"911? Help, I've been hurt in a fall"
"I have severe injuries to my face and back, and I've lost a crown.
Oh, and the meatsack who wears me might be injured, but who cares, AppleCare(TM) only applies to me..."
Apple on Wednesday held its annual mobile device pageant at its Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino to acquaint the fascinated with its latest fondleslabs, phones and wrist wraps. Despite the secrecy – which failed after developer Steve Troughton-Smith found Apple's products listed in an XML file on the company's website – and the …
When they studied the falls were they fake ones onto a crash mat or were they real ones with video or some kind of validation? Also, were they young or old people falling?
I've been involved in clinical trials with accelerometers and detecting falls is very hard; not to mention the liability from missed falls and also false alarms.
It will be interesting to see what the percentage of false alarms turns out to be as well as other statistics such as whether it can detect car crashes and the number of people who party a little too hard and pass out.
Siri, how many folks are passed out at the pub this evening?
@tea hound,
True, but you have to send it in, and Apple don't guarantee that you get your own phone back (they tell you that you must back it up in its entirety and then factory reset it and turn 'Find my iDevice' off).
Given that I have some items in the secure enclave on the phone that I *really* *really* don't want to have to reset, I am loathe to swap the phone unless it's an upgrade. :-/
Call me a... What exactly do you call someone like me? ;-)
Surely I'm not the only person underwhelmed by this? The only one that looks at this and sees nothing more than incremental change?
The whole smartphone market really has reached the point where it's flat, dull, and stable - which has to pose a problem when you're trying to shift phones at $1000+ a pop.
Yep, it's boring, but that's not a bad thing. It's the difficulty in bringing anything radically new to a pocket device (size and power constraints) that forces designers to look at the small details. Polishing away lots of little niggles can lead to a markedly better user experience over time. Or in Apple's case, include long missing g features such as waterproofing, wireless charging and multiple SIM support (this isn't a jibe, Apple have done done things first too, and often find them very well. I don't see value in being first for the sake of being first, but some features were long overdue).
Look at Samsung - very little difference between the S8 and S9 other than the finger print sensor has been made slightly less awkward. Otherwise it's just a slightly better screen, slightly faster processor, slightly this, slightly that. And that's okay.
If you want a crazy radical phone, wait til next year when Samsung and some if their Chinese partners roll out some phones with flexible displays. But the first generation with likely be clunky, poorly supported in software and not proven to be durable. I'll take boring.
"Surely I'm not the only person underwhelmed by this? The only one that looks at this and sees nothing more than incremental change?"
To be fair, the jump to $1500 for a phone is a pretty big increment.
"The whole smartphone market really has reached the point where it's flat, dull, and stable"
People tend to comment on it now being a mature market, but I'm not convinced it wasn't born mature. My very first smartphone was an HTC Hero. Obviously the underlying hardware and software has improved since then, but I can't point at anything missing that would distinguish it from a modern phone. Hell, it has a removable battery, 3.5mm socket and accepts SD cards, so it's actually well ahead of many of them.
It's not really smartphones and the market that have changed, but rather society. When smartphones were new, people saw them as exciting shiny things, and were happy to buy new ones regularly because they were even newer and shinier, even though they didn't actually bring anything new to the table. Now, they're just ubiquitous tools. Upgrades are no more or less meaningful than they used to be, most people simply stopped giving a shit.
only if the shark stays within 2 metres of the surface, and not submerged for longer than 30 minutes.
Flying sharks should be ok, as long as the impact of re-entering the water isnt too great.
The laser beams are neither energetic nor particularly noticeable - otherwise the 'duckface unlock' feature would be far more amusing.
Attachment to the shark can be achieved using a range of adhesives, strapping, or my personal favourite, a nine inch railway spike driven by a sledgehammer - although this may cause some discomfort to the shark.
Can I use it to tell the time?
OK, enough said, that's all I want.
No honestly, that's what I want a watch to do, I want it to tell me the time.
Anything else?
Errrr yes, OK, it you insist, I don't want to worry about the batter more than say once every 5 years or so.
Yawn. Can I go back to sleep now?
Anything else??"
I'm a much more demanding user than you. I want a watch to tell me not just the time but the date too!
I wound have been with you up until a couple of years ago. Sadly I can now only read the date on my watch when I'm wearing my glasses.
Same here - I'll be sorting out a replacement battery for my 6S+ before the cheap offer ends in December. That should keep me going for a few more years yet. If it hadn't been for the removal of the headphone socket I'd probably have updated to the iPhone 7S 8 last year. It might be a small point for some but I found the early smart phones (HTC and iPhone that I know of, and I'm sure others) use of a standard headphone socket refreshing and genuinely useful compared to the Nokia practice of every handset using a different proprietary standard for the headset connector.
I'm just tired of the rehashed arguments against the headphone socket, "It's an obsolete standard", "use bluetooth headphones", "use the lightning to 3.5 jack adaptor", "It's brave innovation".
"It might be old but it's not obsolete - comparisons with floppy disks are misleading (floppy disk storage capacity was long eclipsed by user requirements but audio can still travel along copper wires that terminate in a jack plug which connects to near enough any audio device)", "I don't want to spend money on new headphones to replace my Sennheiser HD-25s that will be something else that needs regular charging, plus carrying another charger", "Why should I need an adaptor for the basic action of listening to music on a fucking £700+ phone?", "removing useful functionality is not innovation (unless you're Apple)".
@MrBanana
A grand is expensive - but is it too much? I’m not sure that it is. Bear with me on this. I’m about to indulge in some high octane devils advocacy.
Once upon a time (the 1980s) a mobile phone cost as much as a car, a ‘humble’ ZX Spectrum cost the equivalent of 800 nicker (and still didn’t have any built in storage or a display). These costs covered R&D for hardware, R&D for software, manufacture (not in a sweatshop) and this mysterious thing called a ‘profit’.
Nowadays, ‘free’ or as close to as possible is the preferred price point. No one wants to pay for software and shitty, cheaply built, hardware rules the roost. Sure, it doesn’t last long - it who cares? It was cheap! Yay! Many mobile phone manufacturers don’t make a profit - it’s a loss leader (for whom though, I wonder) and I wonder why they bother. Similarly, I can’t see the profit in a sub £100 tablet, and still these things get shovelled from sweatshop to landfill with a brief interlude with user.
So I look back to the 1980s, when everything was better and we could cheerfully sing ‘Hold a Chicken in the Air’ whilst walking to the Grundig rental store because the telly wasn’t working and the Ford Orion has broken down again. Prices were higher, adjusted for inflation, but they were the right price - and it seems to me that competition today has driven prices to being too damn cheap.
So yes, these new phones are expensive, no I can’t afford one (but, luckily, my iPhone siX is still quick and works perfectly) - but I don’t think that these new phones are too pricey for what they are. I’m sure that they’ll sell by the boatload - and look on the bright side, they’ll probably be cheaper than whatever gets pushed out next year!
Average 5 pints of beer per week in a pub for a year £1000
Two reasonable bottles of red wine per week for a year: £1000
Cost of a 20 a day fag habit for a year £2000
Cost of gym membership for a year £600
Cost of a latest model iPhone if sold on after 1 or 2 years about £200
Seems to me that iPonies (and most Apple products) hold their value much better than this in the secondhand market.
Post not clear enough and open to misinterpretation. £200 is how much it will cost the original buyer. For example, pay £1000 for it, sell it for £800. Assuming they buy the phone, as for many the cost price is irrevelant, they will buy it on a contract and have to wait to the end of their deal to recover the value in the phone.
The main point being that because of its secondhand value a latest model iPhone will cost its buyer-from-new only a couple of hundred quid in depreciation. All these people choking on their kebabs at the price didn't think too deeply about it.
certainly used to be the case, but i was (out of sheer curiosity) having a look around the webs this morning, to see how much i could sell my 64gb 6s, should i chose to, err, 'upgrade'. i was seeing offers between £80 and £100.
OK, the 6s is now (counts on fingers) 5 generations old (!) (6s,7, 8, x, xs), but, as many others have said, still works fine, so i will be keeping it for now, and talking to the previous poster about what sounded like a beer subscription service.
@werdsmith: "Cost of a latest model iPhone if sold on after 1 or 2 years about £200"
"BRITISH PEOPLE SPEND OVER £680 MILLION EVERY YEAR FIXING BROKEN PHONE SCREENS, SURVEY CLAIMS"
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/broken-phone-screen-fix-iphone-cost-price-uk-a8536236.html