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Comment by sdrothrock | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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