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iPhone SE

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Re: iPhone SE

#552
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, until you mentioned it just now, I’d forgotten my phone even has 3D Touch. It had been literally weeks since I last thought to use force-touch for anything, mostly because there is zero indication where it will work. And it is half-baked in the sense that when I do activate 3D Touch, it’s usually by accident. It is almost the same gesture as deleting apps on the home screen! I go to delete an app, press-and…

Start using the keyboard trackpad for moving the cursor, selecting and deleting words, paragraphs or the whole text input. It's the killer app.

It's not the killer app. Blackberry devices (e.g. Passport) have had this for ages.

(Not a problem that Apple's copying tech, it's just not unique)

Re: iPhone SE

#553

I'm becoming rather impatient with the stagnating Macbook/MBA/MBP product category. Would very much like a lightweight retina Macbook 13" or larger.

Cook's design heuristic seems to be some combination of faster/smaller/bigger/thinner - which leads to exactly the kind of line fragmentation that Jobs hated. The overlap between the MacBook Air, the MacBook, and the iPad Pro is making less and less sense from a customer POV. If you just want a content consumption, browsing, and email device that maybe supports some basic text/photo editing - which is the use case fo…

> The overlap between the MacBook Air, the MacBook

The overlap there is generational, just as there was generational overlap between the final polycarbonate macbooks and the initial second-gen Airs.

Re: iPhone SE

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems great in theory, but many people still have really restrictive data caps on their plans, so I'm not sure we are quite ready for that model. It would also suck if you had an app on your phone like a star/constellation map, which you only use every once in a while when you are out in the middle of nowhere... To have your phone automatically delete that app, then try to re-download it when there isn't any way…

Well I'd want to be able to flag certain apps to not be expired, or to be restored next time I connect to WiFi if they were cleared for some reason. Apps that take more than a second or two to download over LTE would be the difficult edge cases, but there are very few such apps, and even if they occupied 50% of the phone's storage and were never reaped the caching approach would be fine. The big issue is the data cap…

Most of the apps that are installed on my iOS device are ~100MB - slack (140) Snapchat (140) Spotify (100) viber(100) messenger (97) Airbnb (97) Etsy/Yelp/Starbucks/ are all roughly 70MB - Facebook is ~150 I believe. The worst part is that all of those apps are pretty much webviews...

Re: iPhone SE

#555
post #316

Sweet, but it's always risky getting the first generation hardware. I'm holding out for the iPhone SE/30.

beige plastic would seal the deal for me.

Re: iPhone SE

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wal*Mart sells 16GB flash products for $4.99. Company margins need to be padded somewhere?

You get what you pay for. A while ago I bought a Sandisk 64 GB USB flash at Costco on clearance for what I thought was a good price. I wanted to use it to back up a laptop on which I don't have too many files, so 64 GB was just right. Big mistake! Huge! I formatted the flash and started backup and it was pathetic. A MB per second write speed. If that. I gave up after a few hours. I went back to my tiny Apricorn backu…

Indeed, you have to look hard to find a flash drive with better than 2MB/s write speed: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/usb-3.0-thumb-drive-revi...

Re: iPhone SE

#557
post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I got really excited about the keyboard thing (when I edit code on my phone, proper cursor movement is severely lacking), but when I tried it on a friend's 6S I was severely underwhelmed. The activation force seemed random, and the cursor would never land where you expected. It was slower than using the little magnifying glass on the actual text. Touch keyboards are a hard problem, but we use them so often (…

That's an accurate assessment. I use the trackpad on my 6s+ frequently. 50% of the time it works perfectly. 50% of the time I apparently don't lift my finger in the speed or direction iOS expects, so the cursor moves forwards or backwards 1 or 2 characters from where I wanted it to stop. And I have to try again because there's no other way to nudge the cursor a character or two. Just a little tweaking and it would be…

I just looked at the changelog for iOS 9.3 and it says:

> Improves reliability when using 3D Touch on the keyboard

Hopefully this means "just a little tweaking" was done and the feature is more comfortable to use.

Re: iPhone SE

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want to use an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus with one hand, just double-tap ( not press, tap) the home button and the software adjusts the display size for you.

Except IME it's not very good because (with a 6S) you have to hold the phone very low to reach the home button comfortably enough for a double tap (which is lower than extending a bit for a firm press), which makes the phone top-heavy and much less hand-safe. I've dropped my 6S a lot , I've probably dropped it more in the few months I've had it than I dropped my 4S (at all) I expect a Plus has an even worse hold and…

I'm not sure I follow. I just sat here with my 6S trying various ways of holding it for a good 10 minutes, and I can't figure out for the life of me what you're talking about when you say that you have to hold it lower to double tap the home button than you do to firmly press it. If anything, I find the exact opposite to be true: I need to support the bottom of the phone less when I am simply double-tapping on the home button, while I need to have more support towards the bottom of the phone if I want to firmly press it.

This seems to make sense, intuitively, as well: I'm applying way more pressure to the bottom of the phone with a firm press of the home button than I do when I lightly tap it, even if I have to tap it twice.

Re: iPhone SE

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A full 24 hours worth of music (~33 complete albums) at 192 kbps is only 2GB.

I don't want just 24 hours of music, I want a comprehensive sample of my entire music library. In my case it exceeds the 16gb (or whatever it's available after iOS + other apps) easily .

So buy the upgrade.

Me, I'm the type of guy to have 10gb of music, photos and apps, and offload a lot of stuff to my PC and stream increasingly more. I'm okay with 16.

Is 16 a bit silly? Sure, but it's an easy way to pad the margins a bit and there's just plenty of people for whom 16 is just fine, to the extent that the upgrade option is a decent solution.

e.g. my entire office is on iPhones and they use it for mail and some other stuff, 80% of their storage is unused, will be unused forever, and it makes sense not to pad that even more and increase the base price.

I wish the price bump was a bit smaller if you want to increase your 16gb, more in line with their cost price, but... I'm not at all opposed to the notion that a 16gb base model exists.

Re: iPhone SE

#560
post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 3D touch is a lot like a right-mouse click in the desktop environment, in that there is rarely anything to indicate where you can do it. You basically have to read about it or just try. That said, I don't personally care for it. I also feel that iOS is getting too complicated.

A right-click equivalent already existed: a long press. 3D Touch is the long press controlled by finger pressure instead of time pressed. It took an already hard-to-discover feature and made it more nuanced (that is, more complicated).

It also doubles the bandwidth of that interaction. You had one slow and one fast interaction, and there now are two of each.

Big question seems to be what the best mapping between those interactions and commands is.

You want to map the most frequently used interactions to the fast interactions, but you also want the mapping to be learnable (consistency across applications likely is needed there), and 'intuitive' in the sense that the mapping starts feeling normal relatively easily.

From what I read, it seems it isn't even clear yet that there a good mapping exists under those constraints.

I do look forward to more experiments here, though. Multi-finger force touch? I can't imagine how that would work on an iPhone that you hold with one hand, but on an iPad, there might be some really useful application.

Cameras in the LCD screen that allow non-contact interactions? Apart from the "screen is a copier" use that Sun predicted in project Starfire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfire_video_prototype), it seems hard to envision uses, but who knows? Signing to your screen could be easier or faster than typing.

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