Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/08/apples-iphone-7-event-in-un.html
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Five minutes? You can summarize it in one word: courage.
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Five minutes? You can summarize it in four words: GIVE US MO’ MONEY.
*fixed
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You mean, like Navy Cross type courage?
Or standing-up-in-front-of-a-bought-&-friendly-audience-and-babelling-market-speak type courage?
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Headphone plug port removal is BS. It does absolutely NOTHING for the consumer. It only profits Apple and Beats.I remember when Apple made things that made sense for a user. No longer it seems. Wireless audio sucks.I’m saving my hard earned money and buying another brand of phone once the next bloated OS bricks my phone. Tired of getting F’d by another greedy corporation wanting my money and giving me little in return.
Silly kids can have their wireless crap and over priced accessories. Courage is moving on…
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I’m not impressed but not upset either. I hate more or less all headphones, though there’s a special place in hell for Apple’s lousy-sounding, slippery ear buds so I can’t imagine paying for their wireless ones. The headphone jack is only meaningful to me in the car and at certain locations where I use it to connect to older stereo equipment, and in all those settings it’s dead easy to replace a patch cord with a Bluetooth receiver should I ever want or need to.
Thankfully I don’t need the latest and greatest (of anything, really), so my current iPhone will do me fine for at least three more years, and then I can decide for myself whether the lack of a jack means jack. Probably not, but I know I’m likely in a minority.
On the whole, this looks to me like Apple’s standard M.O. It’s arguably less sensible than the dropping of the floppy drive, optical drives, 30-pin connector, etc., but all those things generated similar outrage when they were announced, so it’s hard to be sure whether it really is less sensible, or just the usual first-day-post-announcement perspective.
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http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-laptop-with-no--14299
Sent from my iPhone 5s
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The only desirable changes are the slight water resistance and the better camera. But to get the better camera, you have to buy the Plus, which is an overlarge unwieldy POS, so fuck 'em.
The video erroneously refers to the lack of a headphone jack as a feature. Not dipshits, that’s called a bug.
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Would you say that you’re disappointed in Apple?
Disappointment implies there was hope for Apple to begin with 
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The regular sized phone does have a better camera, with optical image stabilization (a plus-only exclusive in the 6 and 6s) and all the other camera goodies that Apple touted (bigger sensor, wide gamut colour, etc), except for optical zoom, which is this year’s plus only exclusive camera feature. .
Meh. I skipped even the 5-minute take. I think I have the gist, anyway.
Can’t wait for the complaints to start rolling in about a lack of a SCSI port or room for expansion cards.
Wait. What year is this?
Hm. Maybe I am interested just a little bit in this iPhone. But I’m also wondering how many generations I can skip before actually having to upgrade (looking to beat 3GS to 5S). Better camera, though…
A million times this. I’ve never had a good experience with Apple’s ear buds, not even the so-called premium ones. They all suck for fitment. I look at the new ones and I just know they won’t fit right either, and I’ll look like a douchebag while wearing them as a bonus. I’ll pass.
The video might be wrong (though I doubt it, MacRumors being a bunch of shills), but it clearly said only the Plus would receive the update for narrowing the depth of field to mimic the clarity of a DLSR. Even though it’s almost certainly just a software filter, that’s the one thing that might make the camera worthwhile because, although my DLSR has vastly superior optics and sensor, it would be nice to be able to get a quick approximation of a DLSR image when all I have on me is my phone. And because it’s almost certainly a software filter, there is no other reason for excluding it from the regular sized iPhone 7 other than Apple likes to dangle features in front of its customers to work up a nice Pavlovian salivation. So they can take their Bluetooth earbuds and their supersized phones and shove them right up the hole in their la-di-da shiny new spaceship-shaped campus. Fetch, boy…go fetch!
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“filter, there is no other reason for excluding it from the regular sized iPhone 7 other than Apple likes to dangle features in front of its customers”
actually, according to the explanation in the keynote, The depth of field feature depends on using both cameras in the 7+ to acqure a 3-d map of the objects in the FOV so it knows waht parts to blur. with only one camera, it can’t “know” what’s foreground and what’s background, so it can’t apply the blur properly.
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Apple removing the 3.5mm jack is a clear cut case of a cash grab. You don’t gain any functionality from this…as IPhones already let you use wireless headphones, or lightning ones.
Instead, you can now only use proprietary headphones that potentially won’t work on other devices, or you have to awkwardly patch things in. I’m sure Apple is making a healthy cut out of all 3rd party headphones that don’t need an adapter, which they certainly weren’t getting when there was an included 3.5mm jack. I’m sure this financial arrangement has nothing to do with why the 3.5mm jack disappeared, and it’s all due to “courage”, or what the fuck ever.
People keep comparing this to the floppy drive, but that’s total BS. The CD was far better than the floppy in nearly every way, unlike this situation. Nothing beats a standard 3.5mm jack for raw audio.
Meanwhile here are things you can’t do with an iPhone 7, without a fucking adapter you have to carry around.
- Hook it up to the stereo in your living room and awkwardly dance.
- Hook it up to your car so you can avoid having to actually talk to your family.
- Charge the phone and listen to something at the same god damn time.
Don’t buy this piece of shit, for the public good.
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Hmmm…If so, then at least there’s some sense to it. I still don’t see any compelling reason not to include the second camera on the regular 7. I’d much rather have a minutely thicker regular than the absurd size of the “Plus” screens. If I wanted an iPad mini, I’d buy an iPad mini. Phablets are an abomination. It’s not so much the price as the stupidly large size that irks me.
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Because there is no room for it. Smartphones are tightly packed jigsaw puzzles of ultraminiaturized components, each of which has a fixed size and shape. So you want a double sized camera, without expanding the phone, without making the battery any smaller, the only compromise you are willing to entertain is making it ‘minutely thicker’. But increasing the z-height would only help if it were enough thicker to allow for the stacking of components, which is more than ‘minutely’.
Sadly, Apple is a company of engineers rather than wizards, and sadly we do not have access to the 4th dimension or to TARDIS technology. May I call your attention to An article in buzzfeed interviewing Apple execs on the descision to ditch the headphone jack, which talks about how making the camera bigger lead them to moving around a cascade of other components.
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Not at the time it wasn’t. The original iMac had a CD-ROM (that’s read-only for those who don’t remember) and only wired networking for sharing files. It was massively inconvenient for some people, and they had to buy an external device to restore what was then standard functionality.
And when writable optical drives did become common, they were mostly write-once. Writable discs were more expensive than floppies and there were competing technologies so not all discs worked with all drives. The saving grace was that they could all store massively more data than floppies, but aside from that it was a confusing and expensive mess. Fortunately wifi and broadband gradually made it all obsolete.
So I say the analogy is pretty good though not necessarily perfect. It’s the usual Apple M.O.: remove a standard bit of equipment before anyone else, subject a lot of people to hassle, endure the rage. In every previous case it has worked out fine for everyone.
Maybe it won’t this time, but so far it’s the same old story.
However, it does appear the wrinkle this time is DRM. I don’t know for sure that this is part of it, but removing analog output at the same time as DRMed streaming is taking over online music delivery, and more specifically Apple’s music business, does seem like quite a coincidence.
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