Now when only X<80% of devices lack compatibility, I'm not likely to take the time to make 3D Touch a core interaction.

So your apps have to optionally use 3D Touch, Pencil, adaptive layout, fingerprint, and several other interactions that only cover fractions of their hardware line.

And it is half-baked in the sense that when I do activate 3D Touch, it’s usually by accident. It is almost the same gesture as deleting apps on the home screen! I go to delete an app, press-and-hold a little too long and instead of squiggly icons with delete buttons I get...a menu? And usually I get that the 2nd time I try, too.

Force-touch badly needs something to make it obvious, and they need to work a lot harder on making it not overlap with anything else. Ironically, for an interface that loves gratuitous animation, force-touchable objects might have made a lot more sense with some fancy appearance or animation and they have none.

Edit: HOLY WHAT!?! How did I not know that this exists?!?! I just figured it out. If you didn't know what it is, like me, then pull up any place where you can input text. Type something in and then Force Touch anywhere on the keyboard while it's showing. Your cursor will move with your finger like a trackpad. That's amazing.

Of course, this is all on a grade. Control Centre has a medium-low discoverability (given only a visual hint on the lock screen), and is more vital to the iPhone. The 3D Touch cursor movement is a lot less necessary (I know about it but never use it), and is a lot less discoverable. The 3D Touch-from-edge-of-screen-to-switch-between-apps gesture is there as well, but make slightly more discoverable as its easier to accidentally trigger it to learn about it for the first time.

An aside, I actually find the 'advanced' cursor movement, in both the 3D Touch form on iPhone 6s Plus and in the long-press form on the iPad Pro, to be next to impossible to use. I can never reliably figure out what triggers the different modes of it (cursor movement, text selection, etc) and thus barely ever use it.

Pop-up tutorials always make me feel somewhat intruded on and break the transparent assimilation between me and the tech; being reminded you don't completely control this thing in your hand (or on your monitor -- websites fall in the same boat) dampens my trust of a tool.

Maybe including it in tutorials in the system app. But, yeah something would be nice.

It's odd that after ten years of development, Apple still hasn't made their keyboard just work. Selecting and manipulating text is still buggy and unpredictable.

Touch keyboards are a hard problem, but we use them so often (I'm using one now) that I think Apple would be smart to put some more thought into it.

Just a little tweaking and it would be perfect. I don't have this problem with using the keyboard normally, which is quite accurate.

> Improves reliability when using 3D Touch on the keyboard

Hopefully this means "just a little tweaking" was done and the feature is more comfortable to use.

I have the same problem with the dictation icon. Sometimes I'll start typing a message and then realize that I'd rather dictate it. Once you start typing, the keyboard goes into "typing" mode. If you try to tap the dictation icon, it thinks you're aiming for the space bar.

I think that the keyboard is trying to be "smart" by altering its behavior based on what it thinks you'll do next. The problem is that those changes aren't reflected in the UI, so there's no way for me to know about them. I'm sure I benefit from that intelligence some of the time, but I only notice it when it when the keyboard stubbornly refuses to do what I want.

The 3d touch 'trackpad' thing on the keyboard is great, but i could never get it to reliabily work... but i think using this (slight push, then harder again) makes it almost completely usable.

There's a delay for how quickly you can use it after the last time you've used it. The delay could/should be smaller, but don't get frustrated. Go slow and don't press too hard.

When you get used to the timings and pressures, it pays off and it's suddenly a pleasure to go and delete or correct something, or the whole input. Now I get frustrated on phones without it.

I liked the windows phone keyboard, thought the Fire phone was okay, but am chronically unsatisfied with the Android typing experience. I have played with a few but settled for a while on Google Keyboard before moving onto Fleksy which isn't bad. Shame its broken for HTML text input fields...

The default Apple keyboard makes me incredibly frustrated, especially when used one-handed (which is 90% of my usage). No flow typing, and nearly all numbers, punctuation, and symbols are locked away behind layers of menus. I do find it the most accurate for typing in unpredictable plain text, but that's not very useful even for passwords (LastPass + most of my passwords have symbols in them).

Most of the third party keyboards are crippled shadows of their Android counterparts, but I can least get flow typing through them.

The Xperia Z Compact line is, for my money, the most pleasant Android phone I've found. The Z3C is still plenty snappy and is my personal favorite, but after sacrificing mine to the pavement deities the Z5C is still pretty great.

And the keyboard has exactly the same problem; force-touch uses space that already has a purpose and a gesture that is somewhat similar to that of the normal keyboard function. I tried it just now and there is a decent chance I will start typing random characters instead of activating it. That, to me, is a failure of an interface. I will admit that once activated correctly, the mini-trackpad is a better method for moving the cursor (although, almost anything could improve over the default text editing on iOS).

(Not a problem that Apple's copying tech, it's just not unique)

It seems like a year and a half is a long time in mobile phone tech. Google apps have already said that the browser that Blackberry is out of date (which speaks about both the release cycle of Blackberry for a newish phone and Google).

Either way, the touch interface is very cool on Blackberry.

With my muscle memory, I end up marking parts of the text and overwriting it afterwards instead of inserting that one letter with the diacritics.

(I do use 3DTouch shortcuts as well and they probably save me a whole bunch of minutes over an entire day.)

Apple, are you listening?

That said, I don't personally care for it. I also feel that iOS is getting too complicated.

3D Touch is the long press controlled by finger pressure instead of time pressed. It took an already hard-to-discover feature and made it more nuanced (that is, more complicated).

Big question seems to be what the best mapping between those interactions and commands is.

You want to map the most frequently used interactions to the fast interactions, but you also want the mapping to be learnable (consistency across applications likely is needed there), and 'intuitive' in the sense that the mapping starts feeling normal relatively easily.

From what I read, it seems it isn't even clear yet that there a good mapping exists under those constraints.

I do look forward to more experiments here, though. Multi-finger force touch? I can't imagine how that would work on an iPhone that you hold with one hand, but on an iPad, there might be some really useful application.

Cameras in the LCD screen that allow non-contact interactions? Apart from the "screen is a copier" use that Sun predicted in project Starfire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfire_video_prototype), it seems hard to envision uses, but who knows? Signing to your screen could be easier or faster than typing.

Please no wave-at-me interfaces.

I wouldn't mind those, especially if it relates to multitasking. Sometimes I hold phone with two hands.

Force-swipe to switch tabs on Safari, force-swipe two fingers to switch apps.

I would argue that it fixed the long hold, honestly. Waiting for long holds is a total pain. Being able to reach the same level of contextual menus instantly without long holding is a huge source of relief for the user in apps that rely on that kind of interaction.

You don't see how what you just wrote is drastically more complicated to the average user? Tiny differences in time and pressure determines two different features when pressing an app icon.

The overlap with the long press, and uses they got for it are not compelling.

It should be a way to displace content and move it to other apps, for example. Or to pierce through the lock screen to command a running app (like Spotify). Or to pierce the simple interface of an app to access advanced features or something. Just thinking out loud.

Assuming you haven't set this already, you can go into Trackpad preferences and change it from Medium to Firm. That'll switch from "you have to press pretty hard" to "goddamn dude, are you trying to break the trackpad in half?" If you're still doing that by accident, you can disable it completely.

If anybody has a force meter handy, I'm curious what the actual numbers are on these.

EDIT: QuickLook is the more useful function than Dictionary, IMO. I use it regularly.

I think they should have at least done something similar to the pull-to-refresh animation (where the shape isn’t “complete” until you’ve pulled far enough). Why couldn’t they pop up a tiny circle or something under your finger that turns like a clock and shows you how much longer you have to press to activate a 3D Touch?

The real question is if they will admit it was a misstep by removing it from their flagship model or just keep pretending and keep it in. Companies really hate admitting they were wrong so my bet is that they are stuck with it for the forseeable future.

The current CEO of Apple is the former COO, someone well regarded for his prowess in managing Apple's supply chain and determining optimal cost per unit for Apple's products.

If only a small percentage of customers use 3D Touch and 3D Touch adds a substantial cost per unit, I can see why Mr. Cook would disagree with 3D Touch being an awesome addition.

I personally use 3D Touch to open links in new tabs in Safari, but that's only because 3D Touch interferes with the long press gesture.

Yeah, but there is a difference between a software feature that, once written, would generally take more effort to remove, and a hardware feature that costs money for every unit you ship.

That seems to be a thing with Apple in general. For example, I just recently discovered that by holding "option" while clicking the "Format" drop-down on the Preview program's Export screen, you can get additional formats to appear, magically. For "advanced" users I'm guessing?

How the hell was I supposed to know that ??? Where else can I see additional things by holding down "option" ???

Yes, Apple is simple, but there's a lot of cute little hidden things that you can do by combining option/apple under the right circumstance. I feel like I'm playing Super Mario Bros. and jumping wildly into the air to hit some hidden block.

It gives you (a bit of) pressure sensitivity in painting apps (Sketches, Paper, Procreate).

Looks like this:

https://i.imgur.com/eX2bfHp.jpg

The blue dot is always there, but the four way arrows only appear after you press it, and you can drag further away to move faster, or closer to move slower.

It is one of these things that after you use it you wonder why everyone hasn't copied it yet. Microsoft's keyboard is actually the best thing on Windows Mobile.

I still want gesture based typing (Swype) on the Surface Pro. The on screen keyboard is substantially worse on full Windows 10 than it is on Windows 10 Mobile, it makes no sense at all...

What the heck Microsoft? Why is a keyboard on a 5" device better than a keyboard on a 10" one?

Patents are very possible

The patent was initially filed in 1990 and granted in 1996. So it should have expired in 2013. It seems to be owned by Lexmark (which was owned by IBM.)

Maybe I should check the documentation, but this also highlights the discoverability problem of 3D Touch. I guess I need to get in the habit of trying to "3D Touch" all over the place to find new features?

This video explains how to activate it for those who haven't used it before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQpCPOSCu10

Edit: I wasn't aware of the double peek to select whole sentences. Cool.

would have worked better with a button on the keyboard that turns it into a trackpad.

It's really nice to be able to move the cursor and select text so easily and fast. It feels like a hack.

What?

They regularly withhold features from cheaper versions to achieve better margins and lower the cost, nothing about them being bad.

And nothing about 3D Touch being bad. Where did you ever get that?

That doesn't make them bad -- just hard to discover.

Once you find out about them, they are dead easy.

Not all UIs have to be immediately apparent, UI design is also about teaching users new idioms. Pointing with a mouse was alien once too...

Another example, a great feature in Google Maps on mobile is the ability to zoom with one hand. You double tap and drag (tap, tap-and-hold, drag), but I only figured this out because some blog talked about it. From what I can tell there are no instructions in the app that tell you about this feature, and I see this as being in the same vein as 3D touch. Sure it's great, but if people don't know about it or can't learn about it easily, they won't reap the benefits.

It's fine for secondary controls (other ways to zoom). I'd say Google learned the lesson with the now discontinued Menu button on Android. Application authors would sometimes hide critical functionality behind a Menu button press, and sometimes the Menu button did nothing. This lack of discoveribility and inconsistency is bad for User Interaction

This is a native Android gesture, by the way, and works in most apps and web-pages. It used to work on HN, but stopped when they changed the markup to be more mobile-friendly.

Someone shows you, you see someone do it, you accidentally press and activate it, you watch the introductory "wizard", you see it in an iPhone ad -- there are literally tons of ways.

Including the one everybody hates, RTFM...

What I mean by that is that OS X has hundreds of small features, keystrokes and affordances that are probably documented somewhere, but that I and most other people tend to find either by accident or by being told about them.

Apple's products have always been this way, and I rather like it. It is similar to my learning experiences with physical tools - over time, I've found a lot of tricks and 'off-label' uses for various woodworking tools by experience, and the OS sort of mimics that process.

For whatever reason, it doesn't work as well on the phone. I suspect it is partly that I don't spend hours at end doing things with my phone - I look something up, send a text, call someone, whatever and put it back in my pocket. A second factor is I almost never do complicated things on a phone. I have edited code in vi and then pushed/deployed it from my 6s, but not by choice, and that's not even that complicated.

So I do think discoverability is somewhat worse on a phone, at least for the way I use one, and it seems like an indirect form-factor consequence. It isn't that the form factor can't be used for complex tasks, but it is much more comfortable elsewhere, so the phone stays relegated to simpler stuff, which doesn't lead to the same degree of discovery/experimentation/happy accidents.

You can quickly switch apps using 3D Touch? How?

I think it's more about segmentation. For people who prefer smaller phones, there is still a reason to go for an iPhone 6s with a higher price point anyway. If the se was exactly the same except screen size, it might cannibalize the 6s.

That said, I've never used it on the iPhone -- if anything, Force Touch only gave us some shortcuts to actions that long-time users have already acquired "muscle memory" to perform differently (and without significantly more steps).

Force Touch is just a menu button. Only it's a menu button that's extremely fussy and difficult to use.

I actually struggle to save my workouts on the Watch because after a workout when I'm sweaty and breathing heavily, it's damn near impossible to bring up the menu and save the workout.

The Watch would be a better device if it had a hardware menu button instead of Force Touch.

Same goes for the iPhone. Force Touch is only useful for bringing up the app shortcut menu, and for positioning the cursor in a text field. Those are important but utterly mundane features. You don't need a sophisticated force-sensitive screen to bring up a menu for move a cursor, and those features would be easier to use if they were not implemented using Force Touch.

1. Speed. The delay between a force touch and the haptic feedback is often measured in seconds rather than milliseconds, particularly when the watch has been inactive for a period of time. That kind of delay is frankly outrageous. The haptic feedback needs to be instantaneous to be effective, even if it takes the actual software longer to wake up and respond.

2. Tap vs. Scroll. Unlike the iPhone, the Watch does an especially poor job of distinguishing between tap and scroll gestures. If your finger isn't perfectly still the software will treat it as a scroll gesture, and no amount of force will override it.

Pairing those two behaviors can produce some frustrating user experiences.

On the original iPhone, Apple did an amazing job of producing a very fluid and responsive UI on very humble and underpowered hardware. They've been less successful at doing the same with the Watch hardware.

I for one hope they keep it around and just work to improve it's accuracy and discoverability in future iterations.

> The real question is if they will admit it was a misstep by removing it from their flagship model or just keep pretending and keep it in.

They're talking about removing it from the flagships in the FUTURE. Specifically the 7 and 7 Plus later this year.

I don't understand this point at all. What does it have to do with not including the feature on a smaller device? "Because it might be used too much" makes no sense.

Whether you agree with the argument depends on how much faith you have in developers/designers to understand how average users will experience and learn their software, and in whether they might go for the lazy "shove it in a contextual menu" solution even knowing that it's questionable at best. 3D touch is supposed to be a "power user" feature; if you don't know it's there you can get by just fine. It'll take you an extra half second to open an email.

By holding it hostage on some new products, Apple can hope for more developers to say "I'll use this for time-saving shortcuts and other convenience features since the iPhone SE users don't have it." Once best-practices for that are more ingrained and many apps have implemented it in a way that lines up with Apple's vision, there's less risk of buried features when they eventually include 3D touch across the lineup.

I really hope apple sticks with it moving forward. As a developer I have been having a blast coming up with new and interesting ways to use it that legitimately increase a user's satisfaction and the usefulness of an app.

But it doesn't provide an easier way to access long hold functionality, instead of provides different functionality that could be activated accidentally instead of long hold functionality.

e.g it doesn't make deleting apps less tedious, it instead adds a shortcut menu you might activate by accident when trying to delete the app.

Force touch, on the other hand, isn't tedious, so it does what Apple wanted to do: it gives you a menu. I would expect that whatever a long hold does to an item should also be a thing on that menu. You could think of a long hold, then, as the "default secondary action"—like how shell object handlers in Windows use their "default primary action" from their context menu when double-clicked.

https://github.com/marmelroy/PeekPop

I'm genuinely curious, because I have not seen anyone say "hey maybe they just used the same screen as the 5S and that's why 3D touch is left off" but I have seen a lot of "I don't understand why Apple neglected to include 3D touch in the SE".

[1]: http://www.apple.com/au/iphone-6s/3d-touch/

You didn't see apple implementing Samsung's "show your face to unlock your phone" feature because it was kinda slow and dumb. Likewise, I don't see any Android phones with 3D touch.

Yet when front-facing cameras came out, EVERYONE jumped on that feature, now your phone is dead in the water without it.

It was left to the history books the moment other manufacturers said 'meh, we don't need this right now'.

I went into the Apple store and couldn't even figure out how to get 3D touch to work and spent quite a while. After research it seems like you need to magically know which apps support it and even then which interfaces within the app. It is very obscure.

Apple is often first to market with new stuff, and sometimes I look on in jealousy (e.g. when Siri first shipped), but 3D touch is one of those features I never want Android to copy. I think it makes Apple's ecosystem worse and is opposed to their "simple and straightforward" UI strategy.

What were they thinking?

Several apps came out within days of the Apple 3D Touch announcement, such as https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.casual_dev..., that were installable and worked on existing Android phones. Since it was basically evidence of another Apple copy-paste, this information was basically ignored by iGizmodo / iVerge / etc, so many people think that Apple "invented" pressure-sensitive touch events, despite getting them a full 5 years after Android.

I believe that the reason that pressure sensitive apps were met with a "meh" on Android is because long-click works great and people understand it. Click to do a thing, long-click to get a context menu on a thing. It works everywhere, even on many Apple-developed iOS apps that haven't been "upgraded" to 3D Touch yet.

When do you think front-facing cameras came out?

The answer is, they were rather common in (non-touch) smartphones outside the U.S. before the first iPhone was even rumoured of, yet Apple only introduced one in the 4th generation of their phones.

That said floppy drive was available for 14 years (128K->iMac) so that should give you some idea of the commitment Apple has to keeping technologies in place.

Now you don't even know which devices support it. Very frustrating from the UX standpoint.

Indeed.

I see this as a sign that 3D touch is not getting much traction.

Fragmentation is more like when apps run poorly on less popular Android phones because of all the differences (screen sizes, performance characteristics, etc.). But optional features like 3D Touch peek/pop aren't really essential to make apps run well. They're bonuses. And there's literally tens millions of people who can use 3D Touch already, so it's an optional feature probably worth implementing. And if you're building a design app it makes complete sense to support the Pencil, which is specifically targeted at that niche.

Also you're mistaken about Touch ID and adaptive layout. Touch ID is standard across all current devices, and adaptive layout helps you support them all with minimal work.

1) 3D Touch is not that important a part of the UI anyway, as devices are fully functional without it.

2) Developers will add it to their apps anyway, to entice high end users -- it's a very competitive landscape for apps, so they can't afford not too, even if it's only in half the new iPhone models.

3) Eventually it will be present to all devices anyway. In the meantime, the cheaper SE models allows Apple to cater better to places like India without sacrificing much.

App developer here. Patently false. I actually haven't implemented 3D touch in any app. Want to guess how many support requests I've received for it? Zero.

Well, I said "will add it to their apps anyway", Not "already have added it". And I'm talking about flagship apps , the kind everyone has on their home screens, not any random app or developer.

It's not a "no true scotchman" either. Obviously I know that not all of the smaller/casual/fart/etc apps are gonna get it -- heck, I've got several old apps that haven't been updated for even for far more important changes (like Retina assets or larger screen sizes).

So, if you make "Funtime Googly Eyes" or "Milan Metro timetables" you might not add 3D Touch. But apps like Facebook, Twitter, Gmaps, Dropbox, Gmail, Evernote, Instamatic, Flipboard, Procreate, VSCO, etc, are sure gonna add it. (and lots of smaller apps wanting to differentiate themselves too, but all the big ones are getting it sooner or later -- some already have).

Depends on how the app is programmed.

Still, there might be 10 of such apps out there. But I doubt there will be 100.

Spotify accounts for 2 GB of traffic per month on my phone and some plans are barely affordable when you want more than that--fortunately I can do up to 6 GB before I am traffic shaped, but that isn't the say the same for all carriers in this country.

Obviously, it's advisable to do the upgrade after your warranty has expired. ;)

[1] http://9to5mac.com/2016/02/03/iphone-flash-storage-upgrade-s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaqiangbei

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qihoo_360

[2] http://bang.360.cn/huodong/up128

[3] http://bang.360.cn

I have an iPhone 4s that is "the kids phone" for my two-year old so she can watch YouTube and Netflix. I'd love to upgrade that so I could put all the other movies she likes on there as well.

PS: This technique has been around since April 2015. A Youtube search yields roughly 8000 videos. I wouldn't be surprised that there are dozens or even hundreds [1] of this "repair shops" in Shenzhen's huaqiangbei or Beijing's Zhongguancun [2] electronics market.

There was even a similar video tutorial made by iFixit Vietnam;) [3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=iphone+nand+fla...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongguancun

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQFpay9HgEk (by iFixit.vn)

Worst comes to be worst, Huaqiangbei has tons of vendors who sell iPhone scrape parts so an accidental damage can be easily "replaced" and fixed up.

And I wouldn't be surprised if some of the technicians were Foxconn trained workers.

I wonder how many people in the China tech scene read HN?

Fortunately, HN + Github are accessible free within China so I wouldn't be surprised there are significant Chinese engineers using these sites daily.

Write Sam Altman a nice email, he may just tell you the detail stats to answer your question directly ;)

I also think 4 inches is decent size for my pocket.

I think I'll buy my first iPhone soon. Good job, Apple.

I've since moved to a big 6S, but my 4S is still quite usable.

Previously, even if a developer was on his best behavior (putting expensive tasks on a background thread to avoid bogging down the main thread and causing a frame rate drop), it didn't really help, because you only had one hardware thread.

Even though the 4S is a "slow" processor compared to the latest phones, it's UI was way more usable than the 4 and 3GS because of the second processor core.

I don't think anyone will take pro-4S comments seriously except people who already own a 4S and know the tradeoffs, though!

   o Photostream/iCloud Photos.
   o Rock Solid/Fast Camera
   o Overcast
   o Tweetbot
   o All the IOS controls in Finger DNA

Any other cheap phone doesn't truly meet this requirement, aside from some Chinese mid-range Android handset (which have their own issues, typically, except perhaps the Meizu or OneTouch phones). Maybe a Motorola G would also fit, but there's something to be said for having what is basically a top-of-the range handset that works flawlessly and will continue to do so for years afterwards.

My iPhone 5S is 3 years old at this point, and is still perfect. I bought it 12 months ago, second-hand and couldn't be happier.

It would also suck if you had an app on your phone like a star/constellation map, which you only use every once in a while when you are out in the middle of nowhere... To have your phone automatically delete that app, then try to re-download it when there isn't any way to do so would be a pretty awful experience.

Works well for something like the Apple TV - I don't think it's good for phones yet.

Apps that take more than a second or two to download over LTE would be the difficult edge cases, but there are very few such apps, and even if they occupied 50% of the phone's storage and were never reaped the caching approach would be fine.

The big issue is the data cap, but things are trending toward unlimited data (I have it with T-Mobile now) and many of us are often connected to WiFi at least periodically throughout the day.

http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-th...

I think they have something like 150+ iOS devs, so they're almost up to a megabyte per dev!

So while it is difficult, I think that from a product perspective there would be only upside to treating it as a cache compared with the horrible usability of a 16GB IOS device with a typical 2016 usage pattern.

cache invalidation: distributed resource synchronization

naming things: all things abstraction

off by one: we always fuck it up somehow

I've got 5GB free on my 16GB phone. You've explained why 16GB is not a good fit for you, but that doesn't mean it's not a good fit for anyone.

In France for instance, you can have 50 GB LTE for 20 € per month (with Free). In Austria, 10 GB LTE for 15 € is not uncommon.

To travel from Vancouver to the next principal Canadian city (Calgary), it requires 900 KM of driving and there's only really one metropolitan area of sorts between the two, meaning that you're going to be setting up cell towers that handle only so much traffic in a day.

As a result, to get service where you end up with just traffic shaping once you go beyond 6 GB (beyond that there is no real limit really), you need to go with a carrier that only services the larger cities. So in my case, my carrier services just Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, and Ottawa, which are fairly dense areas with a combined population of 18 million or so, or just about half of the country's population. Once I leave the city, I have to piggyback on to other carriers however.

Hence why mobile carriers suck in Canada because the bigger carriers do not want to eat into their fairly large profit margins. They can afford to offer such plans, but they simply don't want to.

For the record, I pay $40 CAD/month ($30 USD or 27 EUR) for unlimited North American calling and text plus the "unlimited" data use.

You are wrong.

Both countries have parts of the country covered by the Alps, high mountains that make cell coverage expensive and several areas still have very spotty coverage with often very old GPRS/Edge-only cell towers.

Also there is a competition going on with more than four telecom companies competing that lowers consumers monthly costs (cell phone data plans).

Additionally the former state based telecom copper cables infastructure aged badly and hasn't been touched for 15 years and the fiber network infrastructure connects just big cities, bit not small towns in the Alps. In many areas cell connection is the only option to get 1+Mbit data connection, as the copper cable infrastructure hasn't been upgraded since the mid nineties.

The "we are a big country" is just a marketing stunt.

For example, when I visit relatives in the Frankfurt region (Mainz), I am always amazed by how similar geographically and demographically it is to the greater Toronto area in Ontario. Population and industry wise Toronto and Frankfurt are very similar -- similar financial sector jobs, similar population densities.

And yet their infrastructure is _far_ superior. I take the train from Frankfurt to Mainz in like 20 minutes. From the Mainz train station there is integrated light rail and bus to a whole network of suburbs and villages, right out into the countryside. If I want to go for a hike in a forest preserve, I don't even need a car necessarily, I can take a streetcar and a bus to many very nice places.

Accessibility of food -- groceries, farmer's markets, restaurants. All better.

And yes, the telecoms infrastructure is far superior value for the money.

North America has let itself fall behind for several decades.

As for population density, Sweden is about 6x more dense than Canada (23 people / sq km vs 4, respectively).

It's comparatively a dense country.

Canada quite a high effective density -- something like 80 or 90% of the population live within 100 miles of the US border. Those statistics are not terribly convincing.

Better, I think, to note that Sweden has a high proportion of urban residents at 87%, compared to around 83% for Canada and the US.

http://www.geohive.com/earth/pop_urban.aspx

http://www.rcs-rds.ro/telefonie-digi?t=telefonie-mobila&pach...

That being said, yes, we are getting very bad price on that side of the ocean because of price inflation.

  * US population density: 35/km2
  * Finland population density: 18/km2

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operato...

* Sonera: http://www.sonera.fi/asiakastuki/verkkokartat/kuuluvuuskartt...

* Elisa: http://elisa.fi/kuuluvuus

Notice how 4G already covers almost half of Finland, and 3G basically everything excluding larger swaths of forest.

Our population density is 3.7/km2 and infrastructure owners are also required to let other in. The prices are still very high.

The coverage is big and winter put a big load on the infrastructure.

Infinity Blade 3 is 1.7 GB. A single photo takes up more space than a song from an album. 40 minutes worth of 4k video maxes out the device (and that's optimistically assuming the apps that come with the phone don't take up any space).

You sound like when data plan providers say "Our average customer doesn't use that much data." Of course they don't. They try to stay within the ridiculous limits providers give them.

iOS 9 alone takes up a few GBs. The only reason the 16 GB option is the base option is because it anchors the price of iPhones. iPhones have an absurdly large profit margin, and price anchoring just provides the average consumer a psychological "out".

Music is definitely a sticking point for me, I've got 30GB of music on my phone, and the same again in applications and games.

Streaming them in that quality for two to three hours in per day on average would take a lot of data.

I keep my 50GB+ music collection on a separate device (FiiO X3), which allows me to stick to the lowest storage tier for any phone I'm interested in, and not have to worry about expandable storage (which seems to be on the way out as a trend, unfortunately).

Also, I'm a rather heavy user and my phone tends to only barely last the entire workday and commute before running out (if it lasts at all). Having a separate device for music means I don't need to feel guilty about wasting phone battery when listening to music.

The downside is you end up having to carry 2 devices instead of one, which can honestly be annoying at times, but I'm willing to make that compromise. YMMV of course.

I could never fathom using a phone without reasonable storage capacity. 16GB was bad in 2000. In 2016, anything less than 256GB is a joke, and the joke is really no laughing matter anymore. It has not been for at least a half decade in the mobile space.

Me, I'm the type of guy to have 10gb of music, photos and apps, and offload a lot of stuff to my PC and stream increasingly more. I'm okay with 16.

Is 16 a bit silly? Sure, but it's an easy way to pad the margins a bit and there's just plenty of people for whom 16 is just fine, to the extent that the upgrade option is a decent solution.

e.g. my entire office is on iPhones and they use it for mail and some other stuff, 80% of their storage is unused, will be unused forever, and it makes sense not to pad that even more and increase the base price.

I wish the price bump was a bit smaller if you want to increase your 16gb, more in line with their cost price, but... I'm not at all opposed to the notion that a 16gb base model exists.

Moreover, as many have noticed here, there are only so many minutes in a day, so the actually amount of data you'll download is limited anyway, and the fact that its SC gives you the variety, so I find myself missing very little.

However, for genres where the SC model doesn't work (or at least it isn't present), this doesn't help. When I want to listen to doom metal or psychedelic music, I'm left out and having to resort to what you do. And since I hate poor quality recordings and use flac when I can, my phone runs out of space quickly when I resort to carrying around a music collection.

Google Play Music has spoiled me -- their station selection is vast. Albums don't even mean anything to me.

Plus I can upload all of my personal music collection to it and listen to it on the go, and it exceeds 2GB easily.

Among computer illiterates in my family it also doesn't seem to be a problem. My mother has been using 16GB iPads and iPod Touches for years and never ran out of storage.

Sure, if you play lot's of > 1GB games (which seems to be typical these days), you don't want a 16GB model.

Mine doesn't have data allowance caps of any kind.

Of course if Apple didn't have to skimp so badly on the base phone the upgrade wouldn't be necessary. Shame so many Android phones are also 16GB. My experience with using microSD cards for more storage is a bit less than spectacular as well with so many of the stupid cards dying suddenly and without warning.

I don't know, since I do not use one, but at least for Spotify it is possible (as tested by my brother).

I'm sure Apple has been running very sophisticated simulations on different model pricing, but 399 has so far been really the ballpark of Android phones.

Therefore I think what we're observing here is nothing less than the beginning of a new phase of iPhone strategy: They are starting to reach down from the top into the middle class segment whereas everybody else in the smartphone industry is trying to move up segments (so far with very limited success). Now Apple's brand is playing for them as they move down whereas everybody else's brand is playing against them as they want to move up.

Wait. No, it's not funny. It's really frustrating in 2016. And pretty transparent.

At this point I've started to come to terms with the fact that for the next few years, my phone will not be able to be my primary portable music device because of storage.

On that note, are there any reasonable high-capacity alternatives for a portable music device that don't require streaming? I want a small form factor, large HDD with a headphone jack and a good battery and solid interface. I'd considered a new iPod Touch, but to get even 64GB is $300, which seems a bit much.

Curious what recommendations others have here.

and 64GB microsd cards are only ~30 bucks also [2], you can get 128GB microsd cards for under 50$ pretty easy

Putting you at 8GB+128GB for less than a hundred bucks.

Haven't done it myself, but have been thinking about it.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VXMY262?ref_=zg_bs_12648...

[2]http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=lp_3015433011_nr_p_n_feature_two...

[3]http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=lp_3015433011_nr_p_n_feature_two...

I've sold my iPod touch 5th gen 64GB as I wasn't using it anymore since moving to a smartphone + big sd.

It's going to be $559 in Denmark. I had to check the prices on the other models, the cheapest 6S is $875. I never realized how expensive an iPhone is. Why anyone would buy an iPhone at those prices are beyond me. Sure, most will be buying via their carrier along with a subscription, but in most cases that will just make the phone more expensive.

Though which comparable device would you suggest at a similar price point?

I wouldn't know, I won't pay above $30 to $40 for a phone or above $10 per month for my cellular plan. While a phone/smartphone is insanely useful, I just don't think the price is justified.

It still runs the latest iOS, albeit a bit slower. Show me 5 year old Android device that can run the latest Android version WITH CARRIER SUPPORT, without any 3rd party hacks or rooting.

I've got excellent value for money from every iOS device I've ever had, with regular software updates years after they were bought.

Company margins need to be padded somewhere?

A while ago I bought a Sandisk 64 GB USB flash at Costco on clearance for what I thought was a good price. I wanted to use it to back up a laptop on which I don't have too many files, so 64 GB was just right.

Big mistake! Huge!

I formatted the flash and started backup and it was pathetic. A MB per second write speed. If that. I gave up after a few hours.

I went back to my tiny Apricorn backup drive, which I love, and which uses a 1.8" hard drive internally. Zoom. Easily 10x faster than that Sandisk flash.

As I said, you get what you pay for.

With the OS taking up a huge chunk of that 16GB and basic functionality like messaging taking up another 700MB-1.5GB, and not even counting photos and videos than can almost take up infinite amounts of storage; little is left for actual music, movies, apps, and other content.

Tinder alone is basically a 1.5 GB app. If you want to watch a movie and it's another 1 GB. If you want a decent sized music selection you are down another 5-10 GB. With every damn poorly coded app being around 100 MB you quickly run into situations where people with 16 GB are having to make choices and are dissuaded from purchasing Apple music and video content, let alone purchasing apps and playing games. Apple is essentially cutting into various app developer revenues by introducing artificial limits.

I, as a 16 GB iPhone user, would not be able to download or keep various apps on my phone that would be available for use if I had to trade off with taking pictures of my life. So app developers are losing out on revenue because Apple is putting these artificial limits on things for utterly retarded reasons. Please, someone provided me a single rational and irrefutable argument for there even being a 16 GB version, let alone a 32 GB one. Do you want people to buy Apple content or not, Apple. Do you want app developers to make money or not, Apple. I suspect apple is going to screw around again until their retarded greed leads to innovation that results in them having to buy some shitty company for 3.5 BILLION dollars again ... Beats. It's far less obvious how that would happen, but the effect they are causing is still there, pent up, who knows how it will burst free.

Stop being assholes, Apple, let people have enough space so they can actually use your ecosystem's products services without having to make hard trade-offs. You greedy bastards.

On a 4in screen? Nope, I don't.

> If you want a decent sized music selection

I don't. I listen to music at home, from my desktop. I don't really have a use case for listening to it on the road.

> I, as a 16 GB iPhone user, would not be able to download or keep various apps on my phone that would be available for use if I had to trade off with taking pictures of my life

Sure. So don't buy a 16GB iPhone.

It's ok that there are phones that don't suit your needs, as long as there are also phones that do. Moving the base-level storage to 64GB has a cost, and assuming that Apple is determined to keep its industry-leading margins - and why wouldn't they? - then I don't want to pay that cost for 48GB of storage I don't need.

It's fine that the 16GB model is not for you. It really is. You don't have to call people bastards because they made a phone you don't want to buy.

Then again, it's livable, and it's just annoying enough to make me want to upgrade to 64GB, so in that sense it's an ideal product segmentation for Apple, and in the end I don't mind paying what amounts to $50 more on contract for the 64GB version for the increase in utility it gains me.

Pretty brilliant when you think about it.

   Please, someone provided me a single rational and irrefutable argument for there even being a 16 GB version.

They would also buy the same spec for half the price. Or an entry level for the same price with 128GB. More realistically : would it be better to have a more expensive entry level with 32GB? Maybe. Just because apple might be technically able to offer the product configuration you want them to for the price you want them to doesn't mean it is the right thing for them to do.

Here's the thing. You don't get to decide what is right, or what is better, for anyone except you.

Apple may be doing this mostly for product differentiation purposes; they may not. But whatever the rationale, it is working for them, well enough to pretty much define the category of premier smart phone. Arguing that this is somehow irrational comes across as either sour grapes or naive.

Now they are stuck with a phone that is of an inadequate size in order to not only fully utilize it, but also it impacts developers and sales and companies that are constantly trying to push their incidental apps onto people.

I don't get your opposition to bigger storage when the increased storage would probably cost Apple literally next to nothing. Do you understan that the delta between the cost of 16 and 32 GB, let alone even 64 GB is basically negligible for them? It does not seem at all to be about cost, it's all about perceived price maximization, but I am rather certain their calculations either don't quite make sense or they are not properly considering and weighting their inputs.

I also don't understand why developers are not up in arms because Apple's foolishness keeps their app from being installed and used, which leads to decreased revenues. It really undercuts the whole ecosystem because people with 16 GB phones are not installing the hilton app, not installing the app for every airline, not installing health kit apps, not installing care kit apps, and not installing various other incidental apps that the ecosystem really requires you to have installed but take up way too much space to justify keeping installed on a regular basis.

Clearly you are much smarter about this than Apple is. Their failure to understand the market as well as you have has undeniably lead to shrinking margins and market share, eventually to their exit from the premium phone market. It's a shame nobody buys their phones anymore.

More seriously - there are good criticisms that can be made of apples strategy, but they aren't the ones you are making. Your complaints show a naivety about how such markets work, and why.

In many markets, price is not a function of cost but a function of value (perceived or otherwise). In fact, this can be viewed as the defining characteristic of markets a company like Apple wants to be in, vs. those it doesn't want to be in. Competing in a commodity market is brutal.

That isn't to say that there aren't good arguments about why 32GB base would be better, but COGS delta isn't one of them, and focusing on it demonstrates a pretty fundamental lack of understanding of what market this phone is in.

Reality 1: If there were memory card slots, easily accessible to users, then they would immediately see it as a way to put data "into" the phone. Data, here is mostly going to be movies, music, apps, etc.

    Apple's Strategy: iTunes, and now iCloud. Period.

    Apple's Strategy: No memory-card slots. Period.

    Apple's Strategy: Make the best devices. Period.

What? I don't see it even being close to it

290Mb storage used on an Android system (14.25 in internal storage)

Funnily, I just noticed on the 6SE tech-specs site that Apple's "premium" Apps (Garage Band, iPhoto, etc.) come pre installed on the 64GB version. It's like them admitting that 16GB is just to damn small.

OTOH I bought a 64GB iPhone 4S when it came out (that thing just quit on me 2 weeks ago) and I'll never ever in my life want to sync that much music again. So for me, it'll probably be the larger option, but I'll fill it up with photos and videos of my cats.

i never have seen the clearing text on my iPhone, although i figured it would be automatic.

If the math is still accurate and figure half your storage is music (7GB) we're talking 750-1750 songs. At 2.5 minute average runtime, 750 songs would be ~78 minutes of music per hour over 24 hours. So, you could skip 5 songs and still fill an entire day. And if you figure average 4 minute runtime like that poster did, that's 125 minutes of music per hour, or skipping 1/2 of the songs that come up.

A lot of folks aren't power users and don't need big storage on the phone. It's okay to offer them an option.

You can get ≈16h of 128K VBR MP3 in a single gigabyte.

The real problem is video. Those guys are selling 4K devices that can barely hold a full event.

But if you must, go 192k/256k, which is pretty much guaranteed to be indistinguishable for almost all wetware/hardware combination in the world and would still get you about 12h in a gigabyte.

Coincidentally it's also why I went off contract. Much cheaper to buy phone outright and buy 3gb of pay as you go data a month than get locked into an absurd and useless contract.

Because upgrades are where they make most of their money.

Maybe I'm using the wrong apps.

on the plus side, they kept the headphone jack (no new headphones required).

Looking forward to a SE.

Double tapping the home button makes the top of the screen reachable

That being said, I too still use iPhone 5S & I don't think I'll make the switch, 4K video & 2nd generation Touch ID are nice but I WANT 3D Touch. I understand why they're not there yet --- they had to shove some of the battery on the 6S to fit in the 3D hardware.

EDIT: seems they stuck with the first generation Touch ID? (6S and SE) [1]

http://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/

TIL

I've dropped my iPhone6 too many times to count and I'm just lucky my screen hasn't shattered. I can see how someone might get anxiety from this.

In that sense, Apple specifically alleviates that anxiety of dropping AUD$1400 on a new phone and as a result I don't necessarily understand why the parent would find it anxiety-provoking to find it doesn't work for them when they can easily receive a refund.

[1]: http://www.apple.com/au/shop/help/returns_refund

For two years Apple _didn't sell_ a flagship 4"-or-smaller phone. So that "something else" was an Android phone. Which, if you're locked into the iOS ecosystem (or just plain like it) ... would be a bit anxiety inducing.

Then again, considering the 4S is still being updated I'm guessing the 5S still has quite a bit of life in it.

No SE for me though, I can't live in 64GB anymore.

I, too, am hanging on to an older phone (Moto X 1st gen) because there's nothing left that runs naked Android that's small enough. I feel like the pendulum has swung too far into tablones (never 'phablets'!).

I'm hopeful that either (a) Google comes around to making a normal sized Nexus, or (b) other high-end manufacturers start to ship pure (or close to pure) Android OS on some of their devices. We don't need no stinkin' TouchWiz/Sense/Optimus/&c crud.

#isanyonelistening

Unfortunately, the Xperia brand is not doing well in the US. Sony has completely neglected marketing their phones here, so very few people know the Z5 Compact even exists. There has been a good deal of speculation that Sony might stop selling Xperia in the US entirely or even carve off their ailing mobile division.

I was going to jump to the 5x, but a limit of 16GB storage with no external storage in this day and age of high-end phone cameras, video, app bloat, etc. is just flat out unacceptable for me in a phone at this point.

It's a shame they have such an awful UI, because Samsung is doing some really great stuff with their Galaxy line on the hardware side of things.

Hope google adds smaller phones to their lineup.

Comparing the 5X with the 6 and 6P is disingenuous -- the numbers refer to the phone size, not generation number.

Granted I thought the 5X was too big, considering the 5 was already pushing that limit, but still.

It's junk. Didn't last one year. I'm getting used to the N5X now.

There was some leaked Apple internal document where they said that people wanted larger phones. The post-Jobs Apple created larger phones to meet market demands.

One thing that always makes me giggle, though, is the fact that if you double tap the home button the screen slides down so you can reach the navigation bar at the top of the screen. If you have to provide a hardware solution like that, isn't it proof that the larger phone provides a worse user experience?

I'm excited about the smaller phone. My iPhone 6s is overly difficult to maneuver.

I love my gigantic Nexus 6, some people hate it. I like that I can make the text big and still see enough of it on one screen. I can accurately input text, and comfortably hold the phone in my hand.

At this point if somebody told me that my large phone was a poor user experience and I had to use a smaller phone, I would be very upset.

I think it's proof that they weren't willing to make some significant changes in iOS to account for this size change. The back button being in the top left of the screen is, in retrospect, a pretty bad idea. Android gets many things wrong, but having a back button easily accessible in the bottom bar is very user-friendly.

Instead iOS has this double tap thing, and also added swiping to go back. It's better than nothing, but buttons at the top of the screen still feels like a mistake.

tl:dr; we all have our individual preferences. Glad there's now products for us all.

The thing is, at this end of the technology lifecycle there are always tradeoffs to be made. For me, the 4" (and to a smaller event the 4.7") devices sacrifice too much in the way of screen size, battery life, and keyboard usability. In exchange for those things, I sacrificed one-handed use for some use cases.

There's a lot more to 'user experience' than just the # of hands I need to send a text message... And it turns out that with my watch I do about 70% of my messaging (by far my most common 'quick one-handed' use case) with my phone in my pocket anyway.

I'm sure I'm representative of a market segment, although possibly not the only market segment.

I could carry an external battery like many people but I've watched them (a) forget the cable (b) forget the battery (c) forget to charge the battery. Having a battery cases solves all those. No cable needed, no chance to forget it (well except forgetting the entire phone) and no forgetting to charge since it charging one charges both.

It does make the phone larger, thicker, heavier and means I can't have one of the sexier cases but I choose usefulness over looks for this situation

It's consistent with the Jobs style to completely dismiss the idea of a product that they are not currently announcing or selling, even when history proved he knew it was a good idea.

I've no doubt Steve was mentally locked into small form factor because it was the ideal for the product they were trying to build. The original iPhone sized to fit the market that existed at the time. It was a smarter mobile phone. The current iPhone is a pocket computer with cellular networking and a phone app. This transition was so subtle that most people didn't even notice it at the time.

Bikes come in various sizes to fit various bodies. Handheld devices should too.

Similar to keeping the design language of the MacBook family the same across generations of the product, it's a reaffirmation of Massimo Vignelli's famous quote "Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style."

The iphone 5 came out in 2012, that's 4 years now.

The overlap between the MacBook Air, the MacBook, and the iPad Pro is making less and less sense from a customer POV. If you just want a content consumption, browsing, and email device that maybe supports some basic text/photo editing - which is the use case for most users - which should you buy?

The overlap there is generational, just as there was generational overlap between the final polycarbonate macbooks and the initial second-gen Airs.

Ignoring the tools that developers and creatives use to create and sustain this thriving ecosystem is a very dangerous move on Apple's part. Skylake chips for the Macbook lines have been available for months and the Mac Pro hasn't been updated since 2013. OS X itself continues a long list of bugs and this only grows with "customer" features inevitably introduced down the line. El Capitan was supposed to give Apple a year to slow down and fix things but we have found it has been a huge problem in our work environment.

Datacenters don't run on iPads stacked in a rack, media companies don't play stuff out of an iPhone with a dongle. Xcode alone is the single reason OS X is still incredibly relevant. I don't see Jony Ive designing the latest iOS devices on an iPad for years to come and ignoring these professionals is not a good move.

Here's to WWDC, when the Skylake chips suited for the Macbook line were introduced 9 months prior.

Most of the developers I know prefer OSX because of the close-enough-to-linux terminal experience and compatibility of most libraries. Rails, Scala, Node, JAVA all run pretty similarly on local machines as they do on the servers.

I suppose it just depends which flavor of developer you hang with!

I don't know of many people working in an office environment, much less as a developer, who would be satisfied with an iPad Pro as a daily driver when it comes to getting the amount of work you can get done on something like a Macbook Air.

Perhaps I just don't understand iOS well enough. I'd love to see a video of someone actually working and multitasking effectively on an iPad at the speed that is possible on a Macbook. Most of the videos that Apple releases show work that is limited to video capture, editing and illustration.

Look at the Windows Phone. Fine device by all accounts, but it's biggest gripe from potential users is the app ecosystem -- or lack thereof. Take care of early adopters and take care of the people who keep your mini-economy running. It is short-sighted of them to fall flat in this arena. Arguably though, they've not been doing anything terribly impressive for quite some time by way of product.

  Model               Reco.      Days since release
  ------------------  ---------  ------------------
  MacBook             Caution    346
  MacBook Air         Don't Buy  378
  Retina MacBook Pro  Don't Buy  307

http://www.apple.com/iphone-se/specs/

Edit: Interestingly, the new iPad Pro does have a barometer in the Sensor list: http://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/

I'm using it to forecast the weather by crowdsourcing billions of live atmospheric pressure measurements at Sunshine (https://thesunshine.co).

Other use cases are for migraine headache prediction/prevention and other health-related issues. The primary and most exciting use case however is weather forecasting!

Edit: Basically, barometers are useful for any altitude-related task, as their error margins for relative altitude changes are very small. Additionally, if you can filter out the altitude data as noise, you're left with atmospheric data, which has immense applications when crowdsourced at scale.

https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-9A1.pdf

https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-9A1.pdf

It requested me to allow location access, even while in the background.

This is a deal breaker for me for battery life and privacy, so I will not be able to use it.

Edit: Upon checking in settings, I can choose "while using the app only". I understand you probably prompted with "while in the background" to improve your crowdsource data.

I'm glad I will still be able to use it, thanks for allowing this!

A: drop it from the top of the building and count the number of seconds it takes to hit the ground.

I understand the 3D Touch with the space avaliable & all but why not the second generation Touch ID?

[1] http://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eSrdgTHhK0

The processing power wall. The difference in processing power is extremely negligible between the latest models. What application are you going to be running on your phone that needs more power than the A7/A8, which can load webpages almost instantaneously? More processing power at this point seems like it will only be abused to allow sloppier code to slip through the cracks.

Additionally, innovation in the app ecosystem is basically dead to me at this point.

Differentiation through size, color, camera stabilization, 3D touch, fingerprint reader, lower price point, etc. is cool...but not really $500 cool to me as a user who would like (more than) 64gb on a phone.

It's also interesting that they are still pricing the phone at $400 and not really making it an accessible play for growth markets where Android reigns supreme...maybe we'll see another "C" version made of plastic that will continue Apple's push into the lower-price-point markets. Interested to see if the tradeoff of market share for product focus and brand value is worth it in the long run, and how the market reacts.

In my mind the only innovation is to make software invisible, which would somehow lower the visible value proposition of devices.

Seems like a good size - I haven't cared for their "thinness at all costs" trend lately, as it makes the phone hard to hold onto. This appears to be much more hand-friendly.

I know they've improved battery life in the SE, but still, overall the trend is thinner with a smaller capacity battery (but more efficient components, so you ultimately break even).

I have a phone with a 3100 mAh battery @ 5.1" 1080p, it isn't the thinnest phone around, but boy does it last three or four days. It is super nice. We need more phones like that.

In contrast, if you charge your phone daily anyway, you don't gain anything by 0.5 days of added battery life.

Which one's that? Sounds like a dream phone for me :)

Think I can hold out for a couple more months, just in case something amazing happens with the 7.

(and 4 is stuck on iOS 7)

If the SE doesn't push you over the edge from an iPhone 4, then I don't know what will... iPhone 28?

I've dropped my 6+ so many times that I love the design (it's indestructible) but perhaps Apple's market research is showing that some people love the look of their 5 and are avoiding upgrading for that reason.

I'm really happy about the SE and will be upgrading now.

You may have gotten lucky, or you may have a good case on it (a good case and a glass screen protector do go a long way.) But we've had people bring in phones even in very high-end Lifeproof cases with broken screens, bent frames, etc. It happens a lot.

Apple launched this phone because of the huge number of iPhone 5/5S users who didn't want to upgrade because they felt that the 6/6S was "too big." There was a fairly large/high-demand secondary market for 5S phones for this reason. Apple's hoping to pick up some of that market with the new SE.

If they made a 4" phone with the design of the 6, perfect.

i'll take the thinner 6, and the slightly increased screen of the 5, but yes.

The 6 series is in no way a flop and large displays will continue.

Or that the 5SE isn't seen as an important enough product to be worth a complete design overhaul.

Unfortunately, I found even the 4" too large for completely comfortable one-handed operation. Shame I'll never see another 3.5" iPhone option.

I expect a Plus has an even worse hold and I wouldn't be able to use it 1-handed at all.

This seems to make sense, intuitively, as well: I'm applying way more pressure to the bottom of the phone with a firm press of the home button than I do when I lightly tap it, even if I have to tap it twice.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Boot_Beep.txt

Dimensions 123.8 x 58.6 x 7.6 mm (4.87 x 2.31 x 0.30 in)

Weight 112 g (3.95 oz)

I'm about to buy a new Android phone (or an iPhone SE if I could flash Android on it :-) ) and the problem is that there are only mid (few) and low range (many) phones with that size and weight. Hopefully the SE will sell well and in a year Samsung and the like will start selling again something with the size of a Galaxy S2 which was their flagship in 2011 - a few months before the iPhone 4s. Apple is proving that you can do it with modern chips and modern amounts of RAM and storage. What's closest to that in the Android world now are Samsung's A3 and Alpha and the Sony Z5 Compact, but they're not really there on all specs.

If you haven't guessed it yet, I really don't care about the size of the screen, I care more about the dimensions and weight: I've got a tablet and a PC at home when I need a large screen, I want something small and light for when I'm outside.

I'm still looking forward to something like this http://www.yankodesign.com/2012/01/20/not-a-pamphlet-its-a-s... or the more realistic http://phandroid.com/2016/01/08/samsung-might-launch-its-fol...

It's good to see they are making a $399 model available - but I am not sure it had to be this small and this thick. A 1080p 4.7" model would have been the sweet spot at this price point.

Two breaks would still justify AppleCare, but the odds are pretty low.

I understand if you just greatly value getting service from Apple and want to pay for that privilege, but if you won't buy a 5S only because it's risky, then you should reconsider.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_trim_nomenclature

(* that is, you don't really need to know that SEL stands for Sonderklasse Einspritzung (Lange) to know it comes with something more than an SL).

http://i.imgur.com/IfkUcJ9.png

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/news-trader.asp

Not uncommon.

The only release that resulted in a substantial rise was the iPhone; the rest of them lead to nothing or a small fall. Totally standard.

Spot prices are useless.

http://www.besttechguru.com/apple-iphone-se-retail-box-image...

Too bad; I would love to have a smaller form factor than my 6S. I waited for awhile to upgrade from my 4S to see if they would introduce something like this, but with ad-cluttered pages, web browsing can be really painful on 1 GB.

As you can see from very beginning, Apple most of the time took an existing technology/concept, made it better and made it so user-friendly, usable, and simple that it always took off and became a standard. People loved it. Look at touch screen phones, tablets, buying music online, beautiful keyboard design (mac) and etc.

With forced touch technology, even though it really is promising and advanced, Apple's user base did not really consider it as a key feature yet. It has been some time and you don't feel like you are missing something if you don't have it.

I guess we will see with the iPhone SE if Apple thinks the same way. They may still think that it is an essential technology and put their time on it and I believe forced touch will be great if they continue working on it.

I'm actually shocked that I'm seeing such a Luddite response to something that's objectively better. I agree that the software needs improvement (for example, what makecheck says about deleting apps) and there are a few things that are kind of stupid. For example, one can't move a full window of apps as you can with Android without moving each individual app (which is pretty ridiculous). Apple definitely seems to be falling behind but 3D Touch is a great, solid feature. It was a mistake for them to omit it from this model.

(1,3), (3,2), (3,6), (4,4), (4,6), (4,7), (5,9)

Can people please chime in with the correct identifications?

(There seems to be a logo behind the speaker, which I am not counting)

http://www.apple.com/ios/carplay/available-models/

The entry price model is £359 which is $516 USD instead of $399. The 64GB one is £439 which is $631 USD instead of $499.

So in short $100+ for shipping.

http://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-se/16gb-silve...

Clearly only low on device capacity to keep a low price point (No 3D touch - same reason). Capacity on board device is not really necessary anyway - thats the reason that Apple have been developing the iCloud.

Oh well it was a neat idea but adding multiple dimensions to a 2D screen always seemed kinda awkward to me.

I'm happy to hear that the dimensions are the same, since I have some existing accessories that would probably not work if the size were a bit different.

I probably will too (currently on an iPhone 5) given that my current strategy is to replace my phone every 2 years by buying a refurbished model with 12 month warranty for ~£150 from eBay. I usually get ~£50 or so for each old phone so the physical phone only costs me £4 a month.

4GB data (4G), unlimited texts and unlimited minutes for ~£20 a month here in the UK. Was always amazed at the price of plans in the US, luckily I never had to pay my own bill when I lived there.

Contrary to the popular meme, not all people buy Apple because they're shallow appearance-obsessed hipsters.

Ha. No. The significant reason people buy new iPhones is because their cellular contract is up for renewal and they will get one for for free/cheap.

More info: http://www.iphone.se/till-salu (Swedish)

Of course, I am being hypocritical. The 5s is my favorite iPhone, so this new product is what I wanted all along.

NEW?: http://www.apple.com/researchkit/

NEW in 9.3: http://www.apple.com/ios/updates/

The NEW in 9.3 is a big step back IMO from all previous versions' widgets that had line graphs; the NEW in the researchkit page looks like a reasonable improvement...

I will not let them get away with this pricing model. Keeping my trusted Nokia 2700 :)

There's no way this ship sinks now, the Titanic is truly unsinkable.

Does it only work with an iCar?

Retina flash must be the gotta have feature

Edit

From Techcrunch's post:

The iPhone SE will come in two models, 16GB and 64GB, priced at $399 and $499 respectively.

Kinda expensive for device that does not feature an SD card slot. :(

I feel that between cloud services and 64gb+ phones, I wouldn't want an SD card slot. Accessing files on an external storage device is slow, so I wouldn't want to save direct to SD. You wouldn't want to save any apps to the SD for speed issues. So you would be limited to accessing photos and music. I just don't see a need for it, and if I did, there are plenty of android phones out there that would allow me expansion for storage.

1) "3D touch is useless."

3D touch adds a new affordance to interacting with screen elements. Perhaps you do not use 3D touch, perhaps applications have not yet incorporated the feature in a compelling way, but 3D touch is no more useless than analog pressure sensitivity in game controller buttons. I would be shocked if driving games available for iOS didn't adopt pressure sensitive accelerator features this year. Ditto drawing apps; Pixelmator has already added support.

Additionally, 3D touch means that interactions that previously had to depend on introducing latency (long-press) can now happen more quickly. 3D touch also promises a high degree of real-time feedback to a user, for example in the case of peek and pop.

Application shortcuts are also very convenient and hold even more promise as apps become more powerful and complex, and if anything serve to highlight that Apple needs to improve the springboard environment.

2) "3D touch suffers from poor discoverability."

I agree somewhat, but it doesn't make the feature bad. There is room for improvement here, and hidden features can still be good features. The solution is to improve the extent to which the elements embody press-ability.

My guess is that future iOS versions will incorporate more visual cues for the interface elements that afford 3D interaction. Consider, for example, how the lock screen camera icon bounces when you tap on it -- suggesting that it should be swiped up (IIRC it used to launch the camera when you tapped on it). At the moment it's pure conjecture, but, just to toss out some ideas, elements could appear to depress slightly when touched normally, or be given a (very) minor 3D treatment... or down the line, haptic feedback could simulate texture (see http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...)

(Are any 'discoverability' critics emacs users?)

3. "3D Touch is confusing because some hardware supports it and some do not."

Other people have already argued very effectively against this point. Also...

Some mice have more mouse buttons than others. Some iPhones have processors that support power-free "Hey Siri". Some cars have built-in GPS. In general, people are not confused by higher cost/prestige features being absent from some models of a product.

The E70 was my last not-smart-phone, replaced it with the original G1 (first android phone). It was great for taking notes, and imho was a better form factor than blackberry.

iPhone SE has clearly merged the best of both worlds by merging the features of iPhone 6s and the beloved design of iPhone 5s, that too at a lot cheaper price.

Desktop-class architecture!? What do they really mean? For me desktop architecture is x86-64...

As for Apple Pay, your card details are used once -- exactly once -- to generate an obfuscated alias card identifier, again, only useable by the device.

There is no database. Fingerprint data doesn't leave the phone. No one stores your credit card details.

https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

Research before writing.

So they can want all day, at the end, entropy wins (by design in this case).

Maybe expensive patents will expire soon, which might make smartphones cheaper and cheaper, but still.

I don't think the size is really relevant, but yeah, that's an insane amount of money. If you need it for work, and generally use your phone a lot, it can make sense to pay a premium for a better device, but for the average person, I can't see it being justified. The marked penetration of the iPhone is way to high compared to the price, suggesting to me that to many people are spending their money recklessly.

It is possible that others have more money than you do.

Apple, you are usually good at slogans and titles, but this one... At least three flops in one sentence:

"The only camera" - so no more Canons, Nikons and Leikas? "...you'll ever" - so there will be no more innovation ever, even from you, Apple? "...need" - so you are confident everyone needs a camera?

Of course, it's a middle/upper middle class tradition to get your teen a DSLR but as we all know the end up using the iPhone more.

Again, I used to bring Apple as an example of good, minimum-BS, no exaggerations, well though out marketing. "Your iPhone is beautiful. Give it a complement." Nice, to the point, with a neat pun (complement, as in accessories).

The phrase about the camera is awful. I don't know why I'm getting downvoted so much.