retrogusto

As a shareholder, I guess I should be glad they got rid of the headphone jack, but it sure was annoying last week when I got on the subway and realized that I didn’t have my dongle with me, so I was carrying the earbuds around all day and unable to use them except as earplugs. Apart from a way to push people towards a more costly solution, I haven’t heard any reasonable justification—if they can make a waterproof Lightning jack, they can do the same with stereo mini, and even the “saves space” argument seems a little weak given that the slimmest and most compact iPhone had a jack, and they have only been getting bulkier since the jack was removed. And I know there are people who will say they are glad about the omission, but honestly, just the fact that people are still discussing and arguing about it shows that it’s contentious. I doubt we’ll still be discussing the merits of, say, the Touch Bar seven years down the road, even though it has its fans too. 

Apple has been trending towards thicker phones, but adding weight faster. This would constitute a pretty large jump, but maybe not totally impossible given the half-pounders they are selling now, and still thinner than the 3G or 3GS.

harry wild said:

• Elon Musk is under attacked to by Powers To Be.  Elon will find away to get Twitter a net profitable company.  After all, he was forced in to buy Twitter by the court!

Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but the court only forced him to fulfill the commitment he made, it didn’t force him to commit in the first place. 

It’s complicated when people get accustomed to a certain business model and then regulators decide to upend the business model for simplistic reasons. 94% of the apps on the App Store are free to download, with Apple providing a lot of support to developers and taking no commission. And a large group of developers sells apps for a price, but makes less than $1,000,000 per year, in which case they only pay 15%. Apple knows it’s in their best interest to provide a great experience at a fair price, so they do, and their pricing was thoughtfully calculated to work for everyone. It seems like the only developers who would favor a 3rd-party store would be those who either want to skirt Apple’s rules, which are mostly consumer protections, or to pay a lower commission, in which case they are probably among the small minority that is raking it in due to their success on the iPhone platform and paying 30%. I don’t foresee third-party stores catering to the “free download” market, apart from malware. So is the idea that you would get most apps from the App Store, and then go to 3rd-party stores for the big subscription apps and paid games? Sounds like a convoluted nightmare that wouldn’t do anything for consumers or anyone but the richest software and service companies. 

The last two times I bought iPhones at the Apple Store, I knew exactly what I wanted and was in a hurry but still couldn’t get out of there in less than an hour, due to the wait for a salesperson, then all of the talking they wanted to do, then bringing the phone out from the back and ringing up the purchase. Pretty frustrating, since I wasn’t really expecting it. So 25 minutes in this case sounds downright speedy. 

If I can no longer press the volume buttons through fabric when the phone is in my pocket, that would be an added inconvenience, and if I can no longer glance at the ringer switch to see if the ringer is on, that too would be a step in the wrong direction. It’s hard to imagine any advantages to the user that would more than make up for these drawbacks. It’s not like the current waterproofing is insufficient for my needs.

The action button is cool, but the mute switch is very useful and many of us have been using it regularly for 15+ years, so I don’t know why they felt the need to remove it. We could have had both, and the mute switch has the significant benefit of showing its status at a glance, something the action button cannot do. Maybe the 16 Pro?

The current iPad Air is kind of awkward in the lineup, given that the $599 base model only has 64gb of storage (which probably isn’t enough for most people, especially at that price), and the next level up only costs $50 less than an iPad Pro 128gb (which is enough for many people). And that $50 gets you a lot of extra stuff. It’ll be interesting to see the base storage for the new models—it’ll make a bigger difference for most people than a screen upgrade, unless the screen also makes the device significantly sleeker and lighter. 

JP234 said:

To anyone who's accidentally pushed a button on his phone, why does changing the mute switch to a button benefit the user. Seems like it was done just to benefit Apple. You're going to mute your phone without knowing you did it, you know you are, and wonder why you and Siri are no longer on speaking terms.

Hopefully just a rumor. It would be very frustrating to no longer be able to look at the switch to see if the ringer was off or not, and it’s unclear if this would also mean that I couldn’t adjust volume without taking the phone out of my pocket, but that would be a meaningful step in the wrong direction too, at least for me. And as you note, there would be no clear advantage for the user. Someone might mention something like increased water resistance, but the number of people who really need to take their phone deep underwater is…pretty limited.

I too think that lots of people will want to try it, but not many will feel compelled to spend that kind of money on the first generation device. It seems like incredible technology, but the battery life and comfort will need to be worked out in future iterations. Right now, there’s a somewhat awkward-seeming 2-hour external battery, but the bigger limitation might be the comfort; I think Marques Brownlee said that it was very impressive, but after 15 minutes he was ready to take it off, due to the weight. But hopefully we’ll all be so blown away that we won’t be able to resist the temptation.