Iphone 5s info?

[CitizenBBN]

I have a friend who needs a new phone, we held off pending the iphone announcement but now looks like it still may be a while before we could actually get hands on one in the store. Wondering if pedro or anyone else had opinions on the 5s versus the Samsung S4. I have the S4, really like it. Googled the spec differences, looks like the camera is still better (except low light) on the S4, screen still an inch bigger if that's the way you want to go.

iOS7 seems to be still an unknown variable. Sounds like it'll be different enough that any reason to stay with iphone (has the 4) is out the window as either will be a learning curve. Not sure what its benefits are and not sure if I want to wait just to see.

Wondering if anyone knew much more about it than the little I've managed to scrape together.

[BigBlueBrock]

Unless your friend is heavily invested in Apple's ecosystem, then he should go ahead and get the S4. there's nothing really worth waiting for with the 5S unless your friend has spent a lot in apps and is just really settled into iOS. the 5S has brand new internals that are a few months better than the stuff inside the Galaxy S4 and HTC One, but we've gotten to a point with smartphones that the leading edge will only have marginal differences in performance and your regular user isn't going to notice the difference.

[Lfbj00]

The only info I can give, is that we are guarding the damn things over here at the Big Brown Plane Facility like they were gold bars!!!!

[BigBlueBrock]

The only info I can give, is that we are guarding the damn things over here at the Big Brown Plane Facility like they were gold bars!!!!

some of them are!

http://cdn3.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/8921413/iphone5s-gallery2-2013_verge_super_wide.jpeg

[KSRBEvans]

I didn't see anything in the announcement that would lead me to run out and get a 5S. Aside from the faster processor, looks like an incremental improvement over the 5.

I think the analysis is still what Brock posted: if you live in the Apple walled garden like I do, the iPhone's for you. Otherwise, the S4, Note 2 or new Nexus phones are the way to go.

[PedroDaGr8]

There isn't much more here for me to add.

The big innovations are:
1) Finger print sensor integrated into the home button. There have been phones before with finger print sensors. In fact, motorola had one integrated into hte unlock button on one of their phones in 2011. Frankly, the fact that this is one of the biggest innovations should tell you a lot about how incremental this upgrade is.
2) The new 64-bit processor. Yes the processor is faster; no, not because it is 64-bit. All the 64-bit does is allow it to address more than 4GB of RAM. That's it. That being said, this is the right time for Apple to release a 64-bit processor as many of their programs will be needed to be converted to 64-bit. You do this before it becomes an issue not later. So while an iPhone with 4GB of ram is not around yet. It will be down the road.

This is much less imperative for Android because as I understand it the programs use java so programs are compiled on the fly not compiled before hand. So most of the work goes into the just-in-time compiler. Now some programs will have to be recompiled but as android is linux based a lot of the 64-bit stuff is already taken care of. This isn't to say that Google doesn't have a lot of work ahead of them just that right now its a non-issue that Apple is trying to make it sound magical.

3) Motion co-processor. All this does is its a small lower power co-processor to help the phone save battery life when reading all of its sensors. There really isn't much that it odes that you can't do with any other modern phone from what I have seen.

4) Larger battery. This might be a big deal to some as that is one complaint I have heard from a few iPhone 5 users that their battery didn't last as long as on their iPhone 4.


Don't get me started on the iPhone 5c. That phone is a phone without a purpose. Apple needed a phone to appeal to emerging markets where phones are unsubsidized. They failed on that point miserably.

[Catonahottinroof]

When Steve Jobs passed away, so did Apple's innovative spirit.

[CitizenBBN]

Pedro, my reaction to hearing that the "big" innovation was a fingerprint scanner was exactly as you said, a statement of just how non-big this phone is in the evolution of things. If that's the big news, big woop. Nice for some folks but hardly revolutionary.

Got the S4 today, will be very happy with it. Better screen than the iphone, better camera, far more flexible. Not a terribly tough decision IMO with the 5s being a very incremental step forward.

[PedroDaGr8]

Steve Jobs wasn't so much an innovator as he was the Dr. Dre of the tech world. He could see a decent idea and see what it needed to be great. He seldom had great ideas of his own but he often seized on the ideas around him and gave them that extra push that they needed. That wouldn't keep him from taking ALL of the credit.

Also, a note on battery life. The iPhone has been dethroned. The LG G2, has some of the best battery life of ANY phone AnandTech has tested. It ALMOST hit 24hrs of talk time. To give a comparison the iPhone 5 clocks in at about 9. Similarly, the phone gets 10.7 hours of web browsing on wifi (the iPhone 5 gets 10.3).

Actually, the G2 is showing signs of being an incredible phone in general. Faster GPU than the iPhone 5 (higher frame rate AND higher resolution). Fast CPU, great display, etc. Interesting to see how LG is starting to make a push in the smartphone market. They are doing it the old fashioned way, building solid phones.

[CitizenBBN]

Steve Jobs wasn't so much an innovator as he was the Dr. Dre of the tech world. He could see a decent idea and see what it needed to be great. He seldom had great ideas of his own but he often seized on the ideas around him and gave them that extra push that they needed. That wouldn't keep him from taking ALL of the credit.

This. Jobs' vision of computers as consumer level devices finally came true with the iphone/ipad, but nearly all of his most public "innovations" came from Xerox PARC. As you said, he could take the revolutionary ideas of others and turn them into quality consumer products. Take the PARC GUI nad mouse and build the Mac OS.

I got into a huge debate on here when he died about comparisons to Edison. IMO those are good comparisons, but more b/c Edison was a lot like Gates in that neither were really core revolutionaries, both were however geniuses at seeing what an idea could become and getting it from concept to reality. Edison didn't "invent" the light bulb so much as he bought patents and then worked painstakingly to take the basic concept of the lightbulb to get the right filament that wouldn't fail quickly and get the vacuum right. Jobs saw the GUI at PARC, something they thought was neat but couldn't see as a real product, and worked to turn it into something usable. Same thing Edison did with the lightbulb.

Both were also showmen and more than happy to take all the credit for something, and stretch the truth when it suited their marketing purposes. Both loved patents and using the law to help not just protect their ideas but to crush competition and upstarts with other ideas.

In short they were brilliant business men with technical minds. I still consider that high praise, the Robber Barons helped build a great nation, but what I believe Apple lost was a business genius more than a technical one.

that doesn't change that he was an innovator, at least in that way, and like Edison's company will struggle mightily without him. Also like Edison, Jobs ran Apple as an organic extension of himself, he never worried about or cared about whether it would stand without him,which means it has ground to make up.

[BigBlueBrock]

I predict Apple to actually move the needle in the coming years now that Jobs is gone. He was very puritanical about his idea of what the iPhone should be and stifled innovation as a result. Notice the first thing to go (once a few of his disciples were shown the door) was the skeuomorphic design philosophy of Apple's in-house apps? You'd have also NEVER seen anything like the 5C with Jobs at the helm, but it was something that Ive and Cook have wanted for a while. iOS7, which I think looks rather crummy, is still a BIG step for iOS, which was relatively unchanged from the first iteration. Larger screens will be coming next year, even a rumored near-six-incher. Apple's development process is just rather slow and deliberate, so it's taking a while to see the changes of Jobs-less Apple.