I have mixed feelings. The developers are in a better position to know what needs to be done, and making sacrifices (i.e. updated UI) to improve the foundation of iOS is very admirable. However, as much as I like iOS, it’s feeling a tad on the stale side to me. I don’t need fancy new features to keep me amused, but knowing that Apple is working on changes means they think they have something good to offer, and that’s very interesting. For instance, I like the choices Apple has made regarding the home screens since I think it has increased efficiency over the customisability of Android (just because a user thinks they’re more efficient being able to customise doesn’t mean the ‘timer’ will agree with them), but it hasn’t changed much at all and if Apple does have some new ideas where their efficiency isn’t sacrificed that could be exciting. Guess we’ll have to wait and see!
I still have yet to put iOS 11 on my 6s Plus due to the battery life concerns. I haven't seen any reports of this issue being substantially and concretely fixed with the incremental updates.
There is no need for you to still be holding off at this point? Update your phone, set up as new. Bring your apps back down, monitor your battery to see if there are any offending apps that are using an unusual amount of battery. There are 2 6s Plus' in my house now that are on 11.2.5 with no such issues. Honestly one of the biggest battery offenders is having background app refresh on. I am not sure why this is a feature, when it's so hard on the battery? Even the Apple Genius' go to turn it off if you bring your phone in for battery life issues. I am not sure if it is an individual app problem, or an IOS problem, but it sure is annoying and causes issues for folks.
However, expect your phone to be less responsive and for lots of older apps not to be launchable. I wish I had stuck with iOS 10 for my 6s. Not the end of the world, but the plusses didn't outweigh the minuses.
The goal of fully baking Swift before it's even ready is the problem. I truly wish they'd have never developed the language. It's a false panacea that will eventually be dumped and people will return to learning more slowly evolved OOA/OOD languages of ObjC/C++ on top of C.
I'm good with this focus. Build a strong foundation. But...the rest of the industry will progress a lot over the next two years...before major new features will be released...hope this doesn't catch Apple off guard.
Cue the complainers. Tell us about how wealthy Apple is and they should be able to do both. /s
Yup! Exactly! Apple has hundreds of thousands of employees so they should be able to do both! Apple is damned if they do and damned if they don't.
I for one think this is a great idea for Apple. Do a feature freeze, clean up the OS and get it ready for additional features and major changes. Otherwise, I think they're just digging themselves a hole.
Apple has taken a lot of crap for all of its OS's lately. They could probably follow this same plan for all of their OS's for this year.
If you go to 9to5Mac you'll see just this. People complaining that Apple can't do both. Google can do both, why can't Apple?
Google definitely CAN'T do both. There has been very few large, meaningful features added in the last few major versions of Android, compared to iOS. Also, all Google tends to be accountable for is Android on their own phones (an extremely tiny percentage). When any other OEM phone has OS issues, Google and users can just blame it on that OEM, so the complaints against Google and/or Android are more dilutaed. Apple is accountable for the software and hardware of 100% of iOS devices sold, and thus get 100% of the ire whenever anything goes wrong.
The goal of fully baking Swift before it's even ready is the problem. I truly wish they'd have never developed the language. It's a false panacea that will eventually be dumped and people will return to learning more slowly evolved OOA/OOD languages of ObjC/C++ on top of C.
Definitely it feels designed by committee. Hopefully they lock it down.
Is there any evidence though, that existing apps, API, SDK produced by Apple are being rewritten in swift? That would be a fairly significant chunk of effort.
Is there any way, once compiled to tell the difference between and Obj C binary and a swift binary?
The goal of fully baking Swift before it's even ready is the problem. I truly wish they'd have never developed the language. It's a false panacea that will eventually be dumped and people will return to learning more slowly evolved OOA/OOD languages of ObjC/C++ on top of C.
I doubt it. I like programming in Swift better than C++ and I am not alone. For most use cases Swift and C# are very capable languages and the added complexity of C++ don’t offer much value. I’m not managing memory addresss in my apps.
If you cut your teeth on C++ I understand you may feel differently. But I’d offer you may just be experiencing learning bias and resistance to new.
Currently we can't use Siri for Apple TV, And movies and a lot other features. (Brazil is the 9th biggest digital media consumer in the world projected to be the 4th in 2 years)
Apple Pay is not available (almost all terminals here support NFC and we moved 182 billion dollars with cards in 3 months.) CarPlay is useless. HomePod is available in 3 countries! (no sign of launch in Brazil) Apple maps are not available in any city in Brazil (São Paulo is the most populated city in America, and is the tenth city in GDP in the world)
The goal of fully baking Swift before it's even ready is the problem. I truly wish they'd have never developed the language. It's a false panacea that will eventually be dumped and people will return to learning more slowly evolved OOA/OOD languages of ObjC/C++ on top of C.
WTF are you talking about? Swift is such a beautiful language and so much better than clunky legacy languages like Java. It seemed like a crazy idea to have Apple go their own way with a new language, but it's worked.
Good call, Craig. A great leader knows when to make a timing tough decision. Sometimes it is necessary to go back to the basics even if it is not favourable/popularity-acceptance. You have my support as this is why I love and trust Apple's culture/DNA.
The goal of fully baking Swift before it's even ready is the problem. I truly wish they'd have never developed the language. It's a false panacea that will eventually be dumped and people will return to learning more slowly evolved OOA/OOD languages of ObjC/C++ on top of C.
Could not disagree more. I find Swift to be a much better experience than programming in ObjC/C++. And surprisingly, my business partner who has 40 years of assembly/C/C++ and is a stickler for low level performance has fallen in love with Swift this year. He's considering porting much of our C++ over to Swift. Ironically, the C++ integration is one of the lacking areas, or porting wouldn't be so high on the list.
I started off on Android and moved to iOS in no small part because of the UI framerate consistency, every frame drop is like a bump in the road that’s a little unpleasant. Post Forstall that steady clip seems elusive no matter how powerful the hardware. I hope that’s really honed up again.
I started off on Android and moved to iOS in no small part because of the UI framerate consistency, every frame drop is like a bump in the road that’s a little unpleasant. Post Forstall that steady clip seems elusive no matter how powerful the hardware. I hope that’s really honed up again.
You mst have skipped IOS 3,4 and probably 7 and 8 too cause those early major versions all had serious issues with pas hardware.
IOS 4 in particular was very bad completely wrecking the Iphone 3G in a way it never really recovered and the only way to still use the phone well was staying on IOS 3 really..
The 3GS had major issues too but recovred and made to 6.3.5 in pretty good shape.
I suspect this has, surprisingly, more to do with sales and marketing... historically, Apple has blasted out great new OS’s to the western market and users kept up by buying new phones.
But in India and other developing countries they are increasingly having to rely on older products with A8 & A9 processors in order to compete. In those places people want iPhones but end up with $150 Androids.
Could this be to make those older products more viable? After all, why would they worry about performance with an A11 chip? That’s already way ahead of the curve for most users.
I think Apple should keep releasing a new iOS yearly, but they don’t have to try and stick everything in at once.
Why not distribute major features throughout the year? As in every 3 months an update comes out that adds something new? Quality should go up because there’s less pressure to get everything done at once. And people would have something to look forward to by getting regular improvements.
I could never presume to understand their business decisions better than they do, nor can any outsider really. All we can say is we want them to give us everything for nothing and to hurry up about it.
Is the assumption of this rumour really that Apple cannot walk and chew gum at the same time? They need two years between feature releases to stabilize iOS?
After this many decades doing major software, one assumes the are capable of doing both.
Not when they've spent so much time letting performance problems and bugs build up. Apple have clearly been ignoring these issues and focusing only on bullet point features for new devices. The garbage has built up to a distressing level, when comparing to iOS 6 (and Mac OS 10.6.8).
As I've mentioned several times here on AI, there are serious functionality bugs present in iOS, introduced by iOS 7 and unfixed in iOS 11, plus new problems introduced each version. If you aren't bothered by these bugs, great for you. If you don't know what they are, I guess your usage is entirely different from mine because these bugs irritate me daily, and I discover new bugs almost daily... such as the recently-noticed complete inability to delete web site storage content. Go ahead and try it; if you're on iOS 10.3 or higher, it's impossible to clear your Safari content. I'm surprised no one has taken issue with this broken function in the media since it's a privacy hole.
It's high time Apple focus on stability, bug-killing, and speed/efficiency. iOS desperately needs it and Mac OS isn't far behind (the mouse pointer bugs introduced in El Capitan persist and have grown in Sierra, and High Sierra has been a huge pain for audio professionals and 3rd-party developers, mostly because APFS wasn't suitably tested and refined before release on Mac OS).
Though if Apple come through this time, I bet they'll cut iPhone 6s from compatibility. Because that's my luck. No, it's NOT acceptable to replace a 650+ dollar piece of hardware every three years.
Comments
This reinventing the wheel is moronic.
https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/tree/master/proposals
Expand Apple maps at a higher rate Apple!
Is there any evidence though, that existing apps, API, SDK produced by Apple are being rewritten in swift? That would be a fairly significant chunk of effort.
Is there any way, once compiled to tell the difference between and Obj C binary and a swift binary?
If you cut your teeth on C++ I understand you may feel differently. But I’d offer you may just be experiencing learning bias and resistance to new.
Currently we can't use Siri for Apple TV, And movies and a lot other features. (Brazil is the 9th biggest digital media consumer in the world projected to be the 4th in 2 years)
CarPlay is useless.
HomePod is available in 3 countries! (no sign of launch in Brazil)
Apple maps are not available in any city in Brazil (São Paulo is the most populated city in America, and is the tenth city in GDP in the world)
I find Swift to be a much better experience than programming in ObjC/C++.
And surprisingly, my business partner who has 40 years of assembly/C/C++ and is a stickler for low level performance has fallen in love with Swift this year. He's considering porting much of our C++ over to Swift.
Ironically, the C++ integration is one of the lacking areas, or porting wouldn't be so high on the list.
historically, Apple has blasted out great new OS’s to the western market and users kept up by buying new phones.
But in India and other developing countries they are increasingly having to rely on older products with A8 & A9 processors in order to compete. In those places people want iPhones but end up with $150 Androids.
Could this be to make those older products more viable?
After all, why would they worry about performance with an A11 chip? That’s already way ahead of the curve for most users.
As I've mentioned several times here on AI, there are serious functionality bugs present in iOS, introduced by iOS 7 and unfixed in iOS 11, plus new problems introduced each version. If you aren't bothered by these bugs, great for you. If you don't know what they are, I guess your usage is entirely different from mine because these bugs irritate me daily, and I discover new bugs almost daily... such as the recently-noticed complete inability to delete web site storage content. Go ahead and try it; if you're on iOS 10.3 or higher, it's impossible to clear your Safari content. I'm surprised no one has taken issue with this broken function in the media since it's a privacy hole.
It's high time Apple focus on stability, bug-killing, and speed/efficiency. iOS desperately needs it and Mac OS isn't far behind (the mouse pointer bugs introduced in El Capitan persist and have grown in Sierra, and High Sierra has been a huge pain for audio professionals and 3rd-party developers, mostly because APFS wasn't suitably tested and refined before release on Mac OS).
Though if Apple come through this time, I bet they'll cut iPhone 6s from compatibility. Because that's my luck. No, it's NOT acceptable to replace a 650+ dollar piece of hardware every three years.
If history is any indication, that's a given. and iPhone 7 series will be cut next year.