They make is so easy to login to the phone -- I'm still waiting for the ability to add multiple users. When I hand my phone to my daughter she should see her apps, my son, his. And when I hand my phone to my wife, she should unlock it and see.... her phone. If 256GB local storage and 11ac WiFi isn't enough storage and bandwidth to make this easy, I would be OK if it only kept the last GB of the camera roll.
Of course this sync should happen directly between our devices when they are on the same network. No need to go through the cloud.
By default if her phone rings it should only alert on her primary device. Unless she authenticates to my device at which point everything is there waiting. If her phone was ringing and she picks up my device and authenticates it should answer the call.
Ideally this is all smooth enough that we have matching devices and don't care which one either of us walks out of the house with.
The end game is that when networks are fast enough, the cloud mature enough, and homomorphic encryption performant, we get to the point where the phone basically lives in the cloud and anyone can pick up any iDevice, authenticate, and be looking at effectively their own device.
I strongly doubt that Apple will make it easier to share devices.
Every Apple device, from Macbooks to iPads to iPhones to Airpods is built to be a personal device. Even Macs, theoretically capable of multi-user, are a pain to share (eg try updating a Mac App Store app purchased with a different user account than the one you are logged in as)
Apple doesn’t want to sell one shared device to a family. They want to sell multiple devices to every family member.
Even changing the email address of the Apple account is a world of pain. It confuses all of the ecosystem. But I think it is just poor software design, not necessarily malice.
I've had the pain of trying to do this once before when my parents got a new email address. The Apple account was never consistent thereafter, with different devices showing either the new or old email address.
We solved it once and for all by creating a new Apple ID under the new email address.
Being allowed to have my own email address that I bought that relates to my domain would make iCloud a lot better. But it's not all that difficult to stumble across brittle edges unfortunately, so adding more isn't going to be helpful.
The number of hours I spend per week in front of an iOS device will not decrease by adding this feature. The number of hours my kids spend in front of iOS could conceivably increase though, speeding up the inevitable point where they get their own...
It still could. Many people buy their kids cheap tablets now because buying them an ipad is too expensive, and later in life those kids will be familiar enough with the Android ecosystem that they may never switch to Apple devices.
If those same parents could instead just hand off their ipad to their children and have it only load their apps this could lead to them being more familiar with ios and buying apple devices later in life.
Not a guarantee obviously, but it could theoretically have an impact in future sales and market share.
I'm not sure what you mean by that, since what I'm implying is that there is no real economic incentive for Apple to support multiple users.
And on the other hand, there are also benefits (for Apple) of encouraging one-user-per-phone. For example, it makes it more likely it becomes an extension of your identity. Having multiple users per phone undermines that type of personal attachment.
This isn't something that started with Apple - mobile numbers have always been tied to individuals - but it's very convenient for their "lifestyle" approach to selling their units.
Mobile phones will never be shared by people who don't already share them. This is a convenience functionality, not something that would change how you use the device - from the exact reason you said: mobile phones are extensions of identities. This feature is something you would use when your own phone is out of reach (e.g. on a shelf in the living room) and your wife's phone is with you in the kitchen.
True, it will not exactly boost sales, but it will not decrease them. It will make some people more likely to recommend Apple. Everyone will still have their own phone.
You can overcome the risk of decreasing the likelihood of creating personal attachment by letting the foreign user log in to a de-personalized (no custom wallpaper and so on) space and use a limited subset of functionality, e.g. a browser, contact list, the Apple messenger app and a phone app (that would call from your own number/phone over VoIP); this functionality would be available only when both phones are connected to the same wifi.
I don't see it as being that cut and dry. These new features would have to be focus tested, designed, tested, rolled out, and tested some more. There are maintenance costs for it, as well as additional configuration to present to the user. Done poorly, this sharing option might be simply ignored by the user making the above a waste of time and resources that could be spent elsewhere.
Adults will never actually have one phone for more people (maybe except for old people, but they don't need this feature to share the phone), it's always just a convenient feature when your phone is on the desk and your wife's one is om the sofa you're sitting on.
Then, at least around iPhone, they're idiots. I'm not going to have one cellphone for the whole family. Even in the best case scenario of my wife being a stay-at-home mom, I'm going to work. I'm not leaving my phone with her all day at home. And she's not going without a cellphone all day. So... where's the "one device per family" coming in? Even if we assume kids "share" - that works until they're what? 5? 6? 10? At some point the kid is going to want a phone at the same time you do, and eventually "No because I said so" is going to fall on deaf ears.
My 3 yo borrows my iPhone when we ride home from kindergarden and I don't want that he fells asleep. So he watches an episode of Fireman Sam on Amazon Prime or plays a game. He unlocks the phone with his "magic finger" and after 20 min I get my phone back.
It would be so fantastic if he could just start HIS apps and would access a restricted Prime account. My 6 yo is the same and since he was 2 1/2 I switched by iPhone twice. So I don't see the case that it's not important as they will get their own ones when they are 8 or so - that's 5 generations of iPhones.
I assumed iOS had multiple users, no? Android has native multi-user functionality, primary, secondary, and guest users. It allows to do exactly what you are asking. Samsung has an additional feature where a folder keeps a unique set apps (sandbox) that can be completely different than the rest of the phone. Samsung calls it a secure folder. That allows each set of users to have two set of apps if needed.
>By default if her phone rings it should only alert on her primary device. Unless she authenticates to my device at which point everything is there waiting. If her phone was ringing and she picks up my device and authenticates it should answer the call.
He's talking about each person having their OWN DEVICE, but being able to seamlessly switch between devices among their family group.
Because he is not replying to GP, he is replying to the parent:
> Every Apple device, from Macbooks to iPads to iPhones to Airpods is built to be a personal device. (...) Apple doesn’t want to sell one shared device to a family. They want to sell multiple devices to every family member.
Not sure why people are having problem understanding that.
I think GP was just saying that in the case of phones, it's silly to try to make the devices single-user since people are going to want to have their own phone anyway, even if they could log in to their partner's phone and see "their own".
Steve Jobs talked about this when he returned to Apple. He basically discussed how he would work at his home Mac and then come to the office and login and suddenly with the internet and networking the work Mac would be exactly the same.
I think the ideal should basically be that. You can pick up a phone, any phone (limited to iPhones for Aplle), login to your iCloud account and suddenly it's your phone, indistinguishable from the other phone thst was yours, outside maybe unavailable hardware features.
That's one of the great things about web apps. I can log into Gmail anywhere and it's the same thing. I haven't used it, but I believe this is the promise ChromeOS delivers.
>> how he would work at his home Mac and then come to the office and login and suddenly with the internet and networking the work Mac would be exactly the same
I don't think this is the right end game. Now that almost every adult in the 1st world has a mobile phone in their pocket that is more than capable of being a desktop PC, the solution we should be heading for is universal docking stations (preferably) wireless. So that wherever you are, there's a large screen+keyboard+mouse (or the phone screen can be a trackpad) and your phone just connects to those, be it at work, or home, or in a hotel.
Your main machine is in your pocket; a lot of non-techie people don't even have any other personal computing device (laptop/desktop etc.).
Personally tho, I like having a division between my work machine(s), and my home machine(s).
I would like to have a docking station that could turn my phone into a desktop-like device, with a proper mouse, keyboard and monitor(s). I don't need much, a full-featured web browser, Spotify and a handful of other straight-forward apps are all I really need, but I wouldn't mind a fully-fledged Linux environment.
If I could also get a laptop-like dock, my phone would take care of ~95% of all my computing needs.
Strictly personal, though. I envision simply having a different phone for for work, for privacy reasons. But plugging it into the same docks.
You've more or less described Microsoft's Continuum [1]. Even down to the "handful of apps." Continuum as it exists today runs UWP applications only.
Rumors have been circulating for years about some future Microsoft mobile device. The latest rumors suggest a Windows 10 ARM device with x86 emulation and their new CShell "responsive" UI. If that rumor pans out, it's possible Windows 10 ARM may also include the Windows Linux subsystem, getting you closer to your ideal.
well the manufacturers would tie into their system. If apple implemented this, you would be tied to their ecosystem, no? Don't see a way around that :)
I definitely see a way around it. An open standard, based on USB-C 3.x would be ideal.
The docking station for my Thinkpad doesn't lock me into a specific software ecosystem. I see no reason why a hypothetical phone dock should be any different.
I have a work phone provided to me for free, which I am allowed to use privately, as much as I want, no usage caps whatsoever. I am eligible to upgrade it every 2-3 years to theoretically any brand new Android or iPhone.
And yet, I insist on having a completely separate phone of my own, on my own subscription, completely separate from work.
The work phone is business-only, I have my company email, all of the apps we offer, and the ones we use internally, and that's it.
The personal phone has all the Facebook and messaging and other funtime apps that I use personally, and nothing work-related whatsoever.
The reason for all of this is that I used to have a boss who would call or email at 23:00 and ask me to do something, expecting it to be ready at 09:00 next morning, at the very latest. Because I'm on a "no maximum work hours" contract, he expected me to put in hours basically whenever he wanted (he was later fired, big surprise).
This is why I have two phones, and why my work phone now gets turned off when I leave work, and turned back on when I arrive in the morning. My personal life is not to be mixed with my work.
I fully understand the revulsion towards the day phone/night phone thing. My setup is not a case of handing over, it's a matter of keeping my personal life private.
Parent and grandparent posters: how about a sandboxed part of storage under employer's admin with employer's data? Your phone, they get to manage a small protected portion. VOIP for corporate voice calls?
I also like a division between home and work devices, but I largely accomplish that by simply having a Personal and Work account with Google.
More appealing to me is the idea of being able to have my Work computer with me all the time if needed, without carrying a special bag, etc. I like the vision of Universal Docking Stations, where you go the coffee shop and just sit down and start typing on your own device, with a full sized screen and keyboard, which you carry in your pocket.
This is exactly what the hand off feature in iOS is about, granted it does not work across all apps but they have done some great improvements with iOS 11 and hopefully will keep improving upon it in the future
A lot of people have had that idea over the years (remember John Gage's "the network is the computer"?) You could even argue The Shockwave Rider, a 1975 Science Fiction novel, described it pretty well.
I don't know about the Steve Jobs quote though, do you have a link?
The first time I saw this implemented was in 1996 at Olivetti Research Lab in Cambridge UK. Everyone had an IR badge, and when you walked up to a machine it recognized you and popped up your desktop (no login, and it was exactly how you left it).
Technology-wise it was a bit of a dead end. However the underlying protocol was VNC which they invented for this purpose.
No, it's not, because the CPU is still local, so you're not just using your device as a terminal to a remote server.
We don't have the infrastructure for this yet.
The absolutely open version - even if it was just storing apps centrally and downloading them on demand, and not downloading everything - would still require something like 100 times more bandwidth than we have now to be usably fast.
A workable version, with local storage providing device accounts for a small number of users, would still need more local storage than we have now, and storage isn't cheap enough yet to make this fully affordable.
256/512GB devices could possibly handle family needs, just about, but would struggle at work.
IMO network bandwidth and latency is a bigger problem than storage. Right now, I can stream [1] HD movies from my homeserver to wherever my notebook is right now, because the upstream at home is wide enough (6 megabits per sec). But that application only works because it has quite predictable bandwidth requirements and can cope with latency quite well. Many other applications would be horribly slow if every file access had a second-long roundtrip.
How often do you change phones? I get it more with the model of desktop computers, maybe even laptops. But phones? Why? Is this a vision of a world where phones are treated like umbrellas?
In any case, my desires are for the opposite. If you don't own the storage substrate, you don't own the data on it, and I prefer to own my data. I have an iPhone, but don't use iCloud, except for syncing a couple specific things.
I remember the first release, and remember the NeXT model of "home directories on an optical drive". I was really, really hoping at the time that the iPhone would be that home directory, portable between machines. Now, I join the chorus of folks who think I should just be able to plug a monitor and keyboard into my phone. But that also needs to come with a viable computing environment, which for me means a unix shell and hardware control. Which is why I'm bolting for an open phone, as soon one actually gets off the ground.
It seems obvious to me that Apple is developing the technology that will enable this. Handoff, continuity, iCloud, Apple Watch authentication/unlock... step by step, we're getting to a point where your user identity and your current work all travel with you.
With ChromeOS you can, if you wanted to, sync all of your profile/settings to Google, "power wash" (completely clean) the machine upon shutting down. Then when you reboot syncing everything back to the machine happens upon entering your credentials.
This was looong ago and in the context of desktops which weren't as numerous and obiquitous as phones. Now Apple probably wants you to have 3, 4 of their devices and not 1 per room that can easily be shared.
I mean, just to expand on this.... there's no explicit sync, and no explicit backup. It's always synced. It's always backed up.
Imagine you walk into an Apple Store and pick up the latest iPhone XV. And there you are looking at your phone, your contacts, your apps, everything.
Underneath, it's a virtual shim. In the first instant it's merely grabbing thumbnails of all your apps and notification metadata so it can "look right". As you click in, scroll around, you polyfill data as you need it. Obviously in some cases a more substantial download would be needed, so you may not be able to pop into an AR game with 1GB of assets within the first 10 seconds of picking up the device, but if your primary is on the LAN you could bring the necessary data locally in ~5 seconds from tapping the icon. Underneath it's doing something analogous to "docker run" on that apps image. In some cases this would lock the image from running concurrently on another device, in other cases multi-master could be fully supported with live sync of the backing stream, e.g. for Apple Mail.
> Imagine you walk into an Apple Store and pick up the latest iPhone XV. And there you are looking at your phone, your contacts, your apps, everything.
Imagine anyone points their phone at you in the street, and there they are looking at your phone, your contacts, your apps, everything.
Thanks for saying this. Personally I view a future where the entirety of my data is sloshing around in the cloud, ready to clone to an arbitrary device at the tap of a few keys to be a nightmare scenario.
I keep having to point out that assuming this is built on existing infra, FaceID is just the username. Everything is end-to-end encrypted. You can't get the data onto a new device the first time without the encryption key which Apple doesn't have.
You need your iCloud login/password and also (I think) an existing device which has the key to approve the request.
This is literally no different than how it works exactly today when restoring an iCloud backup onto a new phone, except imagine it can happen as a polyfill so it looks instantaneous instead of the 2-4 hours it seems to take today.
Haha - how embarrassing! What's the term d'art for a virtual/shim file system which dynamically reconstitutes the data onto local storage as you request it, while presenting a false image to user-space that all the data actually is local already?
First time auth on new hardware would certainly ask for at least a PIN but more likely your iCloud password. For the encryption keys to transfer I think you would also have to allow the request from some other device which currently held them.
The Secure Element would need to be upgraded to support "multi-tenancy".
That's all assuming the feature works by building on the existing infrastructure.
Ideally between your face and your iCloud password you could bring your "profile" to new hardware without having to touch an existing device. After the first time, just your face is enough.
Meanwhile the front door lock on my house built a couple of years ago only has 10,000 different keys. They probably sold more locks than that in the last few months.
Read the GP comment. This is talking about walking up to any random phone and having your own environment synced to it seamlessly. For that to work, the phone would have to know it’s you with basically perfect precision. So 1 in a million is not nearly good enough for that use case.
But you can only enter a pin on a phone you have physically with you. With this proposed auto-sync, every new phone is potentially a gateway to anyone else's phone.
Sharing phones seems like an absolutely terrible idea. It goes against the simplicity and good design that Apple pursue. I can think of tons of problems with this: being out of signal; having biometric data in cloud; running face matching across huge databases where false positives are extremely likely; interrupted signal where things are corrupt; designing efficient caching algorithms; sharing onboard storage with multiple users; security properties protecting that data...
Personal devices are personal for a reason. Simple, elegant, effective. Expensive, yes... but a better solution is to buy your kids cheaper phones.
If Android has it, do you want it enough to switch platforms? Or is Apple betting that, in general, people will just buy more devices?
I'd guess most people hand down their old phone to their kids and then carry that for occasions where they might need them (distraction while waiting somewhere, etc). I don't give my phone to my kids otherwise because I don't want them to drop it and break the screen.
I do indeed 'solve' this issue by buying more devices, which is what Apple wants and is a disincentive to them fixing the core issue, so yeah, I'm contributing to the problem.
I used to have the big iPad Pro while my kids had the old busted iPad whatever-it-was. But they were like (to paraphrase), "Fuck you dad, that busted shit loads YouTube hella slow, we want yours!"
So I ended up with a busted old iPad in a drawer, my kids having the big iPad Pro, and I got myself the new smaller 10.5 one. They know they can't use that one, but they accept it because theirs is bigger and not noticeably slower or worse for the things they do.
Also, just to ward off more "bro, do you even parent?" comments from people with no kids: No, I don't let my kids use the iPad whenever they want. No, they don't get to watch TV and eat trash whenever they feel like it. They do chores and read books. Woo hoo.
But, anybody with kids will tell you: trying to implement a you will never, ever, under any circumstances, use my phone policy is completely insane. It will make your kids life worse, and it will make your life as a parent a LOT worse.
Oh shit, this United flight is stuck on the tarmac for an extra 180 minutes, and all our new coloring books are already done!
Buddy, I know you're tired, but this is a funeral service for good old Uncle Jesse who suddenly and tragically died, we really need you to hold it together so we can deal with your little brother who is definitely not...
(Et cetera times 1000 pls use your imagination...)
So in these instances, you really want to be able to hand your phone to your child. And if you do so, every piece of data you've stored in the cloud is at risk. And you just can't have critical business data on your phone. Which limits how useful the phone can be to you.
It's like having your own real, biological Chaos Monkey.
And it can be humorous. I laughed when my wife bought a new MacBook and during the very first 10 minutes of setting it, somehow pressed 'th' and had it auto-expand into 20 paragraphs of Japanese text. She was like, wtf, and handed me the machine... boom! Another 20 paragraphs of Japanese text (seemed to be a cooking blog post).
What I guess happened is:
1. somehow, some kid managed to copy a blog post
2. then they managed to somehow get to the "Text Expansion" settings on one of her iOS devices
3. then, they somehow managed to create a new shortcut for "th" and paste all the blog content into the shortcut expansion text area (didn't even think that was possible?)
4. the cloud did its cloud thing and now my wife can't type "the" on any of her machines
That's just a guess as to how that happened. But shit like that happens pretty regularly. The Chaos Monkeys also managed to delete my favorite photo of my wife — I only noticed because it was my favorite, so who knows how many non-favorites they've deleted. The weirdest shit shows up in my photo stream. I have thousands of notes consisting of variants of 'afhdsf8aiyfoew9ry4t340822u9rtf20悪悪悪'. And I can't find this super-super-important receipt in Evernote... another heinous data-loss Evernote bug, or.... the Monkey???
So yeah. Just because you'd like to hand your phone to your child safely does not necessarily mean you're a shitty parent.
If Apple had multi-user on iPhone, or even just a limited Guest Mode, it would get close to completely solving this problem.
"But, anybody with kids will tell you: trying to implement a you will never, ever, under any circumstances, use my phone policy is completely insane. It will make your kids life worse, and it will make your life as a parent a LOT worse."
My kids (2yo and 5yo) never use my phone and I haven't noticed an issue with my insisting on that. It's likely that they're not old enough to know that the age of their devices is limiting their play so I'll grant that I avoid that issue. And my wife isn't as insistent, so will share her phone with them to keep the peace, but it doesn't seem to be that often.
Might be the ages of the kids? Maybe 5-10yo is tougher?
I have young kids (3 of them ages 2-10) and our family uses iPhones and I don't want this. Guided Access does what I need it to do. Beyond that I don't want them on my device and my wife doesn't want them on hers. For an iPad however, it might be nice.
> Literally every single person in the world with an iPhone and young children wants this feature.
Neither of my sisters, with multiple kids, want this feature. In fact, of all the people I know with iPhones and kids, only one has ever mentioned this.
But if you asked all parents on earth "Hey, would you like to be able to hand your kid your phone and have them be able to use some apps, but not necessarily be able to delete all your data?" I think that the positive response would get pretty close to the literal meaning of "literally all".
I was like "wow how did that person read this in this comment ? did I miss anything ?".
But no, you just went and dig some comments from that user just to try to make a point ? What is this childish and grudgeful behavior, seriously ? I know, you answered since but you're just digging deeper, and still can't answer properly in a productive way why what they want matters more anyways.
Ok, lets turn this around. Can you imagine any situation, no matter how unlikely, where humanity should stop increasing their numbers or do you think we should keep increasing the population no matter what ?
I'm beginning to fear that for the vast majority of humans the urge to procreate is ingrained at such a fundamental level that no amount of rational thought can overcome it. Like the 3 laws of robotics that cannot be overruled, humans seems to have a rule that 'thou shall increase thy numbers'. We could grow until the planet is covered in 100 story skyscrapers where everyone lives like in a Japanese capsule hotel and there would still be people insisting that we grow the population.
I think we are headed in the right direction though. The rate of growth plateaus in very developed nations, so we might just survive the current craziness.
People stop breeding when they're prosperous enough to be comfortable and educated enough to defer gratification.
The correlation is well-known and widely documented. Native - i.e. non-immigrant - populations in the US and Europe are both shrinking now, sometimes dramatically.
> People stop breeding when they're prosperous enough to be comfortable and educated enough to defer gratification.
And when is that going to be something that's true for the entire global population ? It would require us to get rid of some massive issues regarding inequality and that is never going to happen.
Who said anything about biometric data in the cloud? This doesn't need to work the same way the first time you see a device as it will work the second time you see it, after having fully authenticated the first time.
So, it doesn't have to alter the security attack surface or really even a major change in the secure element.
Someone from Apple should just reach out, the design is not simple but it's absolutely workable.
Microsoft had this on Windows Phone -- sort of. It was for the most likely scenario: parents who hand their phone to their kids. They called it Kids' Corner, IIRC... Yes, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=475jxWQ955c
The scenario you describe sounds impractical, unlikely and unworkable, a very edge case "iOS fan family".
Walking out the door with just "any device" that is laying about? Nobody wants that. For one thing, an object like a phone is a personal device, not a sugar bowl passed around and left anywhere.
Your son and daughter will want their own devices, and it makes sense to give them their own devices such as your old phone or cheap phone. For one thing, when you hand your kid your phone you no longer have a phone. Someone might text or call, or the kid will burn through your battery with some game.
This only scratches the surface of what's wrong with your idea.
The wild thing is, apple kind of already did this with handoff, and the iOS/OSX syncing. If my phone is ringing in the kitchen, and i have my laptop with me on the couch i'll get an alert and i can answer the call on my laptop. Or iPad. It doesn't even need to be near the phone, as long as they both have wifi or LTE connected. And while ipads don't do multiple users, on OSX if my roommate or someone else signed in then their calls and messages would come through too. When configged right, even texting to/from real numbers works.
They obviously already have this tech most of the way there and just... haven't implemented it?
I think it still requires faster, more ubiquitous networking. But in general, I think you're correct. This is also probably the long-term solution to how to make iOS a full general-purpose computing device, which to date is somewhat at odds with the "app console" philosophy of iOS's restrictions and the App Store. If I can run anything I want in the cloud with minimal latency, the restrictions on the phone just don't matter as much.
>If her phone was ringing and she picks up my device and authenticates it should answer the call.
Unfortunately Apple don't get to decide how SIM cards, phone numbers and the cellular networks work. So that's not going to happen. Note how the watch has to have a SIM mated to your phone to take calls on your number.
As for FaceID and TouchID, that data isn't supposed to be readable at all, it's never sent to iCloud so how would it get synced between phones?
Then there's storage, all the contents of all your family's devices would need to be syncd between them all the time, multiplying up the amount of storage each device would need. You'd completely lose control of managing storage on your own device. You'd also essentially lose control of wireless bandwidth utilisation.
It's a lovely dream and maybe one day we'll get there. None of these problems are unsolvable in principle, but nobody can wave a magic wand and make them all go away. I think in the same way secure resource and feature sharing between apps required Apple to develop Secure XPC, this would require a lot of fiddly, complex technological and infrastructure groundwork before it could be possible.
The Mac isn't receiving the call, the phone is. The Phone is just handing off the UI to the Mac across Bluetooth and Wifi. If the phones worked this way, if his wife walked out of the house with his phone, and let's be clear at that point there might not even be a way for her to tell she's doing it, it would drop off the local network and incoming and outgoing calls would become impossible.
FaceTime audio, FaceTime video and iMessage don't suffer that problem and I preferentially use those. The cloud storage of biometric data is a problem though.
The smartphone has become the modern day version of the pacifier. Pretty much every parent I know hands their phone to their child and it's unsettling how effective it is at pacifying children.
As for this feature request, I think it makes sense... I wouldn't want my kid tapping on my work email or social apps.
It is a common case for other iOS device(s) though. iPad in a family is usually shared across family members. I do wish apple add this feature in iOS, for iPads at least.
Yep. Two iPads for 3 family members here. It's enough, but you have to remember on which one you left your stuff. If it could seamlessly recognize who picked up the tablet and switch to their stuff, no matter what ipad it was originally on, that would be magic.
I wouldn't even mind having a sync server in the house (a desktop mac, maybe) to help with that.
Yes, I'd really appreciate being able to hand my iPad to my daughter knowing she can only access her apps, and ideally for a set period of time. They seem to have this working reasonably well within macOS users.
Even identical twins might not have facial features (due to body fat percentage differences or sun exposure) which are close enough to fool it.
It's an interesting question how exactly the device switches to the remote profile mode versus an "authentication failed" route. If the profile has never existed on the device you'll need permission from someone who is live on the device (in other words you need to get past the lock screen) to retrieve a new profile.
But if two profiles are live on a device owned by identical twins who can't be distinguished by FaceID -- perhaps detected by trying to authenticate the human to both profiles and seeing if both pass -- you're going to need a PIN (or something else) to distinguish them.
That will never work since the facial tracking isn't allowed to be connected to a network. Remember all the data for facial tracking is stored locally.
I would prefer to only have 3 “users”. Personal, Work and Guest. The Guest account would have access to a list of apps that I have installed but would not share my history and data. For example I do not want my wife’s YouTube history mixed with mine.
I think that setting up multiple accounts would make the experience worse as I don’t want other people to get too comfy. On an iPad that is a different case though.
This would be less beneficial IMHO on a phone. My wife sometimes uses my phone, but she always has her own nearby. when she is using it, its for a quick, specific reason.
But I could really see this on an iPad. iPad's are often shared around a household, this would be amazing for that. Macs themselves would also apply here.
unfortunately our current global network doesn't allow for proper delegation of trust, so your vision is more like a dystopia where a few single corporations and ultimate governments have ultimate power. homomorphic encryption is way too limited to allow these things. traditional encryption is only about encoding channels, its not about solving runtime and delegation problems. it seems more like its going to be the other way around. giant institutions will be replaced with DAC's which perform the desired functions of users/citizens. I'd be happy enough if iPhone would be an open system where I can run my desired OS of choice, with open hardware components and profits going not to already rich investors, who pay close to 0 tax using Irish/Dutch shell companies, but also more to employees and customers.
The amount of development, testing, and customer support this would require likely outweighs any profit increase by a couple of orders of magnitude. It'll never happen.
This is my only gripe with Apple. It's an incredible PITA to share devices even temporarily. You have to log the primary user out of their phone, login with your credentials and we are in business. This whole process is so long and frustrating that it forbids any sharing experience. I do wish Apple or someone made sharing devices a lot easier.
What exactly is "your phone"? Is it that physical mass of circuits and lithium ions in your hand? Or is it the bits making up the user-land data you've accumulated on it over time?
"Do you think that's air you're breathing?" ;-)
What I dislike most is handing someone "my phone" for them to use for a minute and they are actually using my phone. If they authenticated and were immediately interacting with their phone I have no problem sharing the hardware for a minute when the wife/kids want to do something briefly on it.
I don't ever hand anyone my phone and it wouldn't be helpful anyway due to the passcode needed.
I understand the point you're making though. You want a phone that's a terminal to the cloud, with caching. That's a fine use case I suppose. Wouldn't stand in your way.
Many phones are cheap enough today (not to mention hand-me-downs) that there isn't a huge need however.
Well I have kids 5 and 8 that when they are using a screen (which is limited) it's always someone else's hardware, usually mine.
But it's also bigger than that. If everything you do user-land can be synced down fairly instantly to any piece of hardware - phone, tablet, desktop, TV, watch, etc. - it provides a level of mobility and usability which can enable some very powerful use cases.
Approaching a device and have it immediately be "yours" is important for the screens in the self-driving ride you hail, or the shared workspace you might rent by the minute, or even the TV you sit down in front of in your own living room.
But this could even extend to the POS terminal which you checkout with at a store, a screen you walk up to in a mall, a digital assistant you approach in a store, an ATM, etc.
FaceID is transparent walk-up/pick-up authentication, which is table stakes for some very cool possibilities.
If your kids are using your phone, and it becomes "their phone", what happens if someone tries to call, text or notify "your phone"? Do you expect some sort of hybrid profile with cross-notifications and contacts? That's messy.
Your kids want their own device. They will get it sooner or later. Mobile devices by nature are personal objects, complete with personal greasy screens and battery levels we have nobody else to blame for.
Approaching a device and having it become "yours" might be a fine idea for certain applications, but I'd argue the living room TV is better off having a default profile which everyone in the house uses. If one person's profile is lagging or missing content or apps or settings, they fall behind and we now have a frustrating scenario of some profiles better than others for watching TV. Obviously sub-usage areas such as Netflix makes sense to have different profiles, but not the whole TV.
Ironically, a lot of tech companies had this vision for the enterprise in the late 90s. Insert your id card and instantly see all your stuff. Interestingly, for the most part the market rejected the idea. I suspect this is an idea that sounds good on paper, but ends up being undesirable to the majority of folks.
I don't want to share my device, ever. I like to know where it is at all times, even for benign uses like "i need a flashlight, where's my phone" or "what time is it." This feature would not improve my user experience.
I'm not sure what you mean? It's not going to work as a 3rd party service. So Apple can do it for its customers and I guess Google for its own, and Microsoft, and so on....
But how is Google going to ensure "full portability" across the lineup of all Android devices in the same way that Apple could do so for iOS?
> why do companies insist on getting this shit backwards?
They don't have it backwards, but they're also simplifying when they say it's your password. In the presentation they actually say specifically that there's a chance that someone else can unlock your phone (1 in 50'000 for fingerprint, and supposedly 1 in 1'000'000 for Face ID, given that you don't have a twin).
Reality is that it's somewhere in between. A fingerprint sensor or face reader will keep casual snoopers - and most people who find your phone on the street - out. That's all that matters for most people. It's not a username. It's at least moderately hard for someone to duplicate, and it's not something you'd actively share with someone. It's not as safe as a password, but Apple isn't trying to claim that either.
I think it's a good idea to avoid false dichotomy here. Biometrics is biometrics. It should be treated as distinct from passwords or usernames.
Watching someone key in a PIN and recording it, then swiping the phone is easier than building a 3D printed color model of someone's face. Not to mention that having the biometric unlock sitting on top of a PIN means that there are many fewer chances for the PIN to be observed.
Whether biometric access is a password or username is trying to force the wrong paradigm. Going back to first concepts, we had keys and we tried to make them hard to copy but not too inconvenient. The face is the key. No, there's no practical way to re-key this lock, but it's still a lock and key. But the door also has a deadbolt (PIN code) which has to be disengaged for the "face key" to function.
The username concept applies when you have multiple people using the same resource (and don't want to know or reveal whether any 2 people use the same password) -- which again doesn't apply to a single-user device.
Finally, all this combined with the quick "hard lock" of the device (5 taps of power button) gives me the impression of a very thorough approach to security.
> Watching someone key in a PIN and recording it, then swiping the phone is easier than building a 3D printed color model of someone's face. Not to mention that having the biometric unlock sitting on top of a PIN means that there are many fewer chances for the PIN to be observed.
With how cheap video surveillance is these days, any PIN that you've regularly entered on your phone in public is probably recorded on video somewhere.
So is your face, of course, but like you said that's much harder to reproduce.
> Watching someone key in a PIN and recording it, then swiping the phone is easier than building a 3D printed color model of someone's face
Right, but couldn't somebody just use my actual face? Steal my phone, hold it up to my face for a second to unlock it and then run off?
A really interesting thing to think about is what happens if somebody is in custody and is refusing to unlock their phone, but uses face authentication? Can the police just hold their phone up to their face and unlock the device that way or is there any protection from that in the law?
I thought something was mentioned about "active gaze" in the keynote? The phone detects if you're paying attention; it doesn't unlock if you have your eyes closed, it doesn't unlock if you aren't looking directly at it.
Should make it more difficult (though not impossible) to force an unlock by waving the phone in an unwilling person's face?
You only need to look at the phone for a brief moment. It's designed to quickly unlock. If you had to stare at the phone for 10 seconds it would be a frustrating experience.
Except that a regular pin pad lets anyone enter the pin. Your pin code can only be keyed in by 1:1000000 people [citation needed]. So no, your pin is not on your forehead. Your pin is an organic material with color and depth and movement that for all intents and purposes is your actual forehead.
The average opportunist thief won't be able to duplicate that key. The best that they can do is use your actual face, within a few feet from you, while you're staring directly at the phone in their hands.
Funny you should say that, here's a video of a guy accidentally unlocking a phone and using his apple pay by pointing it at him https://youtu.be/WYYvHb03Eog?t=1m27s
> building a 3D printed color model of someone's face.
A 3d rendering on a screen is probably enough. The device seems to infer 3D from motion, but would probably be fooled by a rendering or even a recording.
That makes all the interlocutors you had on video chat as potential ID thieves.
False. iPhone X has points(invisible) projected on your face from what depth is calculated. Same as xbox kinect i assume. So 3D rendering on flat display wont fool iphone.
It's been done one some laptops via Intel RealSense depth cams or similar hardware. Not sure if any other phones have featured this, though. The ones I've seen typically add the depth cam on the back for niche stuff like 3D scanning.
It wasn't that it failed to recognize, it was that it had restarted, and all iPhones require the passcode to unlock the very first time after restarting. (You can tell by the small text over the PIN pad in the video.)
My guess is that he didn't want to dwell on the issue, or didn't know the passcode.
Facial recognition is something humans are known to be better at than computers, and identical twins throw off humans all the time.
Even when computers surpass humans at this task (probably not that far off) they will likely have difficulty with identical twins because of how they do facial recognition. At the moment computers do it by identifying points that correspond to the geometry of the face, like nose, eyes, and cheeks. These are all features that would be similar between twins. Usually humans can differentiate twins by fatness, scar tissue, hair style, etc. Not something that can't be overcome, but also not something common with current approaches.
The FAR rate is quite misleading especially for facial recognition. FAR counts on the data being "random" for that 1:50,000 or 1:1 million to be true. But you can bet whoever is targeting you will build a 3D profile of your face out of all the pictures it can find on you online. I at least assume it won't be "easy" from the get go to bypass Apple's face unlock tech, like it was for the Galaxy S8 with a god damn 2D picture that we've been known for a decade that's an effective attack, but I also don't think it's impossible. Machine learning techniques will become advanced enough in a few years to build someone's 3D profile like that.
Plus, as the parent said on the issue of not being able to replace your face as you can your password, they can still target your face data stored on the phone.
Okay, but shouldn't developers make security easy? This makes introducing a sizable hole into existing security easy, which is the opposite of what you'd want.
Something that I think people underestimate is just how easy it is to observe you entering your password on a phone, and why that (in my opinion) makes thumbprints much more secure than passwords for casual usage - e.g. every-time you unlock your phone.
All you need is a camera over your shoulder and you don't even need to observe the key-presses as generally the current character is displayed on screen. You could likely observe 100s or 1000s of them a day with an overhead camera at transit stations and the like.
The same thing goes for "Tap And Go" contact less payments not requiring a PIN number under $100.
Everyone goes on about how people can run up a few hundred dollars at different stores with your card if they steal it. But consider exposing your pin to surveillance during most common transactions which then also lets you remove cash from an ATM with that card if stolen which is much harder to recover and is also much higher value than the generally $30-$100 limit for transactions without a PIN.
Next minute you'll freak out when I tell you I can clone your house key from a photo of it hanging off your belt...
The general point is that security trade-offs are generally deeper than you might realise on the surface, especially at "public outrage" levels of observation which so frequently haunt the public mind in recent times.
The other thing is that I kept my phone unlocked in the time after physical keyboards were dead but before fingerprints. There are way to many situations where I want to unlock my phone with one-hand.
A fingerprint lock is way more secure than no lock.
People will freak out... but I don't lock my phone. Never have.
It's either in my pocket or in my hand, and I never ever put it down in public. If get mugged (god forbid.. and do people still mug other people for phones these days?) there's nothing mega personal on it, and I can remote erase it pretty quickly.
I live in Dresden (Germany), and I've never even heard of anyone who has been mugged here. Sure, there will be cases in the statistics, but I can not name anyone who has been mugged, ever.
This is a great point, and why I'd like to see more features being locked without a passcode. The move in iOS 11 to restrict device imaging without a passcode is a great step in this direction.
Perhaps we can see more customization as to what biometrics unlock and what they don't?
As long as biometrics don't unlock secrets (keys, passphrases, shared data etc) it is fine. In all other cases you are correct and it needs some form of replaceable, retractable secret i.e. a passphrase.
This would be a very welcome feature but considering how the secret stores work at this point it is not likely to see this any time soon.
Sidenote: The false positive rate on any biometrics is way higher than you think (it is highly disadvantageous to be black unfortunately, yes biometrics are racist). People usually consider the near bound (e.g. small sample size, high differentiation unless you have twin) of the people around them as proof it is impossible but this has been problem a fallacy in even mediocre sized studies.
It still works but I would really like to see your suggestion to make sure real secrets are properly stored/safe.
> As long as biometrics don't unlock secrets (keys, passphrases, shared data etc) it is fine.
That's a weird definition of "secrets". Mails may contain secrets. Pictures may contain secrets. Messenger posts may contain secrets (cf. all the leaks of chatlogs).
If I remove all apps from the homescreen that may contain secrets, that leaves me with the flashlight and Candy Crush.
On ATMs they use a keyboard with random multiple digits per key, e.g. "2 or 7", "8 or 0", etc. That's a defense to the "observing-attack", but it's slow and boring. Also, someone could unlock with other password.
Biometric data is authentication. One looks at their mother and says "hi mom" not "what's the passcode?". Your issue, I think, is that you don't trust the tools on the phone to read faces or fingerprints well enough to detect fraudulent login attempts.
Factors of authentication:
* What you know - things like passwords online that other people shouldn't know
* What you have - Two-factor tokens, certs (kind of "know" but used to supplement "have") that other people shouldn't have
* What you are - Biometrics like finger, face, or eye that are unique and difficult to duplicate or trick (ideally)
So the question becomes which and how many factors to require, and when, depending on the risk model.
Unless you believe Apple is lying, that information is never sent to them. The hardware is designed such that, with TouchID at least, it's never even seen by the CPU on the phone.
If you do believe Apple is lying and is secretly phoning home with your personal information, then I think you'd have bigger problems than fingerprints; I would be more concerned about surveillance on everything you do with the phone.
What kind of analogy is that? I don't know what you were trying to say but you're way off on saying it. I think OP's point stands, biometrics: are not be relied upon for these matters.
What OP means is that at least theoretically faces contain enough information to uniquely and correctly identify someone, which is the reason why we identify someone by looking at their face. If iPhoneX was as good as a person in recognising faces then this discussion would be meaningless.
It's not a password, but it's not a username either. It's something in between: It's vastly easier for me to type your username in the login box than it is for me to create a sophisticated prosthetic or high resolution 3D scan (with correct infrared coloration) of your face.
I wish people would stop repeating the canard that biometrics are usernames, not passwords. Biometrics are biometrics. They are different from both usernames and passwords. They have their own advantages and limitations. Learn them, understand them, and use them or not based on what they are, not some other thing they sort of seem like.
The weird thing to me is that apparently we have so many people on HN that consider themselves worth the effort to make full 3D renderings of their faces just to unlock a phone. Unless you were Osama Bin Laden, it seems highly unlikely anyone would go to the trouble. If you are that kind of person, you’re probably going to be protecting your information with much more than Face ID.
There would be more than enough detailed photos and videos of politicians, celebrities and business leaders floating around for a skilled sculptor to recreate their faces, there'd be some high value targets there.
Your both right and both wrong. Biometric authentication is an identity scheme. The combination of username and password is also an identity scheme. A certificate chain is another identity scheme.
Identities both identify who you are and are, ideally, difficult to fake. Username password artificially handled those two concerns separately, but that doesn't mean that all identity schemes must do so. For them to say it's your password is wrong, but for you to say it's your username is also wrong. It can be thought of as both or neither but it isn't either one on its own.
Their job is to sell. They want everyone watching to understand exactly what they mean.
For what it's worth, I would say that Face ID isn't quite a username either. Once known, anyone can reproduce a username. I can't easily recreate your face even if I know you well. That would require an extra set of skills/equipment. The same argument goes for Touch ID.
In a perfect world, we wouldn't actually need passwords. If a machine can reliably tell that you are really you, then what's the point of passwords?
That actually works very well between humans; we let friends in our house without asking for passwords. Machines still have a bit of catching up to do, but Face ID is a step in the right direction.
No they don't. They behave like a username/password combination. A username is an individual identifier and a password is a confirmation that the identifier is valid for the person it's identifying. TouchID and FaceID confirm both - that it's the correct user that has access and that the user is who they say they are.
Definitely this. When I was using an iPhone, it was for all intents and purposes locked behind my thumbprint (even though you could theoretically make a model thumb with my fingerprint and unlock it, it protects from everything other than highly skilled criminals/governments who very specifically target me). Now that I have a Galaxy S5, there's no way I'm writing in a passcode every time I unlock it (and that horrible "fingerprint scanner" is not a replacement for Touch ID), so it's just unlocked.
I consider biometric data a keepalive, nothing more. Any biometric system that doesn't require a non biometric pass at some point after boot before the biometric becomes a means of device authentication is broken, to me.
If only we had high resolution 3d printers or people who can carve lifelike portrait replicas out of stone! Oh, wait, we do. A bit more complicated, but if you think this is not way to simple to fool, you're out of luck.
If they can build a captcha that keeps out robots based on mouse movements, I'm pretty sure they can build a facial recognition system that can keep out prosthetics based on facial gestures.
I agree and I think most of the comments here cover why this should mostly be OK.
Another neat feature in iOS 11 is the ability to disable Touch ID quickly, but touching the lock button five times. I assume this works for Face ID as well – this would help those who have immediate concerns that they would be coerced into using biometric data to unlock their device.
Isn't it though? It's the "password" to the secure enclave which then provides a "password" to the OS.
Edit: I agree with your statement that "a password is something i can change if it gets compromised. a password is secure from others." Which is why I like that there is a method for disabling TouchID/FaceID with iOS 11.
Apple is speaking to a broad consumer audience, not just technical people. "Password" is a reasonable concept that will be easily understood by a lot of people. "Biometrics" is not.
Who you are (authentication) and what you can do (authorization). But for iPhone they are effectively one and the same since there's only one account on the phone. You can only authenticate as the phone's primary user, after which point you have full authority.
When, Oh When!, will my kids get their own home screen and separate sandbox, limits, etc. when I hand them my phone?!
Wow you sound like a real joy to work with. I don't think you've learned to step out of the shoes of an engineer and put yourself in the shoes of an average consumer or the company selling a new phone. The average consumer does not give a shit about the technical definition of a password.
I unlock my phone in my pocket with Touch ID all the time - ready to go and on the home screen by the time I've flipped it around in my hand. Feels like a straight downgrade in usability.
also, some engineer at apple had to continuously grow a beard to test this
Actually, the message ("Your passcode is required to enable Face ID") was identical to the message when too many failed Touch ID attempts are made, not when a phone is rebooted ("Touch ID requires your passcode when iPhone restarts").
You always have the password as backup to unlock. If your appearance were to suddenly change remarkably, such as via plastic surgery or a horrific accident, you would set your new face after unlocking with the password.
Based on their phrasing, I'm assuming the "adaptive" aspect means that slow changes, such as gaining or losing weight, will progressively train the existing face - without it ever failing to recognize you because you passed some weight threshold. Same would go for growing a mustache or beard. As to whether you can shave off a 5-year beard and have it still recognize you without manual intervention, that would depend on how much the algorithm cares about your chin and lip regions vs. the rest of your face. Based on the demo, the hair on top of your head is 100% ignored.
Apple claims that the odds of a random person's finger unlocking your iPhone with Touch ID is 1 in 50,000, and the odds of a random person's face unlocking Face ID is 1 in 1,000,000.
That's interesting. I would think that identical twins would be very hard to distinguish... and those certainly have an almost 1:350 odds. Of course you're likely to know them, but still I'm not sure banks would be happy with that for FIDO.
I think the number is if you choose another human at random, how likely is it that they'll be able to unlock your phone. Having a twin doesn't change that number much, since they're only one person out of 7+ billion. Of course, your threat model may be different from "pick a random human from anywhere on the planet."
If you want to teach Face ID to reject masks, you need to make some masks. Similarly, if it needs to be taught to reject a twin, you need dozens of twins. And if it starts labelling people incorrectly as their twins, is it worth it?
Perhaps they can sidestep this by offering a specific twin learning feature.
Twins are just examples of two people with very similar faces. If Apple are able to train Face ID to distinguish between 6 billion different faces they will also be able to distinguish faces of twins.
The twin's mother is inside the phone telling it what to do? Or the person you replied to is talking about technology finding it difficult to distinguish, and not a close family member?
My point is that twins are only difficult to distinguish for people who do not know them. For family and friends it's easy, which means that there are substantial differences even for faces of twins.
The face detection technology will be able to recognize those differences as good or better than the twins' family and friends. If it does not now, it will eventually.
I wonder what the odds are of someone unlocking your phone with a picture of your face? I've heard lots of biometrics companies say that their system is immune to such simple hacks in the past, only to immediately fall to such simple hacks in testing.
Would you say that Google never implemented maps correctly?
If not then what the GP said doesn't apply.
Of course we could talk about the fact that Google was demanding all sorts of user data from Apple and wanted the ability to display ads on top of the maps… But people never talk about that. And Apple replace the head of the division that messed it up.
I've never really had an issue with it. The data is much better than a few years ago. I don't use Google maps (I'm happy with Apple and its integration).
I've heard (anecdotally on podcasts) they're roughly even.
The one thing I've heard in the past is it really depends on where you live. Google had better data in rural areas or other countries (they've been at it for what, almost 15 years?) so Apple Maps may not be an option for some.
In the US? I'm not sure there is a big difference for streets.
(Pretty sure Apple has slightly fewer points of interest like businesses, but it's rare I run into that).
The corollary to "tak[ing] good ideas that were never implemented properly and do it properly", clearly, is taking good ideas that were implemented properly and completely fucking them up.
>Let’s be clear about how Windows Hello works on the Lumia 950. It doesn’t use facial recognition, but instead relies on the front camera and a nearfield IR diode so that the camera can clearly see your iris. When you enable Windows Hello for the first time, your iris is scanned and a cryptographic hash is generated and stored securely on the phone. When you attempt to unlock the device using Windows Hello, a new hash is generated and compared with the original, and if the two match, access is granted.
>Facial recognition on the other hand, as used in some new notebooks designed for Windows 10 and Intel’s RealSense F200 camera, uses three different methods to recognize your face: infrared, a standard camera, and a 3D camera. This technology requires more space inside the device and as such isn’t suitable for use in phones, but unlike iris scanning works at a distance.
You didn't get downvoted for mentioning a feature already implemented elsewhere, you were downvoted by trying to claim a device did something it clearly didn't.
That article doesn't say anything about an infrared dot map of the face - just that "the infrared camera is first used to light up your eyes".
Additionally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_recognition says "Iris recognition uses video camera technology with subtle near infrared illumination to acquire images of the detail-rich, intricate structures of the iris which are visible externally" which doesn't involve any kind of infrared dot map.
Samsung also has facial recognition on the S8. You can bypass it by printing out a photo of the owner's face. But I would expect Apple's implementation to be more secure and more reliable than previous poor implementations, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
>The Galaxy S8 provides various levels of biometric authentication, with the highest level of authentication from the iris scanner and fingerprint reader. In addition, the Galaxy S8 provides users with multiple options to unlock their phones through both biometric security options, and convenient options such as swipe and facial recognition. It is important to reiterate that facial recognition, while convenient, can only be used for opening your Galaxy S8 and currently cannot be used to authenticate access to Samsung Pay or Secure Folder.
Not exactly a vote of confidence from the manufacturer, is it?
This is not the first time Android has had face recognition to unlock phones. I remember the first time they tried, it was trivially easy to snap a picture of your colleague and open his phone.
That's a beta version and I can't guarantee it was true of the release version, but since all they were working with was the normal front facing camera I doubt they were able to make this secure.
I alo had a lumia 950. It does not have face recognition, it has an iris scanner. An infrared light lights up your eyes and then the camera makes an IR picture where it analyzes your iris pattern. The reason it didn't work well is that your eyes had to be open (no squinting, like in bright light), close enough to capture a precise image and in exactly the right spot for the zoomed in camera. I eventually learned a gesture that unlocked it semi-reliably, but it was basically holding the phone right up to my face in the exact right spot.
Now that I see how apple is doing face id I think it will work more reliably ... eventually. I doubt they'll get it right on the first try because this is the kind of feature that has to bake in the real world (like apple maps). Still, they may surprise us like they did with the equally hard touch id feature.
I think speed of the facial recognition will make or break this. If it takes less than 500ms of me staring at it to unlock it could feel fluid enough. Any longer and it'll be annoying every time.
200ms is five frames/changes per second, and is definitely very noticeable. You may be thinking of a figure closer to about 12ms or so, which is the approximate threshold of perception for audio lag.
You can notice sub-200ms lag, but for when you aren't specifically watching for lag or firing a series of rapid events one-after-another, sub-200ms seems to be roughly the point where it "feels instantaneous."
FaceID with lag compensation! As soon as it sees a face it starts to unlock based on a fast prediction, then if the authoritative secure side of the chip says "No, authentication actually failed" it rolls back the clock and relocks itself!
That's absolutely not true. I can tell the difference between 60 hz (16ms) and my 144 hz monitor. I can tell when my 144 hz monitor is accidentally running at a lower refresh rate, including 120, 100, 75, and 60.
200 ms is like a full react/response time for a human to take action in response to input, our actual sense of time is much finer than what our nervous system can make our muscles do.
Good monitor reviews include a test of the delay. 3 frames delay (<100 ms at 60hz) is absolutely atrocious and easily detected by players in games.
But of course, that's not the problem. It's ok that the phone doesn't unlock with out me noticing the delay. It just can't be so long that I start doubting whether it works.
Yes. You'd feel quite drunk even controlling the mouse pointer with 100ms lag. This was/is actually a problem with some LCDs (VA in particular) that cached a frame or two in order to "anticipate" future changes so that they could adjust the voltage and make the image transition faster.
This overdrive is probably also the cause of burn-in-effects that seems to be especially common in VA panels.
Is that because of the faster refresh rate, or because none of those divide evenly into 144 and thus you're getting weird frame stretching?
Curious as I just got back into gaming after several years and everyone seems to love 144fps now, wondering if I should upgrade. I have a 1080Ti, so I could presumably render that
Ah, I was just wondering if running a 144hz monitor at 60hz was like watching a 24fps movie at 30fps... if that makes sense? But the monitor can just switch its actual refresh rate.
First off, as the person above said, you can start the unlocking process long before it's even facing with with touch-id, as you're taking it out of your pocket. With this, this "timer" starts only when it's fully out and facing you.
Next up, in this, it has to be facing you perfectly. You can't unlock it sneakily under the table, you can't do it while someone else is looking at your phone, etc.
Lastly, you still need to manually swipe to actually open the phone, so it's not like you're not using your finger either. If at least you could unlock it without using your hands that would be something.
At the end of the day, I still want to see properly reviews of what the actual successrate is too. It's not all about speed, if it fails 5% of the time, that's extremely annoying.
That matches what they did to touch ID in iOS 10: unlocking no longer actually took you to the home screen, just left you on the lock screen with your phone unlocked for... some... reason. There is a setting to change it, maybe there will be one for this as well.
One of the reasons was that on newer phones (the 6S and the 7) Touch ID was so fast that it was hard to even see the lock screen. If you use the home button to wake up the phone then you would be authenticated and the screen would go away before you had a chance to see anything.
Their solution was to split it into two different steps.
You have the same issue with Face ID. If the "lock screen" went away as soon as you look at your phone you could never actually look at the notifications there.
Clearly they had to do something. Does this work well? I guess we'll find out when the reviews come out.
No, the issue is different. With FaceID, if there was no swipe, your phone would unlock all the time for no reason at all. For example while driving, or while having it flat on your desk and hovering near it, and so on.
I am very skeptical about FaceID. I actually love TouchID, can hardly imagine anything better, but Apple has surprised us before.
Oh yeah, I forgot that I had to change that setting. I definitely hope it's the same with Face ID - I don't use home screen notifications for anything.
Something that "pop" yes. A border flash, a hint at the bottom that means "you can swipe now". The [un]lock icon can stay but it's to high focus to be a good UI.
To be honest, with the full glass, I expected something like.. a full screen fingerprint scanner (have no idea if it's feasible at all). I thing TouchID is the best biometric input for casual operation.
Sorry, I read your first response as the screen being dimmer, not the wallpaper. I was complaining that you wouldn't be able to read notifications if the screen was dimmed but that wasn't what you said. My bad!
It's having to look away from the primary activity of getting through the barrier that is the problem. Not sure how this will go down at 8am at Waterloo.
No different from now. Plenty of people have eyes down watching videos or reading while walking towards the barriers on both sides. Annoys the bejeezus out of me every single day.
Apologies but what do you need to do to preauth? Is this just the quick-double-pressing to open the Applet Pay wallet in advance? Do you still have to put your finger on it when making the actual payment?
Double press to bring up the wallet, then leave your finger on until the fingerprint changes to a phone with the message "Hold Near Reader to Pay". Then you don't need to leave your finger on when making the payment. Handy when you have to reach over a counter to "Tap" or need the payment to go through quickly (going through a payment barrier such as on the London underground). I assume FaceID will work the same.
I mean, I know you're joking, but it's not really the case. Before Touch ID, you had to either leave your phone always unlocked, or have a pass code/word. Those options are still available, there's just two additional ways now with Touch/Face ID, so they haven't gotten less usable for non-humans, just more usable for humans.
You should look at the specs and how FaceID works. It's so much more than just a camera.
The iPhone X is currently the only device to support face detection. All other iPads, iPhones, and MacBook Pro range use TouchID. It was years before it was ever added to the Mac, it'll likely be years before FaceID arrives as well.
My guess is Apple isn't worried about being consistent. They will provide the best solution according to the tech available at the time and the other constraints of the product.
After spending a week in London this spring, my (already high) appreciation of my Apple Watch went way up. Paying for my tube rides using my watch - even through sleeves and jackets - was really like magic. Don't think I could live there without one...
It's funny how the acceptable level of comfort changes. Having an oyster card in your pocket wasn't a huge issue before. It's slightly less convenient, but not really life changing.
I wonder if it works with scarves and hats covering everything but your eyes. It seems like an obvious oversight, but it's a Californian company that launched a maps app without any transit support...
How about a big helmet? I imagine snowboarders/alpine skiers/motorcyclist will have to take off the helmet to unlock. As someone who goes snowboarding in the winter, it sounds really annoying to not only have to remove a glove, but also the helmet, to unlock the phone (or unlock with a passcode, which is still a downgrade from using the fingerprint).
My 6 worked so infrequently that i stopped bothering. At least with my 7 it works about half the time on the first attempt or two. I've put my prints in many times, I've even recorded my thumb from all sorts of angles as multiple fingers. Still no joy.
Blisters are another deal breaker. As a new golfer I've been feeling this. I imagine people who work with their hands all day (e.g. construction) may have a similar issue.
But then you have to adjust your grip, at least for me when I unlock my iphone I am using a different grip then when I try to click an icon on a homescreen, so if I would use face ID - it will save me some time for adjusting grip, at least that's what I imagine, of course nobody have tries face ID yet.
So what I'm talking about is: I place my thumb on the home button and three fingers on the back of the phone, while grabbing it in my pocket. The fingers are initially pointed down, in the same direction of the phone. As I drag it out of my pocket, I click the home button and flip the phone around, so now my fingers are horizontal across the phone (standard phone-holding position basically). It's almost always unlocked by the time I can see anything on the screen.
This requires you to always orient the screen "inwards" (towards your leg).
I don't understand why having the fingerprint sensor in the back of the phone (Nexus, Pixel and some other android devices) never took off that much. Ever since I got it on my Nexus 5x I absolutely loved it (Pixel now, same thing). It's incredibly intuitive, works both right and left handed, doesn't take up screen space, and they've just added a "scrolling" feature to open your notifications by swiping it. Seems like a no-brainer, I can't see any fault in it, and yet very few phones have it.
Im on a Nexus 5x, but I do the same thing, and had the same thought when I saw this in the keynote. I have my phone unlocked before I'm looking at it probably ~80% of the time.
Indeed especially when driving that millions of us shouldn't be doing but do anyway. Touch ID made it so easy to unlock ... can't imagine Face ID being a better in this scenario.
TouchID is great, but if I've been sweating or have some moisture on my hands for another reason (say I'm cooking and want to check the recipe) it fails horribly.
But the reason you unlock it is to look at the information on your phone, so it's not like you are using touch id without looking at your phone after that, no?
I keep "loaning" my finger to family members all the time, when I'm driving, watching TV, and they want to borrow my phone.
Not really sure Apple thought through this from every angle...
Oh boy, that's going to be awful fun for parents. Let the kid play with a game; they call your name while pointing the forward camera at you and you've just Face ID'ed some in-app purchase.
That's an interesting corner case. My phone has a setting that lets me turn off touch ID for App Store purchases (so I would have to use my passcode) so I guess you'd just have to use that if your kid kept tricking you and you couldn't stop them.
It looks like they made a point in one of their promo ads that it also works at an angle and with weird lighting/obstructions (the video of the swimmer looking down at her phone that was flat against the edge of the pool).
This happens often to me when I used my phone as a sat nav, the phone was attached to the dash but would sometimes go to sleep if the battery went to 20%. I'd open it up again by just tapping the home.
I'm concerned that Face ID will suck more than Touch ID, too.
I do the pocket-unlock you describe often. At the same time, Touch ID has its own limitations. For instance, it doesn't work if you try to unlock after recently holding a cold beer (or have even slightly damp hands for any other reason).
You know, it really depends how fast it is. You need attentiveness to use your phone, so requiring attentiveness to unlock it doesn't seem unreasonable, provided it happens in less time than it takes to move your thumb to the glass.
No, this is not true. I can log in and activate functions of my phone right now without looking at it.
If I have to look at my phone, there is a problem. If the phone merely needs to see my face, maybe it's less of one. The iPhone is already slow enough I find myself waiting on it, I don't want it to be any slower.
These keynotes were magical before leakers leaked everything. I'm wondering if Apple should scrap these and aim for smaller, unplanned releases instead.
As far as this phone goes, I am really excited to see how it stacks up to the Galaxy S8. Face ID is incredibly enticing, but Samsung Pay is much more universal. The only thing that is making me want to retreat back to an iPhone is its inferior Bluetooth audio quality.
I actually thought Tim Cook did a great job this time around. For the first time in a while, I got that "reality distortion field" feeling that I haven't had since Steve Jobs had been the presenter. I think these keynotes go a long way to sell the product. Admittedly, I haven't seen any of the leaks, so yeah I'm sure it's not as cool if you know what's coming, however I do remember from past leaks that they tend to leave out the narrative (just opting for raw features, photos, etc.) that don't really do justice to the product.
One way he's made these keynotes his own is by the humanity he's injecting into them. I've noticed that whenever there's a big keynote after some big crisis or tragedy, he'll acknowledge them in a very sincere way. I'm still moved by his brief remarks and moment of silence after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.
While I think Tim was much more expressive this time around, I still think he sounds too stiff and rehearsed. The one thing that Steve did incredibly well was make his keynotes sound improvised, even though they weren't. I'm not sure if Tim will ever get there, as it's kind of a character trait. Phil and Cue are better at it, IMO.
Within seconds, I really got the impression that he's been working on his presentation skills. I agree; much improved. The dramatic tension was noticeably better.
Honestly, my wife and I had no previous exposure to leaks besides "there will be something expensive".
And then it felt like the real Apple magic. We sat there and at every product presented we said "Wow, we want this. NOW!". While the iPhone 8 still felt quite normal, the iPhone X absolutely killed it for us. And let's not begin with the eSim-Watch... which is so SciFi that I wanted it back in 1990 when I was still 8 years old. We have to appreciate that there is more to life than revolution, Apple "simple" does evolution at a very high level and in the end, they lead the competitors. Today, we could see the stuff that Samsung and others will get right in a year or two. When Apple already presents their next evolution... It is not about having the right specs, but the right concept. I already know the friend who will come to me tomorrow that his HTC has and 8 core processor while Apple has only six. The point is: it is all useless without the whole package being perfect. And while Apple is freaking expensive upfront, the peace of mind is worth it.
I'm glad you enjoyed it but I should have you know that Apple is using a Samsung display and Samsung has been leading the pack in OLED display technology for at least the last 5 years. In fact, the S8 has a crisper screen than the X with its Super Retina display (570 ppi vs 471 ppi)
"I already know the friend who will come to me tomorrow that his HTC has and 8 core processor while Apple has only six. The point is: it is all useless without the whole package being perfect."
It doesn't. I've been an Android user since the Nexus One. Android ran amazing on that phone, on pretty much every Nexus phone, and on my Pixel. It ran like crap on the LG G2x, a phone so flawed they lost a class action lawsuit about it. It ran mediocre on my Galaxy S2 and S4, but much better once I used Cyanogenmod. It ran beautifully on my Moto X Gen 1.
Android, just like iOS or any other OS, requires non-crap hardware (not amazing, just well designed) and an OEM that doesn't bloat it up with tons of crap. Newer versions of iOS run like crap on older iPhones, because the OS is designed for newer hardware. Android runs beautifully on well designed hardware, even inexpensive hardware like the Moto G. It runs great without bloated skins and shovelware that "adds value".
Being a long-time iPhone user and recently using Android for work (high-spec Nexus models) I can safely say that Android has a _long_ way to go both in terms of responsiveness and design.
I hear this from folks, and I must be missing something. My wife has an iphone as do many of my users/clients and so I use it a lot, and own an iPad myself. I really don't see a responsiveness difference. Design is more subjective.
Samsung has a Truetone display now? Don't think so. Samsung puts great components together in a good package then hobbles them with bad decisions, bloatware and incomplete features.
> Samsung has a Truetone display now? Don't think so.
Apparently it has, for a long time:
> The Adapt Display Mode provides real-time adaptive processing to dynamically adjust images and videos – for some applications it will vary the White Point, Color Gamut, and Color Saturation based on the image content and the color of the surrounding ambient lighting measured by the Galaxy S5 RGB Ambient Light Sensor (which measures color in addition to brightness).
I was an iPhone user from the 3GS until my 6+ finally bit the bullet, and refused to give up the headphone jack. I genuinely love the iPhone and MacBooks.
I've been using the Galaxy S8+ since launch. And the Note 8 is, by any definition, as good or better than the iPhone X.
If you haven't used a Samsung phone lately, go try an S8 or Note 8. They have "the package" down. It just works, and doesn't require a PC or iTunes. I don't care about speeds and feeds. I care about how the phone operates on a daily basis.
iPhone X has FaceID and pin# to login.
Samsung has face, retina, touch and pin options.
The Note 8 is cheaper, with expandable storage, a higher density display (with the same white balance adjustment), stylus, side-by-side applications, a headphone jack, samsung pay, and NFC.
(There are probably many more, but these are things I use on a daily basis, or very frequently in the real world)
The iPhone has iMessage and Facetime.
Seriously, it's worth a sniff of the other side of the pond. It took me 2 hours to transfer everything - contacts, media, apps. And another day to get the UI sorted (there's even an "ios mode" for the launcher that acts almost exactly like the ios interface). I still use an iphone often for work and it's honestly painful going back to it, there are so many little annoying papercut experiences.
On the other side of the fence here. I've been on vanilla Google phones since the Android Nexus. I have a Nexus 6P now, which was the flagship of that generation.
Between Google knowing my porn fetishes and the increasing number of issues & bizarre bugs (severe battery degradation, performance issues during normal usage, random freezes, photos occasionally not saving properly and getting corrupted) plus no security updates after 2 years, I've just about had it.
Samsung face login was hacked with a static image of of a face on paper. Sure they are first to a lot of stuff, but if it's not right it doesn't matter
I'm not normally a shit-on-Apple/Android-is-amazing guy, I'm actually typing this on a MacBook Pro right now. But let's reel it in for a moment. Edge to edge screen, Galaxy S8. Smart watch: Pebble, Galaxy Gear, ZenWatch, etc. SmartWatch with cell service that isn't huge: Galaxy Gear S2 3G (frankly, I think better looking than the Apple Watch). Wireless charging: YEARS go in dozens of Android phones. The only thing announced today that Apple very well may have done "right" is the face recognition. Nothing else today was new or r/evolutionary. Yes, Apple frequently does things right that other people have failed on. The iPhone truly revolutionized the smartphone, the iPad made the tablet a non-crap market, iPod was fantastic, but let's not pretend everything today was iPhone 1 level amazing.
> Yes, Apple frequently does things right that other people have failed on.
That is exactly what non tech people want. Things that just works. There is an enormous market of people that don't want cutting edge, but reliable and long lasting tech. Apple fits that way more than Android. That is their force. It is entirely within their philosophy to not include wireless charging unless it is their own they back for a long time, or a market standard emerges. Arguably since Ikea included Qi chargers in a lot of their affordable furniture, that made Qi chargers the emergent standard.
They began using the Lightning connector 2 years before USB-C was a thing. They have a long term support philosophy and they stand by lightning. Perhaps in the future they deem the adoption rate of USB-C good enough to use that, but until then they'll keep using Lightning.
Because of all the docks and alarm clocks that still only expose a lightning port.
It will be super easy to support the USB-C Macbooks out of box -- they just swap out the USB-A-to-lightning cable and charger in the box with a USB-C-to-lightning cable and charger.
That's not really a great reason - there were lots of alarm clocks and docks with the 30-pin connector (and still are if you go to a Hotel!). That said, I'm not sure why Apple went with Lightning for their mobile devices instead of USB-C - maybe timing?
> Apple is freaking expensive upfront, the peace of mind is worth it.
Carrying a device worth $1000 around with me all day would not give me peace of mind. Quite the opposite. I'd rather carry a battered hand me down and not feel sick in my stomach if it falls off arm of the couch
Funny, I could never trigger it when I wanted to. The method is simple though; start your swipe from below the edge of the screen. For you, maybe don't swipe from the bottom of the screen, that's what the scroll acceleration is for. ;D
Objectively speaking, no other consumer tech company grooms and refines their products do much as Apple. (Only got my first iPhone last year after being so hackerish minded as to avoid ever using them... could not be happier)
But Samsung hasn't sold it anywhere near as well as Apple. Honestly, I don't care about watches all that much so I don't go out and look for smartwatch related news, but even as a bystander I can't help but to hear all about Apple's new watch whereas your comment is literally the first I've ever heard of Samsung having something similar.
If some leaks can reduce the reaction to a product from magical to meh, perhaps the reaction was engineered by hype and not actual quality or features of said product.
To be concise, if something is truly groundbreaking, leaks don't diminish their value.
I hate dishonest marketing as much as the next person but I don't think it's a stretch to say that there is nothing wrong with telling a good story about a product. And of course, telling that story means de-emphasizing unpleasant tradeoffs, and emphasizing pleasant ones. The ultimate concise version of this would be a list of features. That wouldn't be nearly as exciting or informative, would it? (I recognize that you did not personally advocate the position you relayed)
This is a fantastic point. Marketing isn't evil - it's just a tool. It gets you connected with things you want faster. And like anything it can be misused.
That's advertising. Some consider it a subset of marketing. Some consider it an entirely separate area. I agree. Ads on web pages are resource hogs. ;)
In its purest form, marketing is any communication from a company. Without marketing you would not know about any products from any company. So some forms of marketing are very valuable to everyone. As with any discipline there are bad points as well.
It's no different than show or movie spoilers. Do they make the show less enjoyable? Does that reflect on the production quality?
People enjoy the keynotes for the suspense and shared joy and excitement.
Leakers of movies, shows or new device features do take away some joy from some people. For me, the fact that 99% of the features are available in some form on another phone already (unlike early iPhones) is a bigger spoiler than the leaks.
I love seeing how Apple can take existing common features and take them to 11 and it's why I've come back to iPhone.
these events (and many other things like unboxing the product) are a big part of the experience that apple wants. not everyone like it, not everyone cares about that side of things (and that's ok!), but for those who like these experiences, a leak is just like someone spoiling what happens in a movie.
Having worked at Apple, the company feels like complete stress apocalypse all around for the 2 months before the fall major releases. I'm pretty sure no one would fall for the unplanned release thing, and that leaks would still happen
> These keynotes were magical before leakers leaked everything
Even without leaks, there's usually nothing really surprising in the keynotes. You get the usual hardware and software upgrade you would expect from a year to the next. Far from magical, I find these keynotes stereotypical. The fake enthusiasm, the marketing buzzwords and the endless flow of superlatives are sometimes painful to watch. I almost feel bad buying their products after seeing this (unfortunately they still make the best laptops!).
The leaks tend to be a consequence of their supply chain not being able to keep tight lips more than anything else. One approach to combat that would be to announce a product well in advance of production, but then you have announcements followed by six or more months of production ramp-up. Which is obviously awful.
Until Apple is able to bring much more in-house, which they can't realistically do in most cases involving manufacturing, the leaks are inevitable.
If you want to maintain the magic for yourself, though, that's simpler: don't look at Macrumors or what have you :)
This latest keynote was pretty much completely spoiled due to a leak which came internally from Apple (URLs to golden master iphone firmware). I was really surprised that happened. I follow Macrumors pretty closely so I'm used to seeing a lot of hardware leaks over the years from manufacturing partners, but this fall's leaks were kind of insane.
Maybe they leaked on purpose to control expectations leading into the event. If there hadn't been any leaks, would you have been underwhelmed by the design of the iPhone 8? and/or confused by the introduction of another phone as a 'one more thing' device?
Idk, with all the energy and secrecy they put into these events, why would they spoil it? I think they know the magic of the event is not knowing that "one more thing." Sure, with apple's leaky supply chain we can expect hardware details to come out, but full software release with art assets and animations fans used to mock up the FaceID setup process a few days before the event? I can't imagine Apple wanting that stuff in the wild.
There's been speculation (which makes a lot of sense to me) that they've always done it this way, and even though it may not be a good idea it was just "the process".
Now that it's a bit in them so bad they'll probably change the way they do it, which I'm guessing they haven't thought about in a long time.
That's the thing though there were almost no supply-chain leaks this time. It wasn't a bunch of different cases and other parts that let us know what was going on.
It was leaks of software images, and those revealed WAY more than case leaks ever could have.
Homepod firmware leaked via their website, then a GM of iOS11 leaked - that's why these leaks were so high confidence. Software is something they couldn't bring more in house, these leaks were on them.
I realize that, but, as I said, the leaks tend to come not from Apple but from their suppliers and partners. Much of the iPhone X was known prior to the GM leak, including its overall design, construction, display notch, camera and sensor systems, etc..
Apple's (presumed) controlled leaks tend to be about setting expectations rather than "building hype": they're not going to deliberately spoil the reveals of their own press shows, but they may deliberately shoot down rumors about things their upcoming products don't have. Also, they tend to talk to established venues that don't have a reputation for rumor-mongering. If a "leak" appears on the WSJ, it's often presumed to be a tip from Apple itself; if it appears on 9to5Mac or MacRumors, it almost certainly is not Apple's own doing.
They also try and reveal controversial stuff early so the public can digest it before the event. And I'm sure they have a bunch of people working the social media trying to explain why them taking a feature away isn't such a bad thing leading up to the reveal event (I bet the removal of the headphone jack was deliberately leaked .
Does Samsung Pay work with more banks where you live? In France there is no support for it (due to come this month but still no dice). I suppose that both can be used anywhere you could use a contactless credit card.
(Aside: in France you can use Apple Pay anywhere a bank card would work up to 20€ but in shops with explicit support there is no limit, few have it though)
> The only thing that is making me want to retreat back to an iPhone is its inferior Bluetooth audio quality.
The S8 has AptX, which in my experience is really quite good. Once Android O drops for that phone you'll have AptX HD and LDAC as well. I've got a pair of Sony headphones. Running LDAC from my Pixel XL on Android O to them, sounds CD quality to me.
Why would you support anything but your proprietary codec in your bluetooth controller chips? CSR didnt know either, was rewarded with handsome ($2.4B) Qualcomm buyout.
Having done development with CSR chips, AAC (and also MP3) support is shipped with the SDKs just like aptX is. AAC patent licensing may be more complex though.
You've been fooled. There was never magical, only a hype train.
Apple sell expansive product without argumentation about the technology. People who fall in this scheme are too easy tricked. I buy because of the technology, support not because I see a keynote. What a waste of time to see Apple Keynote and how they never had real innovation that increase the price by 2.
It's 2017, almost 2018 and Apple continue to over price the storage and you all support them?
It's just a phone, what do you want magic behind a phone?
It would seem there are people ignorant on the subject. The majority of the leaks came from firmware prematurely release from Apple. A second leak was from iOS 11 GA download links.
What were the new incredible features that are missing now? Seems like the iPhone has been a pretty steady march forward in terms of processor, memory, storage, screen, camera, hardware features, and the software enabled by the hardware capabilities. Why is this release underwhelming?
Yeah the leaks gave this entire presentation away.
We are at peak Apple. If I may borrow a similar peak story I'd look at Microsoft and the release of Windows XP. Balmer banked on that cash cow for far too long.
Tim Cook is doing the same thing here.
They need to buy Tesla and put Musk in charge of Apple.
Everything they do these days is just another way to milk the money machine for them.
They need a world class micromanaging innovator at the helm.
Because random advice from internet armchair experts would have worked wonders for them in the past have they followed it. I mean they're only breaking record after record, poor them...
No, but its Market Cap is what it is because people care about Apple.
Whereas if it was some geek factory making "wild bets" on not-ready-yet technologies, like the kind geeks ask to see, it would be liked by few, ignored by most (and for good reason).
If someone wants that, they can buy all those wonderful innovative products MS, Samsung and Google regularly put out... Rocking their Google Glass look and pioneering VR with their Rift.
I think what makes (or made) Apple what it is, is that it did wild-bets correctly. So that's what people are complaining about - the fact that they can't, or won't make wild bets that win.
Is that extremely hard? Yes of course, but doing that effectively is why Apple got the reputation it has.
Wild bets on what? That people would buy a good smartphone?
That's not exactly Tesla (the inventor, not the company) territory, bet-wise.
Phones were one of the hottest markets already -- and they would have only gotten smarter, iPhone or not. The iPhone just brought lots of smartness and polish in concentrated form all at once -- it took around 3 years for competitors to catch up (Android wasn't released for another full year), and I guess it would have taken them like 5-6 years or so to put it all together (or course with less panache) if they iPhone had not existed at all. But still it was no wild bet (except in daring to deal with the telcos -- that was a big bet and took balls).
So, in 2017, what exactly product would you think Apple should introduce as a bet?
I won't argue this point by point besides saying that those are each overblown concerns.
The broader point here, and this makes the point, is that Apple should be taking on any and all major challenges to keep it as a breakthrough trailblazing company. They have the cash, talent and position to do it.
Perhaps Apple can be accused of trailblazing at times, but only when they think they're going to make sufficient money doing it. I say this as a long-time Apple fan: they've never been in the business of experimental moonshots. They have products that don't pan out, sure, but they don't bring anything to market with a "this is crazy, but let's throw it at the wall and see if it sticks" attitude. What they've always seemed to be best at is looking at other good ideas that aren't setting the world on fire and figuring out how to fix them. Arguably, they did that with the original GUI concepts from the Xerox Alto/Star line, and kept doing it, from MP3 players to smartphones to tablets to smartwatches.
"Any and all" major challenges strikes me as kind of a recipe for (slow) disaster, unless Apple decides to set up a quasi-independent Apple Research division dedicated to moonshots. That would be kind of cool, to be sure, but it strikes me as something that isn't really in line with the kind of company Apple's been the last ~19 years.
I mean we're at the point now that they wouldn't be throwing anything at the wall - they would be doing what they always do, like you point out, which is why it makes sense.
Hololens, all the Daqri products, Meta are all in the HMD space with products that are selling. The AR HMD space is WAY PAST where the mouse and GUI were when they introduced it on the Macintosh. They could even buy Magic Leap if they wanted but could probably do better themselves. I mean I live this stuff. If Apple wanted to do AR glasses right, they could.
And yet, all those spaces and companies are totally irrelevant in the sizes and markets Apple plays. The average Joe would have difficulty even telling what they do from their name. Their utility at the moment is even less.
>I mean I live this stuff.
That's the selection bias issue. Most people don't and don't care for these technologies.
Over the last 20 years Apple has had the same kind for advice to get in to all kinds of fads that never went anywhere and technologies that were way before their actual mass market stage.
all those spaces and companies are totally irrelevant in the sizes and markets Apple plays
Just like the mouse and smartphone markets didn't exist previously.
You do realize that all of the majors are focusing heavily on AR right? As in, most of WWDC was dedicated to ARKit, nearly the entire Zuck Keynote was about AR etc...?
I was asked for what the next revolutionary technology would be that Apple could break out with, I gave it. It's staring everyone in the face and has been desired for the better part of 60 years - through thousands of iterations that never worked because processing, integration etc... weren't there.
>I won't argue this point by point besides saying that those are each overblown concerns
Overblown concerns that all made the Google Glass a total non-starter failure.
>The broader point here, and this makes the point, is that Apple should be taking on any and all major challenges to keep it as a breakthrough trailblazing company.
Nope. Apple should focus on carefully selected markets that keep it as a consumer favorite, best experience, record-profitable company.
Trailblazing breakthroughs in various random "major challenges" can be left to those without commercial concerns, like Google Labs who mostly makes up for money spend in positive press PR for its non-marketable "innovations".
We seem to be at peak Apple year after year, as it continues to inexplicably churn out new products and rake in money. Tim Cook somehow keeps popping up on stage with something new, devoid of vision and utterly oblivious he's standing on the precipice of catastrophic decline. Again.
IMO it's purely because Android as OS has not tapped into the UX that most iPhone users enjoy. So when replacement time comes around every couple years, users think why not get the new iPhone even though it didn't change much from my old one. My thought is most iPhone users would and maybe have considered switching but really enjoy the UX familiarity/simplicity of iPhone.
This is actually a conversation I have over and over with friends, family and coworkers. The OS switching cost/risks are too high although most iPhone users know the top Android devices are typically better than the iPhone the risk of not liking the OS experience is too high compared to the reward of taking slightly better photos or bigger screen or whatever Android does now that iPhone won't until XI
> the top Android devices are typically better than the iPhone
In some ways (and on paper), you're right. Apple's stores are a huge advantage though. Any family member that asks me what they should buy is going to be told to get an iPhone. The Genius Bar might not be perfect, but it's better than calling Verizon or posting a message on the One Plus forums.
For many, the Genius Bar may be hours away. For me it is over 3 hours. A full day of driving to deal with a Genius? I'll take my chances with the forums - they have yet to let me down.
Facial data is stored on device, just like touch id fingerprints were. ML happening on device instead of on the cloud. By all means, if you see privacy leaks point it out but I don't see any here.
The "creepy analytics" remark is obviously a response to "They need to buy Tesla and put Musk in charge of Apple". Apple has a very good privacy track record. Tesla is the one with creepy analytics, witnessed by how the company is seemingly eager to release every detail of what you and your Tesla vehicle did leading up to a collision.
I mean, I like quality hardware and as far as I can tell, Apple is the only one even remotely trying to protect privacy. Compared to Google, Samsung, etc. at least.
Tim talked about Steve's legacy, but really, was SJ's dream to build a stale stagnating company? Did he prefer money over putting a dent in the universe?
Steve's Apple was just like Tim's Apple: all about incremental improvement.
Youngsters might not remember, but I've followed those keynotes and introductions since 2002 or so.
It took 4 years for the iPod to get a color screen -- and 8 years to get a video camera. Several years to get Wifi. The original iPhone wasn't 3G -- that was the next model. Those years we waited year over year for Jobs to announce some extremely incremental updates. And people cheered for them -- they were actually exciting, all the press was speculating and gushing, and it was e.g. just a few additional features on the iPod, like the touch wheel as opposed to the old click wheel.
New announcements like the iPhone and the iPad were rare under Jobs too. And those products were low hanging fruit for Apple themselves -- a mobile phone and a table. Quite basic stuff -- not some whole new product category like flying cars and whatever people expect to see.
Apple is not in the business of creating experimental stuff to dazzle geeks. It's in the business in incrementally improving mass market products.
Besides, what competitor exactly did introduce those mythical "Jobs-worthy" products that people ask from Apple to deliver? Google Glasses? Microsoft's laptop/tablet combo that failed to gain much traction and is returned like crazy? https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/14/16142490/microsoft-surfac...
What Apple did better, and affected the industry, was not innovation in the sense of some new BS product category that didn't exist ever, it was delivery. Better thought out, more polished, and with lots of innovation in the details. The kind of innovation that the iPhone models get incrementally but few can understand, but then you use a model from 2-3 years ago and it feels ancient after you've used the last one.
For such introductions of new products, the Apple Watch has been one such under Tim's, err, watch, and it does great in the market (in fact it's almost the only smartwatch people can actually see in the wild -- it outsold Samsung Galaxy watches so much in units it's not even funny).
I'm not more young now, I have see the evolution and never see any Apple Keynote or Steve speech because they talk for nothing wasting time , but I remember a things that every company still can't do now, reducing overwaste, improve autonomy. A single AAA battery did the job for a full week in my Rio MP3 Player. I don't care about fancy color screen, video camera? come on, wifi? useless. If the mp3 player isn't working for a full week the product wasn't better.
There was no improvement on the MP3 player, only the storage, but on crap Apple storage, you don't have choice to throw away a device that have slow memory 8GB? when you can buy a SD card? Too much innovation from Apple...
>A single AAA battery did the job for a full week in my Rio MP3 Player. I don't care about fancy color screen, video camera? come on, wifi? useless
Well, you might find yourself in the extreme minority on this.
It's not like non-color-screen, non wi-fi full-week-lasting mp3 players don't exist -- there are tons of such models.
It's just that the market has spoken, and most prefer to be able to also stream, plays apps, etc on their multi-purpose device than get one such.
>There was no improvement on the MP3 player, only the storage, but on crap Apple storage, you don't have choice to throw away a device that have slow memory 8GB? when you can buy a SD card?
Well, obviously companies like Apple don't cater to some small niche of music aficionados. Most people don't care for juggling cards and having different parts of their record collection on different SD cards or whatever -- they did it with CDs and such on 1999 out of necessity. Heck, most people will just stream today and be done with it.
Also not sure how "slow memory" means anything in the context of an mp3 player. Ever had problem reading mp3s from the memory quickly enough?
Really? Armageddon has been coming for centuries. There is not evidence that humanity is about to be wiped out. Solar panels and electric cars are saving our species? From what?
Musk is certainly an inportant innovator, but he’s not a Messiah.
I wonder if the tech team involved with Face ID factored the birthday paradox into their security factor. They touted a "1 in 1,000,000" chance that someone else's face unlocks one's iPhone X.
Well, with the birthday paradox, let's say there were, say, exactly 1179 people in the Steve Jobs Auditorium and they all had iPhone Xs. That's 694,431 unique pairs of people, and there would be roughly a 50% chance of two of the attendees faces unlocking the same phone.
That's not helpful for brute forcing a single phone, but it is mildly disconcerting that a security factor of only 1 in 1,000,000 is considered a "wow" factor.
Edit: Some people are asking, "But isn't that equivalent to a six digit pin?" Yes, of course. I am just opining on the marketing spiel for security not being nearly as impressive as it sounds. More boring features like the secure enclave play a much larger role in the security of the iPhone than the "1 in X" chance of a successful unlock.
The difference is that if two people in e.g. a class have the same birthday then there will be a day when those two have birthdays, whereas if two people in the same auditorium have the same code, or face, then that has no implications. There is no process where all faces are cycled through and applied to all phones or similar.
So regardless of how many people in a room, or a country, have the same face you still need to bring your one phone up to 1 million people to unlock it.
The thing is if two of you have the same birthday then it falls on the same day . But if two of you have the same face, that doesn't mean you have to use the same phone. So unlike the birthday paradox where your birthdays "clash", you'd still have to try everyone's face on everyone's phone.
An actual Birthday Paradox equivalent would be if you had 1,000,000 phones and the 1,179 people in the auditorium, and you assigned people to a phone based on their face recognition ID. Then you would get your high chance that not everyone would get a unique phone.
"There's a 50% chance that two people in this room have the same face" is not the same as "there's a 50% someone in this room has the same face as mine". The birthday paradox isn't really useful for conceptualizing FaceID's security.
I'm not saying 1 in 1,000,000 is great, but I don't see how the birthday paradox applies. Assume that I want to analyse whether face unlock is secure enough for me -- why is the chance that anyone else's phone gets unlocked by someone else's face even relevant?
Because if you're an actor with a lot of faces (eg, state level actor with a face db) to feed it, and you're sweeping large numbers of phones rather than trying to hit one in particular, this suggests they'd have an easier time than it sounds like when you're considering it in the private use context.
I think it can be assumed that the facial recognition is rate-limited, just like PIN entries. Even if you had a million phones and a million faces in your database, you could only try perhaps 30 faces on each phone.
If you have the kind of surveillance tech people are postulating here, you already have a high-res-enough scan of the actual face of the person you target in order to produce something to unlock their phone.
Not likely - they used professional hollywood mask makers to test against... Remember, this is infrared with a 30k dot projector - the most accurate 3d visual record you could make would appear to be insufficient.
Choosing someone that looks like the owner would increase the odds greatly. You can't narrow down the search field like that with a PIN or a fingerprint.
Especially for groups of people who are less likely to be represented in the training data. Someone with the last name "Tillekeratne" for example is Sri Lankan, and Sri Lankans are probably underrepresented in Apple's training data. If you harvested images of Sri Lankans online you would probably need less than a million to get a false positive.
>If you harvested images of Sri Lankans online you would probably need less than a million to get a false positive.
Bearing in mind that FaceID uses a depth map of the face, you'll need more than photos harvested online. They also specifically said that they've tested against realistic masks to make sure they won't work, so I don't think it'll be quite as bad as you imagine!
The names FaceID and TouchID are apt. They are IDs. Not passwords. You should unlock your phone by something in your memory. Unlock by face or fingerprint is an anti-feature for me.
Perhaps, but what if they ensured that FaceID only worked when you had both eyes open? It would then, be much easier to be non-compliant than it would with TouchID since it's harder to hold someone's eyes open without obscuring the face than it is to press the phone's home button against someone's finger.
Wink/Blink if you don't want to unlock your phone seems, to me, to give more consent to unlock than a fingerprint.
When you record your face for the unlock, strike a pose that is not your default expression. Put your hand on your face with the sherlockian "hmmm" expression.
Guards/police won't know, they'll just hold the phone up to your face and try to unlock it.
For a 4 digit pin, yes. I believe iPhone now defaults to a six digit pin (equivalent to the 1 in 1,000,000), and the enclave will delay and lock out repeated attempts. They didn't say, but I would hope a similar lockout is employed on the iPhone X.
I strongly suspect that the number 1,000,000 was chosen due to marketing, and that the actual strength of the security lies in the enclave preventing repeated failures and this feature that disables Face ID by repeatedly pressing the power button.
It's interesting you're modelling the pairs as being unordered.
If person A's face unlocks person B's phone, does the reverse hold? I'd guess it's moderately likely, but not certain (e.g. the chance in the other direction becomes 1 in 1000 instead of the magical 1 in a million).
That's like saying "lightning is much more dangerous than thought, because what matters is not your risk of dying, but the risk of any one of 30,000 people dying".
If the risk is "1 in 1,000,000" that means it's 1 in 1,000,000. People understand that doesn't mean it never happens. But it's orders of magnitude lower than their risk of dying in any given year, so it's factually negligible.
I don't think anyone's considering faceid a "wow" factor in terms of its high security (or lack thereof). It's hard to get the general public excited about levels of security. Face ID is pretty much a hack, one that's existed on android phones for many years, that Apple has to polish as best it can.
I didn't watch the keynote: do they have touch ID on the back?
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it was "bad" when I said "hack". I meant that it was introduced in order to solve a problem introduced by another design change (i.e. the removal of touch ID).
Well they introduced completely new dedicated hardware components that I've never seen in a smartphone to enable this feature. For me "hack" doesn't do the feature justice.
If using a 30k dot projector, 2 cameras (one IR), and a neural network processor is your idea of a 'hack', I'd love to see what you think an elegantly designed solution is!
You should watch the keynote then. Calling it "existed on android phones" is borderline incorrect as it uses infrared sensors to match 3D models of your face.
Nope, no Touch ID. The presenter also failed to unlock via Face ID several times in a row, prompting a "please enter your pin to unlock phone message". Worst time for it to happen.
You are seriously misrepresenting what happened. The display phone was showing the “passcode is required to unlock” screen that iPhones show when they are cold-booted.
Huge mistake, IMO. People really love touch id, and it would've essentially been 'free' had they just moved it to the back. I've been using Huawei's equivalent on the Nexus 6P for over a year now, and it works like a dream.
I have a suspicion that removing the home button and relying on swipe-interactions might be a step back in usability for the non-tech savvy people who have made up a large share of iPhone users.
might be a step back in usability for the non-tech savvy people who have made up a large share of iPhone users
"non-tech savvy"? I write software for the damned things, and my first thought was, "oh, great, more obscure swipe gestures to try and memorize." As an added bonus, the control center is now a swipe from the top, not the bottom like it's been for the last, what, five versions?
That actually makes intuitive sense, now that there's a notch there dividing the clock—notifications are associated with time, so that's easy to remember—and the battery/wi-fi indicators, which are associated with the control center.
Jarring if you're used to swiping from the bottom, but it does make sense at least.
It reminds me of Motorola's option to remove Android's black button bar and rely instead of swiping gestures over the fingerprint reader [1]. I tried it and, to their credit, it works very well. But it felt unnatural and my muscle memory didn't adjust quickly, so I disabled it.
In my experience, it works like a dream. The combined fingerprint reader / home / back / app list button on MG5+ is great. I think it took a few minutes to fully internalize it. Also "make a twisting motion to start camera" is incredibly handy. I don't use the "shake for flashlight", as I fear it will misfire and empty my battery.
Maybe I should give it a second chance, but I agree that the other gestures are great. You should try the flashlight one, I have it activated in my MG5+ and has never misfired, since you need a pretty vigourous shake to activate it.
The presenter claims that once you've tried it for the first time you will realize that it was the best way. I agree with you and think that it's quite an assumption. Sure the homebutton may of created problems when it needed repair etc, but I really love having actual hardware buttons on a phone.
Indeed; one of the things that struck me about iOS devices versus anything else nowadays is the discoverability that the home button provides. The device is sitting on the table, and there is a single button to press. With a home button, it's obvious what to do.
That said, maybe the X branding is akin to 'Pro' and is not intended for the less tech-savvy
I don't think you'll see this be the default experience across Apple devices for quite some time. I don't think even the iPad Pro will have this edge-to-edge screen for at least a couple years – the home button is not dead.
This made me curious, so I picked up my iPhone 7 Plus and tried it. Of course I got the control center because it's not an X, but it feels completely natural. I'll be perfectly happy when that gesture replaces the home button.
In fact, this actually improves the lock screen quite a bit now - no more accidentally missing my notifications because the home button that woke up my phone also unlocked it and took me away from the screen.
I agree! I don't know how many times Ive seen a notification that caught my eye and before I could recognize what app it was from or what it pertained to I'd already auth'd and missed it.
I had to disable double-tap for multitasking (and bunch of other gestures) on my family iPads because they caused a lot of issues with older users. I wonder if there's going to be an accessibility feature to make it more friendly to people who have issues differentiating between "swipe up", "swipe up from bottom", "swipe up from bottom and pause" and other overloaded gestures.
Under accessibility iOS already has a floating menu button, that a lot of people, especially outside the US, enable. It actually works very well, and I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing iPhones sold with it enabled.
It was discussed at length at the time on different podcasts such as ATP and The Talk Show, and I recall it was the case mostly in Asia.
It had to do with the perception of the physical button's flimsiness and unreliability. And was coupled with the far different experience in regards to Apple Repair centers (sometimes not even provided by Apple itself) which made the whole experience an ordeal. So, to preserve the value of the phone, they preferred the software button instead.
Others chimed in to say that, other than having to deal with repositioning the button from times to times because it obscures something below, it was actually a step up in usability as it offers more options (there is a whole user configurable menu there).
Why they continue to do it after the 7's fake hardware button? Probably because of the latter cause.
Question regarding these new guestures: Are these a iPhone X only thing or they now supported on all IOS11 devices? I think from a hardware point of view it should be possible to let iphone 6/7/8 users to chose whether they now want to use the button or the guestures for this functionality.
For what it's worth, I really miss the gesture bar on the Palm Pre (and other Palm) phones.
It had a little button there too, but swapping the swipe up for this works fine imo. I think this is a great move forward, but will wait until I have to use it every day to decide.
I can understand the compromise of the "notch" for the sensor bar in portrait-oriented UIs. Some thoughtful juggling of the status bar, some added interaction, and you're all set. A reasonable trade-off.
What I cannot understand at all is the compromise in landscape mode, for games and video. Rather than just black out the uneven area and limit the drawable area to the largest unbroken rectangle, everything Apple shows appears partially obscured by the notch. The AR game example literally has the notch starting to eat into the UI. In my book, this leaps from "acceptable trade-off" to "bizarre sacrifice." It's like living with a cracked corner of the screen, right out of the box.
This phone has a 19.5:9 screen so 16:9 videos will have vertical black bars on either side that are thick enough to envelop the notch. You can see that in this [1] hands-on video.
Thanks for the laugh. That said, I am concerned that HN is becoming more and more like reddit. No offense, but the reason I come to HN is for serious informative discussion, not puns and jokes. I realize this is an asshole thing to say but I just had to let this out.
Aah I agree. I do resist most of the time. But this 'HN is becoming Reddit' is itself a cliche repeated here far more often than I like. A direct "Please no joke' would be just fine.
"Don't mask or call special attention to key display features. Don't attempt to hide the device's rounded corners, sensor housing, or indicator for accessing the Home screen by placing black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Don't use visual adornments like brackets, bezels, shapes, or instructional text to call special attention to these areas either."
Same guidelines also specify the safe area to put actual content, which excludes that area. In addition they suggest not hiding the status bar, which generally would push your content below it anyway.
> Inset essential content to prevent clipping. In general, content should be centered and symmetrically inset so it looks great in any orientation and isn't clipped by corners or the device's sensor housing, or obscured by the indicator for accessing the Home screen
...and...
> If your app currently hides the status bar, reconsider that decision on iPhone X. The display height on iPhone provides more vertical space for content than the displays of 4.7" iPhones, and the status bar occupies an area of the screen your app probably won't fully utilize.
[emphases mine]
My take is they don't want you putting a black background up there to mask it (unless all of your background is black, presumably) but you don't have to lay out around it either. For videos and photos in particular, since black is the normal background for outside the image I doubt there'll be an issue using it at the ends.
My take on this is that they're aiming to have people experiment with the two little areas rather than have everyone immediately "letterbox" it away. (Although to be honest it's a little baffling since I think it detracts from the phone, especially when playing games or watching videos).
Probably, yeah. I think the proof will be in how they deal with HUD-less full screen games like Infinity Blade--will they expect an animated background to draw around the notch, will they be OK with a 16:9 crop to normalize between phones, or what?
That's one interpretation. Cropping video content doesn't necessarily fall into that, yet I can see how some other designs would and why they would want developers to avoid that. Besides, there's also:
> Be mindful of aspect ratio differences when reusing existing artwork. iPhone X has a different aspect ratio than 4.7" iPhones. As a result, full-screen 4.7" iPhone artwork appears cropped or letterboxed when displayed full-screen on iPhone X. Likewise, full-screen iPhone X artwork appears cropped or pillarboxed when displayed full-screen on a 4.7" iPhone. Make sure that important visual content remains in view on both display sizes.
Emphasis mine.
EDIT: Also here [1]:
> Adhere to the safe area and layout margins defined by UIKit. These layout guides ensure appropriate insetting based on the device and context. The safe area also prevents content from underlapping the status bar, navigation bar, toolbar, and tab bar. Standard system-provided views automatically adopt a safe area layout guide.
The diagram shown suggests a "safe area" even inset a little from the notch.
I think they got their aspect ratio statement backwards. Surely 16:9 (iPhone 7) content appears pillarboxed on the 19.5:9 screen (iPhone X) and iPhone X content appears letterboxed on the iPhone 7?
I imagine most developers won't want to design a tweaked layout specifically for the iPhone X. As a compromise, developers will probably just avoid putting important UI elements near the horizontal edges, similar to what console developers used to do to accommodate older TVs [1].
It's not as significant as the notch, but the corners of the display area are also rounded off, so the screen has some fairly interesting effective geometry in terms of viewable pixels.
I wonder if the graphics and UI SDKs will have built-in functions to determine where these boundaries are (as they're likely to change in future models), or if developers will just be expected to work around them as best they can.
> What I cannot understand at all is the compromise in landscape mode, for games and video.
I find that an odd glass-half-empty view. Since the screen has more pixels than earlier phones, instead of worrying about some being "taken away" by the notch, consider it as Apple adding some space for status info and the like to dead space that was previously bezel.
> instead of worrying about some being "taken away" by the notch, consider it as Apple adding some space for status info and the like to dead space that was previously bezel.
But my bezel didn't literally cover parts of videos or fullscreen app UIs.
I don't really get your point. Sure, overall you get more pixels but the screen still gets covered partially and you're not allowed to fill in the left and right of it with a black bar to make your content look not overlapped.
> I don't really get your point. Sure, overall you get more pixels but the screen still gets covered partially and you're not allowed to fill in the left and right of it with a black bar to make your content look not overlapped.
Plenty of content will use a black bar, especially 16:9 video.
For non-video content you could put info there that previously would have covered other content. (Plus I think the non-pixel notch area would be a perfect place for Safari to banish those stupid floating "share" buttons).
Instead of getting hung up on the camera zone and what it "takes away", think of the phone as having a large rectangular screen plus a pair of small rectangular additional screens, like ears. Even if those little regions were always black you'd still have more pixels than Apple's previous phones.
> Plenty of content will use a black bar, especially 16:9 video.
Huh? I'm not sure I follow. By default video playback does not unless you manually resize it. Apple's updated language means you can't explicitly do this to cover those gaps with a black bar, either.
It's not exactly the best user experience if I have to manually resize videos smaller to fit the screen properly.
> Even if those little regions were always black you'd still have more pixels than Apple's previous phones.
That would be great but Apple does not approve of that as per their updated language in their ToS for developers. You can't just fill it in with black bars (otherwise I would agree with you though I would argue Apple should have ways to automatically handle that).
The iPhone X display is 19:9. You cannot display video without either cropping or letterboxing, i.e. black bars.
And I don't know what you mean by apple doesn't approve of that: their own Human Interface Guidelines for the iPhone X ( https://developer.apple.com/ios/human-interface-guidelines/o... ) read: "Inset essential content to prevent clipping. In general, content should be centered and symmetrically inset so it looks great in any orientation and isn't clipped by corners or the device's sensor housing, or obscured by the indicator for accessing the Home screen. " They also include a picture showing precisely that.
Also just above that they read, "When designing for iPhone X, you must ensure that layouts fill the screen and aren't obscured by the device's rounded corners, sensor housing, or the indicator for accessing the Home screen." I.e. don't use a square element part of which would lie off-screen, do try to light up in a practical way all the pixels.
But regardless of what apple says, feel free to be unhappy about this if that makes you happy.
> And I don't know what you mean by apple doesn't approve of that
Nothing what you posted is relevant to what I was discussing. In fact it was completely differently.
What I was discussing was having games / apps fill in the rest of the bar so it looks like a flat bar (so it won't look odd with partial content above and below the notch). Many iOS developers have been chatting about this over twitter and other forums and the language being pointed out seems to prevent deliberate obscuring / hiding of the notch itself. https://twitter.com/cabel/status/907684825376595968
> But regardless of what apple says, feel free to be unhappy about this if that makes you happy.
I don't follow; I originally replied to offer a correction to a statement you initially made. I never even stated that I am unhappy with the notch. I'm not a fan right now but it would likely grow on me and I was thinking about getting a new phone later this year.
There are some UX concerns that I think are legit to discuss. I don't see why that would make me someone who is happy to be unhappy.
Whatever. He and others quoted the same sections I did, and in fact made the comments in regards to video having to be letterboxed.
Sure, if you zoom in part will be lost but then again if you zoom in, because of the different aspect ratio other parts of the video will be cropped too.
I guess we simply disagree that this is a big deal.
Not so much that they didn't black it out, that the notch was a notch in the first place.
I get having a screen to the edge of the phone is "cool" there is a half inch of black on the top of the iPhone 7, cutting it down to a 1/4 of an inch or whatever it is on the X and not going to the edge would have been perfectly sane... right?!
Edit: It wasn't a shout, so much as a dumbfounded exclamation. In retrospect, I should have table flipped and yelled "Im switching to a Nokia!"
Also, AND THIS MAY BE CONTROVERSIAL, but I don't need to take a selfie. Its cool, I'm fine. No one needs to see what I look like with my seat belt on.
I get that there is the FaceID, etc in there, but if they could reduce the size and focus on things that are necessary instead of narcissistic that'd be the bees knees.
I hope other manufacturers pick up on this and just make their devices thick enough overall to match the camera bulge, with a huge bonus in battery capacity.
And, isn't it true that phone cases are pretty much a necessity? I remember I took my iphone case off a few a months ago... and just a week or two in, the screen shattered when I dropped it on the concrete floor outside as I was stepping outside the car.
Phone cases have a certain thickness (which is more or less equal to the thickness of bulge). In all likelihood, you'll have the case, so the bulge is perhaps not really a problem.
>There is no camera bulge there... they just deleted it. This is not something I expect from Apple.
I would expect it from Apple these days. That bulge is the number one reason I will never buy a 7/8/X. Steve Jobs must have been rolling in his grave when they first showed that off.
From the shot it looks like it's a complete side view so should be visible.
In reality it's probably that the camera is positioned just right so that it's obscured.
They did the same thing when they made the iMacs skinny, just show them at the exact angle to hide the giant butt on them and make them look razor thin.
The notch doesn't bother me that much. If anything, it adds character in a world where phone designs are getting more generic and less distinguishable.
The lack of a headphone jack (and no valid replacement, such as USB-C) gets me way more annoyed!
Agreed, I like the notch. Mind you, I don't even own an iPhone, but I also like the Essential (Android Phone) notch. The Android phone's notch was less wide, sure, but I'm not sure it matters.
By all means, if you're displaying UI stuff there then great, don't obscure your buttons with the notch. However I love seeing images/etc with all possible screen visible. I've been wanting a head/chin-less phone for years now.
From the looks of it, I love both of them. The Android and iPhone version.
Wireless earbuds are yet another thing you have to remember to charge every night, easier to lose or break, expensive, and nonstandard. What's the point?
In the abstract, not having wires is clearly better in almost all situations - the only catch being, it doesn't take away features that wired tech have (lower latency, higher reliability/bandwidth, etc). Hopefully Apple's decision will spur some innovation in wireless charging/battery tech for headphones. Sometimes even if the decision is dumb, given the existing state of tech, it forces the industry to change, because of the market pressure that Apple exerts.
Except for musicians, who need a latency-free audio path that won't degrade depending on distance or saturation of the wireless spectrum. Given the amount of music apps in Apple's ecosystem, I'm pretty surprised they removed the one jack that made their device compatible with literally every musical instrument and mixing board out there. They're gutting a huge market.
The iPhone was never a good choice to produce professional music anyway. An OS running garbage collected apps, running on a hardware platform that suffers from thermal throttling is a bad combination to begin with.
>They're gutting a huge market.
How big is this market of people using iphones to produce music?
Have you ever even used a music app on an iPhone? They do not suffer from performance issues, even with several running at the same time. And Objective-C is not even garbage collected; it's reference counted, so I have no idea what point you're trying to make.
Having attended and played hundreds of rock shows throughout the world, I've seen many musicians use iPads as synthesizers, loopers, effects pedals, and DAW recording studios. I and all of my professional musician friends use it in performances for both audio and visuals. The audio latency and MIDI support of iOS is legendary among musicians, and is why they dominate the musical app market compared to Android with its unusable 20-300ms audio latency.
Ditto. It's imperative to be able to charge while you're playing, since music apps along with the screen being on all the time really eats the battery quickly.
It's hard to express the convenience and ease-of-use in wireless earbuds until one tries them. If you hate wires, then these are straight up revolutionary
I totally get wireless headphones. The problem is, not every device I listen to music on has Bluetooth. I don't take my phone on runs and I'm not buying two sets of headphones. Not to mention, even when I'm not running, I listen to music on my iPod classic and only use my phone for podcasts.
It has Bluetooth comms to up to 8 Joycons and a general purpose operating system, so the limitation is probably a lacking audio implementation, not physical impossibility.
Don't worry just make sure you plug in your families 4 laptops, 4 sets of wireless headphones, 4 phones, 2 tablets, 2 ereaders. If you arrange it right you could have an entire shrine to technology.
with inductive charging, this could be as simple as setting all of your devices on a table with a large enough mat (one day.. since obviously not all of those devices support it today).
Used to think like that. Bought a pair. Am 100% converted.
Wired earphones are cumbersome and don't really offer any significant audio advantages.
I have a pair of studio headphones for listening to music when I'm at home. But when I'm out in the gym or heading to work on the metro, wireless earphones are 200% more convenient.
Remembering to charge them is easy. I reach my office and plug the charger right next to my laptop charger. Impossible for forget it
That's true, but it's not a sufficient argument. An integrated MiniDisc player would also not stop you from playing music from files stored on the phone, but it wouldn't be a strong argument for including an integrated MiniDisc player.
The real argument is that having a wired option is not a money maker for apple. Apple wants YOU to buy accessories, which are the meat of their business with ridiculous margins. That's just selling to users something they don't need in the first place and making them pay premium for it.
What is that an argument for? It seems like you should be arguing why removing the jack is a bad idea, but plenty of good ideas could also be implemented purely to make money.
Apple will likely sell tens of millions of AirPods this year. At $159 each, and presumably at very healthy margins.
This is no small business, even by Apple's standards!
Removing the headphone jack was a marketing-driven decision. AirPods are a cool product, but wouldn't have sold anywhere near as well without the forcing effect of the jack removal.
This guy managed to install a fully-functioning jack back into an iPhone 7:
How many fewer AirPods do you think they would sell of the iPhone 7 still had a headphone jack? Given that every iphone 7 came with lightning EarPods and a lightning to headphone jack adapter, I would guess that AirPods sales would barely have been affected.
Maybe they're the future, but they're still much crappier than a pair of wired Shures, by a long shot. When that changes, then wireless headphones will be the present. Until then, leaving off a headphone jack is an idiotic omission.
Notches will disappear when we’ll be able to put all those sensors under the screen. Until then I think of them as “more” screen rather than less. However cutting into videos/photos taken on the phone is wrong.
The idea is that you don't break things that work fine and then replace it with a proprietary island solution that isn't even supported by your non ipad/iphone devices. If I buy lightning headphones can I use them on my macbook? No.
I haven't used wireless headphones yet but I will continue to hesitate until they have fixed the audio quality and pairing issues for good.
Try Airpods. They are amazing and the audio quality and pairing are stellar if you can deal with their fit/shape. It's been about 5% of people that I've had try them where they just don't fit or sit right in their ears.
> the audio quality and pairing are stellar if you can deal with their fit/shape
Wait, you mean for music? I've tried them once and I felt as soon as there's more than 5-6 instruments the expression goes way down, it becomes basically impossible to even identify all the strands. Would not recommend - you can get something like AKG k702's for cheaper and get better sound.
I've got a pair of Grado headphones and a set of those exact AKG phones and I test a few different songs with each pair of anytime I'm assessing a new set of headphones. I test "Fame" by David Bowie, "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen, and "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead. The Airpods sounded great for in-ear headphones but they did have a significant break in period of almost 2 weeks. In addition to the fit, ease of pairing, and the overall experience, I can still wholeheartedly recommend them. The AKG's are great but they're not for the same target. I'm not going to go running or working out in my AKG's or my Grado's.
Fair enough. I could see myself wanting wireless headphones for physical exercise, because cable noise is annoying. Thanks for the break in info, it does explain quite a bit!
They may not be but I even the EarPods sound good to me and have good range once they're broken in. If you only ever put them in your ears for 1 song and decided they were no good, you're not going to get the best or most objective sound.
For all the things Essential Phone didn't do well, it actually did do this part correctly and letterboxed videos & games to avoid the camera cutting into the content.
Wow that's messed up. I didn't realize it extended beyond video.
On the plus side it's only gonna be an easy software upgrade to fox this for video and the web although it remains to be seen whether apple will accept they're wrong.
No, the text stays in the center portion only. The guidelines say that content covers the screen in landscape unless it’s text, in which case it’s inset.
What part of the guidelines are you referring to? [1] says "Adhere to the safe area and layout margins defined by UIKit", and the graphics show a "safe area" which excludes the notch at the top.
Do you have an example of where they don’t follow their guidelines? In my experience they’re pretty good about it; it’s Google that can’t get it together and follow Material Design or whatever their new guide is.
The problem is not the notch but the rounded corners.
I think they wanted to show how "cool" is the whole edge-to-edge screen with all the four rounded borders. If you black out the notch and keep that side square, then you must do the same on the other side and the screen will just look like the old rectangular display.
While I'm sure there will be some option to do this, at least for video, for me, a square shaped phone would have made sense.
> I can understand the compromise of the "notch" for the sensor bar in portrait-oriented UIs.
Me too. Still, it'll be nice if there's an option to disable the notch and just use a slightly shorter display. There are no doubt Apple engineers out there who want this, so I hope it's a hidden accessibility setting :)
This is something that can be largely fixed by the software, but it requires 3rd part developer coordination, that honestly only Apple can pull off. In iOS11 there is a concept of a safe area that UI should respect. With constraint based layout you can have a single layout that moved critical UI components outside of the notch area if its present.
The problem is that the AR game was most likely built with Unity, which has its own 4-5 different UI systems, and my guess none of them are aware of a safe area.
The problem is fixable, but why did Apple allow demo that was not polished enough to work well with their flagship phone?
I agree, when they first demoed it I was pretty shocked. For games, I can kind of understand, they can likely work around it...but for video? No videos are recorded with the thought of the left side of the screen being cut off.
Annoyingly, my TV won't let you turn it /off/. Not only that, but it won't accept it's own panel's native resolution of 1366x768, only 1280x720 which it then scales up to crop off a bunch of pixels. It's like they were dedicated to making a 720p television look like blurry bigfoot butt.
And this is the true irony of the persistence of title-safe areas: Broadcast switched over to digital nearly a decade ago, analog set-top boxes haven't been produced in large quantities in years, and thus the concept of overscan should be completely dead by now.
Yet TV manufacturers, for some reason I cannot wrap my mind around, continue to implement it, often by default (or in the extreme case, as you mention, with no way to disable it). And so title-safe areas continue to be an issue long after the obsolescence of the technology they were invented to work within.
Tvs historically have been criticized by filmmakers for cutting off part of the image.
Safe zones are only useful when using analog film cameras and movie projectors, not with digital video.
Of course, you will never place the face of an actor on the edge of the frame, but that doesn't mean that space is useless for the director or the cinematographer. Every filmmaker has a rectangular frame in mind when composing.
And even if you don't care about watching the film in the right conditions, isn't it annoying to know there's something you're missing behind that notch? It's like having somebody's head in front of you when you go to the movies.
Also, there are many films that have a 2.35 aspect ratio, which is wider than 19.5/9.
Sure most of the videos are not films and you wouldn't use a phone to watch films in the first place, but for that price I expect those little details that make the difference. I think Apple has lost that in the recent years.
Honestly the video producers are already used to this bullshit, and have recorded expecting it already. Why? Tube TV. Just when I thought we were going to be able to kiss overscan-safe area goodbye (I mean it's 2017 come /on/), we now have to keep it. Maybe it'll be called "funky phone safe area" now.
Not necessarily true. There's still quite large amount of video (or film) content adapted from wider aspect ratios that has been thoughtfully framed with the expectation that it will eventually be squeezed into a consumer device-friendly 16:9 aspect ratio.
I don't expect the area encompassed by the notch to be meaningful to a lot of video content (possibly most). I think there are scenarios where it would be a minor problem, though.
I've also heard the screen itself is slightly wider than 16:9, though in which direction I don't know. Hopefully, wide enough for native 16:9 to naturally black bar the notch
Oh man that notch bothers me. I suppose maybe I'll get used to it, but is making such a drastic design decision really worth the extra few millimetres of pixels on each side of it? It just bothers me aesthetically looking at images of it.
"Don't mask or call special attention to key display features. Don't attempt to hide the device's rounded corners, sensor housing, or indicator for accessing the Home screen by placing black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Don't use visual adornments like brackets, bezels, shapes, or instructional text to call special attention to these areas either."
note:
I personally say no. The form factor is, with all it's curves, a failure for creating UI/UX that feels complete. It's going to force more people to go Android first with their software development. When Android starts getting newer and better software more frequently the sea change will continue to widen and even long lasting fans will want to try something else.
People go iOS first because iOS has a much better market for paid apps - if Objective C wasn't enough to discourage this approach, I doubt a notch in the UI will be.
> It's going to force more people to go Android first with their software development.
I don't understand this comment. What do "all its curves", as you say, have to do with iOS developers suddenly preferring Android? The iOS App Store has approximately a 7x revenue potential vs. Android's store, why would a developer abandon that just because of a new phone's form factor? There have been many new form factors in iOS devices over the last years, and that hasn't swayed anyone.
Probably not, but trying to run the company by the philosophy of "Would Jobs have done this" is impossible, since if emulating Steve Jobs' brain was possible, he wouldn't have been a unique talent.
Not only does it (descriptively by usage, whatever pedants might prefer) mean exactly what it was used upthread to mean, that usage is structurally distinct from an impossible to confuse with the usage pedants prefer (and helps the pedant-preferred version make sense.)
> All that post says is that it is common to use it incorrectly
I'm not sure if “that post” refers to the grandparent or the one linked from it, but in either case you are incorrect. There are several other things addressed beyond frequency of usage.
Well, "beg the question" is a translation from latin - petitio principii - so pedants could say it isn't from your native language (unless you meant latin).
Language evolves - things that start out as misunderstandings or errors become informal usage, then dominant usage, then the correct way.
Others stay misunderstandings or errors.
It pays to learn the correct way so you sound educated as you speak, and so other educated people don't automatically discount what you say, but there's little benefit in attempting to correct others.
That said, mis-using erudite words or phrases spoils the effect.
>Language evolves - things that start out as misunderstandings or errors become informal usage, then dominant usage, then the correct way.
Yes, language does evolve. For example, American English has evolved in such a way that "beg the question" now means "raise the question" to the vast majority of people in the year 2017.
Forgive me, but I think you're in the minority of people who bristle at the contemporary usage of this phrase, which makes you come off as incredibly pedantic.
Please note that I responded to the "by what authority" comment, not the "begs the question" comment... The reason to care about official meanings is to avoid sounding uneducated.
I literally could care less about "begs the question". The formal use can be depreciated - we're not likely to staunch that floe. But irregardless of my feelings, people who flaunt the official meaning and right "begs the question" in the increasingly common usage have the wrong affect - they sound like they're putting on heirs - "raises" or "brings up" each sound more naturist.
> Language evolves - things that start out as misunderstandings or errors become informal usage, then dominant usage, then the correct way.
Kind of like how "I could care less" actually means you don't care at all, despite the literal interpretation of the sentence meaning that you're capable of caring less, which means you DO care.
You can mean what you want, but in this case you're using an important idiom from philosophy to mean something else. People will pick you up on it. Best to say "raises the question" if that's what you mean.
Oh, I do say "raises the question", because I'm aware of this debate and I want to head off language pedantry. That doesn't mean I don't disagree with said pedantry.
I've literally never seen a usage of "begs the question" that couldn't be immediately disambiguated by context.
Well I am glad you cast it in terms of people understanding one another, because everyone understands the (scare quotes:) "wrong" version of "begs the question" perfectly.
Words mean things, but what they mean is a social phenomenon, not handed down from some authority.
I can see where you're coming from. It just sucks that this argument seems to be, "there is no right, get used to wrong shit". And I know, I know, you're debating whether it's wrong at all - but I can't help but feel when people say the exact opposite words than what they mean, it feels wrong. For example, "I could give a damn" vs "I couldn't give a damn" _(and variations of it)_. It's an almost hilariously opposite meaning to what the user intended, yet.. it's going to become the "right" meaning.
Is there no end in your eyes? When does this just start becoming broken English?
> "I could give a damn" vs "I couldn't give a damn"
That's more understandable to object to because the words in a literal context are being misused. This is the creation of an idiom because of people misremembering the phrase. It's probably too late to stop, but idioms aren't created at a very rapid pace.
Begging the question is nearly the opposite situation. There exists an idiom where the words as taken literally are a mess, and people are using the same words, basically-correctly, to not mean that idiom.
The author did not lay claim to authority but they did give a reason for taking the time to tell you what things mean in probably their own native language; that reason was laid out in the second paragraph of the section with the heading 'What it is not'
Do you think phones are a "done" thing? I mean what we are seeing these days is more of an evolution than revolution. With iPhone X I think we know what the phone industry will move towards for next 4 years.
All these features are cool and somewhat exciting but nothing groundbreaking that will change computing/communications forever.
VR was supposed to be the game changer but it appears that it will also take around 4-5 years at least to be mainstream.
What do you think will bring the next revolution in personal computing and communications?
> Do you think phones are a "done" thing? I mean what we are seeing these days is more of an evolution than revolution.
It's always been an evolution. What we're seeing now is a trend towards cellular everywhere, and device-agnostic services (same phone number on your Apple Watch as your iPhone). The next shift seems like it will be greater situational awareness in your devices -- your device can understand its surroundings (ARKit), and what you look like (Face ID).
So phones as a category may lose their uniqueness, in that other devices can fill the same roll, but I think we'll always see an evolution of a phone -- that is, a pocketable connected computing device.
It wasn't always an evolution. Despite all the apple "oh we changed everything look at us" they really did. And for the first few years after that everything was changing so fast it was a revolution. But it has since slowly died out and I guess new technologies with faster innovation will become the new iphone revolution
True, but capacitive multi-touch hasn't been the only innovation in the iPhone over the years. We forget just how limited the original iPhone was (no 3G, slow CPU -- it took ages to render a webpage, even though it was a huge step up over its contemporaries, it was still barely fit for purpose, no App Store either).
I think the slides in the keynote were actually on-point for this, there've been multiple innovations (multi-touch, high-DPI screens, Touch ID, their shift to in-house processors, computational photography), and it's really the aggregate that's lead to a great device. But break it down and it is an iterative, evolutionary process. That's why so many people often seem disappointed after every keynote!
That said, maybe the original iPhone really was a bit special :-)
I'm not sure if it neccesarily that the first iPhone was special in an of itself, but that the shift to mobile was special, and was largely enabled by the iPhone. Subsequent models aren't tied to a once-in-a-generation shift in technology, and so they feel more like iterative improvements.
The iPhone from 5 years ago will look as limited to you as the 2007 phones did compared to the iPhone.
It's just that the iPhone appeared all at once, whereas you have 5 keynotes to go from 2012's iPhone (the iPhone 4S) to the iPhone 7.
Since then we've got: 4G (LTE), Touch ID, dual-LED flash, NFC and Apple Pay, motion co-processor, 802.11ac, Lightning, Bluetooth 5.0, phase detection autofocus, 4K video and slo-mo 1080p, 3D Touch, haptic feedback, water resistance, wide color gamut, brightness increases, and several times faster CPUs and GPUs (allowing for far more demanding apps).
You are looking from a "groundbreaking" and "refreshing" point of view. Everything is an evolution. Is going from hand textile to mechanical textile a revolution (happened in a period known as "Industrial Revolution")? I still think that's an evolution. The reason Industrial Revolution is coined revolution is the "break the norm" mentality. But the inventions and the transition from hand textile to mechanical textile industry was an evolution itself. We don't call human evolution "human revolution" because we broke the norm of other mammals' biological evolutions.
You are just taking the literal meaning of the words not what they are actually being used for. In this case, evolution means the type of small incremental updates that we have been slowly getting disappointed by for the past few years. Yea literally evolution includes revolution but saying that doesn't add anything to the discussion.
"a dramatic and wide-reaching change in the way something works or is organized or in people's ideas about it."
I didn't deny the actual definition of revolution and I recognized it. I am merely expressing my view on the following comments, which are what being discussed here.
First comment:
Do you think phones are a "done" thing? I mean what we are seeing these days is more of an evolution than revolution.
It's always been an evolution.
Your comment:
It wasn't always an evolution.
And for the first few years after that everything was changing so fast it was a revolution.
Breaking norm is a revolution, but the steps are evolution. Everything is evolution.
Do you mean AR? I am not sure how VR is going to change the phone/mobile industry. You need to wear some kind of glasses to actually experience VR. I think you are referring to augmented reality, but correct me if I am wrong.
When it comes to AR, I am not interested in those "look at the pokemon on the street" kind of AR. I'd like projection on the street from the device. I want the Apple Watch to show me a hologram like in Star War. That's the kind of real AR I want to see. I will enjoy driving if map can be projected like hologram on the car windshield so I don't have to check the app on the side.
I think the next breakthrough is just happening now: all cashless transactions. This is already happening in China, India, and some country in Europe (I forgot which one, but over there even newspaper street vendors accept credit cards). US is way behind. Also, chip in human will eventually take off. So just wait for more human-wearable integrations (and this is depressing and dangerous, see my comment below). I bet in no more than 10 years.
Pokemon on the street was a great way to introduce the public to the concept of AR, but you're right- that's not how it's going to work. As long as our phones are the "lens" into the augmented reality, it will stay out of the mainstream.
We need Google Glass, Spectacles, or some equivalent AR device. All of that stuff you're talking about- projecting onto the street, onto the windshield, etc... that's setting the bar very low. We'll be able to do all of that on a per-user basis once we have AR glasses.
And those are hard problems to solve- projecting holograms into daylight without a surface? Good luck outshining the sun without overheating your tiny pocket projector. They all require unique solutions tailored to the problem and the environment they'll be used in. Why bother with that, when you can either work on AR glasses, or wait until AR glasses are readily available, which is pretty much an inevitability.
I wear glasses, so I am used to wearing glasses at all time, but sometimes I can't (running or swimming or tired), let alone we have people that do not wear glasses at all. Perhaps eventually all humans are going to wear glasses (or have contacts) BECAUSE they HAVE to in order to "enjoy" life (which sounds depressing just think about what that means to human free wills and uniqueness). This is what I was referring in another comment: human wearable integration is going to be a huge thing in the upcoming years. No doubt.
Otherwise, there is no way for AR to really take off as a general use. It would be nice to watch your baseball game from a AR+VR (watching from the "eyes" of the players) views.
Why can't you wear glasses running? I'd fall over myself if I tried to do that. (Maybe shouldn't do the trails then, hey?)
But on the larger point, I'm not sure how it's depressing. We mostly all live in similar houses and buy similar consumer products, and we have interests, work, families and hobbies that look similar to other peoples.
Maybe along the same lines of how everyone just has their face buried in a phone these days? Disconnecting from "glasses" (or eventually smart contact lenses or brain-interface) will be much the same.
I run in different kinds of terrains (park, street, hiking trail, bridge, treadmill, track field) despite my vision on both eyes are close to 900 now.
It's really a personal choice. I swear a lot, and I don't like glasses hanging on my nose. Also, I like to relax and practice mindfulness during my run so without glasses I am not distracted by the details of my surroundings (the same reason i think people like filming black/white monochrome). I do recommend without glasses if you can try.
I just feel we are slowly reaching to a point where we can't be free from "vendor lock-in" even in our lives. Perhaps one day there is no physical device you need to carry around except a pair of glasses or wearing a pair of contacts.
I meant VR only. But I was referring to it from a personal computing perspective - How it can change learning and training experience.
However after reading your comment and the one below which mentions quality AR glasses which can replace a monitor will be really revolutionary on how we approach computing.
Yes, cashless is something truly revolutionary. Being in India I am personally experiencing the change that it is brining in.
I want one computing device, or an iPhone that can run OSX (or some future OS thats a blended version of IOS and OSX). Like a Switch that I can take me, or plug in at home and get more power/features.
Been saying this forever -- this is the next HUGE leap that I see. Steve Jobs wanted the iPad to be a small Mac rather than a big iPhone. For someone like me, there are still critical things missing from the iPhone for it to be my primary computing device.
It would literally have to break out into a jailed macOS session when docked for it to be at all practical for me, honestly.
The average user could no doubt make due with a minimal multi-window iOS interface. I have no idea how people work with an iPad in any serious capacity when you are restricted to a full screen interface.
Though it didn't run iOS (and the little detail that it never came out) the "single computing device" model was one of my favorite selling points of the Ubuntu Edge [1]:
"From mobile... to desktop. Yes, it’s the full Ubuntu desktop OS used by millions on a daily basis -- and it runs directly from the phone, so you’ll be able to move seamlessly from one environment to the other with no file syncing or transfers required. The core OS and applications are fully integrated with their smartphone equivalents, so you can even make and receive calls from the desktop while you work."
Placing my phone next to my 30" monitor and bluetooth keyboard/mouse should make the macOS VM running on my iPhone X resume from hibernate and just start running.
The more interesting thing is how tightly connected the macOS VM could be with the iOS VM (I use the term VM here loosly, they could easily be containers living side-by-side and not within a literal hypervisor).
For example, are there two processes running 'Mail' and two copies of every message so that iOS and macOS Mail apps are both working? Do I have to configure them both separately to connect to my accounts? That would be quite silly.
If you can get the two OSs sharing resources but still effectively providing desktop sized vs phone sized user interfaces that could be something quite powerful.
Several implementations of such a concept have been done, one being Microsoft's Continuum [1]. If there is a future Windows 10 "mobile device" running Windows 10 ARM with x86 emulation, as has been rumored, it will likely use CShell [2], their new adaptable/responsive UI model.
yes, That will be great. There are some Android players trying to do it. I think Samsung also tried it but it was premature. And no big player is really pushing it. If Apple pulls it off with their eco-system of apps and quality hardware, it can be a big shift in personal computing.
I think phones are "done" in the same way laptops are "done" -- the form factor is established, and now it's about incremental improvements like better screens, better cameras, faster processors, AR, etc.
Unless someone invents a phone screen that can roll up like a piece of paper, I think phones are going to look the same for a long time.
Face ID has been done, no home button has been done, big screen to the edges has been done. That notch thing is new, but ... doesn't seem interesting (it just obscures part of the screen).
It's certainly a leap for the iPhone for having amoled alone (having it on my old Samsung for years now but still). The notch thingy is important as a design element, showing us Apple's main product's full redesign with their new signature solution to the design trade-offs for an all-screen phone with front-facing camera, finger/bio scanner, etc.
> I sense something. A presence I've not felt since...
I really wish a phone company would just make a "macbook pro" of the phone world. Something where the hardware and battery can keep up with the OS for the next 4 years. Something where every new OS release isn't destroying my performance, and maybe even MAKING my performance better.
We are getting all this new tech in the phone space, faster processors, more ram, etc. But prices keep going up for "premium" experiences. Seems backwards to me
But not my MacBook Pro retina from 2014, ram is soldered onto the motherboard so I cannot upgrade
That's why many feels Apple is going backwards
And that's why many like me are not buying their new products
They're simply not a good value for money anymore
My next laptop is a Dell XPS
My phone's are Xiaomis as well as all my "smart home" gadgets
At least if they break I have better guarantees from a company that's not trying to sell me support as a religion that you have to go to the temple and/or they are much cheaper
My iPhone 6 is from 2014, next year it'll still run a supported OS that seems to be about as snappy as the previous version. Assuming a yearly iOS release that's 4 years next year (assuming they stop supporting iPhone 6 in iOS 12).
I think prices have stayed pretty much the same or become lower over the years. You can get a 64GB iPhone 8 this year for $699, vs $749 for the iPhone 6 in 2014. I think the iPhone 8 is still a pretty "premium" experience, even if Apple now has a more fancy and more expensive model.
I think they'll be supporting older devices with iOS updates even longer going forward. The 32 vs 64-bit CPU was the line in the sand this year. And the iPhone SE has the same CPU as the 6 but is still considered a current model.
I am using an iphone 5s, 64 gb version - it's been my daily phone for since it was released. I've had no issues, other than finally replacing the battery this last year for $30.
Admittedly, I'm upgrading this cycle, but I'm super impressed by how long this phone has lasted. I bought a Nexus 4 (9 months older phone), and it's been complete shit for the past 1.5 years.
That's great - but the Mi5 came out in February 2016. I'm not sure why you can compare it to a phone that was release in October 2013. I would hope that the Mi5 would be better than the 5s!
I am not stretching it. I run the current iOS version on a 4s purchased in 2011. Battery is still working pretty good too. Not as good as when it was new, but the whole thing still works as my only phone without much issue.
You're right, I'm runnin 9.3.5, just checked. I thought I was running 10. Regardless, the 4S has been a true workhorse and I don't think Apple makes them this robust any more (obviously, Apple lost money on me by making such a reliable phone that I didn't need to replace it!).
I don't have much to add, only to say that I generally agree.
I first started creating custom roms for the Sprint HTC Hero when it came out in 2009. It was my first Android phone and I was in love with everything about it. I was obsessed with getting the next new phone with new features every time a new one came out. I made pretty good money and saved most of it; buying new phones was the one thing I would splurge on.
Now it's 2017 and I have had the same phone for just under 2 years. Previously I wouldn't go 6 months without buying a new phone, so having the same one for 2 years seems like a lifetime. But I just don't feel like I have a reason to get a new one.
I've felt the same way. I went from crappy low-end Android devices when I had no money in school to a Nexus 4 and I haven't seen reason to upgrade since. The only reasons I've done so have been because I cracked a screen and because I wanted to hand down a device to someone else. Been sitting on my OnePlus One for a few years - looking at the market now and not seeing any reason to upgrade still.
Worse, I get worried about some newer devices which may make me less free - the Pixel has a very locked down boot process and the Magisk developer has been struggling to support it. I currently use Android Pay on my rooted device and I'm definitely not willing to pay to lose that freedom.
The N4 was the first phone I sat on for longer than a few months; it was such an amazing phone. The N5 was the next phone I bought and I kept that until my Xperia Z5 because I was not a fan of the N6. I was completely sold on the Nexus line until then.
I completely agree with you on newer devices being worse in some aspects, especially when it comes to rooting.
I always feel like around the 2 year mark my phone feels very different compared to when I bought it. Battery feels worse, everything feels slower, and crashes start to accumulate. Are you not running into this?
I have experienced that as well, but I feel it can usually be remedied by doing a factory reset. I also typically never do in-place upgrades for Android updates. I will download the full OS images (or the RUU/whatever updater is required for that brand phone) and do a full reset and restore. I will say for some reason this seems to be less of a problem on Sony Xperias that I have owned versus LG, HTC, Motorola, and others. But I for sure know what you're talking about.
The basic pattern of mobile phone design was more or less settled in the 80's with the DynaTac, and the phones leading up to (but not including) the original iPhone were all refinements of that same original pattern. The same thing happened with smart phones: the original iPhone set the pattern and then there've been a number of refinements ever since.
I'm not saying the refinements aren't huge improvements (particularly when viewed collectively over a period of 10 years), but just that the basic pattern is relatively fixed most of the time.
> All these features are cool and somewhat exciting but nothing groundbreaking that will change computing/communications forever.
Personally, I'm not that excited about a world where there are are continual 'groundbreaking changes that will change computing/communications forever'. There's a lot to be said for consolidating the gains made in these periodic steps up in functionality, and taking the time to understand the new capabilities offered by each.
> mobile phone design was more or less settled in the 80's with the DynaTac
The Star Trek communicator nailed the flip-phone design in 1966. The StarTac in 1996 was able to realize this: a quite different design from the DynaTac brick and its candy bar descendents.
> The StarTac in 1996 was able to realize this: a quite different design from the DynaTac brick and its candy bar descendents.
Having used both, the StarTac was pretty clearly an evolution of the DynaTac, in particular as far as the functionality goes. (But I tend to discount the significance of the flip phone physical design as any kind of major step forward. Which is borne out by the fact that it's so uncommon these days.)
The iPhone was not a total revolution in phones the way you describe. They did not invent the touchscreen phone nor the smartphone. They improved them.
There were many not a few touchscreen phones before the iPhone, no multi-touch ones, and many crappy resistive screen phones that needed a sharp pointy thing to be kind of responsive.
Smartphones were just a niche before 2007 made them mainstream. The iPhone did to smartphones what the iPod did to digital music players, turning niche into norm.
Many phones at the time had web browsers, games, bluetooth support, played MP3s, et cetera. Look at the Motorola Razr as an example. They were smartphones.
> The iPhone was not a total revolution in phones the way you describe.
It was a revolution because it actually sold and was relevant to more than just a handful of high-end users. (I had phones with e-mail, web, and app capabilities prior to an iPhone, but those features were all just sideshows until the iPhone made them useful. The only use I can remember having for J2ME apps was to play Yahtzee on a Sanyo 4900.)
That you don't have a revolution like the first iPhone doesn't mean it's ever "done". When you sum up all the boring, evolutionary changes over the last 10 years you end up with something pretty outstanding. Especially if you compare it to the previous 10 years before that (back when operators more or less decided the feature set of the phones they would sell).
I doubt there will be another big revolution in personal computing until you have direct brain communication (implants or sensors/transmitters that look unobtrusive).
A cell phone iWatch could change its usecase quite substantially, but whether it'll find new uses remains to be seen.
What we call a phone will evolve. Some great communication device or method will come about.
Pocket computers are pretty handy though. Maybe it will evolve into wrist computers or necklaces or something. The smart watches are coming along, but they all have the problem of screen real estate.
To be fair, phones have it too, but with the various zoom features and "readability" modes, they work around it.
I think we'll have something akin to the smartphones (whether or not they include a phone feature) until we have portable, practical, hands-free displays.
It will probably be a fashion accessory that rasters directly on the retina.
I believe we are already living it. It is happening right now after the introduction of services like Whatsapp and WeChat. And all due to their simplicity and user friendliness. They just work for 99% of most modern world daily tasks, and solve a whole bunch of problems one way or the other. So maybe the real challenge for personal computing is connecting these wonder tools to everything else in world that is still complicated or hard to use, making them easy to use or accessible.
Glasses that make you see the interface as good as a monitor would be a huge step forward.
It's awesome that now we have a supercomputer in our pocket that is stuffed with sensors, needs no cables and is always connected to the internet. But looking at it is still cumbersome.
I love the idea of docking a phone to use the data/apps thereon, but with a larger display, ethernet, mouse, etc. I wrote an article about the concept back in 2005, and yet still, I wait.
>Do you think phones are a "done" thing? I mean what we are seeing these days is more of an evolution than revolution.
Evolution is how we got from primitive sea creatures to man.
>What do you think will bring the next revolution in personal computing and communications?
I think that there have not been many revolutions in personal computing and communications. It's all incremental evolution. The only actual big revolution was the invention of the digital computer and of networking.
Beyond that, well:
There were computers at homes before everybody got one.
There were mobile phones, even touch phones, before the iPhone and mp3 players before the iPod.
There were tablets before the iPad.
There was "internet" and "www" (ARPAnet, minitel etc) before the internet and the world wide web.
There were social networks before Facebook.
Heck, there were actually newspaper columns chronicling a person's opinions and everyday life before blogs.
Can the new camera technology be used to map spaces as big as rooms?
If so, this could be game changing for allowing the creation of VR spaces quickly and inexpensively. E.g., play a VR game in your real house after mapping it with your iPhone X. Or better, do a detailed remodel in VR before doing it in real life.
A lot of commercial uses of VR technology (e.g., construction, industrial design, etc.) can benefit from inexpensive, and accurate mapping. Today, the alternative is to get an architect to build a model of your house, to build a crude version yourself, have a Hololens/Tango phone/or other nascent and expensive technology.
If not, what truly is the game changing aspect of these cameras + specialized compute for machine learning/neural nets? They have to have thought through dozens of use cases beyond photos, animated emojis, and other trivial entertainment... right?
Someone has already built a measuring tape app out of this thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpEWv9_6Cg. Not exactly mapping as you're describing, but it's an interesting use case.
They are going to expose some of this functionality as part of their AR libraries. We know this from their Snapchat demo, as well as the gaming demo (though that used the rear camera, not front one).
So... yes, developers will be able to get their hands on some of this tech, but how much can we do with it?
If room mapping was truly possible, I would imagine they would have done more in their demo with this, e.g. see the Hololens game where robots come flying out of walls, and hide behind your couch. That demo was more substantial than seeing a flat tabletop with a projected 3d game, or a projected 3d robots standing on a flat basketball court.
I think you guys are talking about two different sensors. The 3-D sensor (the one that works like Kinect) is only on the front of the phone and I assume only for short range. That's the one the Snapchat demo used in the one that Face ID uses.
The AR demos of games use the normal cameras on the back of the device. That stuff will be available to any device 6S and up.
Yeah, some bizarre asymmetry there. I'd have preferred they just shrink the top/bottom bezels, similar to the Galaxy S8 or LG's V30. I can't see "the cutout" aging gracefully.
They said that you CAN do that, the screen is wider than 16:9 so normal content will already be presented with black bars on the side anyway and you never have the notch covering content .
Charitably, I assume if you’re holding the phone with no bezel, your thumb has to cover up part of the screen anyway. So it’ll cover that space.
Otherwise that’s the dumbest design decision I’ve ever seen them make on the iPhone hardware. It’s worse than the protruding camera that they STILL have.
I never hold my phone with my thumb on the top... I have it cupped into my palm and if I really need to "hold" it I grasp the sides. Why is your thumb on the front?
I love my iphone camera, and if the upgrade program isn't too terrible, I will get the iPhoneX, but call me underwhelmed.
The implementation of faceID seems really poorly thought out. I can unlock my phone, and navigate it before focusing my attention on it. I feel like "attention to unlock" is going to cause an increase in distracted driver related incidents.
These days, after the rise of dSLRs, post-processing is something that occurs after the image is saved to memory.
Raw sensor data to JPEG undergoes incamera processing. Cameras typically only allow small oversight of that process, so many photographers prefer to shoot RAW, and do 100% of the processing via post-processing.
That's apologist at best. I'm not disputing the feature is cool, or whatever. But what they're doing is unabashedly post processing. Come on, in most of the examples there were sliders to choose the effect, the intensity thereof.
To claim "well, it's not really post processing because you're doing it before 'saving'" (also doubtful because if it's an extension of what is currently possible with editing on the iPhone, it's an edit to a saved original) is grasping at a straws, as is comparing it to "raw-to-JPEG". This is 'straight out of Aperture/Lightroom' style editing, aka post processing.
If I remember right from the keynote, "no post processing" wasn't mentioned on the photos that had the new lighting feature. Even if it were, however, I'd still call it true; I would consider post processing something that you do outside of the Camera app (e.g. even editing it Photos to adjust lighting, black point, saturation). Something you do in the Camera app, even if it does some fancy "magic", I would argue falls outside of the post-processing realm.
You're certainly entitled to that opinion, as is Apple, but it basically flies against the definition of anything else in photography. "Straight Out Of Camera" is about taking the time and effort to nail something so that when you hit the shutter button, exposure, focus, composition are all "as the camera saw it", not "as the camera saw it and then image manipulation software found the subject, and applied a mask to the image to burn out the non-subjective areas while keeping the exposure of the subject as-is, if not enhanced".
Edit: Hell, even Apple's own iPhone X page up now says this:
"A new feature in Portrait mode, Portrait Lighting produces impressive studio‑quality lighting effects."
"Create beautiful selfies with sharp foregrounds and artfully blurred backgrounds."
Somehow, these are "effects" which don't fall under the umbrella of post-processing.
But this is a nitpick, admittedly. Nothing wrong with the feature or whatever, but it amused me to hear "No processing. Just [applied post processing]."
I wouldn't consider it post-processing because it's using data that's only available live. Making a live 3D mapping of a face and applying lighting effects to it will give you much better quality than applying lighting effects after the image has been saved.
"Create beautiful selfies with sharp foregrounds and artfully blurred backgrounds."
This occurs optically, by choosing the proper depth of field, and an appropriate focus point. The blurring of the background is "bokeh" and used in portraits, none of which is considered "post processing."
Clearly the iphone guts aren't nearly as capable as my 5D2, but my opinion is that if it's software that can produce a reasonable approximation of something that can be done optically (or in the case of studio lighting with a pair of strobes), it's fine to not be pedantic.
Unless I misread you, this is not what is happening here. That tiny camera/sensor combo is unable to do that narrow of a depth of field. There's a blur, but nowhere near that extent.
The “bokeh” here is completely software generated, and made quite the buzz last year. I remember reading a technical post by an Apple engineer explaining how they reinvented a way to do lens blur instantaneously on the phone.
The main point they were trying to make is that nobody cares, disciplined elitists are irrelevant, and everyone can realize their creative vision now. Thats what matters right?
Thats why the elitists originally got into the craft right?
I believe they meant that in the sense that they didn't modify it in anyway on the computer, it's exactly what would show up on your photo roll on the device after you press the shutter button.
My understanding is that the iPhone applys GOBS of processing to reduce noise and do other things to make such beautiful looking photos from such a pathetically tiny sensor. I assume other phones do as well.
Same here, a tiny bit underwhelmed, not underwhelmed enough to get a Google Pixel successor for Daydream. If my cellular provider gives a decent upgrade and monthly payment plan, then I won't mind that it costs the same as an entry level macbook.
I'm glad the Iphone X is smaller than the Plus line, and has a more advanced dual camera system with the addition of a fast point cloud. That's good enough for me, I skipped the 7 because the smaller model didn't have the depth camera, and the bigger model was too big.
Face ID is marginally interesting, would like to use the API for more. I mean A FREAKING POINT CLOUD IN YOUR PHONE! Good bye Kinect! I can't wait to hover my hand over the screen for gestures, please open up the APIs.
Very important point. With the current iPhone, by the time you have brought the phone up to look at it, it's already unlocked by Touch ID. It was very clear from the demonstration that there was a delay and he had to look directly at the phone. The phone did not even wake until he looked directly at it.
> I feel like "attention to unlock" is going to cause an increase in distracted driver related incidents.
Aren't you not supposed to use your phone when driving, and it is specifically against the law to do so in a lot of places? In any case, it's as distracting as using your phone currently because it seems that it doesn't have to be pointed directly in front of your face, as long as it gets a decent look at it.
>Aren't you not supposed to use your phone when driving
I know that when driving if we need something on my phone, my girlfriend uses it and I just put my finger out to unlock with my attention still solidly on the road
I have a general aversion to giving anyone enduring access to my accounts, but I don't have a problem giving people I trust temporary access.
Regarding safety, I don't think it's unsafe but would be happy to have my mind changed if you have more experience with the relative risks of driver distraction: my hand is on the wheel with a finger held out and she positions the touch id button under the finger, so I've still got both hands on the wheel & have full control in the event I need to steer out of the way of a hazard. I'd only do it on a straight stretch of road with no obvious hazards (and on top of that it's rare that it's needed, usually just if we need a contact number that was sent only to me).
I'd definitely not use FaceID while driving because I'd be uncomfortable taking my attention away from the road to look at a phone screen (even if it's just a glance just like checking the speedometer)
In WA, it's now illegal (a primary reason for a stop) to use the cellphone when you are in your car, unless you are in a parkinglot, pulled over.
Say with this new feature, you disable it, and you are found to cause an accident while being distracted, are you in more trouble because you knowningly disabled the phones safety features?
Also, I commute by bus everyday, so I will definitely be disabling the "are you sure you're not driving" warning.
The law didn't really change. It was already a primary offense to be using the phone. Before that, there were already distracted driving laws on the books. The only real difference now is that it can all be reported to your insurance company.
I don't see how this changes anything really. How are you going to be in more trouble? I don't think there are any laws regarding bypassing safety features of the phone. If it's not explicitly illegal to bypass the safety features, it's technically legal isn't it?
The new law Driving While Under the Influence of Electronics codifies this even more clearly. No more using phones, unless it's mounted on the dash, and you use minimal interaction (such as starting an app)
Could we have a modicum of skepticism in repeating press releases?
>Thanks to this new design, the iPhone X is sealed for water and dust resistance.
So the iPhone 7, which does not use this design, was not water and dust resistant? I know this is a meta point, but it's annoying. Apple can say whatever they like in their releases, but it would be nice to have people familiar with the domain do a smell test on the content.
I think he's saying that because the iPhone 7 was also water resistant, it cannot be that the new one is so due to the new design, given the old one allowed for it too.
I've accepted that the headphone jack is never coming back no matter how much I'd like it to. I still can't accept that a company that is so focused on design has accepted the ever-growing camera protrusion in order to make the phone "thinner".
My 6s has a scuffed camera ring, and rattles when used on a table, due to its inability to lay flat.
I don't know if this differs from country to country, but the vast majority of iPhones I observe are not in a case — probably at least 90%. The design is a major selling point, so I'm not surprised most people don't want to use a case.
Most iPhones I see around are in a case. I personally don't like that, but if you're going to type on a flat table, you'd better use a case to flatten the back of the iPhone, avoiding those rattlings.
The phone before that, where the camera was flat, is the one where everyone's pictures got foggy after a while. It's because the little lens cover would get scratched over time, since it sat flush. The protrusion is intentional to ensure the outer ring is scratched, instead of the lens cover. That's a feature.
Is the DAC even good enough in the iPhone at that point? Even if you had a straight jack audiophile headphones are probably not getting much benefit over, say, Bose headphones are they?
The internal DAC is good enough when I am on my feet. Its more about stability and convenience than sound quality in this situation. Its inconvenient to carry an additional adapter which gets accidently disconnected more easily than a jack.
I use an external DAC (Beyerdynamic A200p) when I use my notebook or my iPhone stationary.
I'd be okay if they removed the headphone jack if the box came with 2x USB-C headphone jack converters (for when I naturally lose the first one). And they sell them everywhere for $5-10 at most.
If I had to go to an Apple store every time I lost my headphones and had to pay $20 for a new converter I'd go crazy. And I heard they don't even come with a free one with new iPhone's? (I could be wrong here)
This is the real core of the problem to me... they have to make legacy support extremely seamless after making an extreme early adopter product transition to wireless headphone tech. At least with the lighting chargers they are everywhere and cheap.
I mean, 1) The Apple adapter is $9 and 2) it's not just Apple that sells them. I'm sure they're sold in just as many places, if not more, than would sell a USB-C adapter.
Well, I said I would be okay with it given those conditions... Like any new tech there will always be a transition period where it's more expensive and less accessible, but there are ways to help mitigate that pain which I've seen vendors neglect in the past, so these concerns are not entirely unfounded.
I personally have not used an iPhone recently to have an opinion on how well Apple currently does it.
Lightning jacks get accidently disconnected more often than 3.5 jacks when I move around. Also the Lightning connector wears out faster because of the stress a cable imposes on it. For instance, the Lightning connector on my iPhone 6S suffers from a defective contact already. The 3.5 headphone connector is fine, even when I use it much more.
Ah, good, found out from the person they got the phone through a third-party and didn't get either of those with it (and didn't know they should have).
Are those the "earpods" or whatever? Since they started making those, I have thought of them as absolute garbage. The sound quality is terrible, they don't block any external audio, they constantly fall out.
Maybe I just have stupid shaped ears or something, but I have always thought as apple-brand "earpods" as gilded shit.
Apologies for the rough language, I just cannot express strongly enough how much I despise those "earbuds."
I'm pretty sure some people sell little silicone covers for them, but I can't help but think that just buying headphones that fit would work much better.
I just left mine plugged into the headphone connector on the headphones. I briefly considered keeping a rubber band on them to tie to adapter to on the rare occasions when I needed to plug it into something else, but it wasn't actually a big issue for me.
Alternatively, they also have bluetooth transmitters that plug into the jack on your headphones now that you can use. But I don't know what the battery life of UI convenience is on those. I switched to the Beats X for listening on my iPhone and have never been happier. The occasional frustration of not charging my headphones pales in comparison to the everyday frustrations of untangling wires all the time.
Because wireless headphones work with all BT devices and cost hundreds of dollars less.
They are also convenient to use while commuting and while working out, which is basically 95% of my time using headphones with my phone. Ambient noise while walking, riding a bus, or being in a gym is generally too noisy to prioritize audio fidelity anyway. That's not what listening to music on my portable phone is for. I have better headphones for my desk.
Disclaimer: I do not own, or use, i Devices, and refuse to buy any laptop > 700€, or phone > 250€.
I personally use my Sennheiser headphones on the PC, but also on the phone, and elsewhere. I got them from my parents when I was young, and, just like my parents used their top-of-the-line sennheiser headphones their entire life, I plan on using mine for the next 60 years, and I’ve got one single set of them.
So leaving an adapter plugged in isn’t optimal, nor is buying new headphones. Because, who are we kidding, in 60 years lightning and USB will be long gone, but 3.5mm Klincke will still exist.
It's not even that it's easy to forget, it's that it's annoying. More bulk in my pocket, and now if I want to switch from my phone to my computer I've got to unplug two things instead of one.
No, I don't consider bluetooth to be a great solution, either. I've got more than enough individual things to worry about keeping charged already. It's like the electrical outlet is trying to give birth to a damn squid every evening.
The difference, of course, is that while a SCSI drive is out-of-date, a headphone jack is not; it is, in fact, superior in every way to a Bluetooth audio connexion.
Audio going to the wireless earbuds will require another round of lossy compression and decompression. And I'm sure we all remember what they said about doing lossy compression and decompression multiple times...
I'm sorry, but if you have headphones of such grade why are you sticking them into phones in the first place? As opposed to something like Astell and Kern offerings?
External DACs are inconvenient when I just walk around. Also the iPhone DACs are good enough when I am mobile. There is almost always noise around me anyway, even if the IEMs are good at isolation.
The reason to buy these expensive headphones is not only sound quality, but build quality. Before I bought better IEMs, normal / cheap in-ear headphones lasted like 3 to 6 months.
They're clearly banking on wireless chargers becoming mainstream and ubiquitous, leaving the lightning connector for headphones. The dongle madness seems less mad if you can charge all your doodads with the one watchacallit.
Have you tried AirPods? Or the Beats headphones that have the same wireless chip?
I think they might be right. I never cared about wireless headphones until I tried AirPods and there're so incredibly convenient that I use them all the time now.
Now I understand why so many people said wireless headphones were amazing.
> Have you tried AirPods? Or the Beats headphones that have the same wireless chip?
I have not. I like the design, and hate cables, they're just a bit more money than I'd like to spend on headphones right now. When the price drops, I'll check them out.
It seems like iPhone X would have been the perfect candidate to switch to USB-C. I had thought this would have been a long time coming given the USB-C only approach on MacBooks, yet it remains curiously absent. I really don't understand the fracture in the Apple ecosystem in regards to connectivity here.
Can anyone enlighten me as to why Apple are still using the Lightening connector here?
If you switch to usb-c without a headphone port, then you've got to come out with two lines of headphones (actually, three, since they still make regular headphones). Also you ditch a whole ecosystem of peripherals, like the Square dongle, that are built around lightning. I dunno. It's something apple might do, but there are tradeoffs. I wish they would switch to usb-c so I could connect my iphone to my mbp without an adapter, but alas.
Honestly, when Tim said "one more thing", I thought they're going to introduce a whole new line of products, like the Surface Phone we've heard rumors of. A device that only looks like a phone, but is in fact, a whole PC. iPhone X proved to be just another iPhone, nothing more.
Ah I hadn't thought about inoperability with peripherals from other manufacturers. I was focused on the need for adapters within the apple ecosystem (e.g. charging an iPhone from a MacBook). This still seems very inelegant but perhaps the Apple we have today has a beauty that is only surface deep.
It looks like it unexpectedly rebooted prior to the demo as the message on the screen was something like "You must enter your passcode before using Face ID".
Something similar comes up on reboot for touch ID users. You have to enter your passcode once on startup to decrypt the storage where the fingerprint data is stored.
It looked like he had a backup phone for that. For the fingertip version every once in a while you have to put in the passcode. I assume that's what happened in his case as well...
I saw that- I am very curious how this will pan out as its released. I am wondering how well it will really adjust to your face changing(for instance a significant weight loss/gain, or injury)
Me (as he gets ready to unlock): "Well, it's Apple, so it's got to work better than that horrendous alpha version of facial recognition on that POS Samsung Note...oops, guess not."
They just showed a full screen video and the black bar was blocking part of the video. This looks really bad while demoing with views animated in real time.
I think the original rumors said they were trying to make the cameras work beyond the glass/display but winded up not quite getting it to work, so they winded up with the notch this time.
Content doesn't go missing that's why.
When you are watching a video that part of the screen is not used on Android. The area would be a black bar at the top/side and Android doesn't put anything in that part of the screen(middle) when in an app or homescreen
No. What Ive means by that is they were bound by the constraints in technology so far so they could not achieve this vision so far.
This is similar to what James Cameron said after filming 'Avatar' that his vision was to create such a film for more than a decade but slow technology advancement was the reason he could not make this film sooner.
Yes, they have failed so far. It's not all screen. It's got a small bezel and the sensor notch at the top. They will need to develop different materials to support a strong bezel-free phone and sensors that sit inside/behind the screen. They are not there yet.
just looking at their own website it becomes so glaring on any screen where the background isn't black. for me it actually looks worse than keeping a border area.
I agree; the cutout steals my attention each time I see it since it's so stark when the background isn't black. I would have rather it just have a small forehead.
Ugh. So wireless charging is great. I really wanted that because having tried some Qi cases and charging gear, it is pretty magical. And the decision to use a glass back makes sense there.
However, Apple seems to just forget that people use their damn phones in cars. Waze is my GPS because no matter how much my car's built in GPS tries, it's not going to be as good as a thing connected to the internet. And in the car I hate to use the damn charger, so yay wireless charging right? Not so fast. Your choices are limited to a big clunky clamp style holder, or a little tiny magnetic holder that usually goes over one of the vents. Guess what? Magnetic holders don't work with wireless charging. Or rather they could, but the ones I've tried (available on Amazon) were complete shit that broke almost immediately.
There are several options to fix this problem:
a. Car manufacturers could include some kind of standard solution to this. At the least they could make a spot to easily mount a phone and make sure it doesn't obscure the driver's view too much while still being visible. Instead they keep insisting on adding bigger and bigger screens. Sometimes they'll go as far as adding a touch screen (looking at you Tesla) for no goddamn reason. Just give me a nice place to put an aftermarket phone cradle. Or at least don't add a 22" monitor where I want to put one.
b. Apple and/or Samsung could lead the industry in making wirelessly charging magnetic car mounts. It's not impossible to do, and magnets would actually help align the phone so charging is efficient wrt the induction coil used. Sure it has a nice glass back, but who gives a crap if I now need to add an ugly rubber case with a 2.5" steel washer to it just to get it mounted?
I get that Apple thinks CarPlay is their long term solution to this. But I think universal adoption by car manufacturers on that one is probably at least 5 years away. And even so, lifetime of older cars is like what 15-20 years?
I know BMW has that. The point of their thing is that you can't use the phone while it's in there. They have "apps" that connect to their display. It's complete crap.
Of course you can charge with a cable. But you shouldn't. Wireless only charging would be fantastic. They already got rid of the headphone jack. Why do we need a data port?
Also, having a dedicated spot on the dashboard would mean not having to run dangling cables all over the place.
Couple of issues here, speaking as a facial recognition developer, of arguably one of the leaders in the industry.
1) The use of 3D data is a step in the right direction, but to use it reliably it has to constantly re-calibrate to the individual(s) it is supposed to pass. This is very important and a constant issue if using a person's 3D depth data as their face for authentication. My employer pioneered the use of 3D data for facial recognition, via 3D reconstruction, before scanning and depth cameras were feasible. In doing so, we became aware of the significant variation an individual's 3D facial form undergoes during any time period: different times of the day, yes, significant 3D facial form transformation; different days, definitely. Females significantly more, as they experience 3D form transformations simply from their menstrual cycle. Men who drink, less so than women, also gain significant facial form transformations on a weekly basis. Over the course of a season, everyone undergoes significant 3D form transitions, to the degree authentication is not reliable unless constant re-calibration occurs. Which introduces issues of system failure after indeterminate lapses of use, or sudden physical transformation - such as an accident, where your face is swollen. A person could be attacked, and their face altered to the degree their phone no longer authenticates. A person could fast for 2 days, not use their phone, and it will no longer pass.
2) They should be using multiple biometrics for authentication. The facial image in combination with the depth information, if treated separately with completely separate verification trained algorithms, only counts as two biometrics. Reliable authentication of a device attached to one's credit cards and finances requires a MINIMUM of 3 biometrics. They could solve that with the addition of Touch-ID or the addition of a pass code in addition to the face image and the face 3D depth data. But that borders on 'inconvenience', and I feel consumer pleasing stupidity. Sometimes being safe should require an extra step, simply so the consumer has the assurance their data is safe. It's like hearing the click as the lock on your door seals. Too automatic, and it's insecure because one never knows if it is active.
However, ignoring the face as authentication, the iPhone just became a very slick 3D avatar creator.
Not hating on your points, because they're valid, but the sudden transformation part of #1 strikes me as similar to when your hands are wet and you're trying to use TouchID. The phone will shake the passcode prompt a few times and eventually give up and ask you for your passcode.
I don't really see a problem with this. Apple has done a good job of making it known their biometrics aren't perfect, and will err on the side of caution when tested with strange inputs. You're not allowed to setup the phone without a passcode, and it serves as the final barrier to access if biometrics fail.
Ad 1): They briefly mentioned in the keynote that Face ID does indeed adapts to gradual changes like growing a beard. So, that form of recalibration seems to be part of the concept.
Do you have reason to doubt that Apple did not do all of this or even more? In the end we’ll see but one indicator is that the banks at least let them use Apple Pay with FaceId. I am guessing here but I suppose they will still get the “card present” tarifs and if I recall correctly that was tied to the fact that banks deemed TouchId a sufficient form of authentication.
Windows says hello. I imagine in an non-fixed setting like an mobile phone, trying to peek at your phone while not drawing attention to it (meeting or otherwise) will probably be somewhat of a challenge
Windows Hello was one of the first things I disabled on my surface. When I was working with someone, it annoyed the shit out of me to have to turn the laptop real quick to log back in, etc. Sometimes I just wanna activate it without looking, and it had to "wait" a couple seconds to realize I wasn't looking and wanted to just spend .3 microseconds to throw my PIN in.
Much easier to just 100% of the time splat out 4 numbers.
Well everyone will need to wait for real-world tests to be sure, but I'd be quite surprised if they've got it good enough to work when someone is wearing a hat and sunglasses and yet still be secure enough to have a very low false-positive rate.
They generate a depth-map of the face with a pattern projector and IR-camera. Facial bone structure will be unaffected by superficial changes. I suspect things that obscure large portions of the face, like large glasses or a sudden thick beard will give it some difficulties.
That's what the marketing material says. I'd like to wait for some real world tests to determine if this works anywhere near as well as they say it does. My intuition says not, but I'd like to be surprised.
I find I type my PIN faster than Windows Hello works, more often than not, and yeah it is easier to surreptitiously punch a pin under a table than bring your phone to face distance.
Of course it's easy. But it's a severe threat model. Targeted physical attacks aren't really on the list of concerns for most people. And if you are worried about it, you shouldn't be using touch or voice unlock either.
Presumable the IR sensor will know that your photo or replica is not body temperature. That said, maybe heating up your fake with a hair dryer will work?
Why the downvote? All of these system have been proved easy to trick. Do you really think depth perception is a real hurdle? 3d printers do exist. It is based on IR detection of projected points, so you might even be able to fake it with a specially prepared photo (for example with holes for the ir points) and an ir source behind it.
If a common thief needs to go through the trouble of buying a 3d printer, etc., then I don't think it's as big a deal.
Sure, when it comes to more organized crime or the government they'd be more capable. But at that point if you really want to protect your data then I don't think an iPhone is where you want to be putting that data in the first place..
Probably right, depends on how much value you can extract from the phone. Just to resell it, probably not. Use the apple wallet from some rich guy, maybe. Getting nude photos of some celeb off a phone you stole is worth a 3d printer easily.
You could be right, but it seems to me there is a lot of data going into that thing, if it is designed to not just check the data for matches, but also self-consistency across inputs it could be a pretty high bar... I imagine it does depth, IR temp checking (nose colder than face, etc.), image, and maybe even a couple ms of time monitoring to make sure the face is pliable and maybe even has realistic deformability.
Just a guess from the types of sensors and the custom ASIC that was designed to integrate them... at 600 billion operations per second it certainly seems like it would be capable of real-time integration and validation of all those things.
I wonder if the ir camera could be used for other purposes. If it can actually read the temperature, that's a neat trick. Probably can't though (see prices of flir lepton), I'd guess it is a b/w camera sensitive in the 700-800 nm range.
But still, with the dot projector, and that kind of processing power, they should be able to detect 3d gestures, similar to leap motion.
Can't speak for anyone else, but you are making the tiresome and fundamental mistake of arguing about a security system without actually considering economics, usage, and threat scenarios, which are key things that define security.
>All of these system have been proved easy to trick.
By what standard, and in comparison to what? Even ignoring that implementations vary dramatically and importantly in inherent hardness [1], even what you're describing is already significant effort. In terms of security categorization, what you're describing ("3d prints", "specially prepared photo", whatever) all fall into the fundamental form of a targeted physical attack. But once we're into targeted physical attacks everything becomes much harder. Passcode? We live in a world where cameras are everywhere already and becoming more ubiquitous still, along with drones. Even simple shoulder surfing is a thing, but when you're out in public and need to unlock your phone how certain are you really that there is not a single camera, anywhere, pointed in your direction? Even if it's not directly down at the screen merely seeing your finger/thumb movements may be enough. How much work are users in general actually willing to go through to unlock something they use constantly for often very short bursts of immediately desired information? Because if your system isn't actually something people will use and has a good work/value tradeoff, it's worthless. It's not the people who are wrong, it's the system.
This is why threat scenarios are vital in security evaluations, always. In general, there is a big topological difference between scalable attacks and targeted attacks, and with remote vs physical presence requirements. Coming up with convoluted attacks and scenarios quite literally misses the entire point. You need to consider what a system is trying to do, how well it does it, what it is trying to defend under what circumstances, the value therein, the audience targets, etc etc. You didn't do any of that, and on HN people really should know better.
FWIW, I do have significant concerns about Face ID, both in terms of implementation in practice, and in terms of how amenable it is to some real practical security practices I'd like to see like coercion code/variable unlock for example. But my list of concerns do not include anything that relates to a targeted physical attack unless it proves trivially scalable in the real world, as that's outside the core scope.
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1. Seriously, it's immensely irritating how many tech people think ideas, theory and so forth have much of any value whatsoever vs real world implementations, or think they can always talk broad categories rather then specific implementations.
It probably uses an IR light source to illuminate your face invisibly. Trouble on stage may have been from stage lighting drowning out the IR, though that parts just speculation. I didn't watch
Right, but I was saying it probably uses an IR _source_ to illuminate your face in the dark. Then again, humans probably just emit enough IR without it.
Unsure about the downvotes, do you really buy Apples 1 in a million numbers here? Really? This tech has proven to be unreliable before and is nothing more than security theater and for a minor convenience
Projector-based 3D face recognition. Nifty. Shines an IR dot pattern onto the face, recognizes with that, works in the dark. Seems on continuously, wonder how much power draw.
I'd bet ~30 days with this in the public's hands we will see headlines like "How to beat iPhone's facial recognition with X".
There are some crafty folks out there--
They look like they worked hard to cover that, even training the network to reject 3D face models done up by Hollywood makeup artists. It's hard to see how you'd spoof it better than that.
Doesn't really have to look like a hollywood mask though, fooling neural networks is a growing area of research these days: http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling
There are probably many redundancies in face ID, but I wouldn't be surprised if some interesting techniques for fooling it show up.
This is a fundamental issue with developing secure software/tech in a private. You have to hope you are the smartest team in the world and that you thought of everything. It's you vs everyone else.
Since it's based on neural nets, I think there might be ways, but they will likely not work consistently.. they will only work in certain conditions. Also note that they also track head position (must face camera) and check the eyes (must be open and look at the camera).. this will be hard to get right all at once.
I'll be surprised if this works for me as a blind person. There's no way I could directly look at the camera. I don't need the iPhone X since I don't care about camera quality, but if touch id starts being removed from all new iphones I will be giving Android a long hard look.
Apple's pretty good at accessibility, they may have thought of that with one of their settings.
They seem to work so hard at making sure all their products work well for people various levels of vision problems I have to believe they would've done something. After all even the Apple TV has support for people with total vision loss. I don't see why they'd break their flagship product.
If it's true that touch id was expected to ship until a couple months ago they may not have found an alternative. If they are expecting touch id to be in next years model I could see them not making face unlock accessible since you can still get new iPhones with touch id. Remember Apple did not make the iPhone accessible until the 3gs, so there's no guarantee that new features will be accessible.
I wasn't aware that the 3G didn't have accessibility, but they've trumpeted it a lot over the last few years so I have a hard time thinking they would just give it up.
I mean you could just make a setting that ignores whether someone is "looking" at the phone. It would make it a little less secure but at least it would still work.
I have a very hard time believing the rumors that they took touch ID out at the last moment. Maybe when people do teardowns will see some empty space but I figured that something they would've had to lock down early in the year.
I've got to admit I'll miss touch ID. I wonder if it'll ever come back if they figure out a way to get that sensor-under-the-screen thing going, or at this point do they just decide Face ID is good enough and go forward with it alone?
I'm not sure. It was truly bad in the Android 2.3 days. I own a Moto E since it was cheep and I was curious if Android had improved. Running 5.1 was pretty accessible, but was slow which is expected since it's a low end phone. Android apps on a chromebook work pretty well, but who knows how that will translate to a modern mid range Android phone.
THIS is all I could think since the rumors started. If someone wants to steal your phone can't they just hold you for 1 second and point the phone to your face to unlock it?
It probably activates when the phone is raised or held at certain angles. They're pretty smart at recognising the ways devices are held and moved, such as with the watch activating when you raise and turn your wrist to check the time.
Also when Craig demonstrated it, he raised the phone, looked at it and also swiped up from the bottom. If that's how it works, they might activate the sensors at the beginning of the swipe gesture.
There were indications during the presentation that it actually runs face recognition often, including as a power-saving technique (sounded like it would turn screen off when you weren't looking at it, back on when you do).
I'm not a camera hardware expert, but my understanding is that (like most things), the booting process uses up more power than the same duration of time in a steady state. So the "five minutes" number is misleading; if that 5 minutes is broken up into hundreds of discrete startup cycles (which is not at all unrealistic - people instinctively check their phone a lot more often than they think – and there's no way for the phone to tell whether you're turning it on to glance at the clock or to unlock it until after it's turned the camera on), then it's a significant amount of power draw.
Isn't this what the Kinect does to determine who you are and sign you on for the Xbox? I think that's been around for 4-5 years. Impressive they can do it all on the phone.
Apple actually bought company (PrimeSense) that was responsible for Kinect sensor and it seems to work the same way. It's just impressive that they manage to fit it inside these size phone. Google tango devices are bigger.
It’s technically an older concept, and has been used previously for other kinds of 3D scanning of people, but this seems to be the first mainstream miniaturized version of this.
Can't help wondering what the next model will be called given what a dead end "X" is.
After OS X they never went to 11. They codenamed the 10.N versions but it doesn't seem likely with a "iPhone X 10.2 mushroom badger"-type name.
Best guess: they'll just call it the iPhone next year. Like some other products they'll just use the model year to distinguish. Guessing we won't even see the "iPhone XS", it'll just be "iPhone (2018)".
We have iOS 11 which I think is a good indication that Apple isn’t avoiding the number 11. They’ve officially broken the ‘s’ pattern by skipping the 7s and going right to 8, so I’d say the most likely name for the next iPhone is iPhone 11.
it has pretty thick bezel. I think the overall design is evocative of the original iphone with metal wraparound molding, but I think Apple compromised aesthetics in exchange for better drop test durability. From head one, it's definitely not an attractive phone, far from it.
I'm bothered by the move to TouchID and now FaceID from a "the government can make you unlock your phone" standpoint. Legally, the precedent is that the government can force you to use "something you are" like your face or fingerprint to unlock your phone. Currently there is at least some ambiguity to the precedents that say they can't require you to unlock your phone with "something you know" like a pin or password because of that could be construed as self-incrimination and forbidden by the bill of rights.
If you're worried about law enforcement requiring you to unlock your phone DO NOT USE TOUCHID OR FACEID.
One of the most distinguishing features of the phone is the vertical orientation of the backside cameras --- anyone else realize this is likely because their forward facing sensor bar is likely in the way if the backside cameras were horizontal?
A few other quick notes:
1) Those short x-ray shots of the iPhone camera assembly look impressive. I wonder how many components and extremely-fine-scale positioning have to go into the lens system (especially since they have to move! =) )
2) The lack of TouchID seems like a hardware regression to me, but I'd feel more or less confident in that based on the actual experience of FaceID vs TouchID. On a separate note: the engineers working on that must be paid boatloads given how valuable they must be to the company, combining both machine learning + security knowledge. (Not easy to find people like that.)
3) The screen is nice. I don't understand why people are complaining about the screen extending "behind" the front-facing sensorbar, to be honest --- seems like a tiny, fixable detail in the scheme of things
4) I really think people will buy this phone for the camera, and not for many of the other features that were advertised. (not AR, not awesome graphics, not amazing aluminum and glass, etc.)
5) Anyone know what usage has been like for Force Touch? I always was under the impression that it wasn't that popular, but kudos to Apple for not dropping it and still believing in it.
I can only speak of my own usage, but I use Force Touch a fair bit. The first use case that comes to mind (and one I use fairly often) is changing the torch brightness but the app shortcuts are handy too (also force push on a folder with notifications for quick access to the apps with notifications within it).
I wasn't really excited about AI and ML until I saw this iPhone X and the stuff they were doing with the Animojis and the Facial Recognition Tech. Whew! I may have to study AI/ML
I think we're going to look back on that "animoji" bit as a turning point in modern entertainment. It's a silly, even dumb little feature, but look at what's really going on there: realtime near-Pixar-grade facial expressions.
Someone's going to build a toolkit that lets kids make their own CG movies with friends acting out all the roles. That's gonna be nuts and is just the start.
It's a great achievement, and from the demo it looks like they're almost there (the framerate looked a little low and the characters were missing some subtleties of facial expression). I'll make a wild guess and say that in three years it's going to be nearly seamless.
Sometimes i wonder if the people in the valley are so dumb or just so far ahead of the pack that foresaw a future were you can make a beautiful lie just to the take money from the big fish on the pond. // offtopic
Can I ask what your frustrations are with Android? I was actually thinking about going to the Google Pixel, but it's been a while since I've used an Android phone as my day-to-day device.
2) Hold home button to activate Siri without unlocking phone. There
is no Google Assintant button on most Android devices except the
Samsung S8. I want to be able to activate with headphones on while in my pocket without having to count on Ok Google.
I've been considering making the switch as well, can you comment on a few things for me?
1. "Play album x____" used to work in google uh... assistant? Now? Whatever it's called now. Now it doesn't. I remember it working on my iPhone 3gs waaaaay back. Does it still? How about "next song" and etc?
2. How is Google app integration? Even if I make the switch, I'm not going to be using apple suite of calendars and whatnot, my company uses google suite, and I do not like spotify and will continue to prefer Google Play Music. Do those apps work well? (Calendar, Google Play Music, Inbox)
3. You ever hear of someone with a google voice number successfully using an iphone for SMS? I have to use the Google Voice (good) or Hangouts (shit) app for texting, and I need a data connection to do it. I have my reasons for this, is it possible on an iphone ?
1. Play album "blank" works on my Nexus with 7.1 and iPhone but it isn't consistent(on the Nexus). If you the word has special characters like dashes or & it appears to play something that appears to be a radio.
2. The Google Suite works well enough for me on both the iPhone and Nexus. To be fair I actually use Gmail and Google Calendar on my iPhone so there really isn't much of a switch. Google Play Music seems to work just as well on my Nexus as the iPhone in fact I sometimes play music off it in the car because it has a headphone jack. I have not encountered any Google Apps that work better on the Nexus vs iPhone except probably Google Photos because it won't sync in the background for the iPhone.
3. The apps last time I used them were identical. I have had connectivity issues/dropped calls when using G Voice years ago.
Just an FYI on 3, if this was before hangouts, they abandoned Google voice as the texting app for "voice" customers, forcing us to use Hangouts. A couple months ago, they released a revamped "Voice" app to encourage Google voice users to switch to that over hangouts. Hangouts no longer supports non voice sms, and it's performance is absolute garbage compared to the vastly improved Voice app.
Started with the original iPhone, to iPhone 3, to iPhone 4, switched to Android for a few years and the last one I had was the LG G5. The customizability is awesome in Android and I made use of 3rd party launchers to great effect. To me, Android's strength is the ability to get the information you want fast.
I'm still frustrated by this aspect with iOS (I have an iPhone 7 Plus now). Android OS UX is streamlined -- I feel like I have to fumble a bit to get to the app / information that I want in iOS.
But I went back to iPhone because the interop is better (I use an MBP daily for work/personal), apps are better, battery life is better, camera is better, phone is better, etc. It's just better hardware ... at least compared to my experience with HTC and LG phones.
I just switched from an iPhone 6 to a Nexus 6P earlier this year and am extremely happy to be free of Apple and onto an OS which is far less hostile to users, imho.
Also, another nice thing is that the Android app sizes seem to be about 1/10th the size of comparable iPhone apps.
Just switched to a 6s from an LG G4. I still have my headphone jack and the whole experience is so much better. Only thing I miss are my homescreen widgets.
I wonder how well Face ID works with dark skinned people. Dead serious. Historically facial recognition has had a tough time with dark skinned folks. The inclusion of an IR camera should mitigate, if not solve this, but I'm curious to the accuracy in practice.
I'm aware that it uses an IR camera. What I'm curious about is what the accuracy rates are in practice for light vs dark skinned people for Face ID in general. There's more to Face ID than just the type of camera they're using, I imagine. Also, what do you mean by that wouldn't be.... What is "that?"
My understanding is that the issue with people with dark skin is that the camera has less to go off of because there's less light reflection. Face ID shouldn't suffer from that problem since it uses an IR camera.
Given that they say it works in the dark, I'd guess dark skin works equally well. They also use a black guy in their marketing material, where he's wearing a winter hat, scarf, and grows a beard
Not sure why I'm getting down voted. Here's a link to the marketing material where a dark-skinned guy is wearing a hat, scarf, and grows a beard: https://www.apple.com/iphone-x/#face-id
For me? Having a phone is basically the same size but with a bigger screen is a great win, as is the improved contrast and visual quality.
I can tell you TrueTone fantastic from using it on my iPad.
I've wanted the camera system from the plus size phones but again I didn't want to phone that large. So to be able to get an improved version of that in a phone that's almost the same size? That's another big win.
As usual it's even worse in europe. In germany it's 1149EUR for the 64gb model, 1319 for the 256gb one (all including taxes). The latter one is pretty close to what I paid for my 256gb macbook pro 13" 2 years ago (the newer pros are however also more expensive).
If we purely compare prices without tax then 999$ are currently 835€, compared to 965€ (1149/1.19) on the german side. Or as the original post was about CAD, the 1320 CAD are 905€, which is somewhere in between. Which means before taxes the phone gets already more expensive here, and after taxes even more. But this is nothing new for the iphone X and also not limited to phones. Electronics are usually more expensive here.
> if not, what would be an identical EUR price for the $999 phone (tax not included)?
The question is what is an identical price? Based on end-user price and actual exchange rates? Maybe 920€, since that should be what is costs in the US after tax. Based on the average disposable income in the target markets? Don't know. Based on what people are willing to pay in each market? Or based on what the phone manufacturer simply wants it to be priced in each marked?
To be fair, the MB Air is fairly old in comparison. Also, the display is far better on the iPhone X and last time iPhone 7 was compared, it faired better than many notebooks in CPU tests as well. It only got better since then.
I find it fascinating how hard Apple make it to find the battery capacity (mAh or Wh) for iPhones.
My understanding is that they do not want people to make a direct mAh capacity comparison to competing phones on the basis that iPhone can "squeeze out" more out of the smaller battery thanks to optimisations.
Why are people comfortable carrying a $1000 piece of equipment that can be dropped or stolen in an instant in their pocket? My Nexus6p takes great pictures, runs everything smoothly, and I don't have to freak out as much if the $350 suddenly vanishes.
People also drive around in expensive cars on open roads with a lot distracted drivers. You an also get hit in an instant by one person not paying attention. You just have insurance for that, just like you have Apple Care or a similar insurance in case it happens.
Apple Care doesn't help if the phone is lost or stolen. However, I'm quite sure that the risk of damaging or losing a phone is much greater than the risk of crashing a car (at least in the UK and Western Europe). Hence, the price of phone insurance against the price of the phone is so much worse than the price of car insurance against the price of the car.
Then, does someone become lower risk the more time and experience with a phone, like no claims, age and sex profiling on car insurance, or is the price of insurance the same whether the customer is a 25 or 50 adult male.
My phone is the piece of equipment that gets the most use throughout the day so having every creature comfort & feature when using it makes sense to me. I'm not sold on the X but the price has almost no impact on my decision to purchase when it comes to phones.
My point exactly, if you use the phone for just 1 hour a day and keep it for 2 years then you pay ~$1.36 a day for the hardware. I use my phone for 2-3 hours a day so the cost is probably closer to $0.45/day. It makes perfect sense, even if you tack on Apple care it's still a good value (for me).
Yes, it’s a trick to find entitled consumers who would really benefit from an all-inclusive no-questions instant replacement device protection plan! Just $9.99 per week will give you the piece of mind that you’ve been missing!
Just put your phone number, address, and credit card details on your HN bio and one of our prestigious client grooming agents will be personally in touch with you at your earliest convenience…
Is there any way to actually steal an iPhone any more? I think they're just bricks.
But, I completely agree with you otherwise. This thing is just too nice to keep in my pocket all day. Plus, I'm too spoiled to appreciate it. It's like the most awesome, user friendly camera known to man, with an onboard computer and phone -- and I'm not sure I care enough to use it.
For same reason why people comfortable to pay for their car maintenance might be? There is always hidden cost of owning something and everyone can decide whatever they want to take a risk or not. Many of us here buy high-end PC hardware even if we know in 2 years it's price will likely drop up to 2-3 times so I don't see why phones are any different.
Also personally over last 10 years I lived in different parts of the world including Europe and Asian countries and worse and none of my devices or personal things were ever stolen and I only break few devices. So might be it's just less of problem for some especially considering many people rarely go outside of their usual home / office or travel to countries with high risk of theft.
I've traveled a lot too, and haven't ever had things stolen. But I know people who have. One of my friends had his iphone in a waterproof protector strapped around his neck for Songkram in Bangkok, and someone in the crowd walked right up behind him with a scissors and cut the string and ran off . He had a second phone stolen shortly after. Luckily he works in travel insurance and was a big believer, so everything was fully insured! Maybe the bad stories just stick out and are the exception not the rule.
Plenty of people wear watches/jewelry that are worth more than this. My wallet, sans cash, is arguably worth more than $1000 to me if I had to replace everything in it. The value extracted from carrying the thing around is obviously worth more than the risk.
For some it is a status symbol. Ask any teenager how make/model of the smartphone designates their social status at school... It is similar with other items. You can buy (second hand) jeans for $10 and you can buy designer jeans for $1000. Both are suitable to wear in most situations. Some people have no choice. Some don't mind spending (wasting?) $1000 on the high-end version. The features are not always the reason people buy things and this nowadays includes smartphones.
Well, for starters, to some people $1000 is nothing. After all, there is a watch store down the street from me and all the watches start at $50,000. Some are a quarter million.
I carry my iPhone, iPad, MacBook, Apple Watch, $300 headphones and $200 sunglasses with me everywhere. What's the big deal?
I've owned every iPhone from day one and use them without a case and without insurance. I've never had anything broken. I've never had anything stolen either.
I used to be like this until I went through 2 iPhone 7s in the span of a month (dropped both of them). Now I've accepted my fate as a loser case-using pleb for my phone :(. Props to you for fighting the good fight, though!
There is a vast spectrum of personal situations where people can easily afford a $1000 phone every month to people who's monthly wage is less than the price of a $100 phone.
Different companies target different demographics who have varied preferences and utility functions.
For many, that's the point: to show others(inc. the opposite sex) that you are carrying a $1000 piece of equipment. But people prefer to invent other reasons.
If I drop it, It doesn't cost $1000 it costs $100 (at least before this screen type). It won't be stolen as long as it's either in my hand or my front pocket all day (unless I'm mugged). But I have insurance for that. Basically I don't consider it a risk of a sudden loss of $1000.
Just parking my car is a risk of a sudden $1000 loss, even with insurance.
You are carrying a time bomb, that phone (Nexus 6P) came with so many manufacturing issues that android 8.0 has added a special feature just to allow you to reset your phone in case of bootloop problems.
Yeah, the 6P has a famously bad battery lifecycle. Many people's moderately aged phones just start shutting off even though it reports 30%+ battery remaining. Google has been pretty good about replacing them if you bought directly from them though and they recently just started giving people brand new Pixel XLs.
I assume they are doing this mostly because of an inventory surplus combined with "Pixel 2" less than a month away but it's still nice of them to do it even though these phones are a year out of warranty for a lot of people getting these replacements. Even with the Pixel 2 out they could likely sell the older Pixels for a few hundred bucks.
>Why are people comfortable carrying a $1000 piece of equipment that can be dropped or stolen in an instant in their pocket? My Nexus6p takes great pictures, runs everything smoothly, and I don't have to freak out as much if the $350 suddenly vanishes.
I think AppleCare+ insurance is a good deal here. I use the phone wherever/whenever and never sweat smashing it to bits. It also means I never both with screen protectors or cases (except for ones that add grip or just look interesting).
Given that I have a pile of four generations of smartphones sitting on my desk waiting to be recycled, it's also easy to visualize that brand new $1,000 iPhone X sitting in that pile in a few years time. The new phone looks great, but the marginal improvement over my existing phone doesn't look like it's worth $1,000. (Particularly in light of the opportunity costs involved.)
Most people don't pay anywhere near to the unlocked retail price of the phone (so they don't consider it to be a $1,000 device), and many have insurance. If I drop my iPhone (which I paid about $100 for out of pocket after rebates/incentives/trade-in/etc), it's a $99 deductible.
My $20 flip phone survived falling 7 feet onto concrete without suffering a scratch without any type of case.
I never understood why vendors keep mentioning "thin" and "sleek" in the marketing, when most people end up getting a case which in turn makes it thicker than a 10 year old flip phone.
Yep, but laptops are treated with way more caution and attention. Phones are constantly whipped in and out, left on tables or benches, used around kitchens, toilets, swimming pools...
The page is so long that I didn't realize it existed. I saw the big "X" logo and assumed the page was still a "coming soon" teaser, so I closed the tab. Only after reading your comment did I realize I needed to scroll to see the content below the fold. :)
Its detection of how far I'd scrolled down was also off; the images kept "popping in" at higher and higher levels on the screen until by half-way down the page they were presumably entirely off-screen because I couldn't see anything else at all. Extremely unpleasant reading experience.
And about 50% of that is just about the camera. Do phone manufacturers still see the camera as the most important thing in their phone? I'd have thought that years of over-promising lowered the customers expectations anyways.
Does the iPhone X Super Retina Display lack the 120hz refresh rate of the iPad Pro ProMotion Display? I hoped that 120hz would be the future because I really enjoy it and feel that animations on my iPhone 6 feel a bit jerky.
Yes…they mentioned the tests they put it through. Different hairstyles, facial hair, etc. and it worked; they tried pictures and masks and made sure it didn't.
I am surprised they didn't change the included lighting <-> USB cable to USB C. Out of the box still incompatible with the MacBook Pro, and forced to use dongles/adapters.
I am surprised that they still only include a 5W charger. Especially when they advertise fast charging with the 29W charger. Would have been good time to include 15W USB-C charger and USB-C to Lightning cable.
To program iPhone apps. AFAIK, Until the recent Xcode beta you couldn't push code wirelessly to your iPhone, and even now the feature in the Xcode beta is pretty slow. Also I enjoy charging my iPhone with my macs. For a company that takes pride in seamless connectivity within their ecosystem I find it surprising that you cannot buy an iPhone + MacBook Pro and connect them without adapters.
So a lot of times I show my phone to my friends when they ask about the time or if I get a quick message I want to show them on the notifications screen. With Face ID, would this trigger a wrong face recognition? If so, I can see this potentially locking me out as I rarely use my phone when I'm out with groups of people. Touch ID worked a lot better in terms of fine grain control, so this move to Face ID makes me wonder how many different edge cases were considered in this design decision.
How does the "Home" gesture work with games that require gestures? If someone has a game that requires flicking items upward from the bottom of the screen, will that now be impossible? I don't have an iPhone, but I'm assuming that games like Flippy Knife and Flip Master, currently #1 and #2 on the Play store, could run into issues.
A swipe up that starts past the edge of the screen is already a different gesture than a regular swipe. It works the same way as the current phone (swipe up from bottom brings up the "control center").
Yes, but I've seen this control center option get buggy when apps require similar low-swipe gestures. It would be quite frustrating to deal with this without a home button option. Nevermind how annoying it would be if (god forbid) your screen cracked a bit and lowered the touch fidelity slightly.
Sorta. I've constantly opened the notifications or the control center on current and past iPhones in games that require swiping. Maybe I'm not precise enough when playing but I do it so frequently that I'm pretty confident I would accidentally close some apps in this case.
Still, I'm glad they're trying something different. I'm curious how it turns out.
If it works anything close to how it does currently, you have to swipe from off the bottom bevel to the top. If you look at all the screenshots and videos, there's a small bar there.
Current apps ignore input that starts on the bevel and only detect it if it starts and ends on screen.
So, I guess I'm the only one who thinks the notch looks great? Gives it a bit of character! I won't be buying one though, I'm hoping my iPhone 7 lasts at least another 2 or 3 years.
Also speaking of Black Mirror, the first episode specifically, and the real world news story that reminded everyone of that episode… I'm sure David Cameron would love to unleash his inner pig :D
I approve of Face ID more than Windows Hello, but I'm not convinced that neural networks are ready for security prime-time. Have we solved adversarial attacks yet? Were any of the masks they used in training painted with adversarial patterns?
(The tech is cool, though. Actually amazing, that it fits on a phone.)
With Face ID, all the government has to do is detain you. Apple warned against evil twins, but they should have warned against anyone living with you. Family members, kids, roommates.
I thought Tim and the whole team did a great job presenting. And the whole company on every team did a fantastic job making every single piece easy to use. The iPhone X seems like a step forward in phones. I’ve used a number of androids and can say that the usability just isn’t there.
What ianferrel is saying, that in all the scenarios you could use TouchID on previous phones, you can use your passcode on the iPhone X.
I think it's totally fine actually... I'm sure there are several strange scenarios where FaceID is cumbersome because you can't point your phone straight at your face, but in those scenarios you can always just type your passcode.
That in combination with scenarios where FaceID is more available than TouchID (wet hands, for instance), I think it probably evens out.
You're right, why didn't Apple product designers consider the massive segment of the population attempting to unlock their devices via facial recognition in the midst of a blizzard?
I… don't disagree with the "meh" though software buttons and no buttons on the face are pretty different results. And dual camera was added on the 7+ last year (though it was hardly a first back then, IIRC LG and Huawei had dual-camera models in early '16).
This is, of course, a threat model issue. If you're Assange/Snowden, you might want to shy away from Face ID, but you probably didn't have Touch ID on anyway.
Off topic. I posted this same link right when the page was live and it got flagged. This seems to be the only iPhone X link on HN now, but was posted 20 mins after mine. What caused mine to be flagged? Not mad, just curious :)
The TechCrunch/Verge links were on the home page already, so it seems they decided to consolidate into one thread and change the link to the product page.
Cuff someone, pull their phone out of their pocket, hold it in front of their face. "Is this your phone? Oh, it looks like it is..."
How's that Fifth Amendment thing working out for you?
EDIT: There's legal precedent that specifically says you can be compelled to unlock your phone with your fingerprint, and that's not "testimonial" (that is, your right against self-incrimination isn't in play). There is zero reason to think FaceID will be treated any differently.
Interesting twist. There was advice going around for protestors to disable Touch ID as cops need a warrant for a keycode, but don't for a touch ID. Not sure how accurate that is, but presumably you can disable Face ID if you think you're at risk of being shaken down by the police.
iOS 11 comes with a nice feature to temporarily disable Face and Touch ID if you're ever in this type of situation. Tap the power button 5 times and that's it.
This actually raises an interesting question. I say it's easier to do it since there appears on the surface to be less opportunity to mess up as with touch. Sure you could make a face etc but that just seems easier to do in stealth (not seen by cops as doing so) with a finger. [1]
Edit: As only one example you could in theory program a finger that wouldn't typically be used with touch id.
It's interesting how Apple is moving away from being the first phone with a feature (face id, Samsung did that before, or oled displays that are edge to edge). I think the shift from that innovation is a maturing step, but also a sign that the company is aging poorly. They can no longer claim to be leading with creation, just with quality. More and more the focus in smartphone development, not just Apple, is on being the best of what currently exists instead of actually bringing groundbreaking technology to the table.
For Samsung, nope. You can just open someone's profile picture on Facebook on your phone and show it to their phone and It'll unlock (or not, just like with their actual face).
Samsung didn't do face unlock first either, it was part of Android 4.0. Of course, using a single camera without movement you'll only get 2d data, so it shouldn't stand a chance against Apple's 3d sensor.
No, they didn't. What Samsung did was release software that mimicked facial recognition. In fact, it mimicked it so well, people were convinced that Samsung did it first. What Samsung actually did was implement software that would sometimes coincidentally "recognize" a face, and more often would "recognize" a photo of the target user. What Samsung didn't do was implement facial recognition that was reliable and secure, which I think is what most people think of when they think "facial recognition".
This raises a major question though - what's the use case and threat model for facial recognition? If you're remotely concerned about security, clearly you're not going to use it. If you only care about preventing the casual attacker, either option seems good enough.
I just don't see a security model in which Apple has substantially improved it. The security of it is terrible in either case - all Apple did was make it more expensive.
> What Samsung actually did was implement software that would sometimes coincidentally "recognize" a face, and more often would "recognize" a photo of the target user
No way unique to Samsung. Every implementation I've seen fails at this, even the latest one in Windows 10.
If you care about security, don't use it. That's my advice.
I think it was reported here that Samsung just stored a jpeg of your face on the local file system and did a simple compare. But sure, they get to claim being first. I suspect Apple is okay with that.
Google had face unlock back in 2011 when the Galaxy Nexus came out but I'm not going to pretend it was anything like this. It worked alright but had plenty of warnings saying it wasn't perfect and that someone that looked like you could unlock your phone. I always found it quite cumbersome to use because it turns out my natural way of holding my phone doesn't point the front camera directly at my face. I hope for the sake of iPhone X users that that isn't true for FaceID and that the sensors are wide angle enough that it isn't as annoying to use as Face Unlock is.
As others have said, the Samsung face unlock was not secure. Windows Hello has been around a while though and I think it works similarly to how the iphone one works.
Yes I will concede that the original iPhone was a game changer in terms of new features. However once smartphone competition picked up Apple (rightly, in my mind) mostly sat back and refined features others had tried before.
Ok, what consumer device had capacitive touch before the iPhone. You just gotta name one! I'm pretty tired of these smug ignorant attitudes, this isn't reddit.
Also, I stated capacitive, not multitouch, if that is meant a strawman.
If you're simply looking for capacitive touch in a consumer environment, then there are a great many. Simple capacitive touch sensors to replace physical push-buttons were widely seen in the 80s, I remember using them on elevators, and built one myself as a child.
Capacitive touch sensors that registered an X/Y position rather than a simple on/off state were also common in laptop touchpads from around the mid to late 90s. The iPod introduced a capacitive touch wheel to replace the click wheel in their second-generation model, released in 2002.
There were various capacitive touchscreen display devices around before the iPhone, but probably the most relevant to your query (and one of the most well-known, due to its similarity to the first iPhone's technology) was the LG Prada, a phone with a capacitive touch-screen announced about 6 months before the iPhone.
The thing with the iPhone's touchscreen wasn't that the technology was particularly revolutionary -- sure, if you combine enough words together, then you can make the argument that the iPhone was probably the first mass-consumed capacitive multi-touch hand-held consumer device, but you can remove any of those words and it was no longer the first. The revolutionary aspect of the iPhone was, in my opinion, the software that allowed the device to be controlled with the relative imprecision of a finger, rather than a stylus. The actual hardware to process the touch inputs was at best evolutionary, not revolutionary.
I stand corrected. The Prada predates the iPhone by 6 months with capacitive single touch screen. I guess I got angry in my hasty reply; it was a combination of things.
FingerWorks? Looks like they had a bunch of multitouch products starting in 1998. Probably not coincidentally, their technology was acquired by Apple in 2005.
How many iPhone X will sell this month and how many Samsung phones sold the 1st month they released edge to edge displays? I think part of Apple's problem is success, they have to launch with a profitable phone the 1st month; no delays & no defects. Samsung can have a higher internal scrap rate for the 1st few months because they sell less and it impacts the bottom line less.
I actually thought they were always of the opinion that they will only lead when they feel like they can make it a good experience or that the tech is finished or mature enough.
Samsung's face recognition software was hacked from day one. Not only did, it was hacked with a 2D picture, something that was also shown possible since 2011, when Google first introduced face recognition. It's like Samsung didn't even bother to improve it at all.
Being first with a crappy solution is not exactly ideal, either. We'll see if Apple's solution is that much better - I don't really trust any face recognition tech, but the 1:1,000,000 FAR ratio vs 1:50,000 for fingerprint looks promising at least.
> Apple Computer widely popularized the computer-based cut/copy-and-paste paradigm through the Lisa (1983) and Macintosh (1984) operating systems and applications.
I'm impressed with the presentation and looking forward to the iPhone X. Some features are gimmicky like the Animoji, but a lot of the new features and upgrades are really nice. That being said I have two main gripes.
I know it kind of goes against how their Camera app and system works, but I really wish that Apple would (or will) enable RAW shooting from within the default Camera app. I use a separate app, besides for the special features like level and white balance adjustment, for the RAW shooting. I feel that it's kind of put there because it's available but they don't really care about it -- you can tell from the fact that the Photos app doesn't properly show RAW photos. It would be great if you could seamlessly take a photo and be able to take and export the RAW if you enabled a flag in the settings, just like how 4K was/is hidden behind a flag.
The other gripe is now the control center is from the top, rather than the bottom. I use the control center often when controlling music and the flashlight and it makes it less usable for one hand. In fact, I'm wondering how the "swipe from the bottom" will work with apps that take over that gesture, because I run into a lot of issues with trying to open the control center but being annoyingly overridden by the current app. I'm hopeful but hesitant that Apple thought of this and worked out kinks regarding this.
It's interesting that they are not retiring the 6s, which is now 3 generations behind. I am not the only one refusing to buy a smartphone which requires some dongle to listen to my music.
iPhone X has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.
What does this in disclaimer section means?
It means that they purposefully did not file with the FCC before presenting this so they would minimize leak opportunities, and did not care as their timeline is sufficiently padded forward that they will do that this month; but they also can't pretend it is already sellable: the FCC technically could say "no" (though it doesn't seem sufficiently crazy different from the iPhone 8 that I would imagine anyone expects any chance of that happening).
Probably hasn't certified by FCC yet [1], for sale. The FCC process has been subject to leaks in the past, so they've probably waited until after main announcement.
they are promoting it before pasing through FCC certification, maybe they wanted to keep it secret since FCC data is publicly available and that would basically reveal their design and specs
Basically means that Apple had a hard time getting the final specs worked out so they didn't submit it to the FCC for review until it was too late to have approval ready to go for the announcement.
I know that a ton of people swear by the iPhone, and it will probably be a hit no matter what, but every new one that comes up all I can think of is how much good UX they sacrificed for the shake of having a better looking product.
One button without an always on back button was already a turnoff for me, but no button at all? at least android has swipe from the bottom.
FaceID instead of TouchId will remove a lot of use cases people got used to - no longer answering texts in meetings anyone?
So how secure is FaceID actually? It does a 3d scan like the Microsoft Kinect and maybe gathers some more light information in the infrared sprectrum, but that can easily be circumvented with advanced 3D printing.
They even demonstrate that it recognizes you with facial modification like a new beard, a new haircut or a new pair of glasses.
By bet it that this technology is totally overblown and circumvented quickly.
With the Kinect "sign in to profile with your face" we made sure the person had a heartbeat - there's minute color fluctuations in your face that actually allow you to discern heart rate/ BPMs.
That was using primesense. Apple bought primesense. I'm sure they're doing something similar
They said it's 20 times more secure than touch ID, which since it uses more data I could believe.
They also said that they got special-effects artists and other things to work on it and try and make it hard to track. I imagine it's going to take a lot more than a simple 3D printed head to trick.
We all knew as soon as this phone is released people are going to start trying to break this, it should be fun to see what people find.
I very much appreciate the OLED high contrast, wide colour display.
I have yet not watched the release and read the technical details but I am more than slightly concerned about “Your face becomes your password”, while it’s obviously optional so security conscious people by no means have to use it, I’m not confident that it’s a sensible idea to promote the widespread use of what is known not to be a secure, private piece of information that you can change or choose not to use.
However, in my opinion Apple is by far one of, it not the most security conscious large corporate manufacturer of hardware and software and generally tries to know as little about your personal data and promote encryption (FileVault, forced phone encryption etc) as much as possible while maintaining practical use for general public. So I am very interested to see what makes this so different from Samsung/Google’s failed and easily bypassed face unlocking they were very vocal about but ultimately was an embarrassing security and PR failure.
The dimensions seem much more focused on aesthetics than functionality to me. Being mostly thin doesn't seem to buy much when the camera sticks out. Why not make it uniformly thick and increase the battery capacity?
For those of us who enjoy one handed use, the SE still seems unmatched.
Has anyone seen anything about how to get it not to unlock automatically with your face when you look at it?
I have bus times on my lock screen, one swipe to the left away. That seems to become obsolete if the phone automatically unlocks when I look at it.
Additionally, swiping up from the bottom is the single least effective swipe for me. Pulling up Control Center fails for me more often than not, with the little "looking for me?" rectangular handle popping up on the bottom, and still it doesn't work well.
I wonder also what this means for screenshots; with no Home Button to push along with the power button, what do you do? And what do those screenshots even look like, given the ears at the top of the display?
My current PIN is 6 digits, so ~7500 can also unlock my phone on a random guess. Chances are the first five people to try will trigger the passcode though.
Haven't checked your math but that's random guesses on an insecure password and prevented by rate limiting, you can't just enter 7.5 billion passwords.
Face recognition (other than Face ID I mean) is fairly advanced. Let's say a government wanted to unlock my phone they could search for similiar faces and just pay the person. Sure a lot of trouble for unlocking a phone and it's theoretical but it's still a flawed system in my opinion.
There's no perfect solution to this problem. Secure password is too clumsy to enter on phone many times per hour. Passcodes are easy to catch via shoulder surfing.
Sure, I see that but different users - different habits.
I manage just fine with a 25+ character random alphanumerical password that I change at least every six months. I only use Touch ID when I'm home and am very aware when entering my password. In the end it's just a phone but I like to have it at somewhat secure.
Having to enter a 25+ character random alphanumerical password every time you need to use your phone isn't anywhere near acceptable for modern usage expectations. Hell, it's not even acceptable for laptop and desktop computers.
Sure, a useless system is technically safe but it's still useless.
For the average user, definately not, I agree with you there.
For laptop and desktop computers this should be the standard in my opinion, at least 20 random chars if you value your privacy and care for security. Once your inside the system you can use a password manager to use passwords as long as possible without any notable impact on user expierience.
But I haven't said I'm the average user, and a six digit passcode just isn't secure I doubt you'd argue on that point?
I'd argue that under some conditions: I feel it's secure enough for locking a phone for example because a phone won't allow any form of brute-force unlocking that would allow an attacker to try, lets say 1 password/sec. Same goes for pin codes on debit cards. Same goes for a physical combination lock safe: 1 million possible combinations would take an impractically long time to crack on average in a realistic real world attempt.
For things like hard drive encryption where you can get the specific piece of hardware and have software brute force it then yes I agree it's insufficient.
It's funny how the thread has three times more comments that votes. It's like everyone is in a rush to say something but they forget to upvote the story. Shouldn't upvoting be automatic when you comment in a thread?
No, it shouldn't. Because you may still want to comment on a story, so to say a part of it stinks in a very bad way. Something that IMHO is what most commentators are doing here, and for reason. By no means am I going to up-vote the latest apple bullsh*t, but will happily take time to read through the stuff and even drop a line.
I've wondered about this myself (although I've never heard the term "Veblen zone" before!). $999 is a big jump from $699 but it's not a crazy high jump. If you're paying for it monthly over two years it's $29.17/month vs. $41.67/month, an $12.50/month increase.
Still expensive, but very much an attainable status symbol.
Did you not see the array of cameras and sensors in the front? Or the longer battery life? Or the 4+2 core chip? Or the reengineered OLED? Were you actually sleeping during the announcement? Serious question.
You asked what justified the price bump, and he told you. Whether you care/will use the things that are raising the price is irrelevant. If you have no need for those features, then buy the cheaper version.
The price of products is more a function of the perceived value for the consumer, than a sum of the cost of the components.
Adding more expensive components to a phone, doesn't make its value go up if it doesn't add some extra functionality or durability or something.
The array of components for FaceID are just replacing TouchID, so for the consumer the net value is 0.
I don't care what they have to add to make it work, what matters to me as a consumer, is what value I get out of it. And at the moment it looks like a net of 0.
truth, cost twice as much as S8 and I fail to see justification for double price - slightly smaller bezels top and bottom bezels (but huge bezel/frame all around), telephoto (OK, though pretty ueless) and inconvenient face id (overfingeprint)?
anything which cost more than S8 must have serious benefits over S8
...and all I wonder is why they are skipping number 9? Are the negative connotations some culture? iPhone NEIN?
With Windows 9, there was at least the explanation that software might confuse it with Windows 9x (which I didn't buy, since there is view api returning the version as a string, and Windows shims GetVersion if you don't declare compatibility anyway).
More on topic, this looks nice, I think people will not be disappointed like they were with the MBPs. Can't wait to try it in a store (and probably can't afford it either...). Edit: no touch ID?? Might have spoken too quickly...
During WWDC 1998, Steve Jobs announced Mac OS X (as a change from the original Rhapsody strategy) while Mac OS 8.1 was still current. There is precedent by Apple to announce version X before version 9 is released.
I'm pretty impressed and blown away honestly that Apple chose to support Qi wireless charging over coming up with some proprietary nonsense. This might be the killer feature that finally gets me to upgrade.
I suspect only because speculation alone is getting to be tiresome at this point. There are so many comments that say this or that about how Apple isn't the same because Steve Jobs isn't there. What would be interesting is someone really digging into this, looking many different aspects of Apple since it's inception. Otherwise it's just not substantive and can come off as lazy at this point.
Like I said, that's all speculation. From what I can tell based on the shade of gray of your comment, you received at most a couple of down votes. It's really hard to distinguish between something meaningful and noise here, particularly in a hot-topic thread like this one. At the end of the day, I think I'd just make a small mental note but otherwise just chalk it up as collateral damage in a heated thread.
This is the first time Apple have given in to OLED displays and wireless charging (and a standardised one even) - both relatively old technologies [1] which were at their disposal during Steve's time.
From what I've seen the corporate secrecy at Apple will make such conclusive investigation next to impossible. What I often think of is NeXT and Steve's return that saved Apple in the 1990s.
> iPhone X is splash, water, and dust resistant and was tested under controlled laboratory conditions with a rating of IP67 under IEC standard 60529. Splash, water, and dust resistance are not permanent conditions and resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Do not attempt to charge a wet iPhone; refer to the user guide for cleaning and drying instructions. Liquid damage not covered under warranty.
I wish they had enough confidence in their water resistance that they would cover water damage to some degree in the warranty ...
Hey question. Currently, if an officer has you under arrest they go through your phone. With a strong password, they tend to give up. With FaceID wont they just put it to your face and unlock it?
So...wait, wasn't one of the biggest selling points of the (awful) Touch Bar on the latest MBP that it could use Touch ID? And a few months later they are moving away from that entirely?
The notch is really not that good UX. All that elaborations and tricks to show it or hide, to fit in there notifications. If you go bezel-less, one of the best options now is Xiaomi Mi Mix 2. There are already reviews on YouTube. I'd say it is the best configuration yet for that type of a phone. Also, it's worth to consider that it is already the second iteration after the first Mi Mix.
For instance if I'm using an app right now I hit the home button and it take me to my home screen with all of my app icons. How do I do this on the iPhone X?
Being that it is the 10th anniversary, I was hoping they will come out with something ground-breaking. iPhone X seems like a good phone. But it's just a better iPhone 7.
Although iPhone X is a beautiful device and depth camera will have many innovative applications, I'm so disappointed with iPhone 8(plus). There is barely any difference with iPhone 7(plus). As for wireless charging - seems like charging pad will be available only next year and you will have to spend extra money. Considering rumored problems with iPhone X production and starting shipping it beginning november I would expect their year to year sales go down.
From the footnote, fast charging works with the USB-C chargers. That means it is possible it supports USB-PD like the iPad Pro. It does mean that fast charging requires the Apple 29W charger. But should also work with any USB-C charger.
I grew up in a time when "Magnets + Screens = NO! BAD!" Is this not the case anymore? Like, I get freaked out when my girlfriend attaches her magnetized Surface Pro pen to her SP4. Even the macbook magnetized chargers freak me out. Is this just poorly learned behavior that's no longer relevant?
Only if they wanted it to be: stainless steel is not significantly ferromagnetic. My guess is they don't want it to be magnetic but I can't think of a good reason other than "that's not what phones are like".
By not marketing it as a replacement for the 7, Apple has managed to significantly bump the price of the device with barely anyone the wiser. Anyone hazard a guess at the increase in apples profit margin on the X. The price appears to have gone up significantly, for a comparatively small increase in BOM cost.
Even if you question their design decisions, it's hard to fault their product strategy
Perhaps the UX needs to be felt in person but it feels like a way worse UX than before. It seems Apple is losing sight of the question which IMO should define the choices we make when it comes to technology. Does it make peoples lives better? I don't see how this phone does. It feels like apple made something for the purpose of making people want it. It's un-apple like.
Re: black bar. For what it's worth, folks that reviewed the Essential Phone said that the notch on the top does "go away" after using it for a few days.
What I am more disappointed about is Apple not going with a curved display. It looks amazing on the S8 and taking it edge to edge would have made for an incredible bezel-less illusion.
I really don't see the extra $300 justification between this and the regular iPhone 8. A slightly better screen and better camera with otherwise similar specs. Edge to edge and face scanning emojis are neat, but I just can't justify that kind of spend for it.
That, and I'm not all that jazzed about Face ID. Seems less secure than touch.
Wouldn't Face ID allow a stolen phone to be easily unlocked? Just put the stolen phone in a different container (with a hole for the camera/sensors) and point it at the victim.
My daughter likes to "steal" my phone to play games on it. With touch ID, she can't. She wouldn't have a problem if the phone has Face ID.
So does it bug anyone else that the status bar around the notch looks misaligned? The rounded corners make me feel think it's sticking out past the bottom of the notch, and there's this huge empty space above it. Especially weird with the clock. Maybe it's one of those things that looks better in person.
I don't understand why the website keeps repeating "it's all screen" even though the phone is not all screen. I own a entry-level Motorola G5S, never owned a Samsung before so not fanboying here, but their phones strike me more as "all screen" than this iPhone X. Am I missing something?
I do hope Apple have got this facial recognition stuff right, but personally I'm skeptical that it'll be better than TouchID.
For me, from reading previously leaks, this feels like a compromise where design (we want a phone that's all screen) wins out over usuability (TouchID is great for usuable security)
I kind of wish the "home screen line" at the bottom was a big long thick rounded line to mirror the notch on top. That would make the notch a lot less jarring. In the screenshots the "normal" UI seems to never use the bottom space anyway.
Scale an element up (the X), while scaling another down (the device). Place both inside a position fixed/sticky container and interpolate between scaleStart scaleEnd as a ratio of how much has scrolled.
More to it than that from what I see here, but that will get you started
As an Android user I'm still kind of interested in this phone. One thing that bothers me on most phones is the camera sticking out the back. It ends up being the point of contact to every surface you sit it on and sometimes the camera glass breaks.
If someone is willing to do that to you, odds are that they're also willing to apply a crowbar to your limbs should you fail to comply with unlocking the phone.
I'm just excited the GPU'S are getting faster in a mobile device. I really wanted Apple to have more pixel density in their iPhone X. 2000+ do would mean that we can wear an iPhone as a head set and have a descent VR experience.
So many people pre-complaining about some actually neat stuff. The screen looks fine, stoked about the HDR10. Portraits will looks really nice. Wireless charging is a big plus. I think this will be a great phone.
I turned off the stream because I needed to get back to work. Did they say anything about security for FaceID? Such as where the data about your face is stored. Or what about just holding up a photo of someone?
They did mention that they tested against photos, and worked with hollywood makeup artists to make masks to test the phone as well. The number they mention for the odds that someone elses face will match yours is 1 in 1,000,000. They also said that touch id has a 1 in 50,000 chance, so it is 20x more secure.(I say that a bit tongue in cheek) I would like to know how they crunched these numbers though.
It’s stored in the secure enclave locally on the device.
They said it can’t be fooled by photographs and they tested it with “Hollywood mask makers”. It’s “one in a million”.
Meh. I still have a 6P. I will pick up used 7 now (as there is always a ton for sale after a new iPhone) so I can use the NFC for the Tokyo subway. The face thing to unlock to pay is a non-starter for me.
It would be awesome if they could use the facial recognition feature to eliminate the problem with spurious landscape/portrait mode switches when you are lying in bed, reading the phone at an angle.
I was surprised not to see a reconstruction of your own face as one of the animoji options. More than a novelty, it could be very valuable possession to a family member, after someone passes away.
They already butchered the MacBook Pro with the TouchBar last year. And all for a 30 second demo during the keynote. Here's hoping that FaceID actually works and isn't FacePalmID :/
FaceID shows the difference between Apple and other smartphone manufacturers. Apple doesn't release features until they are absolutely sure they can engineer them to work perfectly.
Of course I don't. But the presentation gives enough information to be able to assume it is secure. Some other manufacturers' solutions can be tricked with photos. Since Apple mentioned dot projector, you can assume they are tracking the 3D model of your face which by itself should be much more secure. And it works with Apple Pay, the banks wouldn't allow it if it wasn't equivalent to Touch ID.
So windows Hello, which also uses 3D models, has been available for years.
As to banks, I'm fairly sure (although I have no inside knowledge) that the banks won't have been allowed to review this technology in advance of the release, so they have no real assurance here.
You can of course assume it's secure and as usuable as TouchID, but I'm guessing the devil will be in the detail on this one.
Swipe gestures, a steel frame, and a higher ppi screen. It sounds like the iPhone may have finally caught up with my BlackBerry Passport SE. Maybe I'll give the iPhoneX a try.
The bar is as low as today's iPhone home button. I have a strong feeling you will hardly ever reach it by accident, considering scrolling from a point that low is unnatural and uncomfortable.
Also, there is always a big obvious bar down there.
Do we have any idea what carriers like Verizon will charge to lease the X? I am currently paying $109 all in for 4GB of data and unlimited calls and txt. Phone is iPhone 7 128GB.
I'm pretty curious about the new AI chip that Apple might put in their phone. If the integration with Core ML works well, it might lead to a series of new interesting apps.
Another reason to keep using my iphone-5s. New phones are way too big, and I love the home button. If I was forced to upgrade I'd get the iphone 7 se (the mini one)
It's rather the 6s one. Still, I hope they will upgrade it in future. Also, I'm sure they will release scaled-down version of the X in time; it's just easier/cheaper for them to release a bigger iPhone first.
The Animoji thing is surprisingly neat. I was all prepped to make fun of it when they put the name on the screen, but that's just... really really neat.
Seems likely/plausible. Most of these tech companies prefer to buy a company and then integrate their tech over developing ideas like this in-house these days.
I can see a lot of use in "I don't really want to record video and worry about how I look today, but this stupid poop can share my exact facial expression".
I don't have an iPhone and don't plan to have an iPhone, but this is going to be a surefire hit feature for Apple, and I expect other platforms to try to emulate it pretty quick.
Also, a friend of mine pointed out how popular it will be among the furry community. :)
Seems completely useless to me. Apple has lost it's focus. I'm thinking of switching to Android for the first time since iPhone 3G. The only reason I'm still on iOS is for iMessage/Facetime.
I feel that Apple knows exactly what it's doing with this feature. There is a strong pull with iMessage for 15-25 year olds in schools, the kind of market something like this will go over pretty well with and potentially create more lock in to their message platform. Along with all the other photo apps that will take advantage of this tech. You could even just look at the Animoji as a tech preview for all the other devs.
it may be useless to you ... but like, do you know any "regular" people? do you know how popular things like bitmoji are? and snapchat face 'filters'? This is gonna kill ;)
Will it kill in the first iteration though? I know tons of people who have snapchat and speak in emoji, but they are all using 5 year old iPhones or budget androids.
Because they are 10-25.
It's a CPU+GPU+ML-optimized chip. I'd say "Bionic" is a bit of a stretch from the marketing department but it's likely a reference to the neural network capabilities which are modeled after biology.
Fellow Scandinavian here. Apple has talked a lot about privacy and security in last couple of years, both on stage and off stage. I'd even go as far ans say it's probably one of the topics they've been most vocal about off-stage.
What's your specific privacy concern in relation to the presentation given?
> I think Apple needs to position themselves as a privacy concerned company
They have already been doing this for quite awhile. With their practices on device encryption, public stance on cooperating with police for unlocking devices, etc, they have made it a key differentiating factor between them an Android in many ways. And when it comes to security and privacy, you are incorrect when you say that all phones today are the same.
Throughout HN comments for the last couple years, it seems to be widely acknowledged that Apple offers the best privacy of the current mobile industry.
It's Apple's way of transitioning to a higher price point on their phones. Now they have the iPhone X at $1000 but oh, there's still have this iPhone 8 at the lower price point... I'm betting next year there is no more lower price point and the new standard is $1000 phones.
No, A See-through phone is something Robert Scoble predicted since last year, but i never bought his hype and even the AR stuff is not really ground breaking.
Everybody is discussing the features like they've already bought it. But I find that literally none of the features of the X make sense over the 7, or the 6 even. Maybe a lot of people said this before but to me that's it. The iPhone X event should be remembered as the event when Apple jumped the shark.
No, it didn't. The screen said "Enter PIN to enable Face ID." The phone had been rebooted, and a password is required first. Same as TouchID. He failed, FaceID did not.
I think Jobs would be throwing it into aquarium until the black
notch bar is removed. After looking at those photos the notch is pain in the eyes and pure abomination.
With all that hype building up, I was hoping they would introduce something less underwhelming than an iPhone without a home button like you know... a new wearable.
Face ID seems like a great way to build a global database of people's faces. Not saying they will, but if they wanted to, that would be the way to do it.
3D Touch (before called Force Touch) has been in Apple products since 2014. I use it all the time on iPhone 7S, it's a regular part of interacting with the operating system:
- force touch an image to view fullscreen
- force touch app icons to open a quick menu
- force touch buttons in Control Center to open a menu
It's like a quicker touch-and-hold action in other operating systems, although sometimes there's also a touch-and-hold action in iOS which can be annoying.
Having used an iPhone with pressure sensitive screen the past year, it remains unused for me, partly because the gesture feels unnatural and partly since most apps don't support it, I dont expect it to do anything.
The iPhone 4 was actually the only iPhone with a number which coincided with the generation; before it, there was 2G, then 3G, then 3GS, then 4. If anything, the 3GS should’ve been called the iPhone 3, but they’ve been pretty clear from the start that the name doesn’t really reflect a simple incrementing version number.
Considering their market share, a lot of people have never been excited about them.
I think the iPhone excitement is mostly a US thing. For a lot of people here, it was the first smartphone they saw - or even their first mobile device.
It's hard to get excited about iPhones when you're used to more modern technology.
Goodbye privacy? A phone that can be unlocked with your face = easy enough for cops to snoop on you. No need for a password, just taking your phone and pointing it at your face unlocks it.
Most regular users of iOS products know very little about these kinds of features, they just enable these things without thinking, then I have to explain why its bad. I have this exact kind of talk every other day on a regular basis.
Looks like the truth hurt the majority of you too much. This is fact in the life of an electronics repair tech, so much so that it should be written as a law. Most users have ZERO CLUE. They don't read a manual. They piddle around until they get what they want working and tend to stop there, and go no further.
Oh, and panic mode? Cop sees you doing that, you've obviously got something to hide and they can act then and there. Not a very smart move.
This is reality. You may not like it, but you're part of the reason it is what it is.
I really don't get the notches. They're extra ugly, they put the sensor in a vulnerable position and are basically there so that they can claim a thinner phone forcing user to fatten it again with ugly plastic cases just to have the phone rest flat
My guess is it will be called iPhone X Series 2. Also iPhone 8/8 Plus next year will change to "iPhone" and "iPhone Plus". All follow the same Apple Watch naming as they can't have iPhone 10/iPhone 10 Plus. They keep the "8" this year probably for the hope to gain market share in China as people there like the number "8".
Are they aware that "Surgical‑grade stainless steel" means extremely cheap? Surgical‑grade stainless steel is designed to be single-use. They advertise their phone as having steel that is good enough to use once?
> There is no formal definition on what constitutes a "surgical stainless steel", so product manufacturers and distributors apply the term to refer to any grade of corrosion resistant steel.
"Surgical‑grade stainless steel" doesn't mean anything. AFAICT, there's not certification or metal grading committee that says, "yes, you can call that 'Surgical‑grade stainless steel'. Accept no substitutes."
Beside, we're making phones, not doing surgery. What is that even supposed to mean to me the phone consumer? I understand that I'm supposed to think "better" because "surgical", but for all I know the standards aren't all that high because it just needs to be sharp, not durable.
IOW, it's just marketing, just like "military-grade encryption".
maybe you can cut yourself on it because it's made for surgeons and they just wanna raise awareness that their product is not that safe for careless consumers?
I mean if they want to use a corrosion resistant metal that sounds fancy they should have gone with Monel. It's very hard and tough, corrosion resistant, and the name even sounds fancy and expensive. It also has a nice look when machined.
Sterilizing surgical tools is extremely expensive, and not good enough. You can sterilize some tools, for some purposes, but usually that doesn’t remove all contaminants.
So surgical tools are instead produced for single time use, and after that recycled, to ensure they’re always sterile.
They are much harder to sterilize, and autoclaves don't work. Ideally you'd dispose all tools exposed to prions, but if that's infeasible, the CDC recommends an autoclave in a bath of NaOH.
The phone is definitely 2017. But I would like to condemn those who say its futuristic. Whats so futuristic about it?! is it foldable? Is it wearable? Does it generate holographic images, Does it at least project to wall for larger display? Does the battery lasts a week? They could have placed a touchID on the back(well, may be next iPhone). You might say, I am asking way too much in 2017. Yes I am! Thats why its not futuristic.
Just Realized : Face recognition unlock : Biggest Security Scare
- Case 1 : Imagine crossing security check or border crossing. Guards just take your phone and point it to you : UNLOCKED . No need to resis to give passwd
- Case 2 : drug the activist and point unconscious victim ! Voila !
- Case 3 : Steal the phone, and change the cover and flash it in front of the real owner !
It does, but at the moment the post was put online, there is nothing official, except the name. Hence "this is iphone X" looks like a placeholder for a future event.
I really wanted to see this turn the iPhone X into the primary computer for all things - replace the MBP and the iPad line. Dock to screen/keyboard etc... so that everything is just running off of the phone.
That would be a perfect jump off point to AR glasses with the phone as the computing engine in 2020.
It would let Apple re-focus, kill a bunch of product lines and swallow the market with a singular device + robust peripheral market.
It would be trivial to simply observe which finger a person uses with Touch ID to unlock their phone (something people are doing in public every single day). Something tells me 99% of people are using at least one thumb. And then in your sleeping victim scenario the phone can still be compromised.
If you have people in your physical space while you sleep that you cannot trust to not mess with your phone, then you have other serious security problems.
That being said, I also prefer Touch ID because it still appears to be much faster. But it offers no additional security over Face ID, and based on what was said, Face ID is more secure in other ways.
Of course this sync should happen directly between our devices when they are on the same network. No need to go through the cloud.
By default if her phone rings it should only alert on her primary device. Unless she authenticates to my device at which point everything is there waiting. If her phone was ringing and she picks up my device and authenticates it should answer the call.
Ideally this is all smooth enough that we have matching devices and don't care which one either of us walks out of the house with.
The end game is that when networks are fast enough, the cloud mature enough, and homomorphic encryption performant, we get to the point where the phone basically lives in the cloud and anyone can pick up any iDevice, authenticate, and be looking at effectively their own device.