“According to our source (who asked to remain anonymous), Apple has been working on a smaller, mass-market iPhone for a long time,” Leander Kahney reports for Cult of Mac. “But to do that, Apple had to figure out a way to strip away some of the components to reduce both its size and cost.”
“Apple decided to lose some of the memory, which is by far the most expensive component of the iPhone (up to one-quarter of the device’s cost, according to iSuppli estimates),” Kahney reports. “By ‘some’ of the memory, we mean ALL of the memory. The iPhone nano will have no memory for onboard storage of media, our source says. It will have only enough memory to buffer media streamed from the cloud. ‘I’m talking strictly storage memory here,’ said our source.”
Kahney reports, “The iPhone nano will pull ALL it’s content from MobileMe. When users buy a movie or TV show on iTunes, it’s available to stream to their iPhone or iPad. The service is based on technology from LaLa.com…”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
This is the reason for the data center.
So… when I’m out in the sticks, with no signal, and I take a picture, where does it go? I can’t imagine they’d build a phone with no camera.
I know you have a real camera when you’re out in the sticks but I get the point. What good is a phone without a signal, for that matter.
there would HAVE to be some storage.. maybe 1gb for temp storage or something.
but here’s a question. if everything is streaming… you would NEED an unlimited data plan. 25 days into a month, and your phone is a brick for 5-6 more days cause you went over your limit. cant even use it to play a single song, take a picture.. etc.
The idea of a smaller iphone does nothing for me, i’d prefer my iphone 4 to have a tad bigger screen myself. After using my ipad for a while, i pick up my tiny iphone and try to respond to a text… lol.
exaggerating of course, but going from the ipad to the iphone is a huge difference.
You would not need an unlimited data plan because you only use a finite amount of data. In the USA there are no data caps. Despite popular perception to the contrary neither AT&T nor Verizon cap your data–it’s just pay as you go. Your phone never turns into a brick, you just get billed for the next GB.
Well not just for the camera, for everything… for the iPod. What good does it do me as an iPod in that situation? This is just speculation, to be sure, but unless we’re talking about a phone that’s JUST a phone then there seems to be some flaws in the plan.
yeah, i’m thinking this is nowhere near being true…
you buy the iPhone Nano.
you buy a 400MB game off the app store…
it takes say 10 minutes to download the game so you can play it, normal.
you play for 20 minutes and then quit.
later you want to play it again… wait 10 minutes to re-download it so you can play it?..
cant exactly stream a 400mb game… movie/song sure. the game needs the whole app to run.
unless…. the iPhone nano will not have access to the App Store, just itunes…
Sometimes the sky is cloudless.
Very unlikely. I expect this nano iPhone to have at least 1GB, but as much as 8GB. I extrapolate this based on the cost of the current Apple TV ($99USD) which has 8GB of storage.
either the iphone 3GS will be rebranded and sold without contract, or the ipod touch will be redesigned/ rebranded and have apple’s own voip app installed. maybe even a built mifi builtin so you only pay for data and be able to make many voip calls in more places
This is about as likely as a UFO landing on your front lawn and disgorging little green men with laser blasters out to kidnap you like a bloodthirsty Somali pirate.
I agree, this is bull.
Why would Apple want to make junk? They make high quality stuff thats supposed to just work. This just doesnt.
You guys have no imagination and only prove what Apple has been best at for over 30 years now; people don’t know what they want until Apple shows it to them.
This isn’t about Apple’s imagination, this is about the cruel meat-hook realities of our current wireless network topography. If you have to stream everything, then the laws of physics preclude you from getting any content where you don’t have signal. If there’s no signal, no amount of award-winning ease of use will make one.
Whomever said it above… I think they’re right: 8-16 gb would be a perfect balance for a cloud connected nano phone. Enough storage for a few TV shows, some apps, and music (iow, enough for a weekend in the Sierras). But also enough to keep the price point low vs. a phone that would require 64-128mb to hold a full library of content.
You can also see a nice moat in this concept. Unless a phone manufacturer has a cloud streaming experience that can match iTunes, they can’t create a phone with a price & form factor of the “nano phone”. Classic Apple “closed system” advantage translated into superior customer experience and value (oh, and a few billion in earnings).
Do you live in or near a city? A lot of people do, and are almost never without a signal. This could be a cheaper choice for those who want it. Regular iPhones will still be sold for those willing to pay. I think it’s a great idea.
As long as I can use it on T-mobile I am sold.
I still don’t this is a phone, that the rumor has it wrong. I believe the device exists, but isn’t what they claim it is. I just can’t see Apple doing this. Bigger screens are in, not smaller ones. And since when does Apple care about market share?
Still don’t think this is a phone*
Edit function please MDN, if at all possible.
It will need some storage for Apps. This story is BS! However I do believe there will be another form factor of the iPhone, just like we saw 4 years later with the iPod. The iPhone mini or nano and a larger iPhone similar to that of the EVO or DROID’s screen size.
It’s as unlikely as a laptop without a hard drive!
W.W.J.D. (What Would Jony Design?)
what an absolutely terrible idea.
no connection? NO CONTENT.
Don’t forget that there’s no contract, so how you’re going to get a good data plan rate (certainly no unlimited plan) from ATT, Verizon, etc. is beyond me.
Stripping out the memory basically kills iOS. There’s no reason to have multi-touch, etc. if you can’t have apps and other features on the phone.
I’m sure Apple has mules in its R&D for smaller iPhones, but these rumors are just silly. I saw on CNN this morning that the WSJ was reporting smaller, cheaper iPhones were on the way.
It’s pretty bad when iPhone rumors become news, and ridiculous ones at that.
bogus.
Makes no sense at all. Sure, future iPhone variants may be highly cloud-centric.
Even so, at least some on-board storage needs to be present for caching data that are to go to or from the cloud. Otherwise the device would be completely unusable, especially when there are hiccups in network streaming.
I say 8 Gb minimum on-board. Current cost for 8Gb is peanuts and falling rapidly.
Where’s my 1Tb iPod classic, anyway?
nice way to share your contacts in the underground.
Oh wait, no connection, my apple is useless.
I cant see this type of marketing happening anywhere in the near future.
I call this BS. How could you use this on a plane when you are asked to put ur phones in Airplane mode??
hehe, because, without the airplane mode you would be able to stream your data ? on a plane ? oh right, it’s cloud computing !
so it would be useless in the subway? not gonna happen.
an 8GB model with stripped down capabilities would make sense for a lot of people, but a device that does not function when away from the Internet is not very apple.
no reception on the subway ?? that is unbelievable !, (i live in europe), the first time i heard about “dropped” calls i actually did not understand what that meant. and now you are saying that you can’t use the phones in the subway ? i think i’m hallucinating.
Aha, when the satellites are linked to the Data Center, then you will see.
rumor FAIL
Your personal cloud, not The Cloud.
Next, Apple will live stream engineering meetings to us, so we can be trusted with the truth. They will publish an IP address, that we can better view the proceedings from a live Facetime feed originating from a Parrot AR.drone, flown by Steve himself. Rumors will be officially a thing of the past.
how about letting us turn all the old iPhones into iTouch that make calls…no data plan and give them to our kids.
You can already do that. That’s what I do, with ATT’s GoPhone service, which is “pre-paid” (you pay in advance for X minutes of talk time). It costs me a minimum of $25 every 90 days (more if you use the time faster). There is a pre-paid data option, but it’s expensive, so I don’t use it; all the Internet stuff is done over WiFi (like an iPod touch).
Through iPhone 3GS, a standard SIM card is used. I already used GoPhone with one of their cheap phones. I put its SIM card in my iPhone.
As many tubes/subways are introducing mobile phones transmitters I don’t see this as being too off the mark. I would expect a small about of memory but otherwise this increasingly will be how things will work in the future, its what Google Chrome is all about.
gaaaaaah another retard that thinks “cloud! blah blah blah blah cloud!”
this type of person should be banded from working with copmputers
i don’t believe this one second. this is bullshit. OK, ram is not that cheap, but it’s WAAAY cheaper than bandwidth !
and there are so many other reasons why this is a bad idea, i’m not even going to start.
You can get an 8GB SD or microSD card for next to nothing, especially in the quantities that Apple would procure. This “no memory” speculation is not Scottish.