I am not buying the new iPhone 6

Written on 18 September 2014, 09:41pm

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For some reason I will have to get another smartphone pretty soon. Since switching the platform is not an option, I was expecting that the new iPhone 6 would be just the right thing.
Turns out, it isn’t.

Here’s why:

1. The battery: On iPhone 6 it’s more or less the same as on the 5s (on 6 Plus is marginally better, but 5.5′ size does not appeal to me at all). We are in 2014, we get excited about the new shiny iPhones, but at the end of the day their battery is dead. Can we please put less effort into drawing hearts and emoji on a watch and more into a technology to replace the decades-old Li-Ion one? Pretty pretty please?

design_details_right_large

2. The pill-shaped design with protruding camera: I love the iPhone 4/5 flat-sided form. I got used to it, it’s much more useful when taking pictures and it just feels right. The pill-shaped form reminding of the original iPhones and the current iPads seems less appealing to me. And the protruding camera… it’s simply not understandable from a design-centric company like Apple. I personally would have preferred the extra millimeter and a few more grams to have the camera inside the phone plus a bigger battery. Apple does its best to make it less visible in their presentation photos:

With clever lighting and placement Apple hides that bump in profile view where it clearly would ruin the clean line and sleek looks. That doesn’t make the iPhone 6 bad, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If you are embarassed about the bump then don’t have it, but if you have a bump I think you need to own the bump.
Ben Brooks via cultofmac.com

iphone 6

3. The price: Until now I was pretty comfortable with the 16GB version. However, sometimes I feel the need of extra storage, but 64Gb would be too much. 32Gb would have been just right. But wait, there is no iPhone 6 with 32Gb…
I feel the same as John Gruber:

I don’t understand why the entry level storage tier remained at a meager 16 GB. That seems downright punitive given how big panoramic photos and slo-mo HD videos are, and it sticks out like a sore thumb when you look at the three storage tiers together: 32/64/128 looks natural; 16/64/128 looks like a mistake. The original iPhone, seven years and eight product generations ago, had an 8 GB storage tier. The entry-level iPhones 6 are 85 times faster than that original iPhone, but have only twice the storage capacity. That’s just wrong. This is the single-most disappointing aspect of the new phones.
One more thing

Adding up to the list above:
– for the moment I don’t feel the need for a bigger screen
– the Apple Pay would have been a selling point for me, but it will take another year or so until it will land to Belgium.

So iPhone 5 it’ll be. 32Gb gold if possible 🙂

PS – here is how Steve would have introduced the iPhones 6 and the Apple watches: http://jiggity.com/steve.html

SmashingConf 2014 – the slides

Written on 17 September 2014, 10:32pm

Tagged with: , ,

Day 1:

1. Marcin Wichary (@mwichary)
post
2. Yesenia Perez-Cruz (@yeseniaa)
No slides?
3. Phil Hawksworth (@philhawksworth)
slides
4. Josh Emerson (@joshe)
slides
5. Mathias Bynens (@mathias)
post, related presentation
6. Patty Toland (@pattytoland)
slides
7. Paul Bakaus (@pbakaus)
post
8. Kevin M. Hoffman (@kevinmhoffman)
No slides?
9. Christopher Murphy (@fehler)
No slides?
~~~~

Day 2:

1. Dave Shea (@mezzoblue)
slides
2. Phil Coffman (@philcoffman)
slides
3. Sara Wachter Boettcher (@sara_ann_marie)
slides
4. Gerry Leonidas (@gerryleonidas)
slides
5. Peter Smart (@petewsmart)
slides
6. Matt Andrews (@andrewsmatt)
No slides?
7. Josh Payton (@jpay)
No slides?
8. Jason Grigsby (@grigs)
slides

See also the full coverage on Lanyrd.com