“The new iPhones look like the old iPhones. They sound like the old iPhones. They do the same things as the old iPhones. Just slightly better, more colorfully, and less expensively than the old iPhones,” Matt Buchanan writes for The New Yorker. “This might seem disappointing: even Apple’s phones are boring now. But this is an ideal state of affairs.”
“The original iPhone, released in June, 2007, gave birth to the modern smartphone era: browsing restaurant menus on a sidewalk, watching a movie on a bus, tweeting from the subway and posting photos of a newborn to Facebook the second it opens its eyes,” Buchanan writes. “What we can do now, six years later, has not fundamentally changed since then. It’s easier or faster—forty times faster, according to Apple—or higher resolution, or all of the above. To wit, the iPhone 5S has few genuinely new features, and those that it does have are nearly invisible. In order of importance, they are: a built-in fingerprint scanner to replace passwords, faster chips, a higher-quality camera, and a gold body. The iPhone 5C is essentially the exact same as the current iPhone 5, but shoved into a brightly colored plastic, rather than aluminum, shell and sold for a hundred dollars less than before.”
Buchanan writes, “For the next few years, advances in smartphones and tablets will continue to be subtle and iterative, driven by the twin processes of simplification and connection. The advanced Touch ID fingerprint sensor built into the 5S’s home button, while a seemingly basic technology (it replaces your password with your thumbprint in a handful of very specific applications) is a perfectly representative feature. Today, it’s merely a convenience, since putting your thumb where it goes a hundred times a day anyway is less annoying than typing in a password. But it’s also a step closer to the day when we no longer have to remember or store dozens of passwords—a fundamental reinvention of the way we approach identity and computer security on a daily, even hourly, basis. It breaks down one of the barriers between humans and our machines.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s revolutionary iPhone.