On one hand this is pretty sad. There's no wow factor, no truly exciting product releases. On the other hand the frequent releases mean that you can upgrade whenever and you always get pretty much latest available technology thanks to the yearly incremental updates vendors are releasing.
I'm getting suspicious if anything revolutionary can happen in the consumer electronics space. Companies are too eager to release early instead of keeping the stuff under wraps until it is amazing. Take wearable augmented reality devices as an example. We saw Google Glass years ago and then Microsoft Hololens. Now if somebody actually delivers a reasonably good mass market device in 2019 it hardly feels revolutionary after these prototypes. Same thing with VR headsets and smart watches.
I bet at some point someone will learn from all the attempts at wearable devices and develop something users actually will like. Or maybe we will decide that something like Google Glass simply doesn't work and move on to something else.
I had an app called Vindigo on a Handspring Visor and later a Kyocera 6035 in the early 2000s that gave the location and mapped pretty much every restaurant, bar, and museum in New York long before maps were an obvious part of your phone.
I think the possibilities of AR are amazing, even though I don't think whatever the killer will be has been released yet.
What about in overlooked user interface technologies? I think FaceID would be great for unlocking the a MacBook laptop. Also, the face that Apple can now get ahold of those sensors for cheap and at scale probably opens up the opportunity for user interface innovation. People like to use touch for certain operations on current laptops with a touch screen, but some of those might be better done with a gesture away from the screen the doesn't cover up the view of the screen. (Or require the user to lift their hands up from the palm rest to avoid gorilla arm.)
Tablets existed before multitouch and the first iPad. It was a thinner form factor enabled by better battery and more frugal processors combined with multitouch which made the iPad what it is.
This is in absolutely no way revolutionary. Not least because some Windows laptops have been able to do it for some time (HP? I forget who did it, but it was awful)
You can do this already for a few years now. Surface Pro 4, Surface book, Surface Laptop all have it. Works flawlessly.
Imagine pointing your camera to find an A/C leak inside the wall, or scanning fruit for their ripeness, or measuring furniture at the store to see if it fits in your house/door. Hell, it could even alert you if you have bad breath.
which apparently is now available as an extra sensor small enough to build into ordinary phones, with just one obscure Chinese manufacturer showing a prototype (at $299 for the handheld, it's probably too expensive for now).
Siri, TouchID, FaceID, capacitive touch screen, great cameras, app store, full fledged browser, LTE, etc...
Any of these features by themselves aren't "revolutionary" until you combine it all into a cohesive experience where you look at your phone to unlock it, take a photo that until very recently could only be produced by a DSLR, upload it nearly instantly to a social network within 5 taps, and then receive real time notifications when other people comment on it, all on a device you can hold in one hand.
Sure, you could say this is more evolutionary than revolutionary, but again, I don't believe there was this time where it was revolutionary to the extent you claim. It's always been a slow iterative process.
Tangentially, after seeing some NFL replay highlights this weekend, I really wish HD high-frame rate cameras had been invented when Barry Sanders (perhaps the most electrifying football player of all time) played.
But I am interested in what app developers will be able to do with a miniature 3D scanner!
It took competitors years to catch up, everyone's forgotten how much of a joke Android was until v4, and how Black Berry only caught up just as they were about to die. Things like low latency audio, large image support, GL, crypto, battery life, ...
One of the first remarks from Blackberry's CEO when he first saw an iPhone was; “They’ve put a Mac in this thing,”. https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/excerpt-...
The market was ripe as people realized they wanted to trade battery life for more powerful devices, after the success of the iPod and the iPaq (not a typo, the PDAs from Compaq/HP).
It was a revolution then, and it happened so fast Nokia and RIM were left in the dust.
The phone as a mini-tablet changed smartphones significantly.
all you have to do to remember what interacting with a device before apple provided a good example is to find a fairly shitty, poorly-specced android device [0] and interact with it and get frustrated at the ever-present-and-yet-inconsistent lag.
[0] tablets are a good place to look, partly because they usually have more pixels to push than phones
This. Playing solitaire by easily flicking the cards away was magic back then.
If they complete the whole package and make it all work great, then like the iPod, it doesn't need to be first to market to be revolutionary. Just be better than all the other implementations and UX thus far. Though iOS 11 doesn't seem like that's all coming together super great but their pros still seem to outweigh all their competitors cons for what I want from a device. And of course, marketing is marketing.
Iirc Apple and some other companies threw a bunch of money at LG so they can get in the game as well, which will be nice in the future but atm obviously screen quality is worse and costs are higher due to R&D cost.
PPI is not a fixed number determined by generation and isn’t relevant. Brightness is an interesting point but my Nexus 6 was AMOLED (oh my) and <400 nits so significantly dimmer than the iPhone X.
It’s very possible, even likely, that Samsung’s latest flagship phones use newer display tech than the iPhone X. It is exceedingly unlikely that the iPhone X is using first generation tech.
In the tests I've seen the iPhone comes out on top in almost all situations vs. the Pixel, as a representative example here of a very good Android camera, with the notable exception of extreme low light conditions.
The other features are largely irrelevant (except perhaps the inductive charging), but I'll get the X instead of the 8 because it will be 3-4 years before I update again.
For what it's worth, the 6S's 128 GB and bump to 2 GB RAM (making Safari usable again on JavaScript-clogged sites) were what motivated me to buy that one. The X, incidentally, bumps that again to 3 GB. The 8 remains at 2.
Yes, but not because of the mindless sheep angle you seem to want it to be. Lots of people are comfortable using iPhones and like how they work. They don't want to to switch to something else. The End.
How do you explain the iphone x?
> Lots of people are comfortable using iPhones and like how they work. They don't want to to switch to something else
ok? That's not at all what I was talking about.
> The End.
Oh please, get over yourself.
Is this related to the "zero changes to a phone and billions would want it" or "mindless sheep angle"?
If that's the ecosystem you are in and want a new phone, then that's a pretty reasonable choice.
Expensive, sure, but at this point skipping every other generation or every every third generation is fine. The main reason for upgrading is the battery is starting to ghost. Its max charge is 1900mah from its original 2800(ish? i forget exactly)mah.
Call me a sheep if you want but I've tried my friends android phones and even have a nexus tablet. It just doesn't do it for me. Plus getting rid of all my high scores in games is no bueno. I've spent many years in lines perfecting them.
Not that those features or the article suggest the iPhone X is a bad product, or bug-ridden, non-usable, or anything else. But how in the world are people--is Apple--still not embarrassed pretending that this is a revolutionary device? Even if FaceID is intensely innovative and unparalleled new technology - that is just the feature that people use to get to the features they actually want to use. No one is going to buy a phone to play around with the unlocking mechanism, they buy it for what that phone can do for them once it's unlocked. Hyping on FaceID is like saying, "We are revolutionizing mobile computing by entirely overhauling the millisecond process by which you gain access to a slightly improved version of the product you already have."