Apple iPhone 6S: Same phone, another day, but TOTALLY DIFFERENT So here are the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus - basically the same phones with a few new bits and bobs. Or as CEO Tim Cook downplayed it: "We have changed everything." The new mobes look virtually identical to the 2014 iPhone 6 and 6 Plus smartphones. Same size screen, resolution and casing, pretty much (the 6 versus the 6S, and the …
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>How is it a good experience for users OR developers to augment the internal memory with memory that is relatively slow, unreliable, and potentially missing completely?
A good point, but as developers of the OS there is nothing to stop Apple from somehow defining data types that are more tolerant of slow speeds and unreliable presence; i.e music and video. However, even then one gets into the situation where SD cards need to be indexed before use, app developers need to define data as such (i.e game engine lives internally, big level maps live on SD) or whatever the the situation is in Android these days ( I only have an Android phone, but I haven't tested the way internal Vs SD storage works... some apps are happier than others to be on SD maybe?)
YMMV
How is it a good experience for users OR developers to augment the internal memory with memory that is relatively slow, unreliable, and potentially missing completely?
For audio, video and ebooks and most other data that is streamed, it is generally more than fast enough. Unreliable? I've never experienced any problems with my phones. I agree, for apps loading large amounts of data on the fly (E.g. games) and for launching apps, it might not be ideal, but for media storage that is only going to be streamed, it is more than good enough and is better than not having enough storage.
... You *are* an actual developer, I assume? How about oh, I dunno, doing what Android developers have been doing for years? A 64GB micro SD card packed with goodies like entire TV seasons and films becomes a portable library between my various tablets. Except on my iPad mini, where I have to stream over Wifi from my NAS box <sigh>
I agree 16GB is mean. Minimum should really be 32GB on premium stuff.
However, today most media is streamed, so it's not as bad as it used to be.
But if you need media offline, then 16GB is cramped.
I get by with 8GB, but have a largely unused 16GB SD card installed too (unused because most Android apps are crap at using it). For some obscure reason the Mobo G LTE doesn't seem to exist with more than 8GB (which, come to think of it, is the RAM size on several of my computers).
"Seriously why the hell is the minimum still 16GB?"
So they can draw people in with the price of the base model then- after they've already committed to the idea- have them realise that the 16GB is overly restrictive and upsell them on the larger-capacity models at many times the going market rate for the difference.
Typical sales technique, make the money by upselling the gravy. Like the time I went to Specsavers (#) and after I'd gone for the "two for one" offer on some relatively cheap glasses I was offered anti-reflective and scratchproof coatings which bumped up the cost noticeably. Of course, the iPhones aren't cheap in the first place, but the principle is the same.
The omission of a card slot not only means that you have to pay Apple's prices if you want a larger-capacity iPhone. However, it's also a useful sales technique since- as you can't upgrade later- many people unsure whether they need the extra capacity will go for it anyway, rather than risk disovering later that their already-expensive iPhone has insufficient storage for their needs and they can't do anything about it.
(Oh, and I never bought the "customers will buy crappy low-end memory cards and blame Apple for the poor performance" argument against the card slot. If the will was there I'm sure it would be easy for them to require a minimum spec and automatically peform benchmarks and diagnostics against a card the first time it was inserted, to ensure it performed well enough).
(#) I should be clear that this was about 15 years ago
Not mentioned anywhere on the Reg, of course, but Apple cut the price of paid for iCloud storage to 99cents a month for 50G of cloud storage.
It would take more than eight years to match the price difference of the 64G iPhone. How often are you truly without connectivity these days, be honest? Just sayin'
"How often are you truly without connectivity these days, be honest? Just sayin'" --- dave 93
Personally, I spend about 8 hours a day where connectivity is too low to stream music at acceptable bit rates. My 128GB microSD card is probably the best 40 quid I've ever spent.
"Perhaps you should consider getting out a bit more?"
As my post implies that I'm often out of range of wired networking, WiFi and anything but quite basic mobile internet; and your post strongly suggests that you almost never are (in fact, that you can hardly believe that almost anyone is) it seems painfully obvious which of us should "get out a bit more!" :-)
True, but that implies that one has a free and unlimited data plan (in the dictionary sense, not the marketing sense) and further, one is willing to tolerate the inconsistent coverage and quality that we currently have.
A down vote from someone who clearly never gets out of a city on a major continent (try Buttfuck Idaho or back of Bourke) or ever paid for data in Australia or had his "unlimited" plan suddenly not be so unlimited after all ...
The facts remain that data is expensive in many countries, "unlimited" often isn't, and coverage still sucks outside cities. Visiting a major event in just about any city just about guarantees zero data coverage as people actually try and post to FB etc. Mobile data is still a long way from usable for anything but unimportant things, and not even those.
I would probably take up on Apples offer, were it not for my 1 Mbit/s upload speed.
So 20 x 3 MB photos would take some 10 minutes just to upload. Imagine after a larger photo or video session, for example. Doesn't appeal to me.
I have about 12Mbit/s download, but upload is the important bit when saving your photos, videos etc.
Obviously, doing it with 3G or 4G would be out of the question, unless you have unlimited data.
Although 4G upload could in theory be many times faster than the awful ADSL speed.
It's being billed as 3D, but functionally it's adding a fourth dimension: where you click that click are the first and second dimension, the duration of the mouse-down/click is the 4th dimension (time), and intensity/pressure is the 3rd dimension--arguably 'depth', or something analogous to it. It is "TOTALLY DIFFERENT".
"3D Touch," a new gesture system capable of recognizing how much force one applies to the screen, and the duration of a touch
Force can be measured (I am guessing) by the size of the imprint of the touch screen, if you push harder with your fingertip, then your fingertip flesh will spread over a larger area which the touchscreen can measure. If it is done this way rather than sensors under the glass then it will be interesting to see if a stylus that doesn't deform will work.
Lucky I don't have to use pressure with my old 5S, because the screen is cracked already and has been since it was a week old. I'm not replacing it because I will only break it again. Many people operate iPhones like this.
Apple already have this tech working in their newer MacBooks. The glass touch pad is fixed solidly to the casing but it has an electromagnet underneath that gives a small kick when the pad senses the pressure required for a "mouse click". The effect is that you'd swear the pad had moved - I had to shut the laptop down to convince myself it hadn't. A similar gizmo is fitted behind the glass of the new phone.
The most annoying thing I find about the iPhone 6 Plus is its lack of memory. I use an app like Spotify in the car on bluetooth then I go somewhere and use maybe messaging and Flipboard and get back in the car and Spotify has been killed to free up space and I have to faff about going into it again so it will play over bluetooth. Same for many other apps being killed whenever I play a game.
Soooo annoying that a modern phone would do this constantly and completely breaks the flow of working with it.
If they have doubled the memory I'll be upgrading, otherwise I'll just stick to the crappy 6+ I have.
The behaviour of streaming audio buffers does my nut in too - and I'm an Android user. Let us both hope that whoever finds the solution first, Apple or Android, is swiftly copied by the other! : D
In fairness, Google has a nasty habit of suggesting that an app be updated (i.e maps), when the newer version exceeds the hardware of my device (yeah, my newish phone broke, so I'm on a aged cheapo phone). Apple are aware that many iOS users are still on older hardware, and then *don't always* trip those people up with OS updates.
Hate to be the smug one here but blackberry 10 streams and multitasks quite easily between apps, even audio or youtube streams via the browser. No it does not do what you describe when getting out of the car and doing other things before wanting to play Spotify again (my passport has a dedicated media pause/play button on the side). It runs android apps too. Yes I'm expecting loads of downvotes. Yes everyone finds it hilarious and odd that I use a BlackBerry in 2015. Yes BlackBerry should marketed the fuck out of bb10 cause its core functionality is better than ios or android but everyone missed the memo. Did someone mention webos and meego?
Waspy,
Yup, me too, a Blackberry Passport has superceded my Note 2, plus Deezer (with spotizr to migrate playlists) has just superceded Spotify.
Aside from the ass-hat privacy stupidity, what always glt my goat with Spotify was the amount of audio stuttering/interruptions....
And this was with playlists that were CACHED for offline use, Spotify regularly stuttered, on multiple devices.
Have one on me!
Ymmv.
Jay
>The new iThings also offer identical 16, 64, and 128GB capacities, and prices ranging from $199–$399 for the 6S and $299–$499 for the 5.5-inch 6S Plus.
If your going to quote the price of the phone you should quote the price off contract or make it clear the price you quote is with a two year contract and give a price for the contract).
Upvote. Yes I too get seriously peed off by this widespread form of misinformation $199+(small print: 2 year minimum contract). OK we expect advertisers to tell lies but surely the register can serve us better, I read the article, seeing the $199 price in the 3rd sentence thinking - gosh, I thought iPhone was way overpriced, have they finally come up with a Moto G rival? Scroll down a long way to get to the small print - but still no off-contract price quoted. Surely the true cost of any item is one of the most important metrics for a purchaser.
I think the way Apple mentioned those prices would have raised eyebrows here in the UK because I found them misleading (they only mentioned these were contract prices at the very end). I also wonder how it is possible that Apple can prescribe the prices of those contracts - isn't that anti-competitive? Is it not the decision of the telco how exactly they want to fund and structure the associated financing?
I do NOT want to get into debt for a f*cking phone, so I either acknowledge it's too expensive or I buy it outright - I am not interested in yet another "we'll drain you slowly so you won't notice it" contract.
"Surely the true cost of any item is one of the most important metrics for a purchaser."
It should be, but there seems to be a growing group of consumers who either don't understand or don't care about cost, if it means they can get their instant gratification purchase hit, and ignore the TCO for the next 24 months.
It's quite depressing really.
Thanks for the downvote.
What do you expect from a phone? What major innovations has Microsoft done to smartphones?
Samsung? (Oh, something on the edge of the screen..)
I just don't know what sort of fantastic features people expect to get in a one-year update cycle.
Guess some just can't be pleased.
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