Why the iPhone 5 never arrived • Hacker News Board

Re: Why the iPhone 5 never arrived

#71

Post by juiceandjuice » Wed, Oct 05, 2011, 6:21 PM UTC

achompas wrote: post #19

Is anyone really shocked? Here, I'll write out the tech media "design pattern" for a new Apple product. 1. Hype up killer pie-in-the-sky feature that makes zero economic sense for Apple (see: retina iPad, 4G iPhone with larger screen). Traffic spikes. 2. As launch approaches, use "inside sources" to mock up designs (Macrumors's "we think the 5 will look like this"). Report on supply chain behavior, leaked case design…

More importantly is why didn't it come out sooner, like in June? My guess is that the soonest it would have came out is actually came out is August 10, six months after the iPhone 4 CDMA, and probably because a contract between Apple and Verizon to not let Sprint in on the action quite yet, especially since the iPhone 4 could run on Sprint the entire time. Furthermore the white iPhone 4 didn't really come out until April. October is a fairly convenient 6 months after that as well.

It's possible we could have got an iPhone 5, but I'm sure apple is waiting for WiMax/LTE to really ramp up in both semiconductor quality and carrier service. Also, they won't release two phones, so they're going to wait for chips that do both WiMax and LTE at the power consumption they want, which will probably be in about a year.

Re: Why the iPhone 5 never arrived

#72

Post by gamble » Wed, Oct 05, 2011, 6:21 PM UTC

The advantage of operating at Apple scale is the ability to buy components in vast quantities, giving Apple better deals and exclusivity that their competitors can't match. The downside is that they have to buy at those scales. Apple can't afford to ship anything that contains components they can't source by the million.

If one HTC handset is delayed by six months thanks to part shortages, that's a problem for them. They have plenty of other products to fall back on, though. If an Apple product is delayed six months, it's a disaster. Apple would lose billions of dollars in revenue and suffer a PR holocaust. So when I see rumors like the Retina iPad 3, I always filter them by asking, "Can Apple get that part in increments of a million units?" Given that, it should be very rare for Apple to ship the first product containing any given component.

Re: Why the iPhone 5 never arrived

#73

Post by hopeless » Wed, Oct 05, 2011, 6:24 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #60

hopeless wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people ever tried using the Voice Control in the iPhone 4? Siri is one of those features (awesome technological achievement notwithstanding) that's great to demo but largely irrelevant (or even unknown) to most users. It's this generation's Carousel view.

- Voice Over often just outright failed. The accuracy for speech interpretation was good, but not great. - The tasks that it could actually do were simplistic (pause! play! call Bob! next track!) and often it was more work to turn on Voice Over and talk, and easier to just touch the device and be done with it. - Voice Over had a very limited verb database that you had to learn. It wasn't so much natural language reco…

My point wasn't that Siri wasn't any good (or even that Voice Control was bad — it worked when I needed it) but that users neither know not care about it. In fact, the only users who knew about it probably discovered it accidentally by holding the home button down!

As you say, time will tell whether it's a hit. I'm betting not.

Re: Why the iPhone 5 never arrived

#74

Post by InclinedPlane » Wed, Oct 05, 2011, 6:31 PM UTC

achompas wrote: post #19

Is anyone really shocked? Here, I'll write out the tech media "design pattern" for a new Apple product. 1. Hype up killer pie-in-the-sky feature that makes zero economic sense for Apple (see: retina iPad, 4G iPhone with larger screen). Traffic spikes. 2. As launch approaches, use "inside sources" to mock up designs (Macrumors's "we think the 5 will look like this"). Report on supply chain behavior, leaked case design…

The best aspect of all of this for apple today is that they have so many products, so you can jump from rumor-hyping one to the next, avoiding burnout. You can go from the retina-ipad to the iphone 5 and then you still have plenty more places to hop around to (such as macbooks, itunes, acquisitions, ebooks, etc.) before you hop back to the ipad or iphone.

Re: Why the iPhone 5 never arrived

#75

Post by InclinedPlane » Wed, Oct 05, 2011, 6:34 PM UTC

hemancuso wrote: post #28

I'm surprised nobody is pointing out similarity to Intel's very successful Tick-Tock release cycle - release a new architecture on tick and refine the process on tock The benefits for Apple are manifold, but the two most obvious are: 1. Keep expectations sane - they can't release a radical new industrial design of superbly high quality every year. 2. Give customers on a 2 year contract predictable value rather than l…

Microsoft does the same thing with Windows.

Tick: Windows 95, Tock: Windows 98

Tick: Windows 2000, Tock: Windows XP

Tick: Windows Vista, Tock: Windows 7

Re: Why the iPhone 5 never arrived

#76

Post by azulum » Wed, Oct 05, 2011, 6:37 PM UTC

ChuckFrank wrote: post #51

It's called phased obsolescence. It is a terrible time to find a replacement for a lost ipod. I've been waiting until today's Apple event before getting anything. I was ready to be pleasantly surprised. Turns out Apple has just enough market share and momentum to waive their hands around for renewed sales. Why break ground when you can still make great profits off the old stuff? Nano is a software update. Touch has a…

i have had many apple products over the years and only bought one of them new.

apple products are in my experience built to work until they break and the cost of fixing them is more than a replacement. this happens much sooner in tech than in other spaces because it changes so quickly. the CPI has stayed relatively flat† because advances in technology have allowed more purchasing power (though for lower cost goods). the iphone is a technological marvel that was priceless ten years ago because it couldn't exist.

† year by year table of CPI since 1913 ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt

Re: Why the iPhone 5 never arrived

#77

Post by mahyarm » Wed, Oct 05, 2011, 6:40 PM UTC

ChuckFrank wrote: post #51

It's called phased obsolescence. It is a terrible time to find a replacement for a lost ipod. I've been waiting until today's Apple event before getting anything. I was ready to be pleasantly surprised. Turns out Apple has just enough market share and momentum to waive their hands around for renewed sales. Why break ground when you can still make great profits off the old stuff? Nano is a software update. Touch has a…

You shouldn't be expecting a fundamental CPU architecture shift to stay backwards compatible 7 years later. Backwards compatibility costs something when you do major shifts such as these. Statistically, the amount of people who have PowerPCs have dwindled to mostly insignificant so the extra cost required to support them is not worth it. It's like asking website designers to stay compatible with IE6 or Netscape Navigator 4, it's not worth the extra work.

It's like your complaining about a countrywide shift from gasoline to ethanol and how your gas-only car engine is finding fewer and fewer gas stations to fill up with pure gasoline as the decades go by.

You'll find things that do not change fundamentally or lend themselves to relatively easy upgrades last for a very long time. Houses, simple tools, cars until they wear out, etc. Things that change and improve frequently like tech does.

Re: Why the iPhone 5 never arrived

#78

Post by glhaynes » Wed, Oct 05, 2011, 6:41 PM UTC

Kylekramer wrote: post #66

ryannielsen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people have tried using Siri? Until it's actually in our hands and put to the test in real world situations, it's hard for anyone to make any claims about how well it works. It could be reliable, useful and effective; it could be sometimes useful given the right environments and inputs; it could be a complete flop. No one outside of Apple knows right now.

This is different though. Plenty of people have used Siri. The new version adds a few Apple app based intents, but we have been able to use what was essentially a beta of Siri for years. And the parent comment is right. In its current state, this is Facetime 2. Good demo, fun to play with, but ultimately inconsequential for the majority of people.

But when Siri was in app form, much (perhaps most) of the benefit that it has now wasn't possible.

Not only could app-Siri not do some of the things that people will most often do with iOS-Siri ("wake me up at 7 o'clock", "remind me to call my girlfriend when I get home", "note that I need to buy lettuce"), but you had to unlock your phone and navigate to the app icon before you could even do those things that you could do with it. If you're already using a touch/visual interface to do things, it's cognitively easier to just stick with touches to finish the job. If the interface is entirely spoken/audible, there are a whole other set of things that start to make sense to use voice for.

Re: Why the iPhone 5 never arrived

#79

Post by Florin_Andrei » Wed, Oct 05, 2011, 6:43 PM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #75

hemancuso wrote: post #28

I'm surprised nobody is pointing out similarity to Intel's very successful Tick-Tock release cycle - release a new architecture on tick and refine the process on tock The benefits for Apple are manifold, but the two most obvious are: 1. Keep expectations sane - they can't release a radical new industrial design of superbly high quality every year. 2. Give customers on a 2 year contract predictable value rather than l…

Microsoft does the same thing with Windows. Tick: Windows 95, Tock: Windows 98 Tick: Windows 2000, Tock: Windows XP Tick: Windows Vista, Tock: Windows 7

Except this "tick" (iPhone 4) was actually pretty good, whereas in your example all the "ticks" were abysmal failures.

Re: Why the iPhone 5 never arrived

#80

Post by Florin_Andrei » Wed, Oct 05, 2011, 6:44 PM UTC

chadgeidel wrote: post #21

prawn wrote: post #12

Saw the common reaction to the iPhone 5 disappointment summarised loosely as: "If this new product looks like the last one, how will people tell that I'm superior to them?"

You can talk to your phone. 8*D I guess Apple pulled Siri out of the appstore yesterday.

Worse yet - the existing Siri app will stop working the day the 4S is in the stores. :(