Hacker News Reader

And thanks to companies like Samsung, we can finally wave our hands in front of our phones to swipe pages and awkwardly hover over the screen with our fingers to interact with our phone in new and completely useless ways. Seriously, there's not a whole lot of useful innovation happening on either side of the fence. Smartphones have peaked and are now commodities. Arguing about who's more innovative in this space is like trying to make the case for Ford being more innovative than Chevy because they added a motion sensor to their trunks so people can open them by waving their foot underneath the bumper.

Can we just move on, and for the love of god, stop using the term "Fanboy"?

"Can we just move on, and for the love of god, stop using the term "Fanboy"?"

Agreed, it's pointless and cheapens the debate. Along with sheep, fandroid, apologist and whatever the camps have whipped up that week.

Maybe HTC, Samsung, Nokia et al have come so far in the last five years because they had no choice. If you look at Android phones from 5 years ago, they were mostly shit. The original iPhone was a huge departure from where mobile phones sat 5 years ago.

Does Apple need to change up the look of iOS, yeah probably. But they won't make a radical departure from where they are right now. They are still selling the phone that they built 3 generations ago, and they're selling it well. I'd say that the vacuum chamber says iOS is stale, but the consumer does not.

You said what had also occurred to me. I have an original iPhone sitting on my desk. I love the look and feel of the thing and would happily use that form factor again. I'm not sure I could say the same about the other manufacturer's original devices.

> If you look at the progress not just in design, but software, hardware and everything. Samsung, HTC, Nokia, all the major manfs have come miles further than Apple in the last 5 years when it comes to hardware design.

Are you serious? The iPhone 5 came out six months ago, and still holds its own hardware-wise. It's the thinnest and lightest of the flagship phones. Dual Core A6 is entirely competitive with the Snapdragon S4 in the new Nokia on a CPU basis, and while the quad core Snapdragon in the U.S. version of the Galaxy S4 will have more cores, it's not clear phone software can effectively use the extra cores. It had the fastest GPU of any phone at release. The Adreno 320 in the new HTC One and the 544MP3 in the international Galaxy S4 simply bring Samsung and HTC to parity with Apple's 6 month old phone (and the Adreno 225 in the Nokia 920 is comparable to the GPU in the iPhone 4s).

The iPhone 5 owned the benchmarks when it was released: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6324/the-iphone-5-performance-....

There are certain design decisions Apple makes versus its competitors. It has so far chosen to spend its transistor budget and TDP on more GPU cores than CPU cores. It has also chosen to favor weight and size over screen size. Given the popularity of the iPhone 5, it's hard to say that these are the wrong trade-offs to make.

>> "Sure you fanboys can make the argument about every feature added, but look at the specs differences."

>> "Although, most of their users are to drunk on koolaid to even know what other products are in the market."

You know, statements like this make you come off as if you're just the flip-side of a fan-boy, with equally irrational emotions coloring your logic. It really dilutes the point you are attempting to make.

Given the tone in the initial paragraph, I'm not sure if you're receptive to these arguments, but here goes.

Using the very wiki page you linked, over 5 years the changes were:

* 4x in default storage * 8x in default RAM * over 4x in number of pixels (doubling PPI, and increasing height) * 4x increase in camera pixels * Addition of full HD video * Addition of GPS, Compass * 20x (at least) increase in processor performance * 2x increase in battery life * 35% decrease in thickness * 16% in weight * Same cost

If all of these are "slight" changes, I'm not sure what to say. Would you say a stock portfolio changed "slightly" if it quadrupled in 5 years?

The form factor and design is branding. You might as well say "Porsche has barely changed their form factor in 40 years". The point is to be recognizable, not to arbitrarily change a design. And for a human-interacting product, our hands didn't change much in 5 years, so the "ideal" handheld device shape probably wouldn't change much either (if it does, it likely means we didn't look hard enough the first time around).

I've said it before I will say it again. Apple should spend less money worrying about and suing it's competitors and spend more time and money on improving their mediocre products.

Do you honestly think that Apple are incapable of developing products and suing people simultaneously?

If you omitted the third sentence you comment would have been more interesting.

" If you look at the progress not just in design, but software, hardware and everything. Samsung, HTC, Nokia, all the major manfs have come miles further than Apple in the last 5 years when it comes to hardware design. "

Hardware design is just one (of many) important characteristics in smartphone design. Of much greater importance is the balance across the different characteristics.