501–510 of 715 posts
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I'll bite. Explaining to a "geek with low reading comprehension", what is the actual benefit to the iPhone being 64-bit?
Memory bus bandwidth - moving large chunks of data around just got twice as fast. That means loading textures for games, or hauling photos up from flash memory will be substantially faster now.
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So use a passcode - the fingerprint feature is optional. That said, I doubt they are doing anything nefarious with it - if it eventually leaked that fingerprints were being sent to the NSA, the cost to Apple would be incalculable. I would bet, or at least hope, that Apple has designed the hardware involved to be subpoena proof - meaning that the design would make it impossible to remotely collect fingerprints even if…
"subpoena proof" ... hmm Do you believe disabling the reader in a software-setting is enough to be sure it's not working? I don't. With all these NSA concerns going about, having a hardware fingerprint-reader on your smartphone that you can't avoid touching is something to think about.
It's your hardware after all. If you're worried about it, take steps to protect yourself.
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I can't imagine why I'd need to ask my SO's PIN or she'd need to ask mine - I actually would, as you say, probably give it without even thinking about it; but if you have a healthy relationship then noone feels any need to check the other's phone/email/diary/whatever.
I can imagine lots of reasons to use my partner's phone. "Your dad sent a text, want me to read it to you while you're washing dishes? I know your mom's in the hospital." "Mind if I use your phone to call our friends and tell them we're running late? I left mine at home and you're driving." "Is it OK if I use your phone to put on some music? It's already paired with the reciever." And so on. Checking a partner's phon…
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I'll bite. Explaining to a "geek with low reading comprehension", what is the actual benefit to the iPhone being 64-bit?
There are a lot of interesting things you can do with a massive address space even if you don't have the RAM to back it. You can mmap massive files. False pointers are virtually nonexistent for conservative GCs in a 64-bit environment (I believe modern Objective-C is compiler supported refcounting though so this doesn't really apply here). You can virtual alloc a 4GB array and just let it grow in physical memory on d…
In most previous Apple iterations, when they release a cheaper/multi-colored version of a flagship product, they also release a new (more premium) product line. This time they didn't. This is disappointing to Americans (hence the drop in share price) but also shows Tim's direction: China. His expertise in the company under Jobs was in supply chains and Asia, and now he is orienting (pun not intended) the company towa…
In general, adverse stock market reaction to an Apple announcement is slightly negatively correlated with Apple's success following said announcement.
When I see Apple putting forward as a key feature the number of bits in their processor in a general public announcement... I'm really feeling the "new" product is not really new. In the past Apple was always laughing at the PC ads boasting processor speed and memory capacity.
Apple laughs at numbers-based ads when they are behind, and play up the numbers when they are ahead. Remember the Pentium snail ads? There's nothing surprising here. They have a spec advantage right now and they're playing it up. If and when they drop behind again, they'll be back to talking about more qualitative aspects.
Shame on them. They should be like the more well-behaved companies, which emphasize numbers when they're behind and ignore numbers when they're ahead.
Can't believe they didn't make bigger screens. iPhones seem so tiny these days. Also, just 33 votes on HN atm - made me realize that probasbly people are already using HN votes as input for their stock trading aslgorithms :-)
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What? Is iPhone leaking emails and browsing? Can you provide me more information on that? If you're talking about ISP monitoring, that's not specific to the iPhone, and not relevant to this discussion.
Apple was added to the PRISM program in 2010 iirc, and PRISM is a program designed for one purpose: surreptitious data collection.
If iPhones phoned home information on stored on phones, I'd expect there to be a huge shitstorm and ample evidence of suspicious traffic. Do we have any evidence _at all_ that this has happened?
When I see Apple putting forward as a key feature the number of bits in their processor in a general public announcement... I'm really feeling the "new" product is not really new. In the past Apple was always laughing at the PC ads boasting processor speed and memory capacity.
Smartphone hardware is in the 9th inning. These devices have mostly hit the natural limits of what's achievable for now. Bad for Apple since this effectively levels the playing field.
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More importantly, what are they talking about when they say 64-bit? The architecture uses 64-bit addresses? The processor uses 64-bit registers? What are the main advantages to current CPUs?
They mean that they are switching to a 64-bit ARM architecture. Note that the 32->64 bit register and address size increase is by far not the only difference between 32-bit ARM and 64-bit ARM. Aarchv8 (64-bit arm) is effectively a complete clean redesign of the ISA, designed to be modern, fast, and only maintain some backwards compatibility, discarding many signature features of ARM that no longer make sense. Such as…