Generally smaller nanometre designs are a lot more power efficient. Your old iPhone will do just fine yes - but imagine if it had twice the battery life?
Now why they just keep massively increasing power as efficiency goes up is beyond me......I think a lot of people would love a new iPhone with a processor a bit faster than your old iPhone 6 but with insane battery life.
Mere physics says it won’t. It’s always possible to pack more performance in a larger package, even if it’s just because you can more easily dissipate heat on a larger surface.
iPhones are amazingly powerful and might just be sufficiently powerful for everyday computing soon or even right now, but they’ll never surpass anything that can accommodate a larger die.
I was thinking in the context of Apple. Redesigning the form factor every 12-15 months has a cost. For this reason, redesigning the iPhone to incorporate the LTE chips wouldn't make sense since Apple seems to aim for a 24-28 month refresh on the form factor.
I wasn't suggesting that it was impossible if you were designing from scratch.
Battery life is important. So yes you can sacrifice battery life for more power hungry 1st generation chips but it isn't wrong to decide that the battery life is more important.
Seems like the effective CPU+GPU capability of the iPhone 4S is at the head of the pack. When you add in the overhead that Android software has I don't think it is necessary for Apple to goose the processor specs in order to get fantastic end-user experience. This also saves power. Again tradeoffs that have to be made and the ones Apple picked seem entirely reasonable to lots of customers (based on pre-sales orders).
I believe the reason we don't have an iPhone Nano is battery life. The minimum size you can make the iPhone with acceptable battery life is the current form factor.
Given the current rate of improvement for batteries I would wager we don't see an iPhone Nano for quite a while. It took a long time for iPods to shrink for similar reasons.
The market is basically in a holding pattern. New features tend to be situational and the performance improvements are pretty modest year-over-year. What's more, even old phones are fast enough for most uses, so even when the new one is 50% faster that's not a huge deal. It's hard to justify $800 to make a webpage load in .75 seconds instead of 1 second.
I'm still using my iPhone 6 and iOS 10 (I have some 32 bit apps that I still use). I'm considering swapping the battery instead of buying a new phone. Right now I would only upgrade if I severely broke it.
In some ways it would be a downgrade, because I use the headphone jack to wire it into my car's audio when doing navigation, and plug it into the cig lighter because navigation is a battery hog. It's pretty clear that Apple has no intention of ever bringing back the headphone jack.
Maybe I could find a bluetooth adapter on a headphone jack? I wonder if it could draw enough power from the headphone jack to not need a battery? Probably not.
They can pry my iPhone Mini from my cold, dead hands.
I mean, what reason do I have to upgrade, even if I wanted a phone the size of a skateboard? Better camera? Eh...I'm trying really hard make that a reason to layout $800, but I'm failing. Faster chip? My phone isn't slow the way it is now. I don't do iOS work anymore, so there goes that excuse for an upgrade. And let's face it: the novelty of smartphones has worn off. The iPhone was released seventeen years ago. It's not awesome new tech, it's the appliance that I carry around so that $PEOPLE_IMPORTANT_TO_ME can get hold of me, and I can check the weather. I'm otherwise about as excited about a new one as I am about a new washer. (Well, probably less excited, because our new washer/dryer all-in-one is awesome.)
A top-level comment says battery. When Apple will no longer plop a new battery in my Mini for $80, I guess that's when I'll upgrade. Or Apple could, you know, make another Mini.
Strategically, I think Apple has made a right move by internalising all the hardware designs. That said, as many have suggested, the new iPhone is no more than just another faster, smaller, and costlier.
OLED Improvement, thinner and more energy efficient, along with all the improvement from current iPhone 14 Pro.
Modem and CPU efficiency improvement from Shrinking Node.
Thinner iPhone, Sub 6mm from its current 7.8mm.
Battery Capacity improvement, Super Fast Charging, Battery Cycle ( Which Apple has kept it just above 2 years under normal usage ).
All while staying within the current 170g weight if not lower.
That is a lot of iteration, and enough work for at least 5 version of iPhone.
For a lot of people, Phones has reach a good enough point and buying another one is simple because of MNO contract expiring or Battery degrading they are buying a new one.
To this point, iPhone performance has grown by first doing their own silicon and then by offering more hardware blocks to do what used to be done purely in SW. Of course, they also rode the wave from 45nm to 7nm.
As you look forward from 7nm, the picture is less exciting. Claims of 2x and 4x improvements will give way to 20% benefits from the hardware alone, and they'll have to work really hard on technologies like Metal to limit the amount of SW layers between an API call and the instructions in the chip.
Making products that last as long as possible is good for the Earth, but without breakthroughs in semiconductor physics, the space is maturing. Software already ate the world, and must now learn to coexist with the remaining resources.
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.
If you want the smallest iPhone available, and prioritize that in your purchasing, you no longer have to compromise on a wide array of features to do so.
That will spur a great deal of people who are refusing to buy iPhones to buy iPhones (+$$$) and convert a certain percentage of bigphone users to smallphone users at a lower pricepoint at the next upgrade cycle (-$$).
It is possible that Apple's usage statistics for old iPhones indicate that the + will be greater than the - while getting a bunch of users off of older lower-performing phones.
Eh, I can see that argument with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6+, but in this case we're just talking about keeping older products alive at a lower price point.
Since Apple typically caters their decisions to the majority of their buyers (as opposed to those power users who look specifically for the most up-to-date tech specs) this decision makes a lot of sense. Having more battery time is rather large plus.
Well, reasonable. And not very daring. Maybe even a bit too much on the safe side: the current iPod touch already runs at about 800 MHZ. I don’t think the next iPhone will be any slower than that.
(But the idea about the screen resolution is great: I think they could actually do that.)
I dont think nano iphone would be success! Instead they should try to make their current line of iphones bit cheaper to compete with other android based smart phones.
What do you get from an iPhone 6 4" over the current models there? Better processor, NFC, nicer camera? While the screen is a big part of battery drain, I'll bet that moving to the A8 also justified a bigger battery, and all these things got more room to fit in. You might have to give up something for a 4" form factor. But I'll also bet that as they hone the new architecture, you'll see it trickle down to the lower price slots, a la iPad mini Retina.
it's easy to resign iphone models every year. it's not as easy to increase chip performance every year. there's a lot of R&D involved, i think in the long run it'll be better but Apple will have to devote more resources into it. you can't just wish for specs. the manufacturers actually get the hard job of trying to make it.
That's a great explanation that I want to believe but the series of meh iPhones doesn't support. I think it's that Apple has the same priduct org structure when Jobs was directing and whoever is the bottleneck now doesn't scale as well.
Now why they just keep massively increasing power as efficiency goes up is beyond me......I think a lot of people would love a new iPhone with a processor a bit faster than your old iPhone 6 but with insane battery life.
reply