iOS 16 Available September 12th(apple.com) |
iOS 16 Available September 12th(apple.com) |
Six months on Verizon and I get more spam calls a week than those 8 years.
The new lock screen customization is nice, especially combined with focus modes.
Editing iMessages? YES. Dictating emoji? YES.
Easily extract photos from the background to send in messages like a sticker? Sure.
My iPhone 12 Pro feel way faster, especially Safari. Is it actually faster or are animations shorter? You know what? I don’t care. I like it.
Some things like making search prominent on the home screen will help many people.
The new password replacement stuff will be great. Can’t wait.
Live tiles to show the status of a pizza delivery or something like that on my lock screen? Handy.
Built in delivery tracking with ApplePay if stores opt in? Sure!
And none of that includes the stuff announced today for the new phones, like the notification/background changes that look nice.
ALL of that was off the top of my head.
This is a very good year. Not every year can be as big as multi-tasking/etc, but this year is not just piddly little nothings.
New updates brings features that might be important or useful to some subset of users, while to the rest of us they are something we need to deal with, either remove if possible or learn to ignore. Personally I use iMessage, a browser and a few other apps, but fairly irregularly. That mean that any addition to iOS is an annoyance. The lock screen, with all the gizmos, annoying and pointless. Personalization feature... Sort of pointless if you don't also allow me to disable the gesture that turns on the camera, seriously that is the ONLY personalization I wish to do.
It's understandable that they don't make it, but I'd like an iOS light. One that has the bare minimum of features, for those who use their phones for calls, text messages and a few basic apps.
It surprises me how Apple continues to add a lot of fancy feature and ignore basic day to day usability features like these.
[1] https://medium.com/@contact_54652/how-can-apple-improve-the-...
> Coming later this year
Apple going to start offering email too?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobileMe
Replaced by iCloud later. So it’s not something they will do, but something they have been doing for over two decades.
This guide to using imapsync was invaluable: https://blah.cloud/miscellaneous/migrating-google-workspaces...
I can count on one hand the amount of times I've FaceTimed someone because of fragmentation in my network with Android.
More importantly you can create unlimited throwaway vendor / site reg emails you can receive to and send from with Hide My Email.
- Add or edit lists
- Add reminders or due dates
- Add tagging or priority
- Add things like location-based reminders
E.g. if your number is (555)555-1234 it'll block anything from (555)555-0000 to (555)555-9999.
But then you mess up callbacks.
I assume they do this to muddy the block lists that get used to filter their calls.
I know this because every now and then I will get up to 5 or so calls or texts of people claiming I called them.
In the age where most phones are mobile, this whole "scheme" is pitifully ignorant.
Huh.
Last month I had a flurry of spam texts and calls. I moved the slider to the "enable" side a few weeks ago and have had zero issues since.
I missed a hospital calling about a family member. They should have left a voicemail, but they didn't.
1) You have a kid AND 2) You're not currently looking right at that kid
Then you need to pick up calls from random numbers basically every time. Just the way life is.
It’s a simple read and worth the minute or so if you use the feature.
Just make it a contact with like a 7 day TTL or something. If it’s longer term, save it proper.
I mention this because the old Caller ID setup doesn’t really work any more.
It's my understanding that this is largely because of the carriers.
Phone and text spam filtering came to the iPhone in China long before it hit other countries. I only know a couple of people in China, and neither are in tech, but they say it's because spam was absolutely rampant so the government leaned on the carriers to fix it, and the iPhone spam filtering appeared a short time later.
There's no shortage of Chinese users on HN, so maybe one of them can explain further, or refute what I've been told.
They will either feel commited to that hardware design and stick to it longer than they should, or they will have to abandon a lot of software.
Clear Spaces https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clear-spaces/id1532666619
iEmpty https://iempty.tooliphone.net/
MAKEOVR https://www.makeovr.io/
(photo deduplication is nice too btw, been a long time coming)
Back when computers were super expensive (like millions of $) the owners (or lessors) would try to get them to do as many things as possible all the time so maximize the "value" of their investment. What was truly revolutionary about microprocessors was that they were inexpensive enough that you could dedicate them to doing just one thing.
But then the capabilities of microprocessors started to greatly exceed the level of computation you needed to do that "one thing" and so the age of "featuritis" was born where the "wasted" compute resource in the dedicated microprocessor could do something to differentiate or add value to a product. That could be as silly as adding more indicator lights, but usually it was a way of altering the thing the appliance did. Today, nobody things twice about a washing machine that has a combinatorial set of 20 different wash cycles, versus the simple "water level", "water temperature", "number of cycles" that was achievable with just simple mechanical switches and a few dumb sensors.
However, it seems we might inflect again, as even cheaper microprocessors make even less expensive appliances available. Further, the subsumption of dozens of devices into the "phone" (copier, camera, recorder, navigator, television, Etc.) has created its own "traffic jam" where you might be watching TV on your device, and suddenly there is something you want to take a picture of and call someone about it. Multiplexing the device kind of works but it can also become annoying.
It will be interesting to me to see how this more "computer os like" version of iOS will fare, and whether or not multi-functioning on a single devices develops into a negative feature vs the current economic win.
As they get closer, differentiating them becomes more challenging. And I am really curious about how this affects both markets.
I find the feature would be useful in all situations, but would be especially useful in group threads. I don't need to hear a ding every time someone in a group thread sends a message if I don't have my phone in my hand. One ding generated when the first unread message is received will do just fine.
Looks like my other options for a small phone are 12/13 mini or possibly the 2nd/3rd gen SE. But not nearly as compact as the 4" SE.
Anyway, looks like my old iPhone 7 is finally going to have to retire. :/ I can't wait for a good Linux phone.
Edit: 7 years of use isn't bad compared to Android, but the phone is still just fine, and it really bothers me that it's turning into e-waste for no good reason.
I used to be so pumped for them when I was a teen. They’d unlock a world of new opportunities.
Now I just feel anxious that there’s change for change sake to justify the resourcing of the design teams and that they’ll make things I’m used to worse all for a bunch of features I’ll never use or want.
I don’t want more features. There’s so many already and they’re really cluttering.
Like when they moved the address bar to the bottom in Safari. Bad. Shame. But they let you revert it. I’m just waiting for that team to decide, “no those users are idiots. It’s been a year. Time to remove the setting and impose our new vision on existing users.”
…it’s me isn’t it? This sounds like old man yells at cloud speak.
Stage manager on iPadOS doesn’t do it for me though.
Would love to try it first, before buying the expensive Apple licensed one.
You mean a feature of their only competitor?
If the other company doing something makes it an industry standard I guess the way Apple does things is an industry standard too
But the bigger surprise is that there's literally nothing in it that I care about despite being an iOS user.
Also, multiple stops on Maps? That's Google maps 15 years ago.
Google Maps UI is a mess - only real advantage is (usually) better POI data. Routing quality is the same in my experience.
On my side I'm kinda excited about live notifications, it looks cool for food deliveries.
BUT tighter Apple/CarPlay integration with existing brands is most definitely coming.
Soon your iPhone will handle the whole instrument cluster and infotainment for your car as well as functioning as a key.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/09/apples-2023-carpl...
But now with the new improvements it looks like there is an automatic option "you can share photos instantly right from Camera, choose to share automatically when other shared library members are nearby".
I secretly hope this read-receipts feature (anti-feature?) is coming to an end. I believe read-receipts should be a per-message option or be discarded from apps. I know read-receipts can be disabled as a user choice, but most people expect them nowadays (me too, to be honest). It's that very expectation that I'm questioning and for which I suggest we should at least have a specific notion of ethics or politeness.
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
From the list, I only see two features that don't have equals already in iOS - both related to Material You.
There's something about general availability that just hits different, exposing bugs to be fixed in the eventual .1 release.
For 3rd party developers to show information in the Island, that will be achieved through the Live Activities API, which is not specific to the iPhone 14 Pro.
The Island will likely stick around for a few years, after which point Apple will adapt that notification area UI to work without the Island.
And since it's basically baked-in that iPhones will have a front-facing camera, and they don't seem eager to abandon Face ID, I don't see the Island disappearing anytime soon. And even if they get some fancy new tech that allows to hide everything behind the screen without massive compromises, it's still possible for the holepunch design to live on in the non-Pro models and later in the SE models (similar to how Touch ID still exists on the SE).
It makes sense to keep an incarnation of this in the future because they explicitly are replacing a few types of built-in UI with the Island.
Sure, maybe by the end of the 20s, the “island” will be obsolete, but I think Apple is secure in the knowledge that the pill is here for several generations of iPhone to come.
I don't mind how it looks/operates, and it's definitely nicer seeming than the notch it replaces.
When you actually use it to customize your workflows it was really cool. For example I added a global screenshot button in mine. In iTerm I added buttons to split vertically and horizontally, and buttons to SSH on my most common machines. On VSCode I liked to be able to run in debug with a keyboard button.
I'd love a compromise with both the fn row, and customizable buttons, either physical buttons or a mini touchbar (or a full fledged touchbar above the fn row)
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90755838/theres-a-big-problem-wi...
Currently, managing and using close to a 1,000 passwords, all around 35 characters and completely random, is an absolute breeze using 1Password (and likely any password manager of choice) and my data is securely stored in a cloud I can access from any device (and from my neighbor's laptop if disaster should strike).
No way that I am handing over this functionality to a bunch of private keys that I can only access when logged in using a device from one specific vendor.
The security benefits are vastly less than the loss in portability/emergency use.
So the idea of passkeys is fantastic, but as long as I cannot store them in a central platform agnostic place, it's passwords for me.
The article does talk about how tools like 1Password could allow for PassKey sharing without vendor lock-in.
Allowing each tenant to move thousands of highly-sensitive internal tokens to a competitor is something the credit card processing industry, somewhat surprisingly, has more or less solved. Most credit card gateways that store card information on file in a PCI compliant way will allow a merchant to specify another competing PCI compliant service provider, and will export the merchant's information directly to the new service provider in bulk, without needing to provide any of the raw information to the merchant themself.
Via https://www.chargebee.com/blog/credit-card-portability-impor... it seems Braintree developed an industry standard for this in ~2010, potentially (I don't know the history) as a way to force Stripe to allow its merchants to move elsewhere in the ecosystem without holding their cards-on-file hostage. Based on the list at https://docs.spreedly.com/guides/exporting/ - all of whom support this workflow - it seems this was quite successful.
Ironically, the standardization site has been down since 2019, but I suppose it was no longer needed. https://web.archive.org/web/20190212151438/http://www.portab...
Its guiding light was to be "patterned after telephone number portability that was part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act" - which is quite telling in this context.
Point is, there is precedent for developing frameworks in which secure token storage platforms can allow you to freely move between them, with secure bulk data transfers. Apple and Google would do well to get ahead of this, lest it become a regulatory or PR nightmare later when high-profile stories accuse them of intentionally promoting lock-in.
That being said, I was hoping to see more touch ID webauthn so I'm not super hopeful. But we can hope!
If I get arbitrarily locked out of a Google/Apple/Microsoft account then my logins for absolutely everything go up in smoke too.
(Assumes the key is a composite pair of local passkey + cloud account secret)
For starters, it doesn't release any secret information into the wild. Instead, it uses a public/private key pair to challenge the user to decrypt something that only she or he can decrypt. The website (as an example) no longer stores anything but your public key, which doesn't reveal anything.
Secondly, you can't give away your passkey information so it is for all practical purposes unphishable. (I can't conceive of a way that it might be phished, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.)
In addition, it is super-duper easy on users. They don't have to remember anything, and can login with the touch of a finger or a glance at the camera.
This is a huge step forward in authentication.
Knowing apple they're going to be another avenue to lock in. Now not only does switching your device been that you have to leave apple's ecosystem, it also means you lose all your passwords for all your websites.
I'm honestly hoping this does not take off.
I mean it's just Webauthn under the hood, I'd bet money you can export them from keychain into another tool like 1Password or similar.
Ergo I’d rather not have shared devices anyway. It was hell when we shared a family windows 2000 computer back in the day.
Have you tried logging in with multiple accounts on a Nintendo Switch? You're sort of just logged into all of them at once; and when you launch a given app/game, it asks you which profile you want to launch it under.
To me, that'd be the perfect multi-user experience for iPad. Any user can unlock it with their own biometrics/credentials; once unlocked, that user can then act as any user that has a profile on the device.
At this point, any feature that exists on their laptops is lacking on the iPad only by choice.
I agree though, native multi-user support would be great. Though, I'd hope it's better than what we got on tvOS.
It is not a viable solution for either the average user or the advanced user.
Model Height Width Depth
SE 4.87" 2.31" 0.3"
Mini 5.18" 2.53" 0.301" (strangely precise)
Diff +0.31" +0.22" +0.001"
Still, it's too bad there isn't a 14 mini.
There's definitely an inflection point - I also have a Galaxy 10+ for work and still find it uncomfortably large. The 12 mini seems to fall right in a sweet spot for me.
I don’t really get it either. You want to charge a premium for your handsets, why not let there be a secondary market all the way down the value chain for prices below where you want to go? It just means you’re selling more iCloud services and locking people in that way so that when they finally do need that upgrade it’s an iPhone rather than an Android.
We can't treat the exception as the rule. It would be misleading to claim that Apple is still supporting iOS 12, or 13, or 14. Every other security patch in iOS 15 has been left vulnerable in pre-15 versions.
It’s more likely the fact the iPhone 7 only has 2GB of RAM and two cores, not to mention missing the Neural Engine, the image processor and other features on Apple’s latest SoCs that iOS 16 requires for some of its features.
Most of major features of iOS 16 would have to be removed to run on an iPhone 7.
I use both iPhone 13 Pro & Pro Max everyday because I do iOS development (among many other things), so it's not like I don't know how to use the newer models, but the Home button is so intuitive I can use the 7 even when I'm half awake whereas I need to pay close attention to the screen on 13.
Not having a Home button is like a keyboard without an Esc key.
iOS 14.8 was released on September 13, 2021, iOS 14.8.1 on October 26, 2021, and then nothing else.
I also liked the safari address bar change, as it’s objectively more ergonomic for thumb use.
Many recent iOS updates have significantly expanded power user features too: we have shortcuts and automations, customizable focus modes, default browser/mail apps, Home Screen widgets, etc. Most of which the HN crowd (and many others) have been asking for for years!
In fact, we’re at the point that people can technically customize app icons.
I think these updates objectively are unlocking a world of possibilities. The features I listed above a pretty powerful — especially shortcuts and automations.
It’s ok to not be in that headspace anymore — but many others still are :) You can always stick around on older iOS versions! And I’d argue there are vanishingly few new features that dramatically change the way you use your phone. The address bar being a good example.
I use a spacer app for transparent icons for that.
Back button and menu items should also be in the bottom.. park in the ass to go all the way up there
I update iOS on my phone as soon as I’m notified I can. I have not been disappointed once. I was also skeptical of moving tabs to the bottom in Safari, turns out it’s awesome! It did take me a bit to get used to. But I can actually reach the address bar, and I can swipe between tabs and even create new ones in the same motion. It’s everything I miss with whatever godforsaken extension I used to use on desktop to scroll between tabs, and a lot more reliable.
The problem with macOS is it’s clear these well considered designs are a backport even if they really put in the effort to make them fit on the Mac. I will stick to 3 year major version upgrades until it feels otherwise. And I’ll continue to update my phone as soon as I get the notification that I can, until I feel similarly disappointed.
Not just you. Other than the automatic OCR of chunks of text in the camera, I can't think of a major feature in the last few years' iOS updates that I have enjoyed and regularly used. Apple used to produce surprisingly stable and snappy software on an OS that didn't have protected memory and ran on a toaster (Mac OS <= 9). Now it produces crashy trash on a teraflops machine with an MMU.
How about if, instead of making buttons harder to identify, Apple fixed the Podcasts app to take fewer than five seconds to load the "downloaded episodes" list? Or to hang and crash less often? Or to not randomly require an internet connection to play downloaded episodes? Or to make the "Listen Now" thing less of an opaque AI-driven roulette wheel of uselessness?
Not just you. I don't feel like the features they keep adding are very well conceived, and they just seem to ignore earlier features that need refining.
Yeah I'd have to disagree on that. The bottom is the correct place for the address bar on a phone. It's where your thumb is.
555-555-1234
All the 5s match my number, which hasn’t happened since I used to live in a small town. That always makes me do a double check but it’s also easier to ignore.
Also, A/B testing is not just for good guys.
There is no standard for the file format used to exchange data. Could be JSON, CSV, Excel, etc.
Aren't there lots of instances of intentionally promoting lock-in on these platforms already? I haven't seen significant measures taken against that. How would this be different?
I’m just saying, I’ve seen a lot of sites demand mobile 2FA and also allow for nothing else shudder.
iPads can be shared in a business or school setting and going through the administrative steps to implement that. https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv... talks about how to do it using a Mobile Device Management (MDM) server. There are various services not from Apple that provide free servers but we've seen over and over how a free service goes paid or is simply cancelled.
There's nothing on the iPad like Macs have for allowing multiple users.
the ONLY calls that call me from that area code are spammers. if I get calls from any other area code, only 20% or so are spammers. Others are sales/marketing for IT companies, etc, and calls from one of the 2 area codes that cover my area where I actually live are usually all local businesses, etc. If I had to guess, I would say 85-90% of the 'spam callers' call and spoof the 920 area code when they dial me. that drastically cuts down on my automated messages about a car warranty that is about to expire.
You're misunderstanding them too, I suspect. One could equally assume that a call coming from an area code they've never been to, 5 states away is spam - so this trick works if you do not make a lot of calls.
Not equally. I have an area code from the opposite coast. If I get a call from that area code, it is 100% spam. Spammers just love outing themselves by spoofing the same area code of the person they are calling.
A call from any other area code is only 30% chance of being spam.
Nobody will care. Everybody's cell number is just a record of where they lived when they got their first phone; people you call will have you in their contact list most likely.
But where there are no strong privacy laws like india, truecaller is straight up spyware
https://restofworld.org/2022/how-truecaller-built-a-billion-...
And at least as of a few years ago, Truecaller would upload a copy of your phonebook to their servers. That's how they bootstrapped their database - from user's addressbooks. I only ever used it on a burner with an empty phone book, and occasionally get Truecaller pearls like "Annoying John - do not answer" as the caller's name.
Post-Ive, Apple is prioritizing reliability and usability over the gimmicks, and I think that’s for the best.
https://www.androidauthority.com/under-display-selfie-camera...
https://www.androidauthority.com/in-display-fingerprint-sens...
What do you mean? My OnePlus 9 Pro has an in-display fingerprint scanner and it works wonderfully, with or without a screen protector (they warn you to redo the scans if you add/remove one).
Otherwise if I login by passkey to a website on an Apple device, how do I login outside Apple’s walled garden?
I believe the login flow on another device (let’s say a Windows laptop) is that you scan some QR code on the laptop’s screen from your iPhone. Then the iPhone communicates with the site and validates the passkey. And if that is all OK the site on the laptop will proceed to log you in.
Perhaps there are ideas for AR-related aspects of this eventually?
* Live Text
* can’t send emojis in iMessage using Siri
* can’t ask Siri about apps
* offline Siri support for HomeKit, Intercom, Voicemail
* being able to smoothly switch between voice and typing when using dictation
* adding medications using the camera
* Door Detection in Magnifier
* Image search in more apps
For a very simple reason. All devices that can run iOS 13 and 14 can be updated to iOS 15, which is still being patched.
EDIT: If it were marginally "intelligent," it would have a box for "listening to stuff" (Podcasts, Music, Audible, ...), "reading stuff" (DDG, Safari, Books, ...), "scheduling" (Calendar, Reminders, ...), etc. But I don't need AI constantly figuring these things out. I can put those apps in folders or known places on my home screen once, and never have to worry about them wandering around because an AI was trying to be helpful.
From Apple's support documentation (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/find-your-apps-in-app...): "The apps in App Library are organized in categories intelligently, based on how you use your apps. You can add apps in App Library to the Home Screen, but you can’t move them to another category in App Library." So I can't even make it less useless. Great.
Also note that 12.5.6 was for a single actively exploited CVE and no other vulnerabilities.
The feature mostly works, but needing to remember to disable it when a call is expected is annoying.
> Time to pay up!
What’s your favorite charity?
Not GP but the EFF is the charity most likely to help successfully push for changes here :) I am sending them 50 bucks in your name. Care to double it?
This is a long-standing security/usability tradeoff in the Webauthn spec. Various solutions have been proposed, but as far as I know most of them are still just drafts, e.g. [1]. The best practice has been and, as far as I know, continues to be to register multiple authenticators, e.g. a primary and a backup authenticator. This practice has a variety of benefits:
1. Avoids lockout if an authenticator is lost.
2. If you use multiple authenticators from different vendors (e.g. Yubico and Google) you:
1. Avoid vendor lock-in
2. Can rapidly respond in case a security vulnerability is discovered in one of your authenticators, as has occurred for both Yubico [2] and Google [3].
One could use Apple's Passkeys as one's day-to-day "personal" authenticator, and use an authenticator from a different vendor (e.g. Yubico Yubikey or Google Titan Security Key) as their backup key. I don't see how Apple's implementation increases the risk of lock-in beyond that of any of the other major Webauthn authenticator providers.
[0]: https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/issues/865#issuecomment-3804...
[1]: https://github.com/Yubico/webauthn-recovery-extension
[2]: https://www.yubico.com/support/issue-rating-system/security-...
[3]: https://security.googleblog.com/2019/05/titan-keys-update.ht...
- Don't give up control of a safety critical interface
- Don't give up data (which they think they can monetize) by not controlling the full stack
- Don't give up a branded differentiator like "iDrive" for what everyone else is offering
- Don't pay a tax on our cars to big tech if we can avoid it (see how they dragged their feet on Carplay to start)
Apple makes it difficult but keeping my iPhone 5S is still going years after iOS 12 is no longer "cool"
The A7 is dogshit slow - I have an iPad with the A7 (or maybe it's the A9) and it's unusably slow for even simple things like apps from newspapers and library e-reader apps; you can watch the page assemble. Even waking the iPad with the home button is slow. On my A11-powered phone these apps run smooth as butter.
A 5S supports 11 of the LTE bands versus 24 bands of the 8. That alone is worth the upgrade, for the greater chance of being able to make or receive an important call.
How much time are you wasting on silly work-arounds just to be a retro-tech hipster pretending it's cool to use a completely outdated and inferior-in-every-way piece of hardware for absolutely no reason?
By the way, I wasn't the one telling me "this is the greatest iPhone yet" at the yearly capitalism conference.
I hope their competitors step it up and beat Apple out on grade A support. I'm seeing them fall further behind in every metric. My iPhone 12 mini that I bought on launch day "just works".
As someone that has worked on this very problem for 20 years, I can say with somewhat confidence Apples choice is the right one.
So let me ask you directly: How would you propose to get around the limitations of the secure enclave for Face-ID on existing iPads?
TBH I’m not sure what you see as an issue, and why it couldn’t be the same secure enclave management as on the MBP with touch-ID.
Now I'm not saying that Apple can't produce an iPad in the future that delivers on the right experience mix in a multi-user capable setting, but that's not what you're asking for - I've provided just a few of the mant kinds of limitations that will degrade the user experience in a way that makes clear that Apple aren't just trying to juice their customers.
So the answer here is neither "Apple should just make it happen", nor "You should just buy a second iPad" - the answer is: you should buy the tablet that gives you everything you want, or learn how to share, I rdgaf.
iOS 15 will be getting patches even if iOS 14 and 13 don't.
You're treating the exception (12.5.6) as if it's the rule, but it's not.
Now that number is 0%.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/begone-call-blocker/id15968181...
...though the creator of Begone will hopefully realize that every entry in its version-history starting with that same rant about fake ad campaigns is making it look more sketchy than ignoring the issue would.
Settings > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification
Their environmental reports that they release each year indicate that they do, yes. It also looks like there's an audit report in there as well that logs the recycled materials as verified (page 109).
> I see that e.g. screens are removed. How many of them (as a percentage of those sent in) are then re-used? And how many of the internal chips are re-used? How many of the batteries are re-used or how much of the underlying materials in the batteries are made into new batteries?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32761701
In any case, thanks for the link. If I have the time/energy someday I might read through that document more closely and see if it sheds light on these questions.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
I am pretty careful with my stuff. Going as far as to only putting my phone in my left pocket because there’s no metal rivet on that side of most jeans. I also probably only dropped the phone three or four times over that six year span. I don’t use the case, I’m just very careful. I won’t even pull it out if I feel I’m in a risky situation where I could drop it.
Even five years is a lot longer than any of my android phones lasted with daily use. I had the Motorola Droid, the HTC Thunderbolt, and the Samsung GS3, among others. I think you would be lucky to get 2 to 3 years out of those. I’m not sure what would go first, your OS support, or the cheaper hardware that they use in general. I had the best experience with Samsung in the Android market.
Rolls Royce was still selling $200,000 with iDrive versions almost 2 years behind the version in a base model 2-series until last year, so I also wouldn't underestimate how much money they've made while keeping that mentality
Mind you, the Switch has to do user-switching only at app startup time, because it's an effectively single-tasking OS. Given that you can be running tons of apps (and instances of apps) at the same time on an iPad, there are many other UI possibilities that synergize with an explicit user-chooser. Examples:
- You know the app groups in the new macOS/iPadOS? Imagine a user profile as an app-group-group (in iOS) or a group of spaces (in macOS.) Do the slow-swipe-up-from-the-bottom thing again when you're already in the app chooser, and you get the profile chooser.
- Some gesture you can do while in an app, that means "give me this same app, but viewed as a different user" — which is like a retroactive version of the Switch user-chooser thing. If other users already had the same app open, it'd work like Expose/Mission Control for seeing what their instance of the app looks like. And, as an optimization, apps that detect that you've user-switched away from them soon after launch, when they're still in their toplevel view, could take that as a signal to quit (as they'd assume that you just meant to open the app as a different user.)
Huh? How would the ipad detect that?
> - Some gesture you can do while in an app, that means "give me this same app, but viewed as a different user" — which is like a retroactive version of the Switch user-chooser thing
That sounds horribly confusing and complicated. And it doesn't even address the security problem where you don't want other users to see your stuff. (Eg, my kids shouldn't see notifications for me, or be able to read my email).
I agree that its possible (its software, anything is possible). But I think it would take serious design work to implement user switching like you're proposing in a way thats not horribly complicated.
Probably the easiest way to do it would be at the unlock screen. Have the user lock their ipad then unlock it as a different user via a different profile attached to the fingerprint sensor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
C-f for "Supported OS release" and there's a chart showing which devices support which OS. 12 was "sticky" in that it was the last one supporting the 5S and 6. 15 will be similarly sticky given the range of devices (6S/SE(2016)/7) that will be stuck with it and will probably get several more years of security updates as a result.
As opposed to Google only offering two years of OS updates and an additional three years of security updates after that on the Pixel 6?
Sorry, but every single flagship iPhone since 2011 has gotten between five and seven years of OS updates. Then there are additional years of security updates after that. For example, the $399 OG iPhone SE got seven years of OS updates.
Google needs to step up their game. They don't even have the Qualcomm excuse now that they are having their own custom SOC fabbed.
My laptops (Linux) last until they die, and it takes a long time for them to die. I’d love a phone that does that.
I think they should support even very old iPhones with updates because:
1) They can’t afford to make an iPhone for $50.
2) Even if they could, they don’t want to make a $50 iPhone because it would be terrible and the margin minimal.
3) Supporting old phones allows a second-hand market for iPhones to thrive in the Chinese-Android-phone-bargain price tier where Apple can’t compete with new devices (this is in fact already the case given that there’s a used market for old iPhones).
4) Once someone buys (e.g. an iPhone 6S) used for $50 you can immediately start making them an iCloud customer for recurring revenue.
tldr; I think Apple views used device sales as a lost purchase for them instead of the massive subsidy that it is in terms of the cost associated with onboarding a new customer. (Apple should be overjoyed that someone is willing to sell a first-time prospective Apple customer an iPhone 6S for $50. The factory couldn’t make them the phone wholesale for that price, and it gets someone into the ecosystem).
In other words, they would not have had any meaningful time getting accustomed to iOS from Android, which is why they used the strategy of getting an iPhone 13 spend 2 weeks or more with it, in the hopes that if they like the experience, they'd return it for the newer iPhone 14 Pro.
Ambient accelerometer data (like is used in the Apple Watch for car-crash detection et al) triggering a background FaceID scan when the movement subsides.
> And it doesn't even address the security problem where you don't want other users to see your stuff. (Eg, my kids shouldn't see notifications for me, or be able to read my email).
Think of this sort of setup as a kiosk device — like a library computer. If accounts were allowed to be persistently signed into the device at all, then it would be in a low-integrity way, where you wouldn't be able to access your email et al through the device. Instead, the only things that would sync would be things that "don't matter" to expose to others: preferences, [non-private-browsing] history, game saves, etc.
The point wouldn't be to allow a whole family to share one iDevice for all their personal information management needs. You — and anyone else that has PII to manage — would still need a personal iPhone for that.
The point, instead, would be to have something like a game console, or a streaming box, or an eBook reader — the superset of all of those. Something for everyone in a family to just pass around to do "general family stuff" with games, books, music, movies, etc; without needing to worry about security. But, crucially, while still able to have "their own" bookmarked pages in books, watched episodes in TV shows, game saves, music playlists, and so forth; where that stuff does sync from their profile on this shared device, to any personal devices they also own.
You probably won't see the concrete use-case, if you don't have multiple children. None of them has any PII to manage, but they certainly do want their own open tabs and game saves, and protection from their siblings accidentally stomping over those.
> Probably the easiest way to do it would be at the unlock screen. Have the user lock their ipad then unlock it as a different user via a different profile attached to the fingerprint sensor.
iPads don't have fingerprint sensors. Also, you're expecting a lot out of children (again, the central point of this) to re-lock the device (just to unlock it again) after taking it from their sibling. My impression is that they'd see something they want to do and just start trying to do it. The ideal here would be to automatically switch profiles when this happens, such that they seamlessly get the same app, but with state recorded for their profile, rather than their sibling's.
Yes they do. My ipad air from last year certainly does. (And its missing Face ID).
> The ideal here would be to automatically switch profiles when this happens, such that they seamlessly get the same app, but with state recorded for their profile, rather than their sibling's.
Sounds like a version 2 feature for user switching. If I were apple and I cared about this, I'd release a simpler version first and wait for feedback.
I hear what you're looking for. I really do. I just think its very complicated to get the interaction you're looking for right. If FaceID started doing its thing every time I handle my iPad, it would be scanning basically all the time.
I mean, it already kind of does (on iPhones at least, don't know about iPads) — ever notice that the screen will automatically come on when you pick up the device and tilt it to a certain angle, but only if you're looking at it?
Mind you, that's a trigger from sleep. But you could just as well have one that's a trigger "from stillness" — i.e. when the device hasn't moved in a while, and then it does.
I believe a few months ago HN comments were riffing on a hypothetical "persistent background authentication" system Apple could be developing that would justify their disinterest in bringing back TouchID for iPhones. It would basically work by using every sensor available to try to constantly determine whether the same person that previously unlocked the device, was in continuous physical possession of the device. As long as that was true, the device would remain unlocked (rather than there being any kind of lock-during-sleep timer.) But as soon as the device was passed to someone else, or taken out and left on a table, all authentication would be discarded. (It wouldn't necessarily "lock" in the sense of taking you to the lock screen as soon as you place your phone on a table — you might want to show someone a cat photo, after all — but it'd at least temporarily assume a low-integrity kiosk mode for that app, becoming "locked underneath", in the same way that the photos app viewed from the camera app accessed from the lock screen is low-integrity + "locked underneath.") This would mean that any authentication that is required could take a lot longer / be a lot more thorough — because the most common kind of auth, the "incremental re-authentication" when you take your phone out of your pocket for a second — would no longer exist.
I feel like this kind of thing is totally possible — even plausible/practical — given Apple's fondness for developing low-power sensor-tracking ASICs for the Apple Watch et al.
> If I were apple and I cared about this, I'd release a simpler version first and wait for feedback.
Apple doesn't really do this; they seem to try to "get UX right the first time", in the sense that they'll never really make a UX iteratively better, only ever completely throw a UX away and then create an entirely new UX that's a-bit-more-than-iteratively better, with an entirely different name and branding (E.g. Exposé → Mission Control.) — presumably so that users don't think it's the old thing, try to use it like the old thing, and fail.
But, mind you — the Apple TV's tvOS already has "user profiles" and "user switching" in exactly the "V1" way you're describing! (https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/tv/atvb59ec8e2e/tvos) tvOS doesn't do any kind of automatic switching; it only allows for explicit switching.
So, conveniently, the code for most of this logic is already there in the iOS codebase. It'd just need to be adapted to the iPad's UX; and some annotations added to apps to mark them as "allowed in low-integrity mode" or not, where apps that aren't "allowed in low-integrity mode" apps — i.e. "requires high-integrity" apps — should never be allowed to be run/installed on an iPad set up for sharing (just like "requires high-integrity" apps aren't allowed to be published at all for tvOS to begin with.)