Deep inside the iPhone 5s lurk a few surprises The gleeful geeks at iFixit and ChipWorks have torn apart Apple's latest flagship iPhone, the 5s, and inside they found a lot of glue and a few surprises – including the manufacturer of the A7 processor and the source of the sensor-wrangling M7 chip that was much touted at the rollout of Apple's latest smartphones last week. …
Have you read the postings on Apple fansites? This goes on everywhere whichever side (if any) you're on.
No side holds the moral high ground. This is an ANCIENT human behaviour - in fact it has its roots in our animal nature - it's a display - "My stuff is better than THEIR stuff!" Take most sports, there is just as much rivalry. Expecting everyone to be eloquent in their discourse is largely wishful thinking.
Let them have their say as long as they are not offensive (and by that I don't mean to an electronic device or the company that designs them).
If anyone is offended by their device being slagged off, there are plenty of fan sites with more partisan opinions whichever flag you pledge allegiance to. El Reg is an arena, not a debating society!
Besides, in all honesty, Apple has so much positive coverage (and are plugged mercilessly eg on the BBC) that getting a good bashing evens it all up! ha ha
> Take most sports, there is just as much rivalry ...
Touché.
Imagine a football stadium with 50/50 fanbois/fandroids all painted in the faces with Apples and ... um ... Samsungamalogos, shouting at each other while raising their phones and tablets in the air, showing off what the devices can and can't do.
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Hmmm... No, not really.
Both the A(5/6/7) and Exynos(3/4/5) are tweaked designs of ARM-based Cortex SoC's licensed from ARM Holdings.
What you've said is almost as bad as saying an Intel Core i7 based Samsung laptop is a design variant of an AMD Vision Processor E2 based Lenovo machine because they both use x86/x64 instruction sets.
The important thing here is that whether you're an Apple Fanboi or a Samsung Fandroid, none of you would be doing anything with any particular power or efficiency if it wasn't for us plucky Brits.
Move along now, nothing to see here.
As a cheap THL W8S phone comes with a 7.4Whr battery (and a spare in the box!!) this low power battery once again shows that Apple stands for looks over functionality. The only reason for glueing it in is to try to ensure that the product has a limited life so that Apple can sell more phones in the future to its fans.
A decently designed and built phone shoud have a lifespan of over 10 years (easily possible if the battery is replaceable) not the 5 years or less of a fixed battery model.
I do accept your point regarding designed-in and built-in obsolescence, but from a commercial point of view, phones at all levels appear to be almost disposable items.
I know very few people who are still using five year old phones, let alone those approaching ten years.
I suppose in some ways, it is similar to the car market wherein other than for a very few luxury motors, there isn't the demand from the mainstream purchaser for 5 - 10 year old cars despite the fact that their lifetime should exceed that.
Also, increases in technology generally mean that the capabilities of a phone will greatly exceed that of a six year-old model. I know they're often full of features that we might not need but it is a part of human nature to want them and to want the newest, latest, up-to-date, all-singing and all-dancing gizmo.
Many of us with a technological bent might see through this marketing, but we're only a tiny part of the target market:- it's those who believe it when they're told that their lives will be incomplete without this latest feature who will think "Who cares if the Soopaphone 7 only has a life expectancy of four years - I'll be on the Soopaphone 12 by then"...
My earlier comment about glue and screw is based on stupidity of having to dismantle a found iPod Mini to replace battery. iPod was, say, 5 years old and the tiny hard drive still functioned. Sad that someone threw it and their music away due to a non-user-replaceable battery. I have 30 year old hifi still in regular use.
All manufacturers of cameras, phones, mp3 players, laptops are guilty of failing to provide realistically priced replacement cells.The whole system has a vested interest in waste, including suppliers of dangerous fake batteries. Trademark owners seem oblivious to the latter -- except some who chip their batteries so expensive replacements are obligatory.
EU recently moved to promote interchangeable phone chargers -- same must happen with batteries. When you buy a torch you expect it to use one of a range of generic bulbs -- and of batteries that are universally available at (fairly) sensible prices.
there isn't the demand from the mainstream purchaser for 5 - 10 year old cars despite the fact that their lifetime should exceed that.
True, my first car (as a student) was 7 years old when I bought it, 10 when I sold it. It gave someone else a few years after that before expiring.
Unfortunately the thing that limits the lifetime of most modern technology is the cost of maintenance. Anything which is in daily use for 5-6 years is likely to have components that fail, especially mechanical ones. Even if the components can be obtained cheaply, the cost of replacing them is disproportionate, usually due to the way everything is shoehorned into the smallest space possible. Just like the iPhone battery, replacing the clucth on a car might cost £100 materials, but £500 labour. That's acceptable (if annoying) on a car that is still worth £10,000 but not on one that's worth £2,000 so it creates a break-point where the used value of the object suddenly drops dramatically. It becomes worth buying only at a price where it can be discarded if it fails, even if it might still seem to be worth more in terms of the quality of service that it can deliver when it works. I do still have, and use, phones that are > 6 years old, but I keep them as PAYG phones with foreign SIMs for use when I travel, nor for daily use.
I'm in no way condoning things like sealed batteries and finger print sensors that will eventually wear out, but what people should know before buying any phone - iOS or Android - is that these things are built to last around 2-3 years, or in other words, the length of a contract.
OS updates and Apps will degrade the performance of your phone over the course of this time to the point where it becomes slow, laggy and in some cases unusable. My experience with the iPhone 4, Morola Razr Maxx and various other Android phones is that over a period of about 2 years the phones slow down in the same way a Windows PC will. Succesive OS updates, along with software (or app) installs are the obvious reason. Sure if you reset the phone to factory settings and managed to revert the OS to the original that came with the phone, there's no reason why it shouldn't run as fast (or near to it) as it did when you bought it. Of course this means less functionality, but that's what you have when you deal with older technology running newer software. PC life cycles used to be 2-3 years for this reason and phones are probably no different.
Like I said, this doesn't excuse poor manufacture quality, lack of upgradibility or the ability to replace broken or expired parts like batteries, but it does explain the reason manufacturers don't care. The want (need?) you to continually upgrade devices, so they're deliberately built with a life expectancy at or near the length of your contract.
Surely Li batteries can be expected to measure from 2.2V to 4.2V when they hold sufficient charge to be usable. This is viable because of sufficiently advanced switch-mode PSUs, where a wide range of input voltage can be accommodated efficiently, and where <2.2V operation is avoided lest we kill the battery. So I recommend labeling them as "3V", i.e. only one significant figure rather than two, and, even then, 3 to 4-delta is only half of the range.
So 3.6, 3.7 or 3.8: there is no significance. Perhaps it is driven by marketing: queue the 4.2V spec!
isn't that not having a big extremely pixelated screen, the HTC desire i had would last about a day with mostly everything running (except gps, that didn't work on that phone) and and that had a 4.2 inch screen and only a 1230 mah battery. talk time hmmph better measure is how many movies it will play before dying.
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