iPhone 5S impressions

[pcchen]

Uhm, current mobile devices do that now, and what should they be using instead...? I thought iOS - being Linux-based - used "modern" pre-emptive multitasking and stuff like that.

I think the problem here is that older multi-user time sharing system is designed for a multi-user environment. In a single user environment, it's probably not the best way. By the way, iOS is based on FreeBSD, not Linux.

Apps could be updating just on the app switcher screen, perhaps at a lower rate than usual. It would often be useful to see an up-to-date view of the app's current state to help you decide if you want/need to switch to it or not. Of course, some apps might not want to do that - banking apps for example - so the app should be able to block realtime background UI updates.

If some apps really need to be seen updated when running in the background, I think it's better to just allow them to be flagged as such. Also, as you said, it's important to remove any sensitive information on screen before going background.

Often I see just a white rectangle on the switcher screen, so the screenshot functionality is not entirely reliable, or there's other factors involved as well...

The snapshot of app screens when going background is done at a certain time. The situation you describe could be caused by some apps removing UI before going background, or could just be a bug in iOS 7.

Of course, you'd need to re-load that data again from flash when you wake up the app, and that too would consume power and also slow down app switching. How much I don't know, maybe just a few tenths of a second at most, I don't know how fast flash access is in an iphone. iP4 at least isn't very fast though that's for sure. 5S is supposedly pretty quick, considering you can shoot up to 1000 (well, 999) photos in a row, and you couldn't fit all of them in RAM even if you don't have any other apps loaded...

It's true that writing to flash is costly, both in time and power. But as in most systems, mobile OS uses RAM as cache for storage, so it's still better than leaving these data in "live" memory, because the OS can purge the cache at any time ("live" memory, on the other hand, can only be purged when the app is suspended).

 

[Entropy]

I know, I know. I was thinking if I should point out I'm being sarcastic or not (wisdom dictates that it's tantamount to playing with fire not to do so on the internet), but I thought, what the hell. A life without risks is no life at all, right?

Sorry about the knee-jerk reaction, your post accidentally transported me back to the days of "iOS doesn't do Real(tm) multi-tasking", when a bunch of barely computer literate internet nerds with a fingernail grip on how a modern desktop OS is implemented, think that it is the one true way (because it allows them to slam Apple).
You can't expand the memory of mobile devices, touch interface requires subjectively absolute responsiveness for a good experience, and there are functions such as calls that cannot be allowed to glitch because an app forces the OS to start paging RAM to flash or whatever. And you're operating under tight power constraints.

It has taken desktop OSs up until now to provide good responsiveness, which is pretty much where it was almost 30 years ago using a cooperative multitasking model and no virtual memory. Only took a factor of ten thousand or so in computing power, and it can still glitch particularly when it comes to disk or network IO. Desktop OSs took what was an understandable evolutionary path back in the day, but it is a sign of health if some rethinking is done on mobile platforms. Android may be the least impressive example in this regard, iOS is better, but there were other more from the ground up approaches that has been squeezed out of the market. Makes me grumpy. ;-)

Definitely agreed there, and I hope most other people including phone and app makers agree as well. That said, I was rather dismayed seeing how much iOS slowed down in version 7 on older hardware, even for stuff that would not require more hardware resources; simple stuff like flipping between pages of app icons on the home screen, stuff like that.

...So there's obviously also planned obsolescence involved here as well unfortunately...

Amen.
When OS designers start adding animations and whatnot to the basic OS functionality, you know what is going on.

PS. It was very interesting to see the Taiwanese PC hardware OEMs openly criticise Microsoft for not doing "their part" in driving the hardware upgrade cycle back when WindowsXP was getting easy to power. And it was hilarious to see Microsoft respond with Vista, at the same time as the Taiwanese OEMs discovered that netbooks could be sold to the public... followed by Microsoft and Intel jointly crippling netbooks in order to drive customers to more expensive laptops and then loosing it all to tablets. The joys of market manipulation.

 

[UniversalTruth]

Guys, is it known how much one 5S costs leaving the assembly factory? Is it something like 20- 30$?

And another question- why is the market cap of the company so large- just a little bit south of 500 bln $?

So, basically they should be having huge margins which means they sell cheap parts at insane prices, no?

 

[Alexko]

Guys, is it known how much one 5S costs leaving the assembly factory? Is it something like ~200$?

And another question- why is the market cap of the company so large- just a little bit south of 500 bln $?

So, basically they should be having huge margins which means they sell cheap parts at insane prices, no?

Fixed it.
http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/Ne...-Manufacturing-Cost-IHS-Teardown-Reveals.aspx

 

[UniversalTruth]

Fixed it.
http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/Ne...-Manufacturing-Cost-IHS-Teardown-Reveals.aspx

Groundbreaking? This seems like a marketing material... because if this is groundbreaking, then what can we say about the Samsung S4 BOM, which destroys it in every possible specification

Anyways, I don't trust these numbers, they look way inflated, that's why I ask you about your OWN opinion, not linking to other articles

 

[Alexko]

Groundbreaking? This seems like a marketing material... because if this is groundbreaking, then what can we say about the Samsung S4 BOM, which destroys it in every possible specification

Anyways, I don't trust these numbers, they look way inflated, that's why I ask you about your OWN opinion, not linking to other articles

This information is from September, so the cost of some components may have dropped a little, but nothing strikes me as inflated here. The S4 includes components that should be costlier, but then again many of them are manufactured by Samsung itself, so ultimately the difference might not be all that large.

 

[Lazy8s]

I can understand how the larger frame, display, and battery, and the greater amount of RAM of the Galaxy would increase its bill of materials over the 5S (countered somewhat by potentially more expensive material/type of each of those components being used in the 5S), but those are about the only specifications that I'd think make much of a difference in cost between the two.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Yeah, but seriously, 2 years is considered to be old???

Lithium batteries age, as we all know, and they age faster the more/deeply they're cycled. If you use your phone a lot the battery ages faster, naturally, so if you're an eager phone user and charge your device more or less daily it's not inconcievable that you could be wearing it out after this time.

Also note that if the phone says 20% charge and then shuts off it could be that the battery was actually holding a lot less than 20%. The capacity remaining indicator is just an approximation, there's no real way to know how much is really there. If the output voltage was dropping too low the phone might have shut off prematurely. Or, software bugs. *shrug* Who knows?

It gets sensible to buy a new battery for a phone. Even here at the sunday market around the old Basilica they sell some, 10 euros for a dumbphone's one, for smartphones I don't know.

 

[wco81]

Samsung is generally more aggressive on pricing, even early in the product cycle.

But the S4 sold 9 million in the last quarter, compared to over 15 million for the S3 in the year-ago quarter.

So the specs alone isn't translating to greater sales.

 

[UniversalTruth]

It gets sensible to buy a new battery for a phone. Even here at the sunday market around the old Basilica they sell some, 10 euros for a dumbphone's one, for smartphones I don't know.

Some of them (including the 5S) don't offer the option to replace the battery as it is built-in.. or at least I haven't heard yet how to solve this annoying problem. Once the battery dies and the phone should go either to a museum or to the trash

Samsung is generally more aggressive on pricing, even early in the product cycle.

But the S4 sold 9 million in the last quarter, compared to over 15 million for the S3 in the year-ago quarter.

So the specs alone isn't translating to greater sales.

Of course, also the market is so saturated now that it is natural to see declining sales at some point

 

[silent_guy]

I don't know what specifications you have in mind, other than size of the display, but they seem to be pretty similar to me from a technical point of view. The biggest differences are probably in the fingerprint sensor and the quality of the enclosure which should be quite a bit higher for the iPhone. But how much? No idea.

But I doubt $20 will get you even half an LCD screen.

 

[silent_guy]

As for the $500B market cap: they have $100B in cash, and they're at the bottom of their peers in terms of P/E, yet at the top of their class in other numbers. If you have questions about Apple, you are probably blown away by market cap of everybody else?

 

[UniversalTruth]

I don't know what specifications you have in mind, other than size of the display, but they seem to be pretty similar to me from a technical point of view. The biggest differences are probably in the fingerprint sensor and the quality of the enclosure which should be quite a bit higher for the iPhone. But how much? No idea

The processor, the memory size, the camera quality, the display size and resolution, the display (the glass) overal quality which makes it more stable after drops, etc

Also, the sensors- "accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer, temperature, humidity, gesture" vs "accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass"

 

[patsu]

I've been using the 7.1 on my 5s and Mini 2 since the first beta, and there are a lot of improvements coming. Maybe it's human nature to bury the bad memories, but I almost forgot that 7.0 issues were "a thing".

I am using the latest 7.1 beta with 5s.

It's noticeably smoother, more robust under bad network connections, plus a few cleaned up UI.

There are still a few un-Apple minor issues here and there. Hope Apple clean all of them up in the next release. Overall I think it's faster than iOS6. Would love to see them pull all the base features together, like fingerprint sensor, PassBook, iBeacon, etc. for some interesting services.

I also like how they update all their apps every 2-3 months now. Starting to play with iCloud apps.

 

[silent_guy]

The processor, the memory size, the camera quality, the display size and resolution, the display (the glass) overal quality which makes it more stable after drops, etc Also, the sensors- "accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer, temperature, humidity, gesture" vs "accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass"

A well thought out and balanced argument! I expected no less.

 

[Lazy8s]

Is the quality of the glass really different between the two?

Certain elements of the S4's camera optics might be marginally more expensive, yet the 5S's camera BOM may counter somewhat with its two-tone flash.

Other than the CPU compute of four fully-ramped Kraits combined to a degree that doesn't realistically match the level of parallelism inherent to real-world use cases (and even then, the two Cyclone cores' combined performance is fairly close), nothing about the application processor portion of the S600 nor the S800 destroys the A7, let alone even reaches it.

 

[UniversalTruth]

A well thought out and balanced argument! I expected no less.

I hope for some technical explanations not sarcasm!

Is the quality of the glass really different between the two?

Perhaps, just watch the video clip, for the glass, from 6:35:

However, I am not sure whether they used the same glass in 5 and 5S... You can tell more

 

[patsu]

Drop tests will depend on your luck. ^_^

I dropped mine 5 times on the road and it survived all of them with just minor scratches and dents. On the 6th time, the phone landed perfectly squarely on its screen (It sounded different), and cracked the screen. Fortunately, I paid for AppleCare and got the entire phone replaced.

 

[Grall]

Dropped my iP4 on linoleum flooring ~3-4 times by accident and absolutely nothing happened. Dropped it on asphalt pavement when trying to untangle the headphones cord too violently and the phone jumped out of my pocket. It landed on the steel frame and received very minor crater-shaped dents and was otherwise unharmed. Lucky!

 

[wco81]

TheVerge guys still go on about how iPhone still produces the best pictures.

But I don't think they're talking about optics or the sensor, but more the software for processing.

For instance, the Sony Z1 has probably higher-end camera components (Apple uses Sony sensors) and yet, they claim they like the pictures out of the iPhone better.