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Comment by tobyhinloopen | Hacker News Reader

In Today's news: A newer model iPhone has a better camera than the previous model.

Neat new features though, like that "slow sync". Why don't older models get "slow sync" though? It seems like something that is controlled by software

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> In Today's news: A newer model iPhone has a better camera than the previous model.

Except that, the point of a review is to go into details - in this case to outline the ways in which it has improved, and how much each of those has improved

All of these except the "smarter sensor" seem like software features -- I wonder if it's technically impossible to get them on the iPhone 7 or if it's just a matter of differentiation.

I expect you could but perhaps not with a very good experience. I think a lot of the lighting modes rely heavily on doing that work in real time, rather than in post processing. It could be that it's just too laggy without the new processor.

That and Apple make their money from selling this hardware, so having software that only runs on new devices helps sell them.

An honest iPhone 8 launch event would say "we improved the camera hardware but also had some fantastic breakthroughs in the camera software, and we'll be backporting those to all supported models in iOS 11". The pessimist in me says that nobody would buy an iPhone 8 if they did this. Wait a second, now that I've thought it through it's obvious that this is exactly why they didn't backport the software improvements to previous iPhones. :)

> The pessimist in me says that nobody would buy an iPhone 8 if they did this

People with an iPhone 4, 5 or 6 have more reason to upgrade to an 8 rather than a 7 than just the camera.

I think his argument is that they are not backporting other software features including those that are unrelated to the camera.

The improvements aren't just to the software. There's non-software reasons for a, say, iPhone 5 user, to upgrade to an 8 over a 7.

They said a lot of that come from the new isp, so no.

Stage lighting uses custom circuitry in the CPU. Some Other effects are only possible due to the ISO of the new camera hardware. They’ve talked about this in interviews. So no, they couldn’t just back port everything to older hardware.

The ISP (image signal processor) is a dedicated circuit.

Sort of like a GPU, you could emulate what it does in software, but it'd be prohibitively slow.

Like Apple say in every single event they do: "It's the most powerful iPhone ever with the most amazing camera ever".

Of course it is.. it was announced today.. :|

It's still amazing that we see visible progress every year. apart from zoom, phone cameras are now in many situations on par with many dedicated cameras. We shouldn't take for granted that Apple can produce such improvements despite the space restrictions.

I agree, and I am happy for the progress every single year. But this marketing makes me cringe every time. Can't they think of some other adjective to describe the changes for each new thing/update?

Why is space a critical variable? the sensor in question is tiny. The rest are software and the phone's CPU.

It doesn't mean if the iphone8 was designed to be 2x thicker, Apple could have done much more with the camera quality.

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