New iPhone

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Pronounce the ‘P’, and it rhymes with “hype phone”.

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So Apple is catching up with the Hong Kong crapvendors who have been selling kits with all you need to midas-ize your iP4, iP4S and iP5 for a couple of years now. Wow.

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I would I pronounce it like “tile” instead of like in “chip”?

Yeah. Assuming of course your crapvendor can supply parts for the fingerprint sensor, the improved cameras and, oh yeah, the 64bit ARMv8 cpu.

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haters gonna hate…

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“Slightly” better camera.

We have gotten so jaded so quickly.

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There is going to be a rash of slow-mo i-cats a-leaping and a-purring on the youtubes.

Slo-mo - in a smartphone. I mean, way cool.

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Great news! Now the NSA will have a database of everyone’s fingerprints! This is so awesome you guys!

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Another feature is a coprocessor that handles motion and biometric stuff, apparently designed to tie into fitness type apps. The idea being that it can count the number of steps you take in a day without having to run the energy hogging main processor. Cute, but I’m not exactly a killer feature in a smartphone.

This is actually even more unimpressive than the lacklustre rumors.

Apple stock is tanking today. Gee, I wonder why.

But it’s 64 bit, just like a Nintendo 64!

That was the strangest part of the conference to me. Apple has never been the company that cares about getting the most bits first, so why make such a big deal about it now? Why not bury it at the back of the conference after talk about the camera and fitness chip? It’s a feature that 99% of their userbase will never notice nor care about. Even developers don’t need to care about it. It’s not like the phone has > 4GB of RAM.

Apple claims the fingerprint data is stored locally. Lotsa luck getting a copy of the source code to verify that.

(Hmm, also, what happens if you back the phone up to iCloud?)

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it’s not just about address space; with a 64-bit word width you are processing data at 2x the rate of a 32-bit machine without doing much but widening all the internal datapaths.

edit: not that it’s easy, mind you; all your logic that does any kind of reduction on the data (adders, multipliers) now become harder to design and meet timing at the target clock speed, and of course the layout becomes harder as well with all that extra metal to drag around.

By tank you mean it’s back to what it traded for on Friday, right? It’s still up 7% for the month.

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I guess you missed the part about how the NSA has access to data stored locally on your phone:

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You’re right, I did. But looking at the article you cite I see

experts boast about successful access to iPhone data in instances where the NSA is able to infiltrate the computer a person uses to sync their iPhone

which is not quite the same as what you wrote. In particular, the story suggests they have to be targeting you specifically before your phone is at risk. If all that is right, then the NSA wouldn’t be stockpiling hundreds of millions of fingerprints just by idly scraping the Internet the way they do with email and call records. And if they do want to target you specifically, well, most people leave lots and lots of fingerprints in all kinds of public places, retrievable using nineteenth-century technology.

oops. reply went in the wrong place first shot.
Isn’t that only the case if the software is written to take advantage of it? With this being the only iDevice currently with a 64bit processor wouldn’t most software still be 32bit? I understand the future-proofing, though.

the OS and all its functions will be compiled for 64-bit arm out of the box. so even 32-bit apps will get some boost when they make calls to the operating system. yes it’s true that 3rd party apps will need to be recompiled (and perhaps tweaked) for 64-bit but they made sure to talk about how easy Xcode makes this during the reveal today.

oh, also the binary formats allow for mulitple architectures, so at the risk of bloating the size of apps, developers can compile both versions for distribution. or, maybe the app store will just take care of this for you, giving you the right binary for the platform you are on.

If its stored as part of your keychain (which it should be), it won’t go to iCloud, AFAIK.

Not saying the NSA won’t have it through other means, but I don’t think iCloud would be the vulnerability.

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