Count me in the group that uses siri every day. Timers for cooking, reminders for nearly everything, texting my wife, calling my folks etc.
I'd love to see a new iMac as I'm in the market, but if they do things like last year, that announcement will come in October. I've stopped trying to figure out what they're doing over there.
It does, which makes me wonder, will they even put effort into marketing it in NA since the target market for such a device is obviously in SE Asia?
edit: As soon as I posted, I realized the teen market would likely use this product heavily. Parents who buy iPhones would almost certainly be willing to pay for a cheap iPhone before they paid for a full featured one. For example, we bought my niece and nephew iPod Touches last Christmas for about $229 (I think?). I would have rather got them one of these phones for $300.
It's interesting too, I think, that the lowest end iPod Touch keeps the Facetime HD camera at the expense of the rear facing camera - I'm not suggesting a low-cost iPhone wouldn't have a rear facing camera (because the hue and cry in 2013 over a phone lacking a camera would be a PR disaster), but that they've shown already which camera they value more highly.
Apple will also be starting an aggressive campaign this fall to get all of the after-market cables (lightning, etc) out of people's hands.
The way it'll work is if you have an after-market cable for your iPhone, iPad or iPod, you'll take the cable to an Apple store and trade it for an authorized Apple cable. There will be some cost as well.
After-market cable + $10 or $15 = brand new Apple authorized cable.
One of the features of the new IOS7 will have a warning that pops up, if you use an after-market cable. Your phone will probably still charge or transfer data, but the majority of people will freak out and be looking for an authorized cable.
So make sure that you if you are buying an after-market cable, it's labeled with this:
One of the features of the new IOS7 will have a warning that pops up, if you use an after-market cable. Your phone will probably still charge or transfer data, but the majority of people will freak out and be looking for an authorized cable.
To try to corner the entire accessory market unless the 3rd party pays a hefty licensing fee is ridiculous.
I bet it won't be long until these knock-off companies figure out how the phone is detecting whether it is an endorsed cable or not and just build it in themselves.
Keep in mind that the analyst (Gene Munster) who predicted no Siri on the cheaper phone has been woefully bad in the past at predicting Apple's future moves. He's been saying a full fledged Apple HDTV has been right around the corner for a good 2-3 years now and at the end of 2012 insisted that a retina iPad Mini was coming in March of 2013.
I'd take anything he's predicting with a huge grain of salt. No Siri on a brand new phone when a soon to be 2 year old device (iPhone 4S) can run it makes absolutely no sense.
To try to corner the entire accessory market unless the 3rd party pays a hefty licensing fee is ridiculous.
I bet it won't be long until these knock-off companies figure out how the phone is detecting whether it is an endorsed cable or not and just build it in themselves.
We had the endless conversation in another thread about why a quality (ie. certified) cable in this case is more important than it appears on the surface - in short, there's a CPU in there that dynamically re-configures the signal and power routing on the cable based on insertion orientation and mode (data, AV, etc).
Ultimately, people hold their own opinions regardless of the higher standards the cable needs to be built to ensure it functions properly. On a device costing several thousand dollars over its contract lifespan, I use the right cable for the job, but to each their own.
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To try to corner the entire accessory market unless the 3rd party pays a hefty licensing fee is ridiculous.
I bet it won't be long until these knock-off companies figure out how the phone is detecting whether it is an endorsed cable or not and just build it in themselves.
I came across some articles today about some Chinese companies that have hacked the sensor or chip inside "authorized" Apple cables and have been able to fool IOS7 (beta) into thinking that the after-market cable is legit or authorized.
But yah, it's just Apples way of getting a piece of the market. It's smart, from a business perspective, but we'll see how well it'll work out.
They'll make a good chunk of money off of doing this cable swap thing.
in short, there's a CPU in there that dynamically re-configures the signal and power routing on the cable based on insertion orientation and mode (data, AV, etc)
Putting a "chip" into a cable to detect orientation is absolutely insane design choice. Cables generally suffer a lot of wear and tear from constantly connecting/disconnecting, getting crammed into a pocket/bag. You're just asking for high error rate and customer dissatisfaction - the first gen cables were rife with problems where the chip would fail forcing you to plug in one way or in some extreme cases, frying your phone.
Remember the good ol' days when you had to use an Ethernet crossover cable if you're connecting computer to computer and a straight through cable when connecting to a switch and how much of a pain in the @ss it was to determine which cable was which? Well, the computer industry solved it the right way by having the device auto detecting and switching the send/receive and power for PoE appropriately so it doesn't matter any more.
Since we are already paying upwards of 1K for the device, keep the cables dumb so they both suffer lower error rate and are cheaper to replace. I've actually never owned a knock-off cable and as annoyed I was about them switching the cable, I ordered 2 extra cables when I ordered my iPhone 5 as I always keep one at home, one in the office and one in the car. It was extremely annoying that 2 of my cables failed within 3 months and I had to get them swapped at the Apple store.
This was a design choice by Apple in order to corner their own accessory market, plain and simple, and has nothing to do with doing something "better". Good business decision, not very consumer friendly, IMO.
Putting a "chip" into a cable to detect orientation is absolutely insane design choice. Cables generally suffer a lot of wear and tear from constantly connecting/disconnecting, getting crammed into a pocket/bag.
It's a very human choice - having to think about orientation on a plug you use at least once a day is the insane choice. Second, the lightning connector was specifically engineered for thousands of insertion cycles, something that USB never was, in addition to being able to handle 25% higher wattage than micro USB.
Comparing Auto-MDIX detection on ethernet to what the lightning cable does shows you don't understand the other design considerations behind the connector - it works on ethernet because both ends of the connection speak ethernet, are expecting the possibility of an auto-MDIX protocol conversation, and know what to do if they see it. Lightning can be power, USB, audio, VGA, HDMI, 30 pin legacy iPod, etc - it has to be able to do the signalling conversion and physical interface management since the devices on the other end of the connector don't, and because for most kinds of devices you'd plug an iPhone into, there exists no convention for doing so.
In fact, if dumb cables were such a good idea, why hasn't USB adopted the notion of non-keyed interfaces? Obviously the ethernet consortium solved the issue a long time ago, so what's the holdup on USB.
Lightning can be power, USB, audio, VGA, HDMI, 30 pin legacy iPod, etc - it has to be able to do the signalling conversion and physical interface management since the devices on the other end of the connector don't, and because for most kinds of devices you'd plug an iPhone into, there exists no convention for doing so.
In fact, if dumb cables were such a good idea, why hasn't USB adopted the notion of non-keyed interfaces? Obviously the ethernet consortium solved the issue a long time ago, so what's the holdup on USB.
So explain this. Why can't this "chip" and signal conversion exist in the device? All it is doing is interpreting whether the signal coming in on any pin is power, audio, usb, etc, why can't that interpretation be done at the connector on the phone and needs to be interpreted by the cable? The chip exists in that white jacket right before the male connector you plug into the phone itself.
I'm not challenging that the fact the cable can be plugged in any way is an insane choice (you're right it is a better solution), the insanity is having the that logic exist in the cable and not the phone itself.
As for the question around USB, it's probably as simple as it was never designed in the spec and no one thought it was a big enough issue to have to tackle. The same question can be asked as to why are TOSLINK cables keyed? They don't have to be - they are a single strand of fibre. The mini TOSLINK however are not keyed. *shrugs*
So explain this. Why can't this "chip" and signal conversion exist in the device? All it is doing is interpreting whether the signal coming in on any pin is power, audio, usb, etc, why can't that interpretation be done at the connector on the phone and needs to be interpreted by the cable? The chip exists in that white jacket right before the male connector you plug into the phone itself.
Good question - the answer is that placing the chip outboard of the phone means you can have outputs supporting any arbitrary number of pins. If the chip was internal to the phone, and the output you wanted exceeded 16 pins, you'd need to use a larger connector. HDMI as an example, is a 19 pin connector. So if you had the chip on board, you'd need an output connector built into the phone that had 19 pins, since you've got to support the full spec. To support legacy iPod interface connections, as another example, you'd need 30 pins, and at that point, you're right back where you started - with an oversized, physically weaker, and more failure prone connection.
Chip in the cable means you can handle any legacy, current technology, or future connectivity requirement without having to change the connector on the phone, since the phone only needs to know how to talk Lightning via 16 pins. No more, no less, irrespective of what the outboard connectivity looks like.
At a protocol level, rather than just a pin out electrical level, it's even more complicated than this - because you only have 16 pins of output capability, the devices themselves are not actually capable of providing full spec output - instead, they deliver an I/O stream that is generalized to the type of data being handled, and let the cable handle the implementation details. So in our HDMI example, since the iPhone only has 16 pins out, rather than attempt to deliver HDMI down the cable, it actually AirPlay's an MPEG data stream to the cable, and the chip in the cable (which is a full on System on a Chip (SOC), by the way), receives that Airplay stream, and encodes it into full spec HDMI out.
In effect, iOS devices only need to know how to "speak" a few simple data formats - audio, video, and binary data. They don't even need a USB controller on board, since that translation is handled on the cable. Apple could introduce a USB3 compatible lightning cable, and you'd never need to upgrade to an iOS device with a USB3 controller on board - it would "just work" at USB3 speeds.
So the engineering beauty of the Lightning connector is two-fold. First, at a physical level, it decouples the number of pins required between input and output devices, ensuring a single, consistent physical interface across all iOS devices. Second, it decouples the protocols and signalling formats the phone needs to know how to speak - the phone needs none of the signalling logic required for multiple protocols, since it just speaks high speed digital data to the cable, and lets it do all the protocol conversion and I/O signalling.
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I was going to post this in one of the Android threads but that would be pissy....but man, reading those threads it seems like every second post is about flashing and rooting and ROMs and running scripts and loading stock Android and.....
I know those phones work just fine without having to do that stuff but why would I want something that complicated? And I'm a software architect. I'll stick with stock iOS
To be fair there are also people who jailbreak iOS so each to their own I guess
I was going to post this in one of the Android threads but that would be pissy....but man, reading those threads it seems like every second post is about flashing and rooting and ROMs and running scripts and loading stock Android and.....
I know those phones work just fine without having to do that stuff but why would I want something that complicated? And I'm a software architect. I'll stick with stock iOS
To be fair there are also people who jailbreak iOS so each to their own I guess
I've been using two pure Android devices (Nexus S and Nexus 4) and one pur Android Tablet (Nexus 7), I have no idea what flashing or rooting is really. I haven't done it on any of those three devices nor do I ever plan to.
The genius of Android is it's as simple or as crazy as you want it to me. The Google Nexus thread I created has been over run the past page or so with that kind of talk, hoping it dies off and goes back to the Android thread because it's of zero interest to me.
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I've been using two pure Android devices (Nexus S and Nexus 4) and one pur Android Tablet (Nexus 7), I have no idea what flashing or rooting is really. I haven't done it on any of those three devices nor do I ever plan to.
The genius of Android is it's as simple or as crazy as you want it to me. The Google Nexus thread I created has been over run the past page or so with that kind of talk, hoping it dies off and goes back to the Android thread because it's of zero interest to me.
That's good to hear. When I see posts like "I got it work by running this script" I shudder
"new 4 minute timer"...done
