago

What a silly person. The hardware is magic! :)

aufreak3• 15 years ago

There is still a lot of scope for significant hardware changes in the device space. A couple of my favourites - a) Pen input on iPad category devices (great for schools!) and b) camera embedded within the display (so you can look at the other in the eye).

daimyoyo• 15 years ago

I was really surprised that Apple chose to unveil thunderbolt in a press release rather than at an event. They'd been working with Intel for years and at the end all it garnered was "oh by the way the new MB pros will have lightpeak I/O ports built in and we're calling it thunderbolt." Couldn't they have waited the few weeks until the iPad announcement and unveiled it then? Apple missed a huge opportunity for free press(they were already there for the iPad, why not tell them about your revolutionary new I/O technology?) but oh well. Guess even Apple drops the ball from time to time.

dot• 15 years ago

the ipad 2 was on the front page of thousands of free daily commuter papers across the globe.

nobody cares about a new port. event or not.

djhworld• 15 years ago

While I really like the idea of 10GB/s transfer speeds, I can't help but think Thunderbolt will go down the path of Firewire.

It's called Unviersal Serial Bus for many reasons, but I still think USB will remain king, regardless of transfer speeds

DougBTX• 15 years ago

You could look at it the other way around: they were getting good press for the iPad2, why dilute it with news about a port update?

efields• 15 years ago

Lightpeak is impressive, but there's barely any hardware out there for it. What could they do to show it off? Show it transfering gigs of movies between some $500 lacie drive in seconds? It might be impressive to us, but until lightpeak hardware drops to a consumer-friendly pricepoint, its really nothing that will help sell products to the average consumer.

gnok• 15 years ago

Not really. It would look extremely awkward to announce a new port standard and then announce a brand new device that does not have that port, nor comes with a dongle to convert. No ball dropped here.

tomkarlo• 15 years ago

Apple isn't a hardware vendor: it isn't building its strategy off continually trying to get people to switch to the "latest and greatest." Instead, it's focusing on making it's money off the app store / itunes platform, and doing that makes it more important to keep their existing customers happy and on the phones they've already bought. That's why you see them being so consistent about upgrades, etc and support for the older units than other manufacturers.

Continual planned obsolescence is great for hardware sales but tends to make your customers feel a little sour about the product they bought from you last year. If you really want them to be loyal, buying apps and staying with the brand, it seems like a better plan to keep them happy through as much of the product cycle as possible by reducing hardware churn and focusing on software upgrades you can use for marketing but also distribute to your existing base.

Apple’s boring hardware updates

Related Stories